Two Young Scientists Awarded: The “Association of the Friends and Sponsors of DESY” presents PhD Thesis Prize

This year, the PhD prize of the Association of the Friends and Sponsors of DESY goes to Dr. Ulrike Elschenbroich (Geneva Univ.) and Dr. Ingo Bloch (Hamburg Univ.) for their theses on HERA-related subjects.

The Association of the Friends and Sponsors of DESY annually awards the PhD prize for an outstanding thesis at DESY. Yesterday, Prof. Friedrich-Wilhelm Büßer, Chairman of the Association, presented the prize during the open session of the DESY Extended Scientific Council.

Ulrike Elschenbroich elaborated her awarded thesis at the HERMES experiment. She was the first to succeed in gathering detailed information about the transverse spin effects and structures which allow a better understanding of the role of the orbital angular momentum of the quarks in the proton, thus creating a milestone for the understanding of the proton structure.

In his prized PhD thesis, Ingo Bloch for the first time developed at HERA a largely model-independent analysis of the production of heavy beauty quarks, leading to a better understanding of the existing discrepancy between experiment and theory. Moreover, his investigation of the background radiation in the ZEUS detector significantly contributed to solve the background problems in HERA runs, thus making possible more efficient experiment operation.