Earlier this week, the European Physical Society (EPS) announced its High Energy and Particle Physics prizes for 2013, and I’m pleased to say that the LHC featured highly. With all that has been happening in the last few years, that’s perhaps not too surprising, but these awards nevertheless constitute a great honour for our community.
The High Energy and Particle Physics Prize went to the ATLAS and CMS collaborations “for the discovery of a Higgs boson, as predicted by the Brout-Englert-Higgs mechanism”, and to Michel Della Negra, Peter Jenni and Tejinder Virdee “for their pioneering and outstanding leadership roles in the making of the ATLAS and CMS experiments”.
Among the other awards, the Young Experimental Physicist Prize went to Diego Martinez Santos “for his outstanding contributions to the trigger and commissioning of the LHCb experiment, and the analyses leading to first evidence for the rare decay B0s→ μ+μ−”, while the Outreach Prize went outside Europe for the first time, to Don Lincoln of Fermilab, “for communicating in multiple media the excitement of High Energy Physics to high-school students and teachers, and the public at large”.
The awards were completed by the Giuseppe and Vanna Cocconi Prize, which recognizes outstanding achievement in astrophysics and cosmology, and was awarded to Art McDonald and Yoichiro Suzuki “for their outstanding contributions to the solution of the solar neutrino puzzle by measuring the flux of all neutrino flavours from the Sun with the SNO and Super-Kamiokande experiments”, and the Gribov Medal, which went to Zohar Komargodski “for his deep insights into the structure of the renormalization group in four-dimensional field theories and, in particular, his proof (with Adam Schwimmer) of the a-theorem”.
All the awards will be presented during the EPS-HEP conference in Stockholm in July. In the meantime, I hope you will join me in offering warm congratulations to all the recipients.