Regina Demina

Regina Demina is a particle physicist, cosmologist, and professor at the University of Rochester. She was a part of the team that discovered the top quark in 1995. In 2024, she observed the first significant quantum entanglement persistence between unstable top quark antiquark pairs.

She was elected as a fellow of the American Physical Society in 2012.

Education and early life Demina grew up in Russia, where she took ballet lessons and dreamt of becoming a professional ballerina. While in high school, Demina said she had a very good physics teacher, and she realized she was looking forward to the days she had physics class instead of ballet.

After she graduated, Demina enrolled at Novosibirsk State University. She earned a Bachelor of Arts in Physics in 1985 and a Master of Science in Physics in 1988. She then immigrated to the United States to attend Northeastern University, where she earned a Doctor of Philosophy in physics in 1994.

Research Demina worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Fermilab before joining Kansas State University in 1999 as an assistant professor. In 2003, she joined the University of Rochester as an associate professor. She was promoted to the title of professor in 2007. She co-led the team that built the tracking device that discovered the Higgs boson and she leads the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) team at the Large Hadron Collider. She also co-leads a group working on the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) survey, where her team develops optical fiber instrumentation, analysis algorithms, and survey software to map the large-scale structure of the universe and probe dark energy’s role in cosmic expansion.

In 2024, the team Demina leads produced the first significant quantum entanglement persisting between unstable top quark–antiquark pairs over separations beyond light speed information transfer. Fellow, American Physical Society, 2012

Selected Publications