Undergraduates Travel for Summer Research

This past summer, undergraduates from the Duke physics department worked alongside physicists at research hotspots around the world, contributing to work on neutrino detection, the Higgs boson, a next-generation telescope, and more. In the process, they not only learned how to apply classroom concepts to real-world problems, but also gained insight into themselves and their plans for the future.

Aaron Webb, a senior from Arizona, worked on the ATLAS project at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland. “It gives you a different perspective because it’s a very different dynamic than in a classroom where there’s a clear distinction between professors and students,” he said. “It almost surprised me how much people there treated me as if I was just another scientist.” Webb, whose advisor is Prof. Al Goshaw, worked on data analysis related to scattering of electroweak bosons, a project he intends to turn into his senior thesis.

Webb traveled to CERN as part of the REU program (Research Experience for Undergraduates). Fourteen undergraduates from colleges and universities around the country participated in the NSF-funded program at Duke this summer, which is a joint venture between TUNL and Duke’s high-energy program. Four of the REU students—including Webb—spent the first half of their summer at Duke and the second half at CERN.

Jincheng “Louis” Xu, a sophomore from Beijing, also worked on the ALTAS project at CERN, although via a different route: a Deans’ Summer Research Fellowship. These fellowships are awarded to dozens of students each summer by the academic deans of Trinity College to support undergraduate research experiences on or off campus.

“It’s the best summer I’ve ever had so far,” said Xu, whose advisor is Prof. Ayana Arce. “It’s not just about the research projects—I also got to talk to physicists, computer scientists, and students from all around the world.” Xu, who is thinking of double majoring in physics and computer science, wrote computer code to help sort through the enormous amount of data being generated to describe the Higgs boson.

Two other physics undergraduates also received funding from the Dean's office: Max Duncan and Andrew Walsworth, who both worked at Brookhaven National Lab in Upton, New York, under the advisement of Prof. Chris Walter.

Max Duncan, a physics major and theater minor, worked on the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST). At the heart of the telescope, scheduled to go online in 2020, will be a 3.2 giga-pixel camera made out of 189 charge-coupled device sensors. Duncan worked on a computer simulation to quantify the distortion created by a positive-charge guard rail that surrounds each sensor. “It was valuable for me to get a glimpse at what a job in physics actually is,” he said, “and also to see what kind of work goes into building a telescope. I underestimated how much conceptual work and problem-solving goes into the creation of the telescope and how much you have to know before you physically start building it.”

Justin Raybern also worked at a national lab—Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee. Raybern, an in-coming graduate student who did his undergraduate work at Kansas State, knew he wanted to do research on neutrinos, so he contacted Prof. Kate Scholberg. She invited him to work on the coherent neutrino-nucleus scattering project at ORNL. He did so, taking background measurements at the Spallation Neutron Source there. He’s continuing his work on that project with Prof. Phil Barbeau this semester.

Danielle Riggin, a junior from Rhode Island, spent part of her summer two kilometers underground in the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNOLAB) in Ontario. Riggin, who is majoring in physics and minoring in computer science, worked on the HALO project, which is designed to detect neutrino bursts created by supernovae. Getting to the underground lab required donning mine gear, descending two vertical kilometers in a mine-shaft elevator, walking two horizontal kilometers, then showering and putting on a clean suit and a hairnet before entering the lab. “The underground lab was a huge surprise,” she said. “It was incredible, and it was so amazing being there and being able to talk to people from all the other experiments.”

Belowground, she helped outfit parts of the detector, which consists of helium-filled tubes surrounded by lead blocks. Aboveground, she wrote code for a computer simulation that will help determine the efficiency of the detector. “It was cool to get to apply my computer-science experience to research,” she said. “And it was really fun. I would spend all day coding and go home and code more.” Riggin’s project was funded through an NSF grant of her advisor Prof. Scholberg.

Eugene Rabinovich, a double major in physics and math from Cleveland, attended the two-week Cargèse Summer Institute on String Theory and Holography on the island of Corsica in France. He was the only undergraduate accepted to the 65-person conference, which is attended mostly by graduate students and post-docs. Rabinovich had already been studying a string-theory technique called localization under Prof. Ronen Plesser. “The great thing about this conference is that I saw the bigger picture of how localization fits into really interesting questions that are being asked and investigated on string theory,” he said. “It gave me some interesting ideas about what kind of a new direction to take my research this year for my thesis.”

As an A. B. Duke Scholar, Rabinovich was able to apply for funding through that program to support his trip. “I feel really lucky, one, that I’ve been able to find so easily the funding to go to such a program and, two, to get to a point as an undergraduate to be able to understand better what the big picture in string theory is these days, which will help me make better choices as to which graduate school I want to go to."

Many of the students said their summer experience helped shape their vision of their future. “It definitely confirmed that I’m on the right path, not just that I like research but that I’m the type of person that likes research,” said Webb of his CERN experience. “It gave me a perspective on what sort of qualities you need to enjoy research—patience and being able to be comfortable not understanding something or not really getting anywhere for days at a time. Some people are very goal-oriented and don’t enjoy not getting results right away. I enjoy the process and the tinkering just as much.”

Mary-Russell Roberson is a freelance science writer who lives in Durham.