Research

The department continues to take pride in the large number of undergraduate majors who work in our research laboratories. This year, roughly half of our upperclassmen were involved in research projects. Upper-level students are strongly encouraged to become involved with a research group and gain exposure to experimental and theoretical research projects.  This experience offers essential, practical training for students who wish to pursue technical careers after their undergraduate education, and broadens the background of those planning graduate study in physics.

Many of our undergraduate research assistants work under their advisors’ research grants. Others are funded by NSF Research Experiences for Undergraduates grants, and several students join research groups through exchange programs or via UROP research awards.

The following paragraphs showcase most of the research being done by our undergraduates.

Deborah Avery (2010) worked with Professor Steve Ahlen on his dark matter project. She helped with the construction of a dark matter detection chamber and with data analysis.

Chelsea Bartram (2011) did research at the University of Geneva as part of the new undergraduate study abroad program for physics majors in the spring. Chelsea worked with Fanny Dufour (PhD, 2009) and Professor Alain Blondel on neutrino physics. She used software tools to study the sensitivity of a range of neutrino oscillation experiments to the unknown parameters of the matrix which governs the mixing of neutrino mass and flavor. Chelsea will continue this work upon returning to Boston with Professor Ed Kearns.

Elim Cheung (2011) is working with Professor Tulika Bose on the CMS experiment as part of the University of Geneva/CERN study abroad program. Her research project has involved performing trigger studies and writing software that will help optimize trigger algorithms. The trigger is an online selection system that is used in real-time to filter interesting events. As the intensity of the proton beams will increase over the next year or so, it will become essential to bring about an evolution of the system in order to maximize the physics potential of the experiment. Elim’s work is essential to this effort.

Ian Cohen (2010) worked with Astronomy Professor Harlan Spence to find spectral similarities between galactic cosmic ray fluxes, and properties of the solar wind.  He also spent a summer at Rutgers University working under the direction of John Hughes.  His task was to process and analyze Chandra x-ray observations of supernova remnants, to determine their expansion rates.

Michael Dimitriyev (2011) has been working with Professor Tulika Bose on a search for exotic particles using data collected by the CMS Experiment at the Large Hadron Collider. He has focused on searching for the “Wprime” particle that is predicted by many new physics models. His research has involved generating Wprime simulated samples and analyzing the collision data recently collected by the experiment. He is currently working on optimizing criteria that will preferentially help select signal Wprime events over the background. Background processes occur at much higher rates and hence developing efficient and optimal signal selection criteria is crucial for the success of the project.

Ryan Eriksen (2010) did research in the Mechanical Engineering Department under Professor Gopalan and Professor Pal. He tested the diffusivity of different layers of a hydrogen fuel cell. He tested how fast oxygen and hydrogen can pass through the layers of a fuel cell. This can lead to better optimization and efficiency for hydrogen fuel cells.

Nicholas Ferreri (2012) has an internship at Yale University this summer in the Yale Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics working with postdoctoral fellow, Kyoungsoo Lee, on determining the x-ray properties of high redshift galaxies. He is looking at a sample of about 2000 galaxies in x-ray wavelengths and trying to determine the average properties of these galaxies based on stacking analyses.

Scott Goodwin (2012) has been working with Dr. Mike Stevens in the Astronomy Department. Together, they have been working with data from the WIND spacecraft, using an instrument called SWE (Solar Wind Experiment). Scott has been looking for, and trying to characterize, events where singly ionized helium can be seen in the solar wind. Events like these are rare and not well understood because helium should not normally make it out of the sun without being fully ionized in the hot corona. Scott and Dr. Stevens have found several events so far, and are currently working on a paper together.

Francine Klein (2011) has been working with Professors Raj Mohanty and Shyam Erramilli over the summer on a UROP project. She is working on Silicon Nanochannel Field Effect Transistors for biosensing.

Jessica Leach (2010) worked with Professor Ophelia Tsui studying the glass transition temperature of thin polymer films (below 100 nanometers) supported by a polymer brush.  In thin films, this transition temperature can differ noticeably from the bulk value and depends on both thickness and the conditions at the film interfaces.  The film can slip at a brush-film interface when subject to a shear force, representing a type of interface whose effect on the glass transition temperature has not yet been studied.  This may lead to a better understanding of the mechanism of the transition and how it can be controlled.  Jessica has been active in all parts of this work, including preparation of the brushes and films, sample measurement using ellipsometry, and data analysis.

