In 2004, when Robert Aymar was appointed to run CERN, he was seen as a troubleshooter brought in to get the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) up and running.
Born in 1936, Aymar studied at the École Polytechnique in Paris and then entered the Corps des Poudres, a former French government agency for basic and applied research. In 1959 he was transferred to the Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) in Saclay, where he focused on fundamental research in plasma physics and applications in controlled thermonuclear fusion. In 1977 Aymar was appointed director of the Tore Supra tokamak in Cadarache. “When I first pushed superfluid technology for the Tore Supra large magnets, I was called a fool,” he says. After the success of Tore Supra, the same technology was proposed for cooling the LHC magnets. In 1990 Aymar became director of fundamental research at the CEA's natural sciences division. He was chairman...
