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Knut Zoch, Ph.D.

Postdoctoral Fellow
in Experimental Particle Physics
Harvard University

Contact

Harvard University
Department of Physics
17 Oxford Street
Cambridge, MA 02138

Based at CERN, the European
Center for Nuclear Research
in Geneva, Switzerland.

Get in touch: kzoch@g.harvard.edu

Bio

Hi, I am a Postdoctoral Fellow in the group of Professor Morii at the Harvard University Department of Physics, affiliated with the Laboratory for Particle Physics and Cosmology (LPPC). I am an experimental particle physicist working on the ATLAS Experiment, which records particle collisions at the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The home of both the ATLAS Experiment and the LHC accelerator is CERN, the European Center for Nuclear Research, near Geneva in Switzerland – which is where I conduct my research.

My journey started in 2010 with the undergraduate physics program at the University of Göttingen in Germany. Fascinated by the exciting fundamental research done at CERN, I continued on this path, eventually earning a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Göttingen. For my doctoral studies, I explored the heaviest particle we know to date – the top quark – and how it couples to and interacts with other elementary particles. After completing my Ph.D., I accepted a position as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Geneva in Switzerland. While continuing top-quark physics at Geneva, I also focused on developing machine-learning algorithms for analyzing particle physics data.

As a Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard, I continue to work on the ATLAS Experiment. My research revolves around searches for physics beyond the Standard Model using novel data analysis techniques, the commissioning of the new ATLAS Inner Tracker (ITk), and studying the physics of the top quark. I am currently leading the ATLAS Top Quarks + X physics subgroup. In this role, I oversee approximately 15 ongoing measurements of rare final states involving top quarks and searches for non-Standard-Model physics in the top quark sector. I have previously served as Online Data Quality Coordinator for ATLAS.

For my PhD, I received a scholarship from the German Academic Scholarship Foundation (Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes). While at the University of Geneva, I was a Feodor Lynen Research Fellow of the Alexander-von-Humboldt Foundation.

Publications

As a member of the ATLAS Collaboration, I am co-authoring 50+ publications released by ATLAS every year. You can find a complete and up-to-date list of all my publications on my ORCID profile and in the Inspire database. The following list highlights a few ATLAS and non-ATLAS publications:

  • Topological Reconstruction of Particle Physics Processes using Graph Neural Networks.
    Lukas Ehrke, John Andrew Raine, Knut Zoch, Manuel Guth, and Tobias Golling.
    Phys. Rev. D 107 (2023) 116019. arXiv:2303.13937.
  • ν‐Flows: conditional neutrino regression.
    Matthew Leigh, John Andrew Raine, Knut Zoch, and Tobias Golling.
    SciPost Phys. 14 (2023) 159. arXiv:2207.00664.
  • Measurements of inclusive and differential cross‐sections of combined ttɣ and tWɣ production in the eμ channel at 13 TeV with the ATLAS detector.
    ATLAS Collaboration (Georges Aad, …, Knut Zoch, …, and Lukasz Zwalinski).
    JHEP 09 (2020) 049. arXiv:2007.06946.

Teaching / Tutoring

I have tutored numerous classes throughout my academic career and have assisted in teaching for many years. Most recently, I tutored courses on particle physics and statistical methods for data analysis. I have had the opportunity to design course content for some of these courses that involved creating physics exercise sheets, hands-on coding exercises, and exams from scratch. These included

  • Introduction to nuclear and particle physics (Univ. of Göttingen)
  • Advanced statistical methods in data analysis: machine learning (Univ. of Göttingen)
  • Top Quark Physics (Univ. of Göttingen)
  • Statistical Methods in Physics (Univ. of Geneva)

During my doctoral studies, I co-supervised B.Sc. and M.Sc. thesis projects and have continued co-supervising Ph.D. students during my postdoctoral appointments at Geneva and Harvard.

In addition to my academic coursework, I conduct workshops on machine-learning topics for the German Academic Scholarship Foundation. These workshops take place during the summer schools organized by the foundation. They cover various aspects of artificial intelligence and machine learning, including algorithm and model discussions, interactive coding sessions, and practical applications of machine learning in science and industry.