Congratulations to Dr Maxwell T. Hansen

Dr Maxwell T. Hansen has been awarded the 2021 Kenneth G. Wilson Award for Excellence in Lattice Field Theory.

Since its inception in 2011, the annual award has recognised physicists who have made recent, outstanding contributions to lattice field theory – the study of quantum field theories on discretised spacetime (the lattice), amenable to simulation by computers.  

The award was presented at the annual Lattice International Conference. 

Max is a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow within the Institute for Particle and Nuclear Physics. His research focuses on extending the reach of numerical lattice calculations to extract more complicated observables governed by the strong force of particle physics and, more broadly, predictions of the full Standard Model. Specifically he has made significant developments in methods for extracting multi-particle scattering amplitudes, based in techniques that use the finite system size of the simulation as a useful probe of the interactions (rather than an unwanted artifact). 

The award is named after Nobel Laureate Kenneth Wilson (1936–2013), who formulated lattice gauge theory in 1974, thereby improving our theoretical knowledge of non-perturbative quantum field theories and eventually permitting such theories to be studied numerically using world class computers.