Interviews with QURS researchers

Rafael Álvarez-García is from Oviedo, a small city located in the north of Spain. He received his Master’s degree in 2021 from LMU and TUM in Munich. His thesis on “Periods and Moduli Stabilization near the Conifold” focused on analytically computing periods near conifold singularities in the moduli space of Calabi-Yau manifolds to construct perturbatively flat vacua. For his PhD, he joined the group of Prof. Dr. Timo Weigand.

Josep Maria Batllori Berenguer was born in Vilajuïga, a small village located in the north of Catalunya, Spain. In 2020, he finished his Master’s Degree at the Polytechnic University of Catalunya (UPC) within the Institute of Photonic Sciences (ICFO). Since 2021, he is a PhD student in Astroparticle Physics group of Professor Dieter Horns at the Institute of Experimental Physics.

Shreevathsa Chalathadka Subrahmanya was born and raised in Vittal, a small town in the Karnataka State in southern India. He received his Master of Science in Physics at Mangalore University in 2019. During a Summer Internship at Raja Ramanna Center for Advanced Technologies (RRCAT) in Indore (India) he worked on Characterization of Ultra-Narrow Linewidth NPRO Laser and got attracted to the field of laser interferometry in Gravitational Wave Detection.

Joshua Clercx grew up in Ghent, Belgium, where he graduated from Ghent University in 2019. In his thesis, “Analysis of top quark pair production in association with a Z boson in the dilepton channel at a centre-of-mass energy of 13 TeV at CMS”, he examined the process of ttZ decaying to 2 leptons at the CMS detector.

Ksenia de Leo is from Portogruaro, a small city near Venice in Northern Italy. She graduated from her Master in Physics in 2019 at the University of Trieste, Italy, with a thesis on the "Study of the double parton scattering in proton-proton collisions at the LHC and extraction of a new data-driven tune using multi-jet measurements". Her thesis focused on the study of the phenomenological aspects of Quantum Chromodynamics – the theory describing the strong interactions of quarks and gluons – at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, and the physics comparisons to Monte Carlo simulations.

Sascha Diefenbacher has made his way from the very south of Germany to Hamburg. He grew up near Konstanz and did both his Bachelor and Master on LHC phenomenology at the University of Heidelberg. His Master thesis, finished in 2019, focused on Machine Learning in High Energy Physics and he worked on applying a novel Neural Network architecture called Capsule Network to the classification of LHC events.

Đinh Quý Dương is from Hanoi, the capital city of Vietnam. He completed his Master’s degree in 2019 at Universität Hamburg under the supervision of Prof. Jörg Teschner. His thesis was "On the role of the global nilpotent cones in Conformal Field Theory and the geometric Langlands correspondence". For the cases of spheres with five and six punctures, he obtained an explicit description of the distinguished loci on the moduli of bundles associated to the nilpotent Higgs bundles. These loci are related to the singularities of the conformal block solutions to the Knizhnik-Zamolodchikov equation in Conformal Field Theory (CFT) on the one hand, and of D-modules in the geometric Langlands correspondence on the other.

Bohdan Dudar is from Kyiv, Ukraine. He received his Master’s degree in May 2020 at the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv. For his thesis, he chose to study the flux of the backwards scattered particles from the surface of the LumiCal detector. LumiCal is the calorimeter detector designed for the forward region of the International Linear Collider (ILC).

Tobias Eckhardt was born and raised in Braunschweig, where he graduated in 2016. His Master Thesis, titled “Interaction energies […] in discrete cosmology with a S1xS2 spatial topology”, was, however, supervised by Prof. Rosquist from Stockholm University. It gave Tobias the opportunity to work with general relativity.

Moritz Fischer grew up in Worms, a city in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany. In 2018, he received his Master’s degree at the University of Heidelberg. Fischer’s thesis was about galaxy formation and evolution. More specifically, he studied ex-situ and in-situ stars in the cosmological simulation suite IllustrisTNG.

Emanuele Gendy says that Theoretical Physics has always had a great appeal on his mind. He grew up in central Italy and made his way to Hamburg via Pisa and Switzerland. In July 2019, he graduated from his Master at the University of Pisa with a thesis carried out in Lausanne under the supervision of Prof. Riccardo Rattazzi. In his Master thesis, Emanuele Gendy focused on a particular case in which the space-time invariance can be hidden in a tricky way in some specific set-ups, so much that it looks like it has disappeared. Since this phenomenon is entangled with Quantum Field Theory, it has repercussions on a wide range of research fields from High Energy Physics to Condensed Matter.

