Junior prof. Dr. Matthias Schott is the new Lichtenberg Professor at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU). The Particle Physics researcher is one of a total of seven outstanding scientists who were successful in the 2012 competition for a Lichtenberg Professorship. He will take up the professorship, which is funded by the Volkswagen Foundation, in February and will also become a Fellow of the Gutenberg Research College (GRC) at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. The newly created Lichtenberg Professorship for Experimental Particle Physics will be institutionalized at the Institute of Physics and will focus on questions relating to the origin of the mass of elementary particles. Schott came to JGU in the summer of 2012 to set up an Emmy Noether junior research group here, which is working on the high-precision measurement of the mass of W bosons, fundamental building blocks of our matter. This work is now being expanded and extended to include the development of a new type of gas detector.

Rhineland-Palatinate Science Minister Doris Ahnen emphasized: “I am very pleased to see how Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz is increasingly becoming a magnet for top young researchers. The institution of this Lichtenberg Professorship shows once again that the university offers outstanding researchers a highly attractive environment. Not least in physics, which has been extremely successful in the Excellence Initiative, for example.”

“We congratulate Mr. Schott on the Lichtenberg Professorship and are delighted that he is enriching our university with his challenging research work,” said JGU President Prof. Dr. Georg Krausch. “He is an ideal and important addition to the Mainz work groups in the field of particle and hadron physics, both as a personality and through the research direction he is prosecuting.”

Junior prof. Dr. Matthias Schott studied physics at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg and the University of Cambridge, UK, and obtained a doctorate (from the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München). In 2008, he was awarded one of the prestigious fellowships at the CERN research center in Geneva and, due to his excellent research achievements, a CERN Research Staff position in 2010. Since the start of the experiments at the ATLAS detector of the new LHC particle accelerator, Schott has played a leading role in analyzing the data. As a result, the ATLAS collaboration appointed him to lead an analysis group of around 50 physicists in the field of electroweak physics. In August 2012, the German Research Foundation (DFG) approved Schott for the institution of an Emmy Noether junior research group working on the high-precision measurement of the mass of W bosons. The appointment to a Lichtenberg professorship is a further sign of his excellent scientific reputation.

The particle physicist’s research area is based in the Experimental Particle and Astroparticle Physics (ETAP) work group at JGU’s Institute of Physics and will focus on the question of how the building blocks of matter, which are described in the standard model of particle physics, actually get their mass. With the discovery of the Higgs boson at CERN last summer, science has come closer to an answer, but at the same time this raises new questions. Junior prof. In particular, Dr. Matthias Schott will attempt to determine the mass of the W boson with an accuracy of 0.01 percent. This will allow indirect conclusions to be drawn about the properties of the Higgs boson. The actual measurements require a very large data set, which is expected to be recorded by the ATLAS experiment in the years 2014 to 2016. At the same time, the scientist would like to work on the development of a new type of microstructure gas detector (micromegas). The new research unit will play a leading international role in research and development work in this field.