Prof. Elżbieta Richter-Wąs from the JU Faculty of Physics, Astronomy and Applied Computer Science was presented with the Marie Skłodowska Curie Scientific Award 2017 in physics. The honour was conferred upon her by the Polish Academy of Sciences for ‘a significant contribution to the discovery of Higgs particle and studying its properties as part of the ATLAS experiment in CERN’.
Prof. Elżbieta Richter-Wąs specialises in the phenomenology of positron-electron and proton-proton collisions. She has been working on analytic calculations in perturbative QED and QCD and their numeric applications leading to concrete phenomenological predictions. Since the early 1990s, she has been increasingly interested in experimental physics, particularly the search for Higgs particle.
On 4 July 2012, two international scientific teams, ATLAS and CMS, gathering data in the Large Hardon Collider (LHC) in the European CERN laboratory in Geneva have announced the discovery of new particle with a mass of roughly 130 proton masses (125 GeV). The observation of the Higgs particle and first measurements of its properties proved to be a crowning jewel of over fifty years of theoretical and experimental studies on the nature of elementary particles. It was a tremendous success achieved by hard work, determination, inquisitiveness, and passion of several generations of physicists. Prof. Richter-Wąs actively participated in the research. She was a member of the ATLAS scientific team from 1994 to 2003. She took part in the final stages of preparing and launching the project as well as the first analyses of the data.
The Marie Skłodowska Curie Scientific Award is given annually by the Polish Academy of Sciences, alternating between physics and chemistry, for outstanding Polish accomplishments contributing to science as a whole.
