20 November 2024

Photo: Carsten Dammann

Katharina Behr receives the Hertha Sponer Prize 2025 of the German Physical Society (DPG) for her outstanding experimental contributions to the search for an extended Higgs sector through decays of heavy Higgs bosons into top quarks. The physicist heads the Helmholtz Young Investigator Group ‘Fingerprints of the Vacuum’ at DESY and is involved as a principal investigator in the Cluster of Excellence ‘Quantum Universe’ at the University of Hamburg.

The DPG honours Katharina Behr for her key role in the search for an extended Higgs sector at the Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator. “She has contributed significantly to expanding the frontiers of our knowledge of Higgs physics by opening up a new region of parameter space and developing sophisticated analytical tools that form the basis for a growing number of analyses at the Large Hadron Collider that are sensitive to interference effects”, emphasises the DPG, highlighting the physicist's special achievements: “Due to strong interference effects that do not normally occur in other searches, Katharina Behr had to develop completely new techniques for this, which could also be important for further analyses. She thus set an example of how a small group like her Helmholtz Young Investigator Group can make significant and visible contributions in large collaborations such as the ATLAS experiment.”

Katharina Behr completed her physics degree at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in 2012 with a thesis on the measurement of the top quark mass at the ATLAS experiment. In 2015, she received her doctorate from the University of Oxford with a thesis on the search for new heavy resonances. Her doctoral research was funded via Rhodes Scholarship. She then joined DESY in Hamburg as a Helmholtz Fellow, where she searched for signs of dark matter in the data from the ATLAS detector, among other things. During this time, she also took on the role of coordinator of all searches in collision events with top quarks at the ATLAS experiment.

Since 2020, Katharina Behr has headed the Helmholtz Young Investigator Group ‘Fingerprints of the Vacuum’ at DESY, where she uses innovative methods to search for traces of new physics in collision events with top quarks and for the pair production of Higgs bosons. She is also working on algorithms for reconstructing particle tracks at high particle densities in silicon detectors, such as the new ATLAS Inner Tracker (ITk). In this context, Katharina Behr also took on the role of coordinator of all activities for track reconstruction at high particle densities within the ATLAS collaboration. As a principal investigator at the University of Hamburg’s Cluster of Excellence Quantum Universe, she is significantly involved in the cluster's research areas ‘Higgs Physics’ and ‘Dark Matter’.

With the Hertha Sponer Prize, the DPG honors female scientists for outstanding achievements in physics. The annual prize is endowed with 3000 euros and is primarily intended to encourage younger female scientists and attract more women to physics. Hertha Sponer (1895 - 1968), who gave the prize its name, was a German physicist who made important contributions to molecular physics and spectroscopy, among other things. The award will be presented in March 2025 during the 88th Annual Meeting of the DPG in Bonn.