Congratulations to Elena Mazzeo on receiving the ATLAS Thesis Award 2025! The ATLAS Thesis Awards are presented each year to the best PhD theses carried out within the ATLAS collaboration at CERN in Geneva.
Elena, who earned her PhD at our department in December 2024 with a fellowship funded by INFN, was recognized for her work on the search for double Higgs production in the channel with two photons and two b-jets in the final state in proton–proton collisions. Following the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 and a decade of precision measurements confirming the predictions of the Standard Model, the deeper aspects of the mechanism of electroweak spontaneous symmetry breaking have not yet been experimentally verified. Among these, the Higgs boson self-coupling is of primary importance. This interaction can be studied by searching for extremely rare events in which pairs of Higgs bosons are produced.
Elena worked on one of the main analyses for this process, the channel with two photons and two b-jets, and contributed to the combination of all double Higgs searches carried out by the ATLAS experiment, further improving the sensitivity of our measurements toward the predictions of the Standard Model. She completed her PhD at the Physics Department of the University of Milan, dividing her time between Milan and Geneva.
Each year, around 150 PhD theses are discussed within the ATLAS collaboration. The selection committee received about 40 applications and awarded eight prizes. The award ceremony took place on Thursday, February 19, 2026, in the main auditorium of CERN in Geneva during the ATLAS general meeting.
Elena currently holds a Research Fellow contract at CERN, continuing her professional development in the field of elementary particle physics.
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