Sarah Heim joins University of Hamburg as professor of physics

9 January 2025

Photo: DESY

Sarah Heim has joined the Institute of Experimental Physics at the University of Hamburg as a professor after a successful application to the Helmholtz programme “Funding of first-time professorial appointments of highly talented female scientists.” She will continue in her role as DESY scientist and started her professorship titled “Physics, with a focus of dark matter and Higgs analysis at ATLAS” in December 2024.

In fact, Sarah Heim’s research is distributed over many aspects of physics at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), as her goal is to understand the most important open questions in particle physics, such as the nature of dark matter and the matter-antimatter asymmetry in the universe. The Higgs boson, discovered in 2012 at the LHC, is often seen as a key particle in this endeavour, and Heim is an expert in measurements of Higgs boson properties. Deviations from theoretical predictions in the measured values would point towards phenomena beyond the Standard Model of Particle Physics that could help explain some of the biggest open questions in physics today. In addition to achieving some of the most precise Higgs boson measurements through the combination of many decay channels, her team also announced evidence of a so-far undetected decay mode of the Higgs boson in 2021. 

As a way to pursue more pathways to uncovering new phenomena, Sarah Heim is currently studying modern methods of machine-learning-based anomaly detection to search for hints of dark-sector particles among the low-energy particles that are produced in every collision at the LHC. These are usually not considered in the search for new particle signatures. In close collaboration with colleagues from DESY and the University of Hamburg, the scientist is planning to expand her machine learning activities also to the new and exciting field of foundation models, which promises to harness the power of huge datasets from different experiments to improve all aspects of particle physics data analysis.

A very important activity that will keep Sarah Heim busy in the next years is the construction of high-precision tracking modules for a new silicon strip detector for the High-Luminosity LHC, an upgrade of the current LHC scheduled to come online in the coming years. DESY is the main responsible institute for one of the endcaps of this new ATLAS subdetector, in collaboration with a number of German universities. The detector will provide high-granularity tracking measurements with the expanded geometrical coverage and radiation hardness required to make most of the upcoming collisions, which will provide about ten times more proton-proton data than recorded so far. Its construction is a huge endeavour, both from a technological and an organisational point of view.

Sarah Heim emphasises: “DESY is a fantastic place for challenging undertakings and cutting-edge research, as there is a wide range of expertise, excellent lab and computing facilities and above all an extremely supportive climate, including for female researchers with families." 

The professorship will deepen Sarah Heim’s already strong connection to the University of Hamburg, built when she was a Young Investigator Group leader and more recently as a Principal Investigator of the Excellence Cluster Quantum Universe. She is looking forward to working more closely with her new colleagues from the Institute of Experimental Physics and of course with university students of all levels.