Britain honours its particle physicists

Theoretical and experimental particle physicists figure among the winners for 2004 of Britain's most prestigious prizes for physics, awarded by the Institute of Physics (IOP). The IOP's own Paul Dirac medal and prize, goes to this year to CERN's John Ellis for "his highly influential work on particle-physics phenomenology; in particular on the properties of gluons, the Higgs boson and the top quark". One of the institute's premier wards, it is made for outstanding contributions to theoretical (including mathematical and computational) physics.

The Duddell medal and prize, in memory of William du Bois Duddell, the inventor of the electromagnetic oscillograph, is awarded for outstanding contributions to the advancement of knowledge through the application of physics, including the invention or design of scientific instruments or the discovery of materials used in their construction. It is shared this year by Geoff Hall, of Imperial College London, Alessandro Marchioro from CERN and Peter Sharp of the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory and CERN. The trio have received the award for their "development of radiation hard analogue electronics for silicon detectors, enabling their use as a means of precision detection and measurement of charged particle production at the Large Hadron Collider".