Infineon Dissertation Award  2025

Physicist Dr Luca Wiggering has been awarded the Infineon Dissertation Prize 2025, endowed with 3,000 euros, for his doctoral thesis at the University of Münster. He completed his dissertation, which was graded ‘summa cum laude’, under the supervision of Prof Dr Michael Klasen at the Institute of Theoretical Physics and during a one-month research stay at UNSW Sydney, Australia. In the first part of his work, Dr Wiggering investigated supersymmetric particles as an explanation for the well-established, but still mysterious dark matter. As an alternative, he looked at a simplified model with candidates that are lighter than the charged leptons known to us from the Standard Model. In the second part, he calculated the effective number of neutrino species in the early Universe with world-leading precision. On the one hand, this now serves as a further test of the standard cosmological model in future measurements and, on the other hand, also allows possible extensions of the Standard Model to be more precisely constrained, which e.g. attempt to explain the aforementioned dark matter or resolve the current discrepancy between various measurements of the Hubble constant. Dr Wiggering's research results, which have already been cited many times, were obtained as part of the DFG-funded Research Training Group "Strong and Weak Interaction - from Hadrons to Dark Matter". They led to a total of five publications in highly respected journals such as the "Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics" and two further peer-reviewed conference papers.