2 March 2018
Physicist Pierfrancesco Butti is one of five winners of the ATLAS Thesis Award, an award for PhD theses that contribute to the international ATLAS particle detector experiment at CERN in Geneva. Butti did his award winning PhD work at Nikhef in Amsterdam and defended his thesis at the UvA.
Butti's thesis, Search for scalar top quarks decaying into scalar tau leptons with ATLAS at vs = 8 TeV and Alignment of the ATLAS Inner Detector in Run-2, presents a search for supersymmetry, a postulated but so far unobserved symmetry of nature, analysed using the data collected by the ATLAS detector.
Butti and the other four prize winners, from Geneva, Paris, Freiburg and Mainz, received their awards on 22 February 2018, at a celebration in CERN’s Main Auditorium. The five winning theses were picked out of 31 nominations, all of very high quality.
“Selecting the winners was not an easy task,” according to Paul Jackson, Chair of the 2017 ATLAS Thesis Awards Committee. “This year’s applications featured some incredible pieces of work – not just the theses themselves, but the high-quality recommendation letters that went with them. Going through each nomination was a pleasure for committee members.”
Besides the award certificate, Butti and the other prize winners received an engraved glass model of the ATLAS detector.