Our newest PhD graduate
"Manuel Xarepe successfully defended his PhD thesis, ‘Measurement of Short Range Correlations on Exotic Nuclei at R3B using tRPCs’."
On 14 July 2026, Manuel Xarepe, a PhD student in Physics Engineering at the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon and a member of LIP’s NUC-RIA research group, successfully defended his PhD thesis, entitled “Measurement of Short Range Correlations on Exotic Nuclei at R3B using tRPCs”.
The work was carried out in collaboration with LIP’s RPC research group, under the supervision of Daniel Galaviz (FCUL/LIP), Alberto Blanco Castro (LIP) and Thomas Aumann (TU Darmstadt).
The examination committee consisted of José Luis Rodríguez (examiner, University of A Coruña), Mario Gómez (examiner, University of Seville), Anna Corsi (member, CEA/IRFU), Paulo Fonte (member, ISEC), André Moitinho (chair, FCUL/LIP) and Daniel Galaviz (supervisor, FCUL/LIP).
As part of this work, Manuel was responsible for installing a detector based on Resistive Plate Chambers (RPCs) in the R3B — Reactions with Relativistic Radioactive Beams experiment at the GSI/FAIR research centre in Darmstadt, Germany.
Following the system’s installation in the experiment, Manuel played an active role in the data taking and analysis of the first attempt to study Short-Range Correlations (SRCs) in exotic nuclei. The results of this research formed the main part of his PhD thesis.
For the first time, the results made it possible to investigate one of the most pressing questions in the study of the strong interaction, contributing directly to a better understanding of the structure of nuclear matter.
Congratulations, Manuel!