31.10.2012

Presentation of PhD thesis award 2012

The PhD thesis award 2012 of the Association of the Friends and Sponsors of DESY is shared by Katarzyna Anna Rejzner and Arik Willner.

Award winners Katarzyna Anna Rejzner and Arik Willner

Katarzyna Anna Rejzner from Poland studied in Cracow. With the help of a scholarship, she then started her doctoral studies at the II Institute of Theoretical Physics at the University of Hamburg. In her thesis titled „Batalin-Vilkovisky Formalism In Locally Covariant Field Theory“,Katarzyna Rejzner worked on the so-called gauge theories which are a fundament of particle physics. In spite of their high predictive value, they present a series of long unsolved problems that are related to the auxiliary parameters which are necessary for their formulation. An important question is whether the theory predictions depend on the rather arbitrary choice of these auxiliary parameters. For this aim, Katarzyna Rejzner developed a mathematically precise version of a formalism of the Soviet physicists Batalin and Vilkovisky. With this, she was able to show that the choice of the auxiliary parameters does not play a decisive role. One of the consequences of her work appears to be that the consistent gravitation quantification - one of the significant and still unsolved problems of today’s physics - is coming within reach.

Arik Willner from Lübeck studied in Kassel and Hamburg where he obtained his doctoral degree. In his thesis titled „A High Repetition Rate XUV Seeding Source for FLASH II“, he worked on the possibilities of the so-called seeding of free-electron lasers. These novel research facilities as FLASH at DESY emit extremely intensive ultra-short X-ray flashes. However, the beam pulse quality is subject to statistical fluctuations if nothing is done to specifically prevent this. One of the globally investigated countermeasures is seeding. It consists of inducing the laser process with a weak beam pulse of the required wavelength. Nevertheless, it is very difficult to produce these seeding pulses within a wavelength of 10 to 100 nanometres, especially when thousands of them are needed every second as is the case at FLASH. Arik Willner was able to solve this problem in his PhD thesis, a significant step in the advancement of this technology.

Every year, the association presents this prize for outstanding PhD theses carried out in DESY fields of research within the period of 1 April of the previous year until 31 March of the present year. The prizes are annually awarded on occasion of the Jentschke Lectures at DESY in Hamburg.