20.12.2011

Frank Tackmann establishes Emmy Noether research group at DESY

DFG funds precision predictions for Higgs measurements

DESY theorist Frank Tackmann has been accepted to the Emmy Noether Programme of Germany’s research funding organization DFG. This programme allows outstanding young scientists to qualify for scientific leadership roles by managing their own junior research group. Frank Tackmann’s group is working on the topic of “Precision theory predictions for Higgs and new-physics measurements at the LHC”. The research will be funded for five years with a total of 940 000 Euros.

The Standard Model of particle physics describes very well all particle phenomena which have been observed so far in laboratory experiments. With the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, particle physics is on the brink of discovering as yet undetected particles such as the Higgs particle – an essential element of the Standard Model – or even heavy particles beyond the Standard Model, for instance dark matter particles.

Higgs particles and other heavy particles produced in proton-proton collisions at the LHC are identified by their decay products, which typically produce a characteristic signature of collimated jets of particles in the detector. The precise experimental measurement of masses and couplings of the Higgs and new particles requires theoretical predictions for signal and background processes containing a specific number of such jets. The goal of the Emmy Noether group is the precise theoretical calculation of the required probabilities for such processes with the help of new field-theoretic methods and their combination with numerical simulations.

Frank Tackmann joined the DESY theory group in September. The 32-year-old has studied physics in Dresden and obtained his PhD at the University of California at Berkeley. Before coming to DESY, he worked for three years as a postdoc at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he made significant contributions to the development of new methods for precision predictions at the LHC.