Maria Spiropulu

Maria Spiropulu (Μαρία Σπυροπούλου in Greek), born in 1970 in Kastoria, a mountain town in West Macedonia, is an experimental physicist at Caltech and CERN, the European high-energy physics laboratory outside Geneva, and is working on experiments for the Large Hadron Collider. These experiments are designed to test some of the most imaginative and far reaching ideas ever proposed in physics. She describes her work as part of the search to discover the origins of the universe.

Maria Spiropulu received her Bachelor’s degree from the Physics Department of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in 1993. She had already begun research activity from 1991, working as a technical assistant at CERN’S DELPHI and later at BESSY, the synchrotron laboratory in Berlin, Germany. After graduation she went to Harvard University for her PhD in particle physics.

For the next seven years her time was shared between Boston and Batavia, Illinois, home of Tevatron, the world’s highest energy particle accelerator at that time, where she worked for the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF) experiment. For her Doctoral thesis, which was completed in August 21, 2000, Spiropulu developed a blind analysis method, to search the accelerator’s output data for evidence of supersymmetry.

Throughout her “schooling”, she had other interests. In her early teens, she wanted to be an F-16 pilot and then an astronaut. She played drums and sang for a Fermilab band called "Drug Sniffing Dogs" (a particularly exotic band, where her signature songs were Time Flies (Vaya Con Dios) and a cover of the Squirrel Nut Zippers "Hell"), until she was expelled for not attending rehearsals. She also practiced for several years in martial arts, especially karate, and later went on her way by doing kick boxing.

With a PhD from Harvard, Maria Spiropulu joined the University of Chicago in 2001, and began searching for spatial extra-dimensions. Her analysis was based on Tevatron data obtained from 1992 to 1996. She was offered a research physicist position at CERN in 2003, while she was conducting extra dimensions analyses with Run II data. On September 19, 2003, she reported, along with Kevin Burkett of Harvard, that any extra-dimensions, if they exist, must be curled up into circles smaller than a hundredth of an inch.

The hunting for physics beyond the Standard Model, including signals for supersymmetry and extra dimensions / Kaluza-Klein gravitons, led Maria Spiropulu, in 2004, back to Geneva and CERN, where the Large Hadron Collider will achieve an energy seven times larger than Tevatron. There, together with thousands of physicists, she helps prepare for a revolution she says “will blow our minds”.

Publications

• M. Spiropulu (2004). Experimental Status of Beyond the Standard Model Collider Searches. Czech. J. Phys. 54. [1]
• M. Spiropulu (2003). Collider Experiment: Strings, Branes and Extra Dimensions. [2]
• J. Hewett, and M. Spiropulu (2002). Particle Physics Probes Of Extra Spacetime Dimensions. Ann. Rev. Nucl. Part. Phys. [3]
• T. Affolder et al. (2002). The CDF Collaboration. Phys. Rev. Lett. 88, 241802
• M. Spiropulu (2000). Harvard University Ph.D thesis

External links

• Physics of the Universe Summit
• "SCIENTIST AT WORK -- Maria Spiropulu; Other Dimensions? She's in Pursuit" - from The New York Times, September 30, 2003
• In search of extra dimensions
• The Official Maria Spiropulu Appreciation Page
• Spiropulu's page at CERN
• Maria Spiropulu's Edge Bio Page
• Video of Spiropulu's lecture The Universe in Collisions at the Kavli Institute.