Quantum Diaries

I'm currently a PhD student at Strasbourg University in France. I am a member of the DZero experiment at Fermilab and focusing on the search for the Higgs Boson. For me, getting a PhD is a big adventure, literally. I've never traveled so much, met so many new people or had this many responsibilities.

I was born in Remiremont (a very little town in the east of France) and grew up nearby in Vecoux (an even more little town). As a kid, I always took my father's science fiction books, I was fascinated by all these amazing stories about time travel, space journey and futuristic technologies. I used to read them like a good fairy tale, but one day when I was about 10, I came upon an article in a junior science magazine about the Einstein's theory of special relativity. It blew my mind. Learning about time expansion was exactly as if someone had told me that magic is real. From this day, I grew up saying "I want to be a scientist" and year after year it became better defined as "I want to be a physicist."

So I did everything I could to go straight to this goal. After a Bachelor degree in physics at the Henri Poincare University of Nancy, I decided to go for a master's degree in particle physics. That's why I went to Strasbourg University.

Thereby, during the last semester of my master's degree, I joined the local team working on DZero. It was so great that I decided to continue on the same team for my PhD.

The subject of my thesis is crucial to particle physics. Indeed, the Higgs boson is the only particle of the standard model that has not been discovered yet. This particle is the source of mass for any elementary particle. I have a lot of hope that the Tevatron will discover (or exclude) a low mass Higgs—either would be a major progress in our comprehension of particle physics and something very good for my thesis!

Science is, of course, a very important part of my life, and I'm also interested in other fields such as technology, mathematics, computer science, even biology and psychology. I wish that I could study everything!

But I also have other interests. I play guitar, and I practice martial arts (the perfect way to let off steam after a tough day). It's an honor for me to be a part of the Quantum Diaries community, and I hope that the readers of my blog will be as pleased to read it as I am to write it.