Speaker
Description
The INFN Unit of Naples and the Department of Physics of the Federico II University have been participating in CERN experiments since 1976, when the Neapolitan group joined the R209 collaboration at the Intersecting Storage Rings (ISR). Since then, this collaboration has continued uninterrupted for fifty years. During this period, the groups from Naples have taken part in the main CERN experiments, from the ISR to the LEP and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), contributing to the design and construction of detectors, the development of electronics, software and computing infrastructures, and data analysis.
In addition to collider physics, Neapolitan groups have contributed to the development of neutrino physics, initiated in the early 1980s with the CHARM II experiment and continued with CHORUS and OPERA at the Gran Sasso National Laboratories, where tau‑neutrino interactions produced by a CERN beam were directly observed for the first time.
The presentation retraces the evolution of these activities by following the growth of the groups and their participation in subsequent experiments, including ATLAS, CMS, NA62, SND@LHC and SHiP, up to research and development activities in view of the Future Circular Collider (FCC). Some of the main scientific results to which the Neapolitan groups have contributed will also be recalled, including the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012.