From left to right: Guy Wilkinson (LHCb spokesperson), Sascha Stahl, Kevin Dungs, Tim Head, Roel Aaij, Conor Fitzpatrick, Claire Prouvé, Patrick Koppenburg (chair of committee), Sean Benson.
Twenty-five nominations were submitted and considered by the committee, and five prizes were awarded to teams or individuals for work that had a significant impact within the last year.
The recipients of the award are:
- Roel Aaij, Sean Benson, Conor Fitzpatrick, Rosen Matev and Sascha Stahl, for having implemented and commissioned the revolutionary changes to the LHC Run-2 high-level trigger, including the first widespread deployment of real-time analysis techniques in high-energy physics;
- Kevin Dungs and Tim Head, for having launched the Starterkit initiative, a new style of software tutorial based on modern programming methods. “Starterkit is a group of physicists who want to improve the working lives of young researchers working on the LHCb experiment” (https://lhcb.github.io/starterkit/);
- Manuel Schiller, for speed improvements in the tracking of LHCb, enabling the full event reconstruction in the HLT. Manuel used advanced numerical methods to provide mathematical tools that speed up the tracking by large factors;
- Claire Prouvé, for the development of the automated RICH mirror alignment within the online framework. Claire's work has ultimately lead to RICH mirror alignment taking just 20 minutes to complete, whereas it took several days before;
- Paolo Durante, for the development of the PCIe40 board, the cornerstone of the LHCb upgrade. Paolo's contributions were crucial to demonstrate the overall superiority of the PCIe40 based-architecture, which made the LHCb upgrade technically possible, using a solution that is significantly less expensive than the original plan.