15.11.2012

DPG awards Hertha Sponer Prize to DESY physicist Kerstin Tackmann

For her outstanding work on the road to the Higgs particle detection, the German Physical Society (DPG) awards the Hertha Sponer Prize to DESY physicist Dr. Kerstin Tackmann. The DPG jury selected the 34-year-old leading scientist for her decisive contributions to the detection of a new particle at the Large Hadron collider (LHC), a promising candidate for the long sought Higgs boson. The award will be presented in March 2013 at the DPG annual meeting in Dresden.

DESY physicist Kerstin Tackmann

The search for the Higgs particle is of high scientific priority at the LHC. According to the so-called standard model of the structure of matter, it gives mass to other particles. The Higgs boson was predicted decades ago, and since then, intense efforts are made to find it. In summer, the scientists of both large LHC detectors ATLAS and CMS announced the discovery of a so far unknown elementary particle. It is therefore not unlikely that this particle is the long sought Higgs boson. However, the properties of this newly discovered particle are subject to further analysis.

The Higgs particle cannot be detected directly but only through its decay products. A promising channel for the Higgs boson search is the decay into two photons. Kerstin Tackmann carried out detailed photon reconstruction studies and optimised algorithms to obtain the required efficiencies and purities. Her work provided an essential prerequisite for the discovery of a new particle with a mass of about 125 GeV/c2 in the ATLAS two photon decay channel, which is a promising candidate for the Higgs boson. Now, particle physics is on the verge of solving an almost 50-years-old mystery, and Kerstin Tackmann made a significant contribution to achieve this.

Kerstin Tackmann studied physics in Dresden where she graduated as a diploma physicist in 2004. In 2008, she obtained her PhD degree at the University of California, Berkeley. She then went to the European centre for nuclear research CERN near Geneva, home of the LHC, and joined the ATLAS group. As from 2011, she is head of a Helmholtz Young Investigators Group at DESY. She and her group work at the search and detection of the Higgs boson and participate in the development for the ATLAS detector upgrade.

With the Hertha Sponer Prize, the DPG honours female scientists for extraordinary research in physics. The annually awarded prize amounts to 3000 Euros, and its purpose is to encourage especially young female physicists and to make physics attractive for an increasing number of women. Namesake Hertha Sponer (1895 – 1968) was a German physicist who among others made important contributions to molecular physics and spectroscopy.

Source: DPG information