Matthias Schott is to form an independent work group to precisely measure the mass of the W boson
30.08.2012
The particle physicist Dr. Matthias Schott will establish a junior research group at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) that will make high precision measurements of the W boson particle, one of the fundamental building blocks of matter. This new research group will be receiving financial support from the German Research Foundation (DFG) over the coming years. The team is part of the Experimental Particle and Astroparticle Physics (ETAP) work group at JGU and thus actively involved in the university's Cluster of Excellence Precision Physics, Fundamental Interaction and Structure of Matter (PRISMA). Its investigations will be conducted using data taken by the ATLAS Experiment at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva. "The precision measurements will help us to better understand the structure of matter," is how Matthias Schott explains his expectations. The project has particular significance in view of the recently announced discovery of the Higgs boson at CERN.
The Standard Model has been the most successful theory in the history of particle physics, describing the fundamental constituents of matter and their interactions. Despite its huge success in the past decades, several crucial questions remain open. Particle physicists still intensely seek to understand how fundamental particles acquire their mass, or in other words, what is the role of the Higgs mechanism in the electroweak symmetry breaking. "The precise mass determination of the three fundamental particles – the W boson, the top quark, and the Higgs boson discovered at the beginning of June 2012 – can provide us with a definite answer," claims Schott.
W bosons are electrically charged elementary particles that mediate the weak interaction, which is for example responsible for the decay of the neutron. As their mass is roughly 80 times that of a proton, W bosons are relatively heavy. Although they can be generated in particle accelerators like the LHC, they decay very rapidly. The goal of the new junior research group is to conduct the precision measurement of the mass of the W boson with a target precision of 0.01%, implementing several innovative approaches on data-analyses and large-scale computing. This is one of the most difficult tasks in modern particle physics due to the large number of experimental and theoretical aspects that need to be taken into account.
"We are looking forward to our collaboration with Dr. Martin Schott, whose research project perfectly complements our current work in particle physics," explains Professor Dr. Volker Büscher of the Experimental Particle and Astroparticle Physics (ETAP) group at Mainz University. Approximately 50 physicists from JGU are participating in research at CERN, in particular in the ATLAS experiment, one of two major experiments tasked with searching for the Higgs particle and providing definitive proof of its existence.
It is the intention of the German Research Foundation to use its Emmy Noether Program as a means of helping young scientists attain independence when it comes to research by enabling them to head up junior research groups and thus gain the qualifications needed to teach at university. Over recent years, Matthias Schott has been working as a researcher at CERN on a project involving the generation of low energy gauge bosons using the LHC. He will start forming the work group in the fall of 2012 in Mainz.