Kristopher Maynard (2010) worked on the IBEX (Interstellar Boundary Explorer) project with the Center for Space Physics. IBEX is a satellite that launched in June 2009 and detects particles coming from the heliosphere. This will achieve one of the project’s goals of generating a global map of the heliosphere. Under the guidance of Professor Nathan Schwadron, Maynard worked on visualization tools for the satellite’s orbit and detected particles.

Daniel McHugh helped on a project which successfully demonstrated a proof of principle synthesis of IRIS and MALDI-MS technologies.  Such a technique could be used for quantifying and identifying proteins on microarrays in a label-free, high-throughput manner.

Joseph McMahon (2013) has been working with Professor Emeritus George Zimmerman since Spring 2010 on high temperature superconductors.

Julie Moreau (2011) studies star clusters with the Galactic Plane Infrared Polarization Survey (GPIPS), which seeks to characterize the galactic magnetic field. Julie looks at the photometry (electromagnetic intensity) of stars in specific clusters, and tries to identify them. Once she can say with certainty that a particular star is part of a cluster, she measures the polarization of that star’s light. Polarization of the interstellar medium is directly tied to magnetic fields.

Freddy Obrecht has been working with Professors Raj Mohanty and Shyam Erramilli over the summer on a UROP project. He is working on Silicon Nanochannel Field Effect Transistors for biosensing.

Zach Raines (2011) is working with the Boston University Intermediate Energy Physics group. The group is responsible for several components of a new experiment to search for a permanent electric dipole moment of the neutron, which is being mounted at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The experiment will improve on the present limits of the neutron electric dipole moment by a factor of 100, or perhaps observe it. One of the responsibilities is the development of a lightguide system that will provide the signal for the experiment.  Because of the very low light levels produced in the experiment, high transmission lightguides need to be developed. Furthermore, these lightguides must be operational at temperatures as low as 0.3K. Zach is working on the simulations of light transmission through the guides, control software in the lab, as well as testing of lightguide prototypes for their transmission properties.

Daniel Pade worked with Professor Tulika Bose during Summer 2009 on a research project that involved generating simulated samples for an exotic particle called the “techni-rho” that is predicted to be produced at the Large Hadron Collider.

Karishma Sekhon (2012) will be joining an OIL TANKER (as a 5-6 week summer project) to study the bending and shearing forces that effect the vessel. She will also get hands-on-experience in the engine room helping the engineers, as she wants to be a high energy experimentalist in the future; this rare opportunity will be once in a lifetime. The ship will be sailing across the Atlantic Ocean, transporting crude oil from Northern Europe to the United States and South America.

Scott Stackley (2011) is helping to build and test equipment for a dark matter experiment called MiniCLEAN, planned to run a mile underground at SNOLab in Sudbury Canada. MiniCLEAN is comprised of 500 kg of liquid argon viewed by about 90 photomultiplier tubes. Scott is working with Professor Ed Kearns and graduate student Dan Gastler to develop a test for the data handling capability of the electronics and acquisition system. This summer, Scott is in a Research Experience for Undergraduates program a Fermilab working on electronics for another liquid argon detector.

Claire Thomas (2010) undertook Work for Distinction on the Double Chooz reactor neutrino experiment, as a continuation of her previous summer REU with Janet Conrad, a professor now at MIT; Ed Kearns was her BU supervisor. Claire studied long-lived radioactive spallation background from cosmic ray interactions in the detector, such as 8Li. These backgrounds are important to understand for the precise measurement of reactor neutrino disappearance, which is the goal of the Double Chooz experiment.

Andrea Welsh (2011) is currently working with Boston University’s ATLAS group at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. She is working on calibration of the monitored drift tube (MTD) chambers which line both the barrels and endcaps of the experiment. She uses the analog-to-digital-converter (ADC) counts of muon hits in the MTDs between different runs to test individual chambers and tubes. These ADC counts give information on the time-distant relationship of the muon hits in the chambers. She is also working on alignment of the MTD chambers finding the best fit for tracks of the muons by minimizing the chi-squared of the fit.

Continue reading: Program Completion