04.02.2021PhD awarded to Dr. Chloe Ransom

Congratulations to Dr. Chloe Ransom who successfully defended her Ph.D. thesis at the beginning of February! During her thesis, Chloe worked on the GERDA and LEGEND experiments to search for the neutrinoless double beta decay of ⁷⁶Ge. Her work was focussed on the energy calibration analysis, which is fundamental for the determination of the energy scale and resolution of the germanium detectors. Apart from increasing the ability to identify a sharp peak at the Q-value of the 0νββ-decay, an excellent resolution also minimises the irreducible background from 2νββ-decays. As an example, her results served as input to the final GERDA analysis, which achieved the world’s best lower limit on the half-life of the decay, 1.8 x 10²⁶ years (90% C.L.).