Dr. Lukas Nickel successfully completes his PhD

We are happy to announce that our chair member, Dr. Lukas Nickel, has completed his PhD, and we congratulate him on this success! His dissertation is entitled "We are Number One: Searching for Gamma-Ray Emission from the Radio Galaxy M87 in Data from the First Large Telescope of the Cherenkov Telescope Array".

In his thesis, Dr. Lukas Nickel analyzed data from the observation of a radio galaxy collected by the Cherenkov telescope LST-1 on the Canary Island of La Palma. The telescope has been in operation since 2018 and is one of the most advanced instruments for observing high-energy gamma radiation. Although it is already producing scientifically useful observational data, it is still in the commissioning phase, during which the telescope's performance is constantly being improved. In the future, it will play a central role in the study of some astrophysical phenomena and fields that are not yet fully understood. These include dark matter, the acceleration of cosmic rays, and the environment of black holes and supernovae.

The data analyzed comes from observations of the radio galaxy M87, one of the largest galaxies in the local universe. It has an active galactic nucleus (AGN) with a jet that ejects matter into space at high speeds.

Dr. Lukas Nickel developed a 3D analysis and background models using the LST-1 software lstchain and the CTAO science tool gammapy. The latter is used to estimate the background that is always present in observational data (eventually in addition to a signal). Dr. Lukas Nickel also investigated the performance of the LST-1 telescope at the time of the radio galaxy observation. He concluded that the telescope was already performing very well at the time of the observation, although it still had some problems. The analysis showed an excess of data in the region of the radio galaxy. This indicates that the data are consistent with low AGN activity. However, the excess is not significant enough to claim detection of the source.

Back