Nikhef PhD student Brian Moser wins ATLAS 2022 dissertation award

16 February 2023

Former Nikhef PhD student Brian Moser of Nikhef received an award from the ATLAS Experiment at CERN for his 2022 dissertation The Beauty and the Boost.

The prize was awarded Thursday, Feb. 16, in the ATLAS collaboration meeting to a total of eight PhD students who wrote their 2022 dissertations on work for ATLAS, the world’s largest particle detector at the LHC accelerator.

German Moser (Freiburg 1994) received his doctorate in Amsterdam last March for his work on new methods to measure high-energy Higgs particles decaying into b-mesons (beauty-quark particles).

His dissertation for the University of Amsterdam was approved with cum laude at the time. Brian Moser, educated in Freiburg, has since been working as a CERN Fellow in Geneva in data analysis at the ATLAS experiment. He is also working on building new pixel detectors for the ATLAS detector. These will be needed later this decade when the LHC accelerator switches to still higher beam intensity.

Moser’s thesis also recently received an honorable mention in the Dutch Physics Council’s Ehrenfest-Affanassewa Prize. This prize will be awarded during the annual NWO physics conference in Veldhoven in April.