Successful PhD Defense of Rune Dominik

Our chair is pleased to announce that our member, Dr. Rune Dominik, has successfully defended his PhD thesis. We congratulate him on this important academic achievement! His thesis is entitled "Saving Time and Money for Monte Carlo: Estimation of Instrument Response Functions as an Alternative Approach to Minimise the Cherenkov Telescope Array Observatory's Need for Simulations". It examines methods for estimating instrument response functions (IRFs) for the Cherenkov Telescope Array Observatory (CTAO).

CTAO is a very-high-energy gamma-ray observatory that is currently under construction and commissioning. It is being built at two sites: the Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos (ORM) on the Canary Island of La Palma, Spain, and the Paranal Observatory in the Atacama Desert, Chile. An IRF characterizes how a telescope responds to incoming signals and relates the observed properties of particles to their true physical values. Currently, these IRFs are obtained from Monte Carlo simulations, which is very time-consuming and resource-intensive. Dr. Rune Dominik proposes interpolation and extrapolation algorithms to calculate IRFs more efficiently using pre-calculated grids.

By applying these methods to observations from the LST-1 telescope on the Canary Island of La Palma, the study shows that the estimated IRFs have a strong performance and their results are compatible with the results of a nearest neighbors approach. Using sparser grids, he showed that the estimated IRFs maintain stable performance even beyond the point where the nearest neighbor approach can no longer give reasonable results.

Dr. Rune Dominik's research contributes a novel approach that has the potential to improve the efficiency of observing strategies at the CTAO, ensuring timely and cost-effective analyses for future gamma-ray studies.

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