The Hans Thirring Prize recognizes the best doctoral thesis in the Faculty of Physics at the University of Vienna and is awarded honouring Hans Thirring.
In his dissertation, Patrick Ludl tackles one of the open problems of particle physics beyond the Standard Model: Why is the lepton mixing matrix so different from the one of the quarks? One potential Ansatz to answer this question are finite family symmetries. The first part of the thesis provides a study of possible candidates for flavour symmetries of fermions. This analysis led to an important contribution to the classification of the finite subgroups of SU(3). The second part of the thesis concentrates on the phenomenological implications of Abelian family symmetries on the neutrino mass matrix. The thesis closes with a detailed study of possible correlations of the elements of the neutrino mass matrix.
