NSF REU at K-State: Laser-matter Interactions at the Atomic and Nanoscales
The K-State REU program offers summer fellowships to do world-class research in our friendly physics department in the scenic Flinthills. We are funded by the National Science Foundation.
Elementary Particle Physics and Cosmology
Dr. Glenn Horton-Smith: Neutrino Physics
Email: gahs@phys.ksu.edu
The high energy physics group's REU project for 2013 concerns the study of neutrino interactions in liquid argon time projection chamber detectors. A liquid argon time projection chamber (LAr TPC) detects the ionization trail of a charged particle in liquid argon, producing high resolution images of the tracks. Neutrinos are difficult to detect because they rarely interact with matter, but when these rare interactions do occur, they produce characteristic charged particle tracks. Thousands of these interactions have been recorded by the ArgoNEUT LAr TPC at Fermilab, and a larger LAr TPC named MicroBooNE is nearing completion. Understanding these interactions is important to our fundamental understanding of the properties of neutrinos and how they affect other matter and energy in the universe. Automated software for analyzing the charged track images to produce lists of track vectors is under development and testing. The next step in the analysis is to determine what kind of process happened to produce each track. Various methods of identifying processes need to be studied to determine their effectiveness. A related study involves methods to use track information to reconstruct neutrino energy. In pursuing either study, experience would be gained with data analysis and object oriented programming tools. An opportunity to visit Fermilab during MicroBooNE construction may also be possible. For more information, see http://t962.fnal.gov/About.html and http://www-microboone.fnal.gov/.
Dr. Andrew Ivanov: Compact Muon Solenoid Detector
Email: aivanov@k-state.edu
The Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) detector is a large multi-purpose detector at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) constructed below ground at the CERN Laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, that is built to help answering unresolved fundamental questions in particle physics. The proton beams circulate inside the LHC ring in opposite directions and are made to collide at the center of the CMS. Near the interaction region, in the core of the CMS there is the silicon pixel detector, that provides high-precision space point measurements for reconstruction of charged particle trajectories. To cope up with projected increase of the luminosity of the proton beams, in the next years the present pixel detector will be replaced with a new detector equipped with a more powerful data readout based on cutting edge technology.
One of the critical ingredients of the data readout is a new digital electronic chip, called Token Bit Manager, that collects and digests the information from the pixel hits due to traversing charged particles. This chip will be mounted directly on the silicon sensors and will send the output information via optical cables to the off-detector electronics. The project involves measuring and testing the characteristics of the Token Bit Manager chip, and an analysis of a set of criteria necessary for the efficient data taking in the future pixel detector.