Oindrila Ghosh is from Kolkata, India. In 2019, she completed her Master’s degree at University of Barcelona and joined the group of Professor Günter Sigl at Universität Hamburg for her PhD. Her Master thesis focused on the dynamics of various axionic species. She proposed Axion Gegenschein as a novel astrophysical detection scheme for axion-like particles along with her collaborators, and demonstrated the dynamical relaxation process of fuzzy dark matter halos from transition probabilities between various states in a bosonic system characterised by stimulated decay of ultralight axions.

Vincent Goumarre is from a small village near Avignon in southern France. He graduated from the Institut d’Optique Graduate School (Université Paris-Saclay) and received a double degree with the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm (Sweden) in particle physics. He did the research for his Master thesis at the theoretical physics department of the University of Oslo (Norway) on the computation of processes implying supersymmetric particles – hypothetical particles, candidate for dark matter – and their implementation in Pythia 8, a particle collision simulator.

Judith Höfer was born in Bamberg, a small town in southern Germany. In 2019, she completed her Master’s degree in Erlangen, in which she did studies on a Finite Geometry.

David Jaklitsch, originally from Bogotá, Colombia, completed his master in Mathematical Physics at Universität Hamburg in September 2020. The title of his thesis was “Towards an equivariant Morita theory for graded tensor categories.”

Henrik Jabusch, who is originally from Elmshorn, Schleswig-Holstein, moved to Hamburg a few years ago. In 2019, he graduated from his Master at Universität Hamburg, with a thesis on “Constraints of Leptoquark Models with CMS Data”. Back then, he was part of Prof. Dr. Johannes Haller’s group, and after graduating, continued as a PhD student in the same group.

Kateryna Radchenko Serdula was born in Ukraine but, up until her recent move to Hamburg, she had been living in Spain since she was two years old. In the summer of 2022, she completed her Master’s degree on particle physics at the Institute of Theoretical Physics in Madrid. The aim of her thesis was to explore the experimental implications of an extended Higgs sector. In particular, Kateryna studied the phenomenology of Higgs pair production at the high luminosity phase of the LHC in the framework of the Two Higgs doublet model.

Suvrat Rao is from Mumbai, India. Before joining Hamburg Observatory and Quantum Universe for his PhD, he graduated from his M.Sc. in Physics at the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur in August 2019. In his Masterthesis "Scalar quasinormal modes in Damour-Solodukhin spacetimes" he made estimations of gravitational waves from the ringdown phase of a binary merger of black holes and even exotic objects like Lorentzian wormholes.

Iordanis Romaidis is from Thessaloniki, Greece. He completed his Master in Mathematical Physics at Universität Hamburg in September 2019. His Master thesis "Permutation Orbifolds in Reshetikhin-Turaev TQFTs" describes the algebraic datum of permutation orbifolds for topological bilayer phases and how the orbifold theory changes under modifications on the G-crossed ribbon fusion extension. At Quantum Universe, he is now part of the group of Prof. Dr. Ingo Runkel.

Antonio Sbaffoni is from Italy and before coming to Hamburg for his Ph.D. he studied at the University of Padua where his enthusiasm for astronomy steadily increased. He did his Master’s thesis on the study of stellar populations in the disks of bulge-less giant spiral galaxies. Looking at the distribution of stellar ages, Antonio tested whether the merger history of bulge-less galaxies poses a challenge to cosmological theories of galaxy formation.

Peera Simakachorn is from Nakhon Ratchasima, also known as Korat, in Thailand. He graduated from the Mathematical Physics Master at Universität Hamburg in August 2019 with a thesis on "Probing Particle Theories with Gravitational Waves". His Master thesis focused on extracting information about the history of our universe by utilizing gravitational waves from primordial sources.

Anton Sokolov is from Saint Petersburg, Russia. He did his Master at the Department of Particle Physics and Cosmology at Moscow State University, where he graduated in June 2019. In his master thesis, he investigated possible particle physics solutions for the inconsistencies between existing theoretical models of the Sun and observational data. He says that from a scientific point of view, our Sun is a perfect astrophysical laboratory where a lot of particle physics models can be tested. Moreover, he is convinced that there will be a lot of new solar observational data from telescopes, satellites and neutrino observatories in the coming years and that these data can well trigger groundbreaking discoveries.

Philip Sørensen is from Odense, Denmark. He graduated from the University of Southern Denmark in 2019 where he did his Master thesis on asymmetric dark matter in composite Higgs models with CP3 Origins. He joined Quantum Universe in August 2019 for his PhD.

Carlo Tasillo grew up in Dortmund, Germany. He did his Master at RWTH Aachen and Università degli Studi di Perugia in Italy. In his thesis “Listening to hot dark sector phase transitions”, he investigated the possibility that there has been a phase transition in the yet unobserved very early Universe, a phenomenon quite similar to water boiling in a pot on a stove. Carlo joined Quantum Universe as PhD student in the DESY Theory group.