Award to Best Junior Scientists - The Association of the Friends and Sponsors of DESY presents PhD Thesis Prize

Awarded this year: Markus Ackermann (left) and Lars Finke

Two physicists who have graduated in 2006 with DESY-related themes are the happy recipients of the PhD Thesis Prize of the Association of the Friends and Sponsors of DESY: Dr. Markus Ackermann (DESY in Zeuthen) and Dr. Lars Finke (University of Hamburg). Yesterday, during an open session of the Physics Research Committee, Professor Albrecht Wagner, Chairman of the DESY Directorate, presented this prize that is awarded every year for outstanding doctoral theses.

Lars Finke earned his doctorate in the H1 collaboration with a thesis on the production of charm and beauty quarks. With the help of the high precision vertex detector in H1, he was able for the first time to use all high energy particles from the collisions for his measurements, enabling him to verify the quantum chromo dynamics’ predictions with so far unprecedented precision.

Markus Ackermann elaborated his thesis at Humboldt University Berlin within the AMANDA collaboration. In his search for cosmic point sources of high energy neutrinos, he was able to deduce the worldwide lowest upper limits for neutrino fluxes from these sources.