VSI student Hidde Hendriksen wins national Lorenz Award for best master research project

Lorentz Graduation award in Theoretical Physics for research on the smallest building blocks of matter

Hidde Hendriksen’s master research project was on elementary particles and especially focused on an alternative model for the so-called Higgs sector, which is a part of the Standard Model of Particle Physics. All of our present-day understanding of the smallest building blocks of matter is summarized in this model. The Higgs sector with its corresponding particle gives mass to all elementary particles. In 2012 this long-sought Higgs particle, that already had been predicted in 1964, was finally experimentally observed at CERN. Despite the huge success of the Standard Model in predicting the outcomes of particle physics experiments, theoretical physicists remain a bit unsatisfied. The current Higgs sector appears to be very unnatural. A parameter related to the mass of the Higgs particle has to be chosen very precisely, i.e. it has to be “finetuned”, to describe the observed physics. Hidde studied an alternative model that builds a different Higgs sector in the Standard Model, namely with multiple Higgs-like particles without mass and with more symmetry. On top of this, he compared the theoretical predictions of this model with various physics experiments that have been or are being conducted throughout the world.