03.11.2011

Award for outstanding PhD theses

The Association of the Friends and Sponsors of DESY presents PhD thesis award 2011

Two outstanding PhD theses were honoured with the PhD thesis award 2011 of the Association of the Friends and Sponsors of DESY on Wednesday. The prize was shared by Dr. Martin Beye and Dr. Roman Kogler. Martin Beye earned his doctoral degree at the free-electron laser FLASH, Roman Kogler in the H1 Collaboration at HERA.

Dr. Martin Beye, VFFD Chair Prof. Dr. Friedrich-Wilhelm Büßer, Chairman of the DESY Board of Directors Prof. Dr. Helmut Dosch, Dr. Roman Kogler (left to right)

New X-ray lasers as FLASH facilitate a completely new approach for the investigation of natural processes. The very intensive and ultra-short X-ray pulses allow taking snapshots of the movement of electrons and atoms with highest time resolution. For his PhD thesis at the University of Hamburg, Martin Beye worked in the group of Professor Wurth at a series of internationally much-noticed experiments and gained completely new insights into the dynamics of matter. Among other things, for the first time he experimentally observed a new liquid phase of silicon, this has a far reaching significance to understand the properties of liquids, e.g. the well-known density anomaly of water, meaning that at 4 centigrade, water has a higher density than solid ice.

The thesis of Roman Kogler was elaborated in the H1 Collaboration at HERA. He presented precision measurements of the so-called 2-jet und 3-jet events at H1. The particle bunches emerging from particle collisions (jets) provide physicists with information about the dynamics of quarks and gluons involved in the collisions. A substantial part of Kogler’s thesis deals with the development of a new and efficient method to evaluate these particle jets. With this is possible to clearly improve the precision of jet measurements in comparison to previous analyses. With this thesis and other contributions, Kogler became one of the prominent persons in the H1 Collaboration.

Martin Beye, born 1981 in Salzgitter, began to study physics in 2002 at the University of Hamburg. In 2007, he obtained his diploma degree with distinction. Within the framework of a DESY scholarship, he graduated at the free-electron laser FLASH and earned his doctoral degree in 2010 from the University of Hamburg.

Roman Kogler, born in Austria in 1981, began to study physics in 2001 at Vienna University of Technology where he obtained his diploma degree with distinction in 2007. Within the framework of the Trans-Atlantic Science Exchange Program, he spent a year at the University of Illinois in Urbana. A scholarship of the Max Planck Institute of Physics in Munich gave him the possibility to elaborate his thesis at the H1 experiment at DESY. In December 2010, he earned his doctoral degree from the University of Hamburg.

The PhD thesis award of the Association of the Friends and Sponsors of DESY (VFFD) includes a sum of 3000 euros. Every year, the association presents this prize for one or two outstanding PhD theses.