09.07.2014

IUPAP Young Scientist Prize in Particle Physics for Kerstin Tackmann

DESY physicist Kerstin Tackmann was awarded the Young Scientist Prize in Particle Physics 2014 by the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP). Today, at the International Conference on High Energy Physics ICHEP in Valencia, Spain, she received the prize consisting of a IUPAP medal and a cash award of 1000 euros. Professor Hiro Aihara, Chairman of the IUPAP Commission “Particles and Fields”, said: “It is a pleasure for us to honour Kerstin Tackmann for her outstanding contributions to current elementary particle physics, especially to the discovery of the Higgs boson through the analysis of its photon-photon decay in the ATLAS experiment.”

Kerstin Tackmann

In summer 2012, the ATLAS and CMS particle physics collaborations announced the discovery of a particle in their experiments at the Large Hadron collider LHC, with properties matching the long sought after Higgs particle. One of the most distinct signals in which this particle is manifested in a particle detector is the decay into two photons. Kerstin Tackmann, member of the 70-member ATLAS group at DESY, and her Helmholtz Young Investigators Group became an important part of the ATLAS analysis team which meticulously investigated this decay channel. They were able to make essential contributions to this analysis which substantially helped to make this discovery.

The existence of this particle, which was with high certainty identified as the Higgs boson in the meantime, confirms the so-called Brout-Englert-Higgs mechanism, which is believed to give the elementary particles their masses. Thanks to this discovery, the theoretical physicists François Englert and Peter Higgs, who in 1964 first described this mechanism, were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2013.

Kerstin Tackmann (36) studied physics in Dresden, Germany, and obtained her doctoral degree at the University of California in Berkeley. After working at CERN as a postdoc, she established a Helmholtz Young Investigators Group at DESY in 2011, explicitly dedicated to scrutinise the Higgs particle in the photon-photon channel. Since the discovery of the new particle, the group focuses on the precise measurement of its properties to find out whether it fits into the Standard Model of particle physics or gives a hint to new physics beyond the standard model. For her work, Kerstin Tackman already won the Hertha Sponer Prize of the German Physical Society and the Bjørn Wiik Prize.