Katarina Simkova was awarded the first prize and Benjamin Flaggs the 3rd prize in the poster-presentation contest of the Belgian Physical Society conference, organized this year in Brussels by the IIHE.
They are both working on the analysis of the data from the Pierre Auger Observatory(https://www.auger.org/news/news).
Katarina is FWO fellow, doing a joint ULB-VUB PhD(https://fwo.be/nl/), while Ben is a BEAF(https://baef.be/fellowships-for-americans/) fellow visiting the IIHE-Auger group and enrolled at the PhD program at University of Delaware.
Katarina presented the first observation of the Moon shadow at energies larger than 10¹⁶ eV. This shadow is a cosmic rays flux deficit caused by the interaction of these extremely energetic particles with the Moon.
Ben presented his study based on simulations on assessing the mass composition of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays as a function of detector resolutions and including different variables in his analysis.
Congratulations to both of them!