Dr. Ahmed Bassalat; Distinguished Research Achievements

In 2006, Dr. Bassalat graduated from An-Najah with a BSc in Physics and an honor certificate; therefore, he was offered a Teaching and Research Assistant job there and worked as such for a year and a half.

Then, he obtained a scholarship to continue his graduate studies at the University of Paris-Sud (University of Paris XI) where he obtained two MSc degrees; one in nuclear engineering and nuclear reactors and another in elementary particle physics. He also obtained his PhD in high energy physics from there.

During his PhD time, he spent most of his time at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), an organization in Switzerland that operates the largest particle physics laboratory in the world.

ATLAS is one of two general-purpose detectors at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) that investigates a wide range of physics, from the search for the Higgs boson to extra dimensions and particles that could make up dark matter.

The ATLAS Experiment paved the way for future research where he participated to more than 250 research papers that have been published on behalf of ATLAS Collaboration by prominent international journals.

In 2013, Dr. Bassalat, as an ATLAS memeber, worked on search for Higgs particle. ATLAS Collaboration was able to prove the existence of the HIggs and measure the Higgs boson mass accurately equaling 125.09 Gev/c2.

The Higgs mechanism is a process by which vector bosons can get rest mass without explicitly breaking gauge invariance, as a byproduct of spontaneous symmetry breaking.

When we interviewed Dr. Bassalat, he said that his nostalgia to Palestine encouraged him to go back and teach at An-Najah to promote scientific research and constructive academic cooperation among students and colleagues.