The 2025 Master’s Thesis Prize of the Finnish Physical Society has been awarded to Aleksi Hartikainen of Tampere University, and presented in the opening ceremony of Physics Days 2026. This award is given annually for an exceptional Master’s thesis in the field of physical sciences. It exists to support early-career researchers in Finland and acknowledge their excellent contributions to the field. The award consists of a €1000 prize, a plenary talk during the Physics Days opening ceremony, and one year of free membership to the Finnish Physical Society.
This year we received a good number of submissions, highlighting the excellent work being carried out across the country.
Aleksi’s thesis is called “Effect of nuclear quantum nature on electron density in crystalline solids.” The thesis computationally investigates the effect of quantum nature of nuclei to reveal its significant smoothing effect on the electron density, which leads to an improved agreement between computed structure factors and experimental data. Aleksi demonstrated deep knowledge of the field and excellent writing skills proven in her theses. You can read more about Aleksi’s thesis in the blog post here: Aleksi Hartikainen: Effect of nuclear quantum nature on electron density in crystalline solids. The full thesis can be found here: https://trepo.tuni.fi/handle/10024/227161.
We also award an honourable mention to one other researcher who made it to our final round of evaluation:
Linus Lind (Aalto University) with the thesis titled “Atmospheric compound identification from electron ionization mass spectrometry data.” You can read more about Linus’s thesis here: Linus Lind: Atmospheric compound identification from electron ionization mass spectrometry data. You can find the full thesis here: https://aaltodoc.aalto.fi/items/efbc3f51-fd1d-4931-9fec-1386e2191f4f.
Mikko Seppälä (University of Helsinki) with the thesis titled “One-Loop Gluon Emission In Light Cone Perturbation Theory.” You can read more about Linus’s thesis here: Mikko Seppälä: One-Loop Gluon Emission In Light Cone Perturbation Theory. You can find the full thesis here: https://helda.helsinki.fi/items/a2565d50-2c05-4c02-803a-282f4798dd76.
