As a member of the H.E.S.S. group in Tübingen, Heiko has made multiple contributions to the hardware of the telescopes during his PhD thesis. He has been responsible for the monitoring of the optical point spread function of the telescopes for several years and was involved in the alignment of the mirrors and the focus settings of the large CT5 telescope after the installation of the FlashCam camera. Furthermore, he was part of the team that verified the performance of the FlashCam camera after its installation, and has worked on implementing a new analysis for pulsar observations that employs a reduced trigger threshold compared to normal observations.
H.E.S.S. Prize Hall of Fame
The H.E.S.S. Prize
With the H.E.S.S. Prize, the collaboration acknowledges young scientists (PhD, postdoc, junior staff) who made outstanding service contributions to the experiment. Such contributions might range from hardware maintenance to various aspects of data handling including outstanding analyses (the development of a new analysis technique allowing a measurement not possible before) or a key contribution to an important scientific discovery. The prize is awarded at every collaboration meeting through a confidential vote by the Collaboration Board.
List of H.E.S.S. Prize Winners
Ramin received the H.E.S.S. Prize for his critical contributions to essential technical infrastructure of the H.E.S.S. Collaboration. Specifically, he put in place the first opt-in procedure for authorship of H.E.S.S. papers, which ran smoothly from the beginning. Furthermore, Ramin was a key member of the team that set up the new wikiJS system after it became clear that the previous system could no longer be used. This was a tremendous effort that every member of the Collaboration profits from every day, to this day.
During her PhD thesis, Laura developed a new and innovative method for the rejection of background events that employs CT5, the biggest telescope of the H.E.S.S. array, as a detector for muons. These unstable particles are primarily created in cosmic ray-induced air showers and can therefore be used to “veto” such events, to better be able to measure the more interesting gamma-ray induced showers. This method has greatly enhanced the performance of the H.E.S.S. telescopes above ~10 TeV and has opened up the possibility for the detection of hard-spectrum sources that would otherwise have remained undiscovered. In particular, Laura applied her method to a data set taken on the Galactic microquasar SS433, which not only led to the first detection of TeV gamma rays from this system, but also enabled her to measure the energy-dependent morphology of the emission. This allowed the identification of the site of particle acceleration and was published in the journal Science – a high-impact result for Laura and the H.E.S.S. Collaboration.
Alessandro is an instrumental member of the H.E.S.S. Operations department. Already as a PhD student, he started to take over the responsibility for the “day shifts” – an essential procedure in H.E.S.S. data quality monitoring, in which different members of the Collaboration investigate the validity of data taken in the previous night. Alessandro has organised these shifts very efficiently and has patiently explained the tasks to numerous day shifters. Alessandro is also the person keeping the Collaboration up to date about operations with his monthly reports about the data taking. In addition, Alessandro has made crucial contributions to several H.E.S.S. publications. Working primarily with data taken as part of the H.E.S.S. Inner Galaxy Survey, Alessandro derived stringent constraints on TeV dark matter that were published in Physical Review Letters. He has also contributed to a study that led to the first detection of the “Fermi bubbles” (gigantic structures in the Sky, thought to emanate from the Galactic Centre region) at TeV energies.
For the first time, the H.E.S.S. Prize has been awarded to a team rather than a single person: Fabian, Johannes, Simon, and Tim together formed the “MC validation team”. In a truly tremendous effort, these four scrutinised the HAP simulation pipeline for the FlashCam camera from beginning to end and validated every part of it through detailed comparisons with actual data. They were able to show that, with several adjustments to the simulation settings, a much better agreement between the simulations and the data can be achieved. Furthermore, their work enabled for the first time in the HAP analysis pipeline to properly take into account the atmospheric conditions during the observations through a transparency correction factor. Based on the work of the team, the simulations of the other telescope cameras have also been validated. Since the work was done by the team as a whole, the H.E.S.S. Collaboration Board decided to award the H.E.S.S. Prize to all four members.
Dr. Tim Holch was awarded the H.E.S.S. prize for his many contributions to different elements of HESS operations and data analysis. From the start of his PhD project within HESS Tim was an essential member of the data acquisition team. In this capacity he has implemented remote observing with the HESS telescopes from a control room in Zeuthen, safeguarding operations in the challenging times of the Covid pandemic. He had been the key person in tracking data transfer to Europe. Besides his contributions to HESS operations, Tim has participated to the efforts of improving the understanding of the instrumental response and data quality. He contributed to the efforts in validating Monte Carlo simulations from the individual components to the whole array against the data. Based on this project, Tim is now leading the development of a novel algorithm for data analysis to correct for atmospheric variation improving the accuracy of many measurements and thus enhancing the amount of data that is available for scientific analysis.