KU professor awarded gold medal of the Mexican Physical Society


LAWRENCE — Christophe Royon, Foundation Distinguished Professor in the Department of Physics & Astronomy at the University of Kansas, was awarded the gold medal of the Mexican Physical Society, Division of Particle and Fields, earlier this fall.

Christophe Royon“This is a great recognition for the work related to the odderon discovery and also to the search for beyond standard model physics using intact protons at the LHC. People had been looking for the odderon for the last 50 years, and now it became a reality,” Royon said.

Royon was selected for his leadership in the discovery of odd-gluon state odderon from elastic proton-proton and proton-antiproton collisions at TOTEM and D0 detectors, his contributions to QCD and physics beyond the Standard Model, and for his support to the Mexican High Energy Physics Network community. Royon worked in collaboration with researchers in Mexico on common projects on analysis in the CMS and TOTEM collaborations at CERN, Switzerland, and in the D0 collaboration at Fermilab, Batavia, Illinois, and U.S. phenomenology and hardware, making this an international undertaking.

“The odderon discovery was made possible because of the work of an international team where I was coordinating the activities in the D0 and TOTEM collaborations. In that sense, this award is a great recognition of the work of a team,” Royon said.

The original announcement from the Mexican Physical Society can be found on its website, and the award ceremony took place Nov. 23 in Puebla, Mexico.

Royon was previously director of research at CEA Saclay, France. He is a specialist of nuclear and high energy physics and worked on the proton and heavy ion structure, as well as potential signal of beyond standard model physics at the HERA, DESY, Hamburg, Germany, the Tevatron, Fermilab, and the LHC, CERN, Geneva, Switzerland, colliders. Royon was awarded the Humboldt Research Award in Germany in 2018 and the High Energy Physics Prize by the European Physics Society in 2013 and 2019 for the Higgs boson discovery and the discovery and analysis of the top quark, respectively. He is an honorary professor at the University of Gyongyos, Hungary, and the leading international editor of Acta Physics Polonica.

Photo: Christophe Royon, Foundation Distinguished Professor in the Department of Physics & Astronomy at the University of Kansas.

Fri, 12/16/2022

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