Yahya Tayalati, Ph. D.

Affiliate professor
Publication list: Google Scholar
E-mail: yahya.tayalati@um6p.ma

Tayalati started his career as an experimental high-energy physicist with a Ph.D. from the University  Mohammed First in Morocco. He pursued the field in the ANTARES collaboration. He has been involved in the early preparation and deployment of the ANTARES neutrino telescope and was for many years the convener of the exotic physics group. ANTARES has allowed to reach very competitive limits on the flux of Magnetic Monopoles and Nuclearites particles in the Universe.

Yahya spent more than twenty years of his career with the ATLAS collaboration, covering many topics ranging from hardware projects and detector operations to software development and physics analysis. Yahya’s first important contribution is highlighted through his role in several steps of the construction, commissioning, and operation of the ATLAS Liquid Argon Presampler, This detector has proven to be very efficient and it is now widely used in all ATLAS physics measurements. Furthermore, He was also involved in several physics analyses, where the most recent achievement consists of the first observation of Light-by-light scattering. The observation by the ATLAS experiment of this extremely rare process provides an interesting way to probe physics beyond the standard model.

Yahya started recently a collaboration with the new KM3NeT neutrino telescope, a large research infrastructure, in construction in the Mediterranean sea. A productions line of optical modules for KM3NeT is successfully operating in Morocco. In addition, Yahya has initiated the participation of Morocco in the  High Granularity Timing Detector, a new system part of the ATLAS  upgrade. The proposed project is at the front-line of experimental particle physics.

Yahya an honorary fellow of the Islamic World Academy of Sciences, fellow of the African academy of Sciences  and has been awarded in 2021 the prestigious Mustafa Prize for all his contributions to researches in physics as well as promoting scientific development in Morocco and beyond.

 Current Research

His current research is focused on the ATLAS experiment to study and test the Standard Model, the electroweak interactions, the Higgs boson production, the hard QCD, and possible signatures of the Beyond Standard Model. He’s actually working on measuring W boson properties, searching for Higgs boson production and coupling, and participating in improving the High Granularity Timing Detector.

Selected papers

  1. Albert et al., Search for magnetic monopoles with ten years of the ANTARES neutrino Telescope, Journal of High Energy Astrophysics 34 (2022) 1-8.
  2. Aad et al, Observation of Light-by-Light Scattering in Ultraperipheral Pb+Pb Collisions with the ATLAS Detector, Phys. Rev. Lett. 123 (2019) 052001.
  3. Albert et al, Search for resonant WZ production in the fully leptonic state in proton-proton collisions at $sqrt(s)=13 TeV with ATLAS detector, Phys. Lett. B 787 (2018) 68.
  4. Didi, A. Moussa, Y. Tayalati et M. Zerfaoui, Simulation of the 6MV Elekta Synergy Platform linac Photon beam using GEANT4 Application for Tomographic Emission, Journal of Medical Physics 40 (2015) 136-1436.
  5. Tayalati, ATLAS Electromagnetic Calorimeter, construction and test of a large scale system, Nucl. Instrum. Methods Phys. Res., A 525 (2004) 178-182