Tayalati Yahya was elected as an AAS Fellow in 2021. As a fellow, Tayalati Yahya contributes to the development of the Academy's strategic direction through participation in AAS activities and governance structures. This gears the Academy's vision of transforming African lives through science.
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 have 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 is an honorary fellow of the Islamic World 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.
