The Charpak-Ritz Prize 2018 is awarded to Roland Paul Horisberger

The Charpak-Ritz Prize 2018, jointly awarded by the French Physical Society and the Swiss Physical Society, has been bestowed to Roland Paul Horisberger for his numerous contributions to the development of precision silicon vertex detectors for particle physics experiments as well as for the application of these technologies in X-ray photon sciences. His ground breaking work for the silicon microstrip detector for DELPHI at LEP, the H1-central vertex detector at HERA and the pixel detector for CMS have been crucial for the excellent physics performances and discoveries of these experiments. He successfully transferred these novel technologies, like for instance the PILATUS pixel detectors, to the field of X-ray photon sciences and such enabled a large number of new scientific results. With his group at PSI he has created the foundations that allowed in 2007 the creation of a spin-off company that now is the market leader in single photon counting pixel detectors at synchrotrons world wide.