URL: https://www.desy.de/news/news_search/index_eng.html
Breadcrumb Navigation
DESY News: ATLAS Ph.D. Award for Emily Thompson
News
News from the DESY research centre
ATLAS Ph.D. Award for Emily Thompson
ATLAS Ph.D. award winner Emily Thompson with her advisor, DESY Particle Physics Director Beate Heinemann.
The ATLAS Collaboration is a huge technological and human undertaking, consisting of more than 5500 people in over 180 institutions all around the world, including DESY. Each person contributes to some part of the detector’s design, construction, operation, maintenance, datataking, and data analysis. Almost one fifth of the collaboration members are Ph.D. students. A dedicated committee selects up to six awards every year to recognise outstanding doctoral dissertations within the collaboration.
Thompson’s award-winning search for long-lived supersymmetric particles used a feature called displaced vertices. With lifetimes ranging from picoseconds to nanoseconds, massive long-lived particles could decay to several electrically charged particles within the inner tracking volume of the ATLAS detector, resulting in the reconstruction of a displaced secondary vertex. But these particles are hard to find as they decay on a longer timescale than other particles measured by ATLAS, meaning they would not match the timing structure the detector provides. Thompson adjusted many algorithms for the identification of the particles and showed with her thesis that these searches are technically possible.
“Emily was a fantastic Ph.D. student, and thus I am not surprised that ATLAS awarded this competitive prize to her!” says Thompson’s supervisor, DESY Research Director Beate Heinemann. “For me it was a great pleasure and privilege to supervise her together with Federico Meloni.”
“I am honoured and humbled to receive this recognition from the ATLAS Collaboration,” Thompson says. “I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my supervisors, Federico Meloni and Beate Heinemann, for guiding me throughout my Ph.D. studies. I would also like to thank the entire DESY ATLAS group for providing me with a welcoming and intellectually challenging environment that has helped me to develop as a researcher.”
