Nuclear Physics REU at the TAMU Cyclotron Institute
2002
The summer after my freshman junior year of college, I was selected to participate in a National Science Foundation (NSF) funded Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program in nuclear physics at the Cyclotron Institute at Texas A&M University. The reason for the location was that it was where I was born (but had not ever returned), and the motivation behind nuclear physics was...well, I had never done it before and it sounded interesting (plus, with my degree in aerospace engineering I could be a rocket scientist and a nuclear physicist!). I packed my things and flew down to Texas where I stayed for 10 weeks in a dorm room with a bunch of other students from across the country.
Being the experimentalist that I am, I wanted to try something a bit more theory-based but ended up doing some computational data analysis instead. Basically, the experiment that I was working fits under the umbrella of Nuclear Astrophyscs - the idea behind it is simple. We see a whole lot of different elements which exist on our planet today, but it is thought that, in the beginning (i.e. the physicist's big bang beginning) the universe consisted of only the basest of the elemental building blocks. Thus, complicated structures like protons, atoms, molecules, etc had to be built up piece by piece. Our experiment involved crashing together two different elements at very high energies and seeing how much of a different element they produced. In this way, we can simulate how the content of our world that we see today was produced and, in the process, get a better idea of what exactly is going on throughout our universe where similar events are taking place.
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With the results from the experiment, I recieved full funding to attend the 2004 APS-DNP meeting in Chicago, Il to present a poster of the research that I had done as part of the CEU program - click here for more pictures and information on that. Also, for more information about the REU program, click here .
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