Master’s Thesis Defences
"Manuel Abreu, Tomás Baltazar, Rui Vieira and Pedro Esperanço have successfully defended their Master’s theses. Congratulations to our new MSc graduates!"
Manuel Abreu and Tomás Baltazar, Master’s students at Instituto Superior Técnico and members of the SNO+ collaboration at LIP, successfully defended their theses, entitled “Characterization of radioactive backgrounds” and “Identification and rejection of pile-up events”, respectively.
Both works were developed in the context of the search for neutrinoless double beta decay in the SNO+ experiment, under the supervision of Valentina Lozza, with co-supervision by Patrícia Conde Muíño (IST/LIP), and were awarded a final grade of 19/20.
The defence committees were chaired by Guilherme Milhano (IST/LIP). Manuel Abreu’s jury also included Ana Sofia Inácio (University of Oxford), while Tomás Baltazar’s included Sofia Andringa (LIP).
These theses contributed to the development of essential methods for rare event searches, namely in the characterization of radioactive backgrounds and the rejection of spurious signals, both crucial to improving the sensitivity of the SNO+ experiment.
Also Rui Vieira, a Master’s student at the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon and member of the ATLAS group at LIP, successfully defended his thesis entitled “Configuration of the Interlock Matrix for the ATLAS-HGTD”.
His work focused on the adaptation, development and implementation of the safety system for the new High-Granularity Timing Detector (HGTD) of the ATLAS experiment. It was supervised by Helena Santos (LIP/FCUL) and José Augusto (FCUL/LIP). The jury included Marius Wensing (University of Wuppertal), Manuel Abreu (FCUL) and Helena Santos (LIP/FCUL).
Pedro Esperanço, a Master’s student at Instituto Superior Técnico and member of the ATLAS group at LIP, also successfully defended his thesis entitled “Optimization of a Transformer-Based Model for Flavour-Tagging in the ATLAS Experiment”.
This work focused on the development of neural network-based algorithms for jet identification in the ATLAS experiment, contributing to improved data analysis techniques in particle physics. The thesis was supervised by Helena Santos (LIP/FCUL) and Patrícia Conde Muíño (IST/LIP), and the jury included Nicole Hartman (TUM), Guilherme Milhano (IST/LIP) and Helena Santos (LIP/FCUL).
Congratulations to all four for their excellent work and for successfully completing this important milestone!