Awarded by the Von Humboldt Foundation and valued at 60.000 euros, the award implies a stay during a year in Germany to investigate.

This recognition will help the scientist from IFIC to tighten his collaboration with DESY, the main German laboratory of particle physics, and with the universities of Hamburg, Humboldt of Berlin and Bonn, in the making of studies of precision about production and the quark top mass in the Large Hadron Collider of the CERN and in future colliders. ‘A part from the scientific recognition that the prize supposes and which I appreciate enormously, is that this prize give us the opportunity to unite our efforts to create an incredibly precise mass of the quark top’ affirm Juan Fuster. ‘And personally, it will be very endearing to remember my time in Hamburg, where I did my thesis.’

To know accurately the quark top mass -the heavier known particle- is fundamental because of its relationship with the Higgs boson, the latest particle discovered of the Standard Model (theory that describes the elemental particles that conform the visible universe and its interactions, which is responsible of giving mass to the rest.)  This makes of his measure one of the most important ones for the particle physics, which is ultimately related to our universe. However, it is more difficult to measure with accuracy the mass of the quark top than the one of the Higgs boson itself.

‘A lot of the current measures of the quark top mass, although accurate, have a significant uncertainty that can be improved’ assures Fuster. The group lead by the researcher in the TFIC, along with groups of Theoretical Physics of the Humboldt University in Berlin, of the DESY laboratory the University of Hamburg, has developed a new method to measure with accuracy the quark top mass that it is not only the amount of the products of its disintegration mass, and in addition allows to incorporate other physical parameters well defined.

Juan Fuster Verdú (Alcoy, 1960) is an international expert recognised for his works about the measures of precision of the Standard Model, a part from her innovative methods as well as in the data analysis as in the development of new particle detectors as trace and vertex detectors. Professor of Research of the ‘Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas’ (CSIC) in the ‘Instituto de Física Corpuscular’, completed his doctorate in the experiment CELLO in DESY (Germany) from where he moved to the CERN to work in the experiment DELPHI of the previous Large Hadron Collider, named LEP.

After his return to Valencia in 1996, he started the IFIC, a research group pioneer in Spain in the development of detectors of silicon applied to the particle physics.  This group built a part of the internal detector of the ATLAS experiment, one of the ‘giants’ of the LHC that discovered the Higgins boson in 2012.  Currently, Juan Fuster works on the physics of the quark top in the LHC and in the development of future linear accelerators.

He has been the director of IFIC (2003-2007), manager of the ‘Plan Nacional de Física de Partículas’ (2007- 2010), coordinator of the area of Physics Science of the CSIC (2010-2012) and president of the Particles Commission and of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP), a part from being the main responsible of the International Conference of Particle Physics event being celebrated in Spain for the first time in 2014, specifically in Valencia.

Every year, the Foundation von Humboldt awards their Research Awards to scientific researchers and academics on any field as a recognition of their achievements in the entire world, whom theories or innovations had a significant impact on their field, and from whom more achievements are expected. Other researchers of the ‘Instituto de Física Corpuscular’ have obtained this distinction previously, as for example José Wagner Furtado Valle (2003) or Antonio Pich Zardoya (2011).