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Fakultät Physik

Dr. Jean-Marco Alameddine successfully finished his Ph.D.

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© Jean-Marco Alameddine
The image shows a graphical visualization of a particle shower above Dortmund, Germany.

Our chair member Dr. Jean-Marco Alameddine successfully finished his Ph.D.

We would like to congratulate our chair member Dr. Jean-Marco Alameddine on the successful completion of his PhD! The title of his thesis is "Enabling Next-generation Particle Cascade Simulations: Implementing the Propagation Software PROPOSAL as an Interaction Model for CORSIKA 8".

When high-energy atomic nuclei and photons from space as primary particles collide with the Earth's atmosphere, they initiate particle showers. Many secondary particles are produced in these showers. By detecting the secondary particles, it is possible to reconstruct the energy, direction of origin, and particle type of the primary particle. The CORSIKA 8 software is used to simulate these particle showers.

However, current simulations have the problem that the simulated particle showers consistently lack a certain proportion of muons compared to experimental observations of real particle showers. This phenomenon is known as the muon puzzle. To address this problem, Dr. Jean-Marco Alameddine worked on the simulation program PROPOSAL, which serves as the electromagnetic and muonic interaction model within CORSIKA 8. It describes the muonic interactions very precisely, so the systematic uncertainty was reduced and the number of muons in the simulations increased. Nevertheless, a muon deficit remained. This indicates that inaccuracies alone are not sufficient to explain the muon puzzle. In addition, the work of Dr. Jean-Marco Alameddine enabled the first physically complete simulations with CORSIKA 8.