International award for Durham Physicist

A Durham University physicist has won an international award for his work on modelling elementary particles, in particular the Higgs boson. Professor Michael Spannowsky , who joined Durham University's Institute for Particle Physics Phenomenology (IPPP) seven years ago, has been awarded the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award , in recognition of his work on Higgs boson phenomenology, which has helped inform work at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland. Outstanding research record The Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award is presented by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation , based in Germany, which works to promote academic cooperation between scientists and scholars from across the world. Named after the scientist Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel, the award recognises a recipient's outstanding research record. Winners receive funding to enable them to spend up to a year collaborating on a long-term research project with colleagues at a German institution. The Higgs particle generates masses for other elementary particles and without it the Universe would not remotely look like anything we see today. Professor Spannowsky's research uses quantum field theoretical methods implemented into super-computers to model the predicted behaviour of the Higgs Boson and aid the design of experiments to test these models at the LHC.