Three new master theses successfully defended
"Beatriz Artur, João Mesquita and João Carlos Antunes were the most recent LIP master students to defend their theses at Instituto Superior Técnico (IST). Congratulations to all!"
Beatriz Artur's master thesis, entitled "Impact of the Quark-Gluon Plasma in Extensive Air Showers", was developed at LIP's Auger group in a collaboration with the Phenomenology group (Pheno). In fact, as the title indicates, the topic links high-energy atmospheric cascades (such as those detected in Auger) with the quark and gluon plasma, one of the specialties of the Pheno group. The work was supervised by Ruben Conceição and Liliana Apolinário.
In this work, Beatriz investigated what would be the impact of the formation of a quark-gluon plasma (QGP) on the interactions of atmospheric cascades generated by extreme-energy cosmic rays. The interesting conclusion is that this possibility is not excluded, and even minimizes the discrepancies found between current models and the data from the Pierre Auger Observatory.
The thesis was successfully defended at IST on December 2nd at 8am. Mário Pimenta (president), Pedro Assis (arguer) and Ruben Conceição (as adviser) were members of the jury.
Congratulations, Beatriz!
A few days earlier, on November 30th, João Mesquita, student at Técnico and member of LIP's Phenomenology group, defended his Master's thesis, conducted under the supervision of Liliana Apolinário and Leticia Cunqueiro (University of Rome, Italy).
The research, entitled "Looking for Coherence Effects in the Quark-Gluon Plasma", consisted in verifying the possibility of using jet substructures to signal coherence phenomena between the particles that constitute these objects. To do this, the Monte Carlo event generator PYTHIA was used, adjusted for proton-proton collisions at the LHC, where several reconstruction methods were tested in order to maximize the differences originated by the various coherence patterns.
It was possible to show that this observable survives the introduction of a high multiplicity background, opening the possibility of being used in future heavy-ion collisions in order to signal an expected coherence breakdown induced by the formation of the Quarks and Gluons plasma.
The thesis was defended via zoom, at 5pm, in the presence of the members of the jury Mário Pimenta (LIP/IST), Patrícia Conde Muiño (LIP/IST) and Leticia Cunqueiro (Rome University).
Congratulations, João!
Also on November 30th, but a little earlier, at 15h45, João Carlos Antunes, also from the Technological Physics Engineering Master's Degree from Técnico, defended his Master's thesis, supervised by Fernando Barão and developed in the LIP's Neutrino Physics group.
With the theme "Particle reconstruction in large liquid scintillator detectors using charge and time signal modelization - the SNO+ Neutrino Physics Experiment", the work was assessed by a panel consisting of Mário Pimenta (chairman), Vladimir Solovov, Nuno Barros and Fernando Barão (supervisor).
Another successful dissertation defense. Congratulations, João Carlos!