On Valentine’s Day 2019, the ATLAS Collaboration took a break from the usual rhythm of scientific discussion to showcase some of its most junior members. In a celebration in CERN’s Main Auditorium, the collaboration held its 10th annual ATLAS Thesis Awards.

The ATLAS Thesis Awards highlight outstanding contributions made to the collaboration in the context of a PhD thesis. “These awards represent an excellent opportunity to recognize the work of our talented PhD students and showcase how their contributions are crucial to the success of ATLAS,” said Claudia Glasman, Chair of the 2018 ATLAS Thesis Awards Committee. ATLAS PhD students contribute strongly and critically to all areas of the experiment, while learning valuable skills for their degrees.

Its winners are the cream of a very talented crop: “The quality of the students graduating in ATLAS is very high and so, as is the case every year, selecting the winners was not an easy task,” adds Glasman. “The committee received 34 nominations this year, encompassing the diverse range of research areas studied at ATLAS.”

After a comprehensive review of each nominee, the committee selected six new winners: Nedaa Alexandra Asbah (DESY Hamburg), Andrew Stuart Bell (University of London), Rafal Bielski (University of Manchester), Nicolas Köhler (MPI München), Stefano Manzoni (University of Milan & INFN; University Pierre et Marie Curie & LPNHE-Paris), and Anne-Luise Poley (DESY Zeuthen).

During the award ceremony, each student was given a certificate, a glass model of the ATLAS detector, and personal congratulations from ATLAS Spokesperson Karl Jakobs, ATLAS Collaboration Board Chair Max Klein, and Claudia Glasman.

The winners each gave presentations about their thesis work in front of members of the ATLAS collaboration. On the subject of physics, their talks varied wildly: from the discovery of new Higgs channels and studies of top-quark production, to novel searches for dark energy and supersymmetry, and technological advances of the new ITk strip detectors developed for the High-Luminosity phase of the LHC.

The students also took this opportunity to acknowledge the mentors, teachers and family members who had supported them throughout their PhD. “Raising” a thesis through to its defence requires not only a village – it takes a whole a collaboration.

Explore each of the excellent, winning theses in the links below:

• Search for the Production of a Standard Model Higgs Boson in Association with Top-Quarks and Decaying into a Pair of Bottom-Quarks with 13 TeV ATLAS Data by Nedaa Alexandra Asbah
• b-Tagging and Evidence for the Standard Model H to bb Decay with the ATLAS Experiment by Andrew Stuart Bell
• Top Quark Pair Production Measurements in the Single Lepton Channel using the ATLAS Detector by Rafal Bielski
• Searches for the Supersymmetric Partner of the Top Quark, Dark Matter and Dark Energy at the ATLAS Experiment by Nicolas Köhler
• Physics with Photons with the ATLAS Run 2 Data: Calibration and Identification, Measurement of the Higgs Boson Mass and Search for Supersymmetry in the Di-Photon Final State by Stefano Manzoni
• Studies of Adhesives and Metal Contacts on Silicon Strip Sensors for the ATLAS Inner Tracker by Anne-Luise Poley