Thomas Michael Gerd Kraetzschmar

About Me

I earned my Bachelor's in Nuclear, Particle, and Astrophysics Physics from Technical University Munich. I received a DAAD PROMOS scholarship in 2015 to complete my Bachelor's Thesis at the University of California, Berkeley.

After graduation, I pursued my Master's in Nuclear-, Particle-, and Astrophysics at Technical University Munich. During my studies, I worked with the GERDA and LEGEND group of Dr. Iris Abt and PD Dr. Béla Majorovits at Max Planck Institute for Physics (MPP) and completed my Master's Thesis there. My research focused on characterizing the properties of Polyethylennaphthalat (PEN) as a radiation detector material and developing production methods for custom-made shapes. Specifically, I studied the light emission of PEN, exploring its emittance mechanism and conducting experimental analysis of its light properties with various setups.

After completing my Master's degree, I had initially intended to relocate from Munich. However, due to my father's cancer diagnosis during my final year of studies, I chose to remain in Munich to support my family. As a result, I pursued a Ph.D. in High Energy Physics under the guidance of Prof. Frank Simon, who was then a Group leader and MPP.

For my Ph.D., I shifted my research focus from hardware to data analysis. Working with colleagues from Hamburg and Mexico City, we conducted the first physics analysis on the tau sector at the Belle II experiment, searching for a Lepton flavor-violating dark matter candidate. In addition, I led the first electron identification calibration project with Bhabha scattering. I was part of the team developing, constructing, and installing the CLAWS++ detector. As part of my Ph.D. work, I also created a new method for reconstructing kinematic information in particle decays with one missing particle, which is on track for publication in JHEP as of May 2023. I received my Ph.D. from Technical University Munich in 2022 with a dissertation on the "Search for an Invisible Boson in Tau Decays with Early Belle II Data and Development of New Analysis Methods for Tau Physics."

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