Research

Here we hope to give a glimpse into just some of the topics our present and past members have researched, developed, or contributed to. This page is meant to show that undergraduates at RPI have oppurtunities to participate in meaningful research around the world and also to receive notoriety for such.

 

Daniel Elton

During the summer of 2008 I participated in a Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) at Stony Brook University. I worked with Prof. Miriam Forman researching turbulence in the solar wind. In particular, I helped analyze solar wind velocity data from the Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE) and Ulysses spacecraft, using Excel and FORTRAN.  My research used the Kolomogorov 1941 theory for hydrodynamic turbulence, which is a simplification as it does not include any of the magnetic interactions which are present in plasmas such as the solar wind.  The Kolmogorov theory is a statistical theory which uses statistcal moments and allows for the calculation of the energy dissipation rate, which is the rate that turbulent disturbances heat the solar wind. We found, among other things, that turbulence is not fully developed at 2-3 AU at high eccliptic lattitudes. I also started working on figuring out how much data is required for adequate convergence of the statistical moments, which is an important unanswered question in the field.

 

Sam Punshon-Smith

I am currently working with Professors John Cummings, Paul Stoler, and Jim Napolitano on the Daya Bay Reactor Neutrino Experiment, which is a large collaboration with institutions from all over the world, whose goal is to measure mixing angle theta 13 using anti-electron neutrinos from two nuclear reactors in Daya Bay, China. The experiment will be placing three detectors comprised of large tanks of water underground in specific locations to measure the neutrino flux, and hence “hopefully” measure the mixing angle theta 13. [2008]

 

Victor Parkinson

For the past two years [2004-2006] I have been working with Dr. Persans on a project sponsored by Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory in Schenectady: computer modeling of the optical reflectivity of corroded stainless steel thin films. We have used Mie theory and Fresnel scattering to compute both angle-resolved and spectral scattering. This work will help characterize the behavior of the stainless steel pipes in nuclear reactors, and will shortly be published in Corrosion Science.

 

Rebecca Lamb

Spring 2003 - Brookhaven National Laboratory - I worked at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) on the Solenoid Tracker At RHIC (STAR) detector. I helped commission a small subsystem, the Forward Pion Detector, and did some analysis on data taken while I was there. My analysis took the form of reconstructing neutrals pions and had inplications regarding gluon density in heavy ions.
Summer 2004 - CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research - This summer I was working on the secondary beam line coming from the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) at CERN. I helpped to "tune" the particle beam (be sure it reaches the experiment with a small spot size and reasonable dispersion) by adjusting dipole (bending) magnets and quadrupole (focusing) magnets. I also made simulations of the beam line with a program called HALO.

 

Joe Yasi

This summer [2004] I am working on the Physics of Music with Dr. Steven Errede at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I developed an algorithm for harmonic analysis of arbitrary wavefiles, or really any periodic waveform. I am specifically looking at the relative phase between the harmonics and the fundamental, and it's effect on the sound. I wrote a program in Matlab to do this, and it will be used in a couple of courses on the Physics of Music at UIUC.

 

Ted

This summer, I have been working at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. The work I have been doing has focused around computer simulations and analysis in a field that would be most likely categorized as materials science. I can emphasize the multidisciplinary future awaiting many students of engineering/science, since I am neither a materials science nor a computer science student (mechanical and electrical engineering).

 

Andrew

I've been looking for evidence of the existence of exotic mesons by running a mass dependent fit on data from the e852 experiment performed at Brookhaven National Laboratory in 1995.

 

Jackson

So last semester I worked with John Cummings in the High Energy Physics group at RPI. I was looking at data from an old CLAS experiment. Photons of known energy were collided with a proton target. The goal was to see if any significant signal for the new possibly observed pentaquark state. After making appropriate cuts no significant signal was found. This summer I am working at the Laboratory for Elementary Particle Physics at Cornell. I am writing data aquisition software for the TTF2 prototype facility at DESY in Hamburg.

 

Jason

I participated in the developement of the first tunable room temperature stable distributed feedback color center laser at the University of Alabama at Birmingham's Laser Lab in the summer of 2003. My current research is centered on the promotion of this laser in various cancer treatments namely Photodynamic Therapy (PDT).