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Fakultät Physik

Dr. Karolin Hymon successfully completes her PhD

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© Karolin Hymon ​/​ TU Dortmund

Dr. Karolin Hymon successfully completes her PhD at our chair.

We are pleased to announce that Dr. Karolin Hymon has successfully completed her PhD at our chair. The title of her thesis is "Atmospheric Seasoning - Unfolding the Seasonal Variations of the Atmospheric Neutrino Flux". We congratulate her on this outstanding achievement!
 
The IceCube Neutrino Observatory is an experiment located at the Earth's South Pole in a cubic kilometer of underground ice and is primarily used to study neutrinos. It detects both astrophysical neutrinos from space and atmospheric neutrinos. Atmospheric neutrinos are produced when cosmic rays hit the Earth's atmosphere. When the temperature of the Earth's atmosphere rises seasonally, the atmosphere expands, and more neutrinos are produced in it. This means that the neutrino flux is subject to seasonal variations. The temperature variations are greater at higher altitudes in the atmosphere. Higher-energy neutrinos are produced there, so the seasonal variation increases with the energy of the neutrinos. In the search for astrophysical neutrinos, the seasonal variation of the atmospheric neutrino flux is used to identify and calculate the atmospheric background. Another application is the testing of hadronic interaction models. In her PhD thesis, Dr. Karolin Hymon used data from IceCube measurements over the past 11.5 years to study for the first time the seasonal variation of the neutrino flux as a function of energy.