Former IceCube PhD student Anne Schukraft is being honored today by the German Physical Society, or Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft (DPG), for her contribution to the measurement of the neutrino energy spectrum. Schukraft will receive the 2014 Hertha Sponer Prize at the DPG Annual Meeting at Humbolt-Universität in Berlin, Germany.
“I am excited,” says Schukraft. “I think it is great that IceCube is considered an important physics experiment, and I am very happy to be part of this project.”
The annual award is given to female researchers for extraordinary research in physics, and is designed to encourage young female physicists. The award is named after Hertha Sponer, who in 1920 was one of the first German women to receive a PhD in physics.
Schukraft’s research used detector data from IceCube’s 59-string configuration, focusing on upgoing muon tracks up to PeV energy levels. The results, which were submitted last fall to Physical Review D, were consistent with the high-energy astrophysical neutrino flux published in November 2013 in Science.
The muon measurements were part of her doctoral research at Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule Aachen (RWTH Aachen) in Aachen, Germany, where Schukraft worked under Professor Christopher Wiebusch. Schukraft received a fellowship from the Konrad Adenauer Foundation and the Deutsche Telekom Foundation to support her thesis research.
Schukraft is continuing her career as a postdoctoral researcher at Fermi National Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, working on the MicroBooNE experiment.