10 June 2022

Photo: Judith Höfer

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.

What is the topic of your research?

I am working in the DESY ATLAS group, with Dr. Claudia Seitz and Prof. Dr. Beate Heinemann as my supervisors. In my PhD project, I am analyzing data from the ATLAS experiment at CERN. The question we’re investigating is if there could be more Higgs-like particles in nature, as there are models where the Standard Model Higgs boson, discovered in 2012, is allowed to decay to light scalar particles. The special signatures of the processes we are looking for (e.g., H → a1 a2 → 6b, with a2 → 2a1) motivate the use of specialized reconstruction techniques using non-standard objects. Part of our work is to calibrate these specialized objects, where I am also learning many interesting methods. In addition, I have been working on a task in the central ATLAS software validation. Here, we are validating the many changes in the reconstruction software done in preparation for the upcoming Run 3 of the LHC, which will start data-taking this summer.

What fascinates you about your research focus?

I really enjoy working in particle physics, looking at the building blocks of nature, and also cooperating with awesome colleagues from different places of the world.

What do you like about the cluster Quantum Universe?

I really enjoyed the ‘What is … ?’ session during the last QU day and I very much appreciate the effort taken by the organizers and speakers, since it is fun to follow and it makes ‘foreign’ fields of research more accessible for us early career researchers.

Anything else that you want to share?

For the researchers and employees at DESY, I want to advertise the help webpage that we as the DOIT working group for diversity initiated with the DESY administration. We hope you’ll never be in a situation that troubles you, but if you are you can find points of contact within DESY on that page.

Further Focal Points:

Please do not hesitate to contact our diversity officer Eileen Schwanold, in case you face any type of discrimination or harassment in the workplace. Additionally, Universität Hamburg offers its employees support in form of personal counseling.