Dr Sebastian Trojanowski of NCBJ's Theoretical Physics Division was among this year's recipients of the Frontiers of Science Award from the International Congress of Basic Sciences in Beijing. The award was established in 2023 to recognise the most momentous scientific papers published in the past 10 years in the fields of mathematics, theoretical physics and theoretical computer science with a particular focus on the achievements of early-career researchers.

The prize is awarded annually on the basis of independent recommendations from an international scientific committee of eminent specialists in the aforementioned fields. This year's laureates in the field of physics are dominated by researchers from the USA and leading research centres in Europe. The awards will be presented at the official congress from 13-25 July in Beijing.

The award for Dr Trojanowski and three co-authors of a paper in the field of high-energy physics phenomenology is related to a work published in 2017, which described a novel idea for the FASER experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). During this work, Dr Trojanowski and two of the co-authors were completing their first postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, Irvine, USA.

The paper initiated efforts that started a new research programme at the LHC related to the search for traces of so-called new physics along the axis of the beam of colliding protons and the study of neutrinos. In the following years, the FASER detector, among others, made the first observations of high-energy neutrinos produced in particle beam colliders. In the future, it is expected that this programme will allow the first direct observation of tau antineutrinos, which have so far only been observed indirectly, without the possibility of separating their signal from neutrinos. The experiment is also looking for rare signals that may shed light on the nature of dark matter in the Universe.