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Deepa Thomas, who earned her PhD. last year under the supervision of Prof. Thomas Peitzmann and Dr. André Mischke (Physics and Astronomy), has won the 2014 ALICE Thesis Award. ALICE is one of the experiments being conducted using the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle accelerator, and which produces an average of 75 dissertations each year. The ALICE Thesis Committee feels that her dissertation ‘Jet-like correlations of heavy quark particles in proton-proton and lead-lead collisions in ALICE’, has made an important and well-written contribution to the experiment. Her doctoral studies were financed from the ERC Starting/Consolidator grant given to André Mischke. 

The ALICE experiment studies the characteristics of matter under the extreme conditions that existed shortly after the ‘Big Bang’. Physicists suspect that the universe at the time consisted of quark-gluon plasma, an extremely hot and dense soup of elementary particles. Over the past few years, scientists at the LHC, the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator, have been successful in producing this quark-gluon plasma. Experimental physicists at Utrecht ľ�ϸ���Ӱ�� and other institutions use the purpose-built ALICE detector to study the behaviour of this ‘primordial soup’.

Delay electrons from heavy-flavour hadrons

Deepa Thomas has studied ‘delay electrons’ from heavy-flavour hadrons, which are formed from collisions of heavy quarks with other particles in the quark-gluon plasma. This ‘quark soup’, which is 100,000 hotter than the core of the sun and has an energy density 100 times larger than the nucleus of an atom, becomes unstable before it can be observed. With ALICE, we can measure the delay electrons from heavy-flavour hadrons, and Thomas was able to use this information to deduce the characteristics of the quark-gluon plasma.

Steep learning curve

“My project proposal was ambitious, but thanks to Deepa I was able to realise my ambitions”, according to Mischke. “I was immediately impressed by Deepa’s thorough approach and the steep learning curve. That, combined with her mastery of the most modern software, her good organisational and communication skills and the effort she put into the project all helped her work to progress rapidly. This enabled her to develop into the main expert in the field of electron measurements within ALICE and our institute.”

Evaluation

The ALICE Thesis Committee evaluates the nominated dissertations for their relevance to the field of research, the quality of the results achieved, the conduct of the research, the originality of the method and the didactic quality of the writing. The prize is only awarded to a dissertation if it deserves a high score for all of these points.

Deepa Thomas

Deepa Thomas has worked as a Post-Doc at the ľ�ϸ���Ӱ�� of Texas in Austin since she earned her PhD. The award ceremony will take place at CERN on Friday, 13 March.