8 June 2026

Photo: Matthias Schröder

Matthias Schröder at Campus Bahrenfeld.

There is exciting news from the Higgs division of Quantum Universe Cluster of Excellence: Starting in September 2026, Dr. Matthias Schröder of the Department of Physics, University of Hamburg, will become the new coordinator of all Higgs boson research conducted by the international CMS collaboration at the European research center CERN. This makes him the first researcher at a German institute to be entrusted with this important role.

Together with Mauro Donega (ETH Zurich), he will be responsible for all Higgs boson studies conducted within the CMS collaboration. “I’m really looking forward to this new role. The next two years in particular will be especially interesting because, starting this summer, we’ll be able to analyze a new, extremely large dataset. With this data, we can measure the Higgs particle more precisely than ever before and address important questions about the Higgs’ influence on the evolution of the universe from the Big Bang to the present day. This will be a particularly exciting time for all particle physicists,” says Matthias Schröder.

The Higgs particle was first observed in 2012 at the ATLAS and CMS particle detectors at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Since then, many new properties of the Higgs boson have been measured—yet key questions remain unanswered, particularly regarding its role in the evolution of the universe. Globally, these can only be investigated at CMS and ATLAS. Follow-up projects are not planned until 2045. Researchers from the Hamburg Cluster of Excellence Quantum Universe play a crucial role for both detectors, as well as in the theoretical interpretation of the Higgs data.

The CMS collaboration brings together more than 6,300 researchers from 526 institutions in 58 countries, who jointly built the CMS detector at CERN and are now collecting and analyzing data. The detector is constantly being improved and upgraded. A major upgrade of the detector is planned for 2026–2029, which will enable significantly more precise measurements in the future. In addition to the search for new phenomena beyond the Standard Model, studies of the Higgs boson are the main focus of the CMS Collaboration. Nearly 500 researchers from Germany, including people from Karlsruhe, Aachen, and Hamburg, are involved.

Matthias Schröder studied physics at the universities of Hamburg and Uppsala, Sweden, and earned his Ph.D. in 2012 from the Institute of Experimental Physics with a thesis on the search for new particles. Following postdoctoral fellowships at DESY and KIT in Karlsruhe, he has been a tenured researcher at the Institute of Experimental Physics in Prof. Johannes Haller’s research group since 2020. Among his most significant scientific achievements is his contribution to the discovery of the so-called Yukawa interactions of the Higgs boson—a completely new type of force in nature.