Joanna Gao is a PhD student in King's Experimental Particle and Astroparticle Physics (EPAP) group. She is affiliated with the Hyper-Kamiokande (Hyper-K) and Super-Kamiokande (Super-K) experiments based in Japan. Her current work for Hyper-K involves using computational simulations to investigate hadron signals from high energy up-going muons and neutron capture in water, with a long term goal of improving the energy reconstruction of the high-energy neutrinos in the Hyper-K. For Super-K collaboration, Joanna is working on the Michel electron analysis in the Outer Detector (OD) region of the water tank for calibration purposes.

Joanna graduated from Imperial College London in 2019 with an MSci in Theoretical Physics, and completed her master's thesis on the topic of developing machine learning techniques for the simplified template cross-section measurements in the Higgs boson to diphoton decay channel at CMS.

Thesis title

Studying High-Energy Up-Going Neutrinos in the Super- and Hyper-Kamiokande Experiments

Research interests

• Neutron capture detection in the Super-K
• TeV-scale energy neutrinos
• Up-going cosmic ray muons in the Super-K and Hyper-K
• Neutrino oscillation parameters
• The CP violation phase

PhD supervisor

Principal supervisor: Dr Teppei Katori