Each year, we honour students with prizes for:
The publication prizes are given for work published during the last 2 years by PhD students in each of the 3 research areas. The prizes are awarded at the annual STAG lecture.
The 2023 STAG publication prize in gravitational physics is awarded jointly to Chris Whittall and Thomas Hutchins.
In his work, Chris studied the 'self-force' experienced by scalar charges when they scatter off a black hole. This work enables the application of frequency-domain techniques to problems with unbounded orbits, opening up possibilities of exploring the interplay between different modern approaches used to study the gravitational dynamics of celestial bodies.
Thomas' work 'Gravitational radiation from thermal mountains on accreting neutron stars: sources of temperature non-axisymmetry' studies how the shapes of neutron stars lose their symmetry due to temperature fluctuations inside them. Thomas’ work demonstrates that neutron stars are viable sources of continuous gravitational radiation.
The 2023 STAG publication prize for High Energy Physics is awarded to Shubhani Jain for her work on assessing the performance of different jet-clustering algorithms in probing the physics of the Higgs boson at the LHC. Her work allows tests of the Standard Model and could potentially help identify beyond-Standard Model physics.
Cordelia is awarded the Astrophysics prize for her theoretical work on black holes. Black hole mass is one of the fundamental properties of black holes, but notoriously difficult to measure. Cordelia has developed a new method to measure black hole masses using X-rays. The novel method uses the irradiation of a companion star to determine the mass of the black hole. This promising technique has the potential to unveil for the first time the masses of black holes that have not been probed before, due to residing in obscured regions of the galaxy.
Best publication in gravitational physics
Best publication in high-energy physics
Best publication in astrophysics
Joint winners:
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