FOM research three times in top ten of 2012 breakthroughs
On 14 December the authoritative magazine Physics World announced that the breakthrough of the Year goes 'to the ATLAS and CMS collaborations at CERN for their joint discovery of a Higgs-like particle at the Large Hadron Collider'. A discovery by FOM workgroup leaders professor Allard Mosk, professor Ad Lagendijk and professor Willem Vos of the MESA+ Institute at the University of Twente has been ranked as one of the ten most important breakthroughs in physics research in 2012. The discovery of majorana particles by FOM focus group leader professor Leo Kouwenhoven is also in the top ten.
Mosk's group succeeded in making images through completely opaque layers. They let a laser beam fall from different angles on a scattering surface of frosted glass and a computer accurately registered how much light came back from the hidden object. The researchers expect that these results will yield new microscopy methods with which high-resolution images can be formed despite light scattering. Mosk et al. published their discovery on 8 November 2012 in Nature.
Kouwenhoven leads a FOM focus group at Delft University of Technology and carried out his research into majoranas within a FOM Industrial Partnership Programme 'Topological quantum computing' in partnership with Microsoft. Nature published the discovery in February 2012 as breaking news.
At a seminar held at CERN at the beginning of July, as a curtain raiser to the year's major particle physics conference, ICHEP2012 in Melbourne, the ATLAS and CMS experiments presented their latest preliminary results in the search for the long sought Higgs particle. Both experiments observed a new particle in the mass region around 125-126 GeV. "We have reached a milestone in our understanding of nature," says CERN Director General Rolf Heuer. "The discovery of a particle consistent with the Higgs boson opens the way to more detailed studies, requiring larger statistics, which will pin down the new particle’s properties, and is likely to shed light on other mysteries of our universe." A large number of Nikhef researchers is closely involved in the Higgs study.