PD Dr. Kai Hencken
LecturerLecturer
Lecturer
Departement Physik
Klingelbergstrasse 82
4056
Basel
Schweiz
Tel. +41 58 58 67650
k.hencken@unibas.ch
Lecturer
Departement Physik
Fachgruppe Thielemann
Klingelbergstrasse 82
4056
Basel
Schweiz
PD Dr. Kai Hencken
Short Biography
Kai Hencken, born in Hamburg in 1965, received his diploma in physics from the university of Basel in 1990 and his Ph.D. in theoretical physics also from the university of Basel in 1994 for his thesis on "Electromagnetic Production of Electron Positron Pairs in Relativistic Heavy Ion Collisions." He worked as a post-doctoral research associate at the "Institute for Nuclear Theory" at the University of Washington, Seattle, USA from 1995 to 1997. He returned to the university of Basel, where he received his Venia Docendi in 2000 for his work on electromagnetic and diffractive processes in high energy nuclear collisions. Since then he is a lecturer in theoretical physics at the department of physics.
He joined the Corporate Research Center of ABB in Baden-Dättwil in 2005, where he is currently senior principal scientist for "physical and statistical modeling" in the theoretical physics group. He was a member of the board of the Swiss Physical Society from 2009 until 2015 as head of the section on "physics in industry".
Research Summary
Until 2005: work on electromagnetic processes in particle and nuclear physics, especially on "ultraperipheral heavy ion collisions" in connection with RHIC (Brookhaven) and LHC (CERN) and Coulomb excitation and nuclear reactions with rare isotopes (MSU, GSI).
Since 2005: work on physical and statistical modeling on different topics for industrial applications. Sensor physics for industrial systems, plasma physics with a focus on electrical arcs. Particle and Monte Carlo simulations. Application of Bayesian Statistics, data analytics and inverse problems.
Kai Hencken has published more than 70 journal articles, a number of review and overview articles and contributed to proposals for CERN and GSI experiments. He holds more than 15 patents.