Valerie Halyo

Valerie Halyo (b. Paris, France) is an experimental physicist at Princeton University. She is currently working on the pursuit for new physics beyond the Standard Model at the Large Hadron Collider at Geneva.

Valerie Halyo received her BSc in Physics and Mathematics in June 1990 from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel. Following her service in the Israeli army, she continued her education and obtained a MSc in Theoretical Physics under the supervision of Prof. Yosi Nir in Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot Israel in 1994. To pursue her higher education, Valerie Halyo moved to the US and obtained a PhD in Physics under the supervision of Nobel laureate Prof. Martin Lewis Perl at Stanford University in 2001. During her PhD Valerie looked for a "Free fractional electric charge elementary particle" using an automated Millikan experiment.

In 2001 Valerie Halyo became a Research Associate at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) working on the BaBar experiment. She was heavily involved in all phases of the BaBar Level 1 Drift Chamber Trigger (DCT) upgrade. While pursuing the search for rare B meson decay, there was a claim by LEPS Collaboration in Japan of evidence of a new particle called pentaquark. Valerie Halyo was chosen as the co-convener of the Pentaquark Task Force to coordinate the search effort for pentaquarks and confirm or refute the existence of the pentaquark using BaBaR data at SLAC. Together with her colleagues they refuted the existence of the pentaquark using the BaBaR data.

In January 2006 Valerie Halyo became the first female faculty member of the Princeton University Experimental High Energy Particle Physics Group. She became a member of the CMS collaboration and worked on the development of the Online CMS Luminosity System. From February 2006 – 2010, Valerie was a co-manager of the Luminosity System. Valerie Halyo was responsible for the design, development, commissioning and deployment of the CMS luminosity system which provides LHC with bunch-to-bunch luminosity as well as the absolute luminosity measurement via the Van der Meer calibration.

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