12.09.2013

New Helmholtz Young Investigators’ Group at DESY

In the present funding period, DESY will again establish a new Helmholtz Young Investigators’ Group. Particle physicist María Aldaya Martín was selected in a rigorous international peer review process and she will be supported by the Helmholtz Association and DESY in the creation of her own young investigators’ group.

María Aldaya Martín will establish a research group in collaboration with Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and the University of Hamburg. Her team will work at the CMS experiment at the LHC to carry out ultimate precision measurements of top quarks and use them to search for new physics. Being the heaviest elementary particle, the top quark plays a very special role within the Standard Model. Particularly now, after the discovery of the Higgs boson, the special status of the top quark becomes more evident: it does not only interact very strongly with the Higgs field which gives mass to elementary particles, but recent theoretical calculations also revealed that the stability and, therefore, the ultimate fate of our universe depends very sensitively from the exact mass and the interaction of this quark.

Moreover, many scenarios of hypothetical physics phenomena beyond the Standard Model expect the top quark to couple to a series of new particles. When measuring its properties with highest precision, it turns out to be a key to discover a broad range of possible new physics.

Apart from top precision analyses, which allow among others to determine whether the discovered Higgs particle does or does not fit the predictions of the Standard Model, María Aldaya Martín and her group will experimentally work on the development of the high-sensitive CMS tracking detector, which will be incorporated into the experiment at the beginning of the next decade.

For the eleventh time, the Helmholtz Association supports scientists in the establishment of their own young investigators’ group. For five years, the association provides financial support of 125 000 euros for each year, bulked up with the same amount by the participating centre. With this sum, the young investigators’ group leaders are able to fund their own position and three or four additional staff members, and the laboratory equipment. Moreover, this leadership of the group offers the opportunity of a permanent job position in research. 66 candidates applied for this funding round; apart from María Aldaya Martín, 18 young scientists were also selected. Currently, a total of ten young investigators’ groups are active at DESY, each in collaboration with university partners.