Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron DESY
Notkestraße 85
22607 Hamburg


Universität Hamburg (UHH)
Luruper Chaussee 149
22761 Hamburg

The vacuum of space is not empty. This was impressively demonstrated by the discovery of a Higgs boson in 2012, which showed that the vacuum is permeated by a Higgs field. There are, however, strong reasons to believe that the vacuum is more complex and that additional Higgs bosons exist. These may hold the key to some of the most fundamental questions of particle physics today, such as the nature of dark matter or the matter-antimatter imbalance in the universe.
The proposed Young Investigator Group (YIG) will use novel experimental techniques to search for rare and challengingly complex signatures of additional Higgs bosons that previous data analyses would not have been able to resolve. It will thereby probe the vacuum structure in a previously unaccessible kinematic regime and, additionally, measure processes predicted by the Standard Model, which may themselves be sensitive to new phenomena, at record precision on the dataset to be collected by the ATLAS experiment until 2023.
Furthermore, the YIG will take a leading role in preparing the ATLAS experiment for the high-luminosity phase of the LHC (from 2026) by developing fast, efficient algorithms for the reconstruction of particle trajectories in the new ATLAS tracking detector, which will partly be built at DESY.

Leader of the Helmholtz Young Investigators Group:

Dr. Janna Katharina Behr
Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron DESY
Notkestr. 85
22607 Hamburg

Phone: +49 40 8998-3075
Email: katharina.behr@desy.de

Partner university:

Prof. Dr. Peter Schleper
Institut für Experimentalphysik
Universität Hamburg, Luruper Chaussee 49 22761 Hamburg, Germany
Phone: +49 40 8998 2957
Email: peter.schleper@physik.uni-hamburg.de