Siggi Bethke's research focuses on the investigation of the fundamental building blocks of matter, their properties and their interactions by means of experiments on high-energy particle accelerators.
He is involved in the ATLAS experiment at CERN.
The experimental physicist Prof. Siegfried Bethke focuses primarily on the investigation of high-energy particle collisions and the development of particle detectors to detect the phenomena that take place during these collisions. At the Max Planck Institute for Physics, he heads the research activities for the ATLAS detector at the LHC accelerator at CERN in Geneva, one of the largest projects in which the Institute is involved. Prof. Bethke and his Research Groups have made crucial contributions to the discovery of the Higgs particle.
Prof. Bethke was born in 1954 in Ludwigshafen, Germany, earned his doctorate at the University of Heidelberg and also obtained the German postdoctoral lecturing qualification there in 1987. From 1986 to 1988 he was a Feodor Lynen fellow at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in the USA; he began his research work at CERN in 1989. In 1993 he was appointed professor for experimental physics at the RWTH Aachen. In 1995, he was awarded the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of the German Research Foundation, one of the most highly endowed German research prizes, for his work. In 1999, he became Director at the Max Planck Institute for Physics in Munich, which he headed as Managing Director from 2000 until 2006. Moreover, he has been Managing Director of the MPG Semiconductor Laboratory (HLL) in Munich-Neuperlach from 2013 to 2022. Since January 1, 2023 he has been Director emeritus at the Max Planck Institute for Physics.
- Co-organizer of annual “School for High Energy Physics” at Maria Laach (1999-2022)
- Chair of the Scientific Council of DESY (2002-2004)
- Chair of the ATLAS Collaboration Board (2004-2005)
- Editor-in-Chief of European Physical Journal C (2007-2012)
- Chair of the scientific advisory board of the Institute of High Energy Physics (HEPHY), Vienna (2008-2014)
- German scientific delegate to CERN Council (2009-2020)
- German delegate to the European Strategy Group of CERN Council (2012-2020)
- Member of the Executive Board of the German Physical Society (DPG) (2013-2017)
- Member of the Executive Committee of the European Physical Society (EPS) (2016-2017)
- Member of the PRISMA Forum (strategic advisory committee) of the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) (2018-2022)
Determination of the strong coupling constant αs(mz) from measurements of the total cross section for top-antitop quark production, T .Klijnsma, S. Bethke, G. Dissertori, G. P. Salam; Eur.Phys.J. C77 (2017)
Quantum Chromodynamics, S. Bethke, G. Dissertori and G.P. Salam, in: Review of Particle Properties, M. Tanabashi et al., Phys.Rev. D98 (2018) no.3, 030001
Data Preservation in High Energy Physics – why, how and when? S. Bethke, arXiv:1009:3763; Nucl.Phys.Proc.Suppl. 207-208 (2010) 156
Experimental tests of asymptotic freedom, Siegfried Bethke; Prog.Part.Nucl.Phys.58:351-386,2007;
e-Print: hep-ex/0606035
Eleven years of QCD at LEP, Siegfried Bethke, Presented at LEP Fest 2000, Geneva,Switzerland, 10-11 Oct 2000; Eur.Phys.J.direct C4:1,2002. e-Print: hep-ex/0112032
New jet cluster algorithms: next-to-leading-order QCD and hadronization corrections, S. Bethke, Z. Kunszt, D. Soper and W.J. Stirling; Nucl.Phys. B370 (1992) 310.