Former DESY scientists Eckhard Elsen and Robert Klanner will be awarded the W.K.H. Panofsky Prize in Experimental Particle Physics by the American Physical Society (APS) next spring, the APS announced this week. The two particle physicists are receiving the award for “pioneering work in establishing the HERA physics program and detectors, leadership in HERA physics exploitation resulting in the measurement of the proton´s structure in new kinematic regions of vital importance in confronting new aspects of quantum chromodynamics, and enabling discoveries at the Large Hadron Collider.”

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Robert Klanner and Eckhard Elsen. Photos: Universität Hamburg / FIAS

Elsen and Klanner are being honoured for their key contributions to science at HERA, DESY´s largest particle accelerator that operated from 1992 to 2007. At HERA, the structure of the proton in particular was studied in detail. The knowledge gained at HERA is not only of central importance for the general understanding of the proton and its components, but also contributes on a daily basis to the work of researchers from all over the world who are involved in the Large Hadron Collider LHC at the CERN research centre in Geneva. Protons collide with protons at the LHC, and the better we understand the complicated structure of the proton, which is made up of quarks and gluons, the more precisely we can analyse the LHC data for new effects. In particular, the precise determination of the proportion of gluons in the proton was made possible by the HERA data and is of great importance for the investigations into the Higgs particle discovered in 2012.

Born in Austria, Robert Klanner has been involved in setting up, operating and analysing the ZEUS experiment at HERA since 1984. In 1996 he was appointed professor at Universität Hamburg and between 1999 and 2005 he was DESY Research Director.

Eckhard Elsen was a Leading Scientist at DESY for around 25 years before taking up the post of Research Director at CERN in 2016. During his time at DESY, his roles included spokesperson for the H1 experiment, one of the four experiments at the HERA accelerator. He has also worked and researched at the Universität Hamburg, the Stanford National Accelerator Laboratory, and the Universities of Heidelberg and Göttingen, and is currently Scientific Director of the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies (FIAS).

DESY Research Director Beate Heinemann congratulates the two laureates: “The Panofsky Prize is one of the most important prizes in particle physics. This year it goes to two people who have made a decisive contribution to the success of HERA through their leading roles in the H1 and ZEUS experiments. In a way, it also goes to DESY and the many people from DESY and the international researchers who were involved in the construction and operation of the HERA accelerator and the experiments in Hamburg. HERA was the world´s first and so far only electron-proton accelerator and has made essential contributions to the understanding of the proton, which are enormously important for analyses at the Large Hadron Collider LHC, e.g. for understanding the properties of the Higgs boson.”