I’m a master student from France and I’m doing an internship at MPIK. I’m currently working on the search for relic neutrinos from the Big Bang under the direction of Thierry Lasserre. Relic neutrinos are vestiges from the very beginning of the Universe. At the beginning, the Universe was a hot and dense plasma, where particles were constantly interacting with it and couldn’t escape from it. When this plasma cooled, relic neutrinos decoupled from it and started travelling along space. They are of great interest nowadays, as they could partly contribute to dark matter, but because of their very low energy, they are extremely difficult to detect.

The KATRIN experiment aims to measure the neutrino mass by analyzing the differential spectrum in energy of beta decay electrons (electrons induced by a beta- reaction). In theory, relic neutrinos could also contribute to this spectrum, through their reaction with tritium, that results in the emission of an electron whose energy is very high, thus resulting in a small bump at the end of this spectrum. However, what we actually measure is the integrated spectrum, which is more complex to analyze because of the noise background and other physical constraints (see plots below). 

My contribution to this project for now is to perform simulations and data analysis in order to know which model best suits for the relic capture process, and to perform a sensitivity analysis in order to reject high over densities.
Outside physics I also enjoy table tennis and gym as sports. I enjoy every activity related to nature (hiking, animal spotting, fishing…) and water (swimming, scuba diving, boating…). Otherwise I like building models (planes, boats, cars), visiting museums and reading about almost everything.