Physics


My part in physics

As you may have seen in my bio section, I studied physics at the RWTH Aachen (Aachen University of Technology). I specialized in Elementary Particle Physics or Particle Physics for short. This branch of physics is also called High Energy Physics.

Particle physics is trying to determine the ultimate building blocks of matter. It is therefore investigating the smallest physical structures known to man. Because this requires very high energies per particle, the main way of doing research in this field is building enormous, expensive and technological advanced accelerators. In Europe, there are two great facilities for experimental particle physics: CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, and DESY in Hamburg, Germany.

I joined the H1 collaboration at the DESY experiment HERA in 1992. This collaboration has build and is operating the H1 experiment, one of the two big multi-purpose detectors at HERA. From 1992 to 1993 I worked for my diploma thesis called "Ein topologischer Trigger für den H1-Detektor", published as PITHA report. The focus of this work was to improve the signal to background ratio for a special decay channel of charmed mesons by using a topological software trigger at H1's level 4 filter farm. My diploma thesis (in german language) with most figures may be downloaded in postscript format (about 1.4 MB) or in PDF format (about 1.7 MB).

After completing my diploma thesis I continued working at H1 as a graduate student. I became a member of H1's diffractive working group. In November of 1996 I received my Ph.D. in physics from RWTH Aachen for my thesis "Untersuchung harter Prozesse in der diffraktiven tiefunelastischen Streuung mit dem H1-Detektor bei HERA". You may download a my thesis (german language) in GhostScript format (about 5 MB) or in PDF format (about 1.8 MB). A part of my analysis was also included in a contribution to the 1995 Europhysics Conference. The paper is available here as gzipped postscript (about 148 kB) as well as zipped pdf (about 300 kB).

As a member of the scientific staff of the RWTH Aachen, I had the opportunity to experience the success of the World Wide Web from quite an early stage. The WWW was developed by high energy physicists at the European Center for Particle Physics CERN, especially by it's staff member Tim Berners-Lee. The web server of the RWTH Aachen physics department was one of the very first W3 servers in Germany and is up and running since 1993, thanks to the work of Thomas Fricke, Christoph Ley and the late Andreas Kaser. In 1996 I contributed this article (in german language) on the web's status and prospects to a RWTH Aachen publication.

I left H1 and active research in particle physics after receiving my Ph.D. to work as a consultant for financial institutes.


Some physics links


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Author:Peter Uelkes
Last modified: Sat Mar 29 13:44:04 CET 2014