Keisuke Yoshihara, a postdoctoral fellow in experimental particle physics in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Pennsylvania, received a "Young Scientist Award" at the 71st Annual Meeting of the Physical Society of Japan, which took place 19-22 March 2016.
Dr. Yoshihara earned this recognition as a result of his work as a graduate student at the University of Tokyo on the discovery and subsequent study of the Higgs boson in the ATLAS Experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider.
As a post-doctoral scholar at Penn, he is continuing his research on ATLAS. Currently he is focusing on the search for the supersymmetric partner of the top quark. Now that the Higgs boson has been discovered, one of the mysteries is why it is so light (125 GeV or about 125 times the mass of the proton). Supersymmetry is a theory that predicts that for every fermion or boson in the standard model of particle physics there is a supersymmetric partner that is a boson or fermion, respectively.
This award is just one of many that graduate students and postdoctoral scholars working in the Penn ATLAS group have received. Each year the ATLAS collaboration selects typically five dissertations out of the approximately 150 to 200 dissertations that are submitted in the 180 institutions that make up the ATLAS Collaboration. The spokesperson of the ATLAS Collaboration then selects one of these dissertations to be especially recognized by being published in the Springer Theses series.
Three Penn graduate students have been honored with ATLAS Thesis Awards: Mike Hance (2011), John Alison (2012) and Jamie Saxon (2014). In addition, Penn postdoctoral scholar Chris Meyer (2013) received this recognition for his graduate work at the University of Chicago. Hance and Alison were both selected to receive the Springer Theses prize