After a degree in electrical engineering and several years of professional experience in computer networks, I learnt about the CSiS master’s programme in Wuppertal. That gave me the chance to reanimate my latent interests in particle physics and cosmology, hence being able to both gaining interdisciplinary knowledge and performing an appealing thesis in computer simulation in physics.

During my CSiS studies in Wuppertal, I was warmly supported by all participating lecturers and professors and the work in small groups caused an efficient increase of new knowledge. I appreciated the lab courses which contained some theory and then demonstrated numerical applications in various fields. After all, CSiS was much work but the benefit was a solid education in both computer and natural sciences.
The topic of my thesis fell into the theoretical particle physics track which, although prepared by a tutored course in lattice gauge theory, was very challenging to me. But at the end, it even lead to a publication in the journal of High Energy Physics on the Lattice in cooperation with Prof. Knechtli and other scientists from CERN and DESY.

Here’s a trial to sum up the idea of the thesis: In Lattice QCD, the space-time continuum is discretised on a 4-dimensional Euclidean hypercubic lattice. Both gauge and fermion actions are computed on the lattice and reproduce the Yang-Mills theory in the continuum limit. Some non-physical effects emerge on the lattice and need to be eliminated by numerical counterterms. Those can be won by examining symmetries; merely the according coefficients have to be determined to achieve the desired improvement. My thesis aimed at determining the improvement coefficient for the static-light axial current, being induced by a meson consisting of a light and a static quark. That happened at one-loop order perturbation theory, especially under consideration of HYP smeared actions, a technique which originally had been introduced by Prof. Knechtli.

Clearly, I had to delve into deep theory to bring together the main concepts and Prof. Knechtli was patient enough to answer my many questions, also about the basics. Besides learning the principles of lattice gauge theory, I needed to review the calculation of the involved Feynman diagrams and to understand the herein applied tools and methodologies. Based on an already existing C++ program package and with the support of the participating scientists, I could calculate and extend the Feynman diagrams to the smeared action. Finally, the improvement coefficient could be extracted as depicted in the pictures.

The final presentation about my thesis can be found here. The thesis itself is available under Theses (see left menu)

Although I did not pursue an initially intended Phd in particle physics afterwards, I was able to move into a new job within interdisciplinary research projects in the fields of informatics and physics, with a strong emphasis on software development. I found my studies in CSiS highly worthwhile as they enabled me to work in a research environment with points of contact to scientists from different fields of knowledge.