Elisabetta Pianori

What inspired you to work at Berkeley Lab? What excites you about your work?

I was looking for a permanent job in particle physics and I noticed that the Lab had an open position for someone to work half of the time on Particle Data Group (PDG), and half on a research program. As a particle physicist, I have always held PDG in high regard, as it is the most authoritative and comprehensive source of information in our field. Joining the PDG team seemed like a great opportunity to learn and interact with subject matter experts on the various sub-fields of particle physics. Moreover, the Lab has an extremely strong track record in designing and delivering particle physics detectors. Since the time of my undergraduate internship, I wanted to have a chance to build a detector. For various reasons it didn’t happen during my Ph.D and my postdoc, so joining the Lab’s ATLAS group seemed like a great opportunity for me to get my hands into hardware. 

Particle physics is really about understanding the basic building blocks of everything, and which forces are at play to make the universe as is. We are really trying to understand the fundamental laws that govern the universe. I can’t think of anything cooler and more exciting than this! Every day I have the opportunity to learn something new and work with extremely talented and creative people, so I definitely can’t get bored.

What does your current scientific project or research entail?

The particle collider at CERN that hosts ATLAS will increase by about five times the number of collisions happening at the same time. This will make it impossible for the existing detector to “see” the trajectories of the particles generated by the collisions, so we are building a new detector that is much more segmented and able to distinguish their path.

I also work in the PDG, which is the collaboration responsible for updating and publishing the review of particle physics every two years. It contains the values and references for all the existing measurements of particles' properties (e.g., their mass, and their charge), plus many articles on the state of particle physics and related fields. 

What have you been most proud of in your work?

Particle physics at the moment is a team-based science. Our experiments are huge; for example, ATLAS has ~4000 collaborators from all over the world. So the failure or success of any part of the project very much depends on people's relationships. I am proud of the team spirit that we have been able to create at the Lab, and the possibility to see very talented early career scientists blossom in our group and shine in the international ATLAS collaboration, even if they haven’t been able to spend significant time stationed where the experiment is at CERN.

Part of the responsibility of the PDG is to provide standards for the particle physics community. One of those standards is particles' “names”. Particles’ names are used in scientific journal publications, presentations, and discussions. It’s necessary that everyone uses the same language to identify the same particle, and that the name conveys enough information on the property of the particles. In the past few years, the discovery of various exotic particles required us to extend the existing naming scheme to cover these new states, and others that could be discovered in the future. I had to have many discussions with theorists and experimentalists from many different experiments to agree on a common naming scheme. It took the PDG group and the scientific community two years to develop an agreed-upon naming scheme, which we published in the 2024 Review of Particle Physics. This accomplishment stands out to me because it really showed the importance of the role of the group in the scientific community. It also required a lot of patience and perseverance - many times it seemed that it was going to be impossible to find a useful common solution. It was also a great opportunity for me to strengthen my relationship with some of my PDG colleagues.

Do you have tips you'd recommend for someone looking to enter and/or succeed in your field of work?

Experimental particle physics is a pretty competitive field. Most people are extremely talented, smart, and hardworking. But looking at my career and the careers of others, it is very difficult to succeed without being collaborative and striving to always learn from others and grow. So, my recommendation is to always stay humble, learn new things, be curious, and ask as many questions as possible.

How can our community engage more women, girls, and other underrepresented groups in STEM?

Studying science is hard for everyone, but people from underrepresented groups need to overcome even more roadblocks on their path. These barriers range from being actively discouraged from engaging in science to not finding enough support and encouragement when needed, feeling like they don’t fit in in the environment, or being ignored. We really need to work on providing earlier, better mentorship, making the environment more diverse and welcoming for everyone, and creating real accountability for progress toward these goals. 

But none of this can substitute the main driver for studying science - the human curiosity to understand the world around us! So, I think we need to do a better job of stimulating and fostering this curiosity from an early age and improving science education (in high school or even earlier), such that science is seen as yes, something hard, but also something beautiful, interesting, and relevant for people’s lives. This quote by Antoine de Saint Exupéry stands out to me: "If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea."

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