Together with Professor Aneesh Manohar, Professor Paolo Nason and Professor Giulia Zanderighi, Professor Gavin Salam has been awarded a 2024 Frontiers of Science Award from the International Congress of Basic Science. The awards honour top research, with an emphasis on the achievements from the past five years which are both excellent and of outstanding scholarly value.
The quartet were given the award for their work in which they showed how to deduce the distribution of photons inside the proton from existing deep inelastic scattering data. That advance enabled them to reduce the uncertainty on the proton’s photon distribution from about 100% down to 1–2%. Their approach is now being used in a wide variety of predictions of electroweak processes at the LHC, helping it achieve unprecedented accuracy. The work was published in Physical Review Letters in 2016 when Professor Zanderighi was also at Oxford’s Department of Physics; she is now director at the Max Planck Institute for Physics. Professor Salam joined the Department of Physics in 2018 from CERN; he holds a Royal Society Research Professorship and is Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College.