My name is Justus Zorn and I am a scientist employed at the Max-Planck-Institute for Nuclear Physics (MPIK) in Heidelberg and working in the Non-Thermal Astrophysics division headed by Prof. J.A. Hinton. I recently finalised my PhD (as well at MPIK, supervised by Prof. J.A. Hinton) and published my thesis titled as "Cherenkov Camera and Analysis Development for Highest-Energy Gamma-Ray Astronomy".
My current research is focused on camera hardware development and prototyping for the Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA), a future gamma-ray observatory based on the Imaging Atmospheric Cherenkov Telescope (IACT) technique. Furthermore, I am member of the High Energy Stereoscopic System (H.E.S.S.) collaboration focusing on data calibration and analysis to solve one of the most mysterious and still open questions: How and where are cosmic rays (CRs) accelerated up to PeV energies in our Galaxy. More in detail, I investigate one possible so-called PeVatron candidate: Westerlund I, a complex young stellar cluster.
Already in the past, I was interested in hardware development and testing of high-energy astrophysics experiments. In my Master thesis project supervised by Prof. R. Engel at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), I investigated PMT aging and performance under high background light conditions with the goal to extend the duty cycle of the Fluorescence Detector of the Pierre Auger Observatory.
News:
- October 2019: Submission of my PhD thesis with the title: "Cherenkov Camera and Analysis Development for Highest-Energy Gamma-Ray Astronomy"
- December 2019: PhD defense and graduation as "Dr. rer. nat." with the degree "magna cum laude" (very good)