The ATLAS Collaboration celebrated some of its best and brightest PhD students at the recent Thesis Awards. Since 2010, these awards have recognised the outstanding contributions made to the ATLAS Collaboration in the context of PhD theses. PhD students provide critical contributions to all areas of the experiment, all while learning valuable skills for their degrees.

The winners of the 2022 ATLAS Thesis Awards were announced at an award ceremony held in CERN’s main auditorium on 16 February 2023. The recipients are Daniel Camarero Munoz (Universidad Autonoma de Madrid), Giuseppe Carratta (Università di Bologna & INFN), Guglielmo Frattari (Sapienza Università di Roma & INFN), Maria Mironova (University of Oxford), Brian Moser (Universiteit van Amsterdam & NIKHEF), Giulia Ripellino (Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Stockholm), Bastian Schlag (Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz & CERN) and Emily Anne Thompson (Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg & DESY).

“Our PhD students are the beating heart of the ATLAS Collaboration,” said Antonella De Santo, Chair of this year’s Thesis Awards Committee. “Every year, these awards are an opportunity for us to highlight some of the best of the best. Our 2022 cohort stands out academically, with work that reflects the wide diversity of ATLAS' research programme, including physics analysis, detector operation and upgrade, and hardware and software developments.”

For the first time since 2020, ATLAS members were able to applaud the winners in person as they received their awards. All of these new graduates faced the extra challenge of a pandemic while undertaking a PhD. The scientific excellence of their results, despite countless Covid-related complications, is especially remarkable.

Following the applause, each student gave a short presentation about their thesis work. Their talks explored the physics behind their results, as well as the detector, operations and other collaboration tasks they participated in while on ATLAS. It was also an opportunity to acknowledge the colleagues, friends and family that provided support during their studies.

"All of the nominations demonstrated the high quality of PhD students active in the ATLAS Collaboration,” said Antonella. “On behalf of the entire Awards Committee, I would like to congratulate the winners, who were chosen among a very strong group of excellent PhD graduates. We continue to be impressed by the outstanding contributions our students make – not just to ATLAS, but to the global particle-physics community.”

Explore the winning theses:

• Daniel Camarero Munoz: Measurements of the inclusive isolated-photon and photon-plus-jet production in pp collisions at 13 TeV with the ATLAS detector
• Giuseppe Carratta: Search for Type-III See Saw heavy leptons in leptonic final states using proton-proton collisions at 13 TeV with the ATLAS detector
• Guglielmo Frattari: Investigating the nature of dark matter and of the Higgs boson with jets and missing transverse momentum at the LHC
• Maria Mironova: Search for Higgs Boson Decays to Charm Quarks with the ATLAS Experiment and Development of Novel Silicon Pixel Detectors
• Brian Moser: Boson Production at High Energy in Decays to Bottom Quarks and Their Interpretations with the ATLAS Experiment at the LHC
• Giulia Ripellino: Haystacks and Needles - Measuring the number of proton collisions in ATLAS and probing them for the production of new exotic particles
• Bastian Schlag: Advanced Algorithms and Software for Primary Vertex Reconstruction and Search for Flavor-Violating Supersymmetry with the ATLAS Experiment
• Emily Anne Thompson: Search for long-lived Supersymmetric particles using displaced vertices with the ATLAS detector at the LHC