Michel Della Negra (born 1942) is a French experimental particle physicist known for his role in the 2012 discovery of the Higgs Boson.
Della Negra and his colleague from Imperial College London, Tejinder Singh Virdee, were among the first to envisage a hermetic detector for the large hadron collider (LHC) based on a strong magnetic field, the compact muon solenoid (CMS), and was spokesman for the CMS from 1992 until 2006.
Together with evidence from the A Toroidal LHC Apparatus (ATLAS), the CMS experiments were crucial to the discovery of the Higgs Boson in 2012.
[1] Della Negra shared the 2013 Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for the discovery of the Higgs Boson with his pioneering colleagues Fabiola Gianotti and Peter Jenni from ATLAS, Tejinder Singh Virdee, Guido Tonelli, and Joe Incandela from CMS, and LHC project leader Lyn Evans.
[4] In 2014 he won the Prix André Lagarrigue of the University of Paris-Sud for his "exceptional quality in building experimental devices of great complexity, with a profound understanding of physics".