2013–2017·Boulder, CO
B.A. & Sc., Physics — Magna Cum Laude
Where physics became instruments.
I came to physics through the hardware. My family pushed me to find research early, so I asked around the department until I met Jamie Nagle — an experimentalist in high-energy nuclear physics, and at the time the spokesperson for the PHENIX experiment at Brookhaven National Lab. A lot of professors treat undergraduates as free labor and hand them the dullest work in the lab. Jamie treated me like a scientist: real work, chosen so that it would be worth something to me as well as to the field.
My first project was the plastic scintillating panels for the hadronic calorimeter of sPHENIX, the new experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. The calorimeter measures the energy carried by hadrons — anything stable made of quarks — and it matters most for the neutral ones, which no other part of the detector sees at all. My job was to measure how sensitive and how uniform different geometries of scintillator and wavelength-shifting fiber were.
To do it I built my first automated system: two linear rails that swept a radioactive strontium source across a panel while recording its response. That became the quality-control stage for the whole calorimeter — every panel in the detector was scanned on it and checked against specification before installation. The best part came when Jamie sent me to live at Fermilab for a summer for the calorimeter beam tests, where I assembled what I had helped design and watched it meet a real high-energy particle beam. The results were published in IEEE.
After a few years on hardware I asked Jamie for an analysis project. The PHENIX silicon vertex detector — which measures where along the interaction region a collision happens — had degraded and lost resolution. Together we worked out how to recover the collision position from the timing differences between the photomultipliers in the two beam-beam counters at the extreme angles of the detector. Then we added the ability to flag "pile-up" events, where several nuclei had collided at once, by reading the shape of the PMT pulses.
I developed it in my final semester of undergrad, and it is still by far the most impactful research I have done: the algorithm went into the collaboration software library and has been used in more than twenty published PHENIX analyses, including papers in Nature. I am grateful to Jamie for the opportunity and for the years of mentorship that came with it.
That instinct — solve the physics by building the thing that measures it — is the through-line of everything since.
Designed and built an automated test stand to measure gain uniformity across the hadronic calorimeter's scintillator panels — the QC gate before installation.
Wrote a C++ pile-up detection algorithm that was adopted into the collaboration's shared software library and used across the group's published analyses.
Click any image to enlarge. Use ← → to move through the set.
My C++ double-event / pile-up detection algorithm was adopted into the PHENIX collaboration software. These heavy-ion physics papers are built on the collision data it cleaned.
Creating small circular, elliptical, and triangular droplets of quark–gluon plasma
Measurements of multiparticle correlations in d+Au collisions and implications for collective behavior
Measurement of long-range angular correlations and azimuthal anisotropies in high-multiplicity p+Au collisions
Lévy-stable two-pion Bose–Einstein correlations in 200 GeV Au+Au collisions
Overview of results from the PHENIX Collaboration
Measurement of the relative yields of ψ′ to J/ψ mesons at forward and backward rapidity
Pseudorapidity dependence of particle production and elliptic flow in asymmetric nuclear collisions
Measurements of azimuthal anisotropy and charged-particle multiplicity in d+Au collisions
Kinematic dependence of azimuthal anisotropies in p+Au, d+Au, and ³He+Au collisions
Cross section and transverse single-spin asymmetry of muons from open heavy-flavor decays
Nonperturbative transverse-momentum effects and evolution in dihadron and direct-photon–hadron correlations
Nuclear dependence of the transverse-single-spin asymmetry for forward neutron production
Disentangling centrality bias and final-state effects in high-pT neutral-pion production using direct photons
Measurements of Υ(1S+2S+3S) production at forward rapidity
Measurements of second-harmonic Fourier coefficients from azimuthal anisotropies
Measurements of e⁺e⁻ pairs from open heavy flavor in p+p and p+Au collisions
Measurement of emission-angle anisotropy via long-range angular correlations with high-pT hadrons
φ-meson production at forward and backward rapidity in p+Al, p+Au, and Cu+Au collisions
Angular decay coefficients of J/ψ mesons at forward rapidity
Measurements at forward rapidity of elliptic flow of charged hadrons and open-heavy-flavor muons
Measurement of elliptic flow of charged hadrons in Au+Au collisions at forward rapidity
Measurement of elliptic flow of J/ψ in Au+Au collisions at forward rapidity
Measurement of φ-meson production at forward rapidity in p+p collisions at √s = 510 GeV
The hadronic calorimeter I helped build and QC — from the scintillator-panel light-output work to the beam-tested prototype — underpins these sPHENIX detector papers.
Design and beam-test results for the sPHENIX electromagnetic and hadronic calorimeter prototypes
Overview of results from the sPHENIX Collaboration
The development of a sampling hadronic calorimeter for sPHENIX and the detection of event pile-up at PHENIX