The high-energy and particle physics division of the European Physical Society (EPS-HEPP) has announced the recipients of its 2021 prizes. The five awards will be presented during the EPS-HEP Conference on 26 July, which will take place online.
2021 EPS High Energy and Particle Physics Prize
Torbjrn Sjöstrand (Lund University) and Bryan Webber (Cambridge University) have been announced as the winners of the the 2021 EPS-HEPP Prize for “for the conception, development and realisation of parton shower Monte Carlo simulations, yielding an accurate description of particle collisions in terms of quantum chromodynamics and electroweak interactions, and thereby enabling the experimental validation of the Standard Model, particle discoveries and searches for new physics.” Both Sjöstrand and Webber were also warded the 2012 Sakurai Prize for Theoretical Particle Physics by the American Physical Society, along with the late Guido Altarelli.
2021 Giuseppe and Vanna Cocconi Prize
The 2021 Giuseppe and Vanna Cocconi Prize has been awarded to the Borexino Collaboration “for their ground-breaking observation of solar neutrinos from the pp and CNO chains that provided unique and comprehensive tests of the Sun as a nuclear fusion engine.” Gianpaolo Bellini, a former spokesperson of try experiment commented: “The Cocconi prize awarded to us by EPS is the recognition of a more than 30-year history that began in the late 1980s, when the experiment was conceived in the context of the scientific debate triggered by the then unsolved problem of the solar neutrino, and by the need for studying solar neutrinos from very low energies.”
2021 Gribov Medal
Bernhard Mistlberger (SLAC) has received the 2021 Gribov Medal “for his ground-breaking contributions to multi-loop computations in QCD and to high-precision predictions of Higgs and vector boson production at hadron colliders.” Mistlberger also recently won the $5000 Wu-Ki Tung Award for Early-Career Research on QCD for his work.
2021 Young Experimental Physicist Prize
The 2021 Outreach Prize of the High Energy and Particle Physics Division of the EPS has been awarded to Nathan Jurik (CERN) “for his outstanding contributions to the LHCb experiment, including the discovery of pentaquarks, and the measurements of CP violation and mixing in the B and D meson systems”; and to Ben Nachman (LBNL Berkeley) “for exceptional contributions to the study of QCD jets as a probe of QCD dynamics and as a tool for new physics searches, his innovative application of machine learning for characterising jets, and the development of novel strategies on jet reconstruction and calibration at the ATLAS experiment.”
2021 Outreach Prize
The three winners of the 2021 EPS-HEPP Outreach Prize are: Uta Bilow (TU Dresden) and Kenneth Cecire (University of Notre Dame), “for the long-term coordination and major expansion of the International Particle Physics Master Classes to include a range of modern methods and exercises, and connecting scientists from all the major LHC and Fermilab experiments to school pupils across the world”, and Sascha Mehlhase (LMU München) “for the design and creation of the ATLAS detector and other interlocking-brick models, creating an international outreach program that reaches to an unusually young audience.” After building the ATLAS detector out of 9500 Lego pieces in 2011, Mehlhase set up the popular “Build Your Own Particle Detector” programme.
