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DESY News: Adinda de Wit awarded the Hertha Sponer Prize

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2022/11/18
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Adinda de Wit awarded the Hertha Sponer Prize

The German Physical Society DPG has awarded the Hertha Sponer Prize to Adinda de Wit from the University of Zurich. The physicist, who carried out her research as a postdoc in the CMS group at DESY, is being honoured for her outstanding experimental contributions to the first observation of the Higgs-b-Yukawa coupling and the precise determination of the Higgs couplings. She is one of two winners of the prestigious prize, which is awarded for outstanding scientific work by a female physicist.

Awardee Adinda de Wit. Photo: private
Adinda de Wit was a key player in the discovery of the Yukawa coupling between the Higgs and the bottom quark in the CMS experiment, a milestone in particle physics. As a DESY Fellow, she coordinated the measurement of the Higgs Yukawa coupling to b-quarks and performed an innovative analysis on rare Higgs decays into a Z-boson and a vector meson. She was also one of the lead authors of the first combined determination of Higgs couplings using part of the LHC Run 2 dataset, as well as coordinator of the CMS Tracker Alignment group.

This year, de Wit was one of the main contributors to the Nature article on the 10th anniversary of the discovery of the Higgs boson, reporting on precise measurements of the Higgs couplings. Her original ideas and outstanding technical skills make her a role model for female students.

Adinda de Wit is from the Netherlands and received her PhD from Imperial College London for her search for new Higgs bosons using the CMS experiment at the LHC. From 2017-2020 she was a postdoctoral researcher at DESY, where she contributed to important measurements on Higgs physics. She is currently a postdoc at the University of Zurich and coordinator of all data analyses related to Higgs physics in the CMS collaboration.

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