Christoph Genster wins "JUNO PhD thesis award 2019

As the first prize winner, Dr. Christoph Genster received the "JUNO PhD thesis award 2019" in Nanning, South China. During the JUNO Collaboration Meeting in January 2020 the young scientist was awarded for his PhD thesis.

Genster has been researching and working for the project "Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory", JUNO for short, since 2016. The physicist's main research focus is the development of low-level data reconstruction algorithms for the JUNO experiment.
At RWTH Aachen University and Forschungszentrum Jülich, the young scientist wrote his doctoral thesis entitled: "Software and hardware development for the next-generation liquid scintillator detectors JUNO and OSIRIS". JARA-FAME member Prof. Livia Ludhova, head of the Jülich neutrino group at IKP-2 and member of the JUNO Collaboration, accompanied him on the way to completing his doctoral thesis. At the end of 2019, Christoph Genster successfully passed his doctoral examination and was now honored with the award.

JUNO is a highly international project with around 76 institutions and around 680 scientists* involved. Among others, the JARA partners RWTH Aachen University and Forschungszentrum Jülich make a significant contribution within the JARA-FAME section.
The aim of the project is to study neutrinos, for example those from the earth's interior or the sun. The researchers hope that the neutrinos will provide insights into the energy production within our sun, the structure of the earth's interior, and the mass of different neutrino states.
The basis for research into neutrinos will be the state-of-the-art neutrino detector JUNO, which is currently under construction. JUNO is a huge tank that is being built at a depth of about 700 metres in a mountain in Jiangmen, China. When the research work begins, the tank will be filled with around 20,000 tons of a special oil that lights up whenever a neutrino interacts in the tank. With the help of several thousand photo sensors, so-called photomultipliers, the tank will be monitored in order to record every interaction.

_{* Reference: "All designations used in this document are to be understood as gender-neutral. For reasons of better legibility alone, we have refrained from naming different variants of the designations.}