‘It was a very important period for the development of my scientific knowledge’ – this is how Luísa Carvalho sums up the two years she spent at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (commonly known as CERN), developing her doctoral thesis with Instituto Superior Técnico within the ATLAS collaboration. On 20 February, the Técnico alumna was awarded an ATLAS Thesis Award, which ‘recognises PhD students who make outstanding contributions to the ATLAS experiment at CERN and their work in areas such as physics analysis, detector development and software’.
The ATLAS collaboration is one of four experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the largest and highest-energy particle accelerator ever built. Through a controlled particle collision at speeds close to that of light, the LHC seeks to study their properties and test the theories that explain the origin and development of the Universe. ATLAS is one of two general-purpose detectors at the LHC and was involved in the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson (a fundamental particle that’s essential for understanding the structure of the Universe).
Luísa Carvalho’s work focused on exploring new sources of CP-violation in Higgs boson interactions with top quarks, as a possible way of understanding the Universe’s matter-antimatter asymmetry. The Técnico alumna also played an important role in the detector’s trigger system, which was needed to select data during the experiment – with proton beams crossing 40 million times a second, it is essential to curate these events, and a thousand collisions are selected every second by this trigger system for later analysis.
‘Extremely grateful and very happy’, Luísa Carvalho considers this ATLAS Thesis Award ‘as a celebration of several years of hard work, but above all as recognition of the scientific and personal support she has received’. In addition to the Doctoral Programme in Physics, the alumna also completed a Master’s Programme in Engineering Physics at Técnico, in the Laboratory of Instrumentation and Experimental Particle Physics (LIP). The experience of studying at Técnico was ‘challenging’, “intense” and ‘indispensable for me to be able to work today as a researcher in the field of experimental particle physics’, she shares.
The alumna is currently continuing her research work at the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron in Hamburg, Germany.
