Junjie Zhu wins Tollestrup Award

Junjie Zhu

When Junjie Zhu started analyzing W bosons at DZero, the precision W mass measurement was a distant goal.

But seven years later, the DZero collaboration has a preliminary result for the world's most precise measurement of the W boson mass at a single experiment, and Zhu will receive the Tollestrup Award for his work on the collaboration's analysis at this year's Users' Meeting.

Combined with other measurements, the reduced uncertainty of the W boson mass will lead to stricter Higgs boson mass constraints.

"It has been a long journey," Zhu said. "The W boson mass measurement is very difficult. It depends on the calorimeter calibrations-how well we understand our detector. Many people spent years working to make this possible."

Zhu contributed to that work by understanding the detector's ability, writing interface code so experimentalists and theorists could understand each other's analyses, writing prediction software and currently participating in writing the result paper.

"Dr. Zhu made numerous contributions to this very difficult measurement of one of the most important Standard Model parameters," said John Conway, 2009 chair of the Tollestrup Award Committee.

Alvin Tollestrup, namesake of the award given for outstanding postdoctoral research, will present Zhu with the honor at 4:15 p.m. Wednesday June 3, in Ramsey Auditorium.

Zhu will receive a certificate of recognition and a check for $3,500 from URA.

"Obtaining W mass measurement with world's best precision required many years of effort by the collaboration to build, operate and understand the detectors and simulation, said DZero co-spokesperson Dmitri Denisov. "Junjie demonstrated deep understanding of the experimental challenges, an ability to generate and implement ideas and he worked very hard in close cooperation with his colleagues from all over the world."

Zhu, a postdoc from SUNY Stony Brook University, has worked at Fermilab since 2002 and focuses on electroweak measurements, mainly involving the W and Z bosons.

--Tona Kunz

Annual Users' Meeting begins Wednesday

This year's annual Users' Meeting will feature recent experiment results, the laboratory's future plans and physics updates from Washington D.C. and around the world. The meeting, which will take place Wednesday, June 3, and Thursday, June 4, will provide Fermilab employees and users a chance to learn more about global physics projects and plans for experiments at Fermilab.

Register now for the meeting.

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