Michael Trott receives Villum Young Investigator Grant

NBIA Associate Professor Michael Trott has been awarded a substantial Villum Young Investigator grant from the Villum Foundation. The research that will be funded with the grant is focused on studying with high precision the properties of the newly discovered Higgs boson. A Higgs-like boson was reported discovered by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiments based at CERN in 2013, and Michael was fortunate enough to be at CERN during this discovery time. He has already significantly contributed to the development of the theoretical framework used to study Higgs data.

The exact nature and properties of the Higgs are essential to determine, as the Higgs boson is an unprecedented fundamental particle to discover. This is the first (apparently) fundamental boson ever discovered in nature. Further, it is believed that this particle is the key player in an intricate mechanism built into the fundamental interactions of Nature to generate the mass of the observed particles.

Michael will utilize the resources of the grant to build up a powerful research group aimed at further advancing the state of the art in analyzing Higgs data, as precision increases. The theoretical formalism used to study the Higgs will be continually developed so that any deviations in the properties of this particle can be consistently interpreted. The scale of the grant is 7 MDKK, which will be used in support of post-docs, PhD students and outreach activities.