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Studenten im Sommer auf dem Campus Nord, rote Zahnräder im Hintergrund © Roland Baege​/​TU Dortmund

PD Dr. Andrea Knue: New Professorship in Experimental Particle Physics and Top Quark Research

© Markus Betz​/​TU Dortmund
Andrea Knue is an experimental particle physicist specializing in the properties of the top quark and its interaction with the Higgs boson. These particles are the heaviest elementary particles known to date and decay almost instantly after their production. To measure their properties precisely, they must therefore be artificially produced in collisions with other particles (such as proton-proton collisions). The Large Hadron Collider at CERN (Geneva) is currently the only particle accelerator capable of producing them.

Andrea Knue is a member of the ATLAS experiment at the LHC, one of four major experiments capable of recording these collisions.

She completed her Ph.D. in 2013 at Georg-August University in Göttingen and subsequently completed her first postdoc at the University of Glasgow with a Fedor Lynen Fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

She then worked at the Max Planck Institute for Physics in Munich before moving to the University of Freiburg to complete her habilitation.

The topic of her habilitation was the measurement of the top quark mass and the top-Higgs coupling, the strength of which has implications for the stability of the universe.

From July 2022 to September 2024, she led the top quark research activities at the ATLAS experiment, working with approximately 300 scientists.

The current focus of her research is the precise measurement of the top quark mass, the investigation of the top quark’s spin properties,

and a state of top-quark pairs—commonly referred to as “toponium”—that was only recently measured for the first time.

In fact, top quarks do not live long enough to form a bound state with other quarks.

However, when the collision energy is just sufficient to produce a top-quark pair, they move slowly relative to one another.

In this situation, there is the possibility of briefly exchanging another particle, a so-called gluon.

In doing so, the two quarks enter a pseudo-bound state before each decays independently of the other.

A more detailed study of this non-relativistic limiting region is expected to lead to a better understanding of the strong interaction.

The professorship is part of the new Cluster of Excellence “Color meets Flavor,” in which TU Dortmund University is collaborating with the University of Bonn, the University of Siegen, and the Jülich Research Center to address common research questions.

The focus of this Cluster of Excellence is the detailed investigation of the strong and weak interactions.

As part of this effort, another experiment called INSIGHT is being built; it will use the ELSA particle accelerator in Bonn to study the lighter hadrons in the Standard Model in greater detail.

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