Alexander L
- Research Program Mentor
PhD at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
Expertise
Galatatic Astrophysics, Particle Physics (neutrino/rare event searches), History of Physics, Instrumentation, Instrument Design, Signal Processing, Applied Mathematics in Physics
Bio
Growing up in a multilingual German-Mexican household in Baton Rouge, Louisiana exposed me to a wide variety of cultures and perspectives on who physicists are and what they do on a daily basis. The public lectures and colloquia at what is now the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology resulted in my first conversations with physicists, which allowed me to learn about the skills and responsibilities required to be a physicist. During these conversations, I learned that physics valued intense curiosity and that being a physicist was more than just writing long lists of equations on a chalkboard. I started my education at the Louisiana State University working on developing small pixel gamma ray detectors. From there, I then moved on to MIT where I became involved with a wide variety of projects over the course of graduate school. I started with developing the next generation of ultra-low background detectors that sought to detector one of the possibly millions of dark matter particles passing through us at any given second-research that I have built upon in my post-doctoral work. I was also on the team that developed new techniques for detecting/monitoring neutrons that are generated as a background in nuclear reactors. Finally, I worked together with colleagues in France to build, instrument and analyze an experiment designed to probe the physics that govern the rates at which heavy nuclei decay. The common thread that binds all these experiments together was that they all utilize ultra-cold detectors that seek to measure processes that occur at the very slowest time scales. At the heart of any physics experiment lie the instruments that measure the process under investigation. I have always been fascinated by how these instruments work and all the techniques that are used in order to extract the answers that we seek. I hope to continue to learn about new technologies and pass this knowledge to the next generation of physicists and show that physics is so much more than equations on a chalkboard. .Project ideas
Enviromental Monitoring with Sensors/Arduino
Data can be collected from all around our everyday lives. With the development of Arduinos it has become even easier to collect, store and then analyze this environmental data from all around us. In this project you will learn to develop a system that can: a) Collect data from the environment around you via the implementation of a sensor network b) Log the data in the form of your choosing c) Develop a theoretical model of how you expect the environmental variable to evolve over time/parameters d) Perform a data analysis on the environmental data and compare to the data collected. e) Develop a live platform for the logging/display of the data collected Look up https://www.google.com/books/edition/Environmental_Monitoring_with_Arduino/4iE94hFDtp8C?hl=en&gbpv=1&printsec=frontcover for some inspiration.
Analysis of Celestial Orbits
The night sky is filled with many different celestial objects that pass overhead over the course of a evening. For thousands of years various civilizations dedicated themselves to calculating the expected paths of these celestial objects. With the advent of modern computing the calculations of these paths has become very easy. In this project you will learn about basic orbital mechanics and apply that knowledge to determine the path various objects take across the night sky and compare to observations taken at night. From there you will calculate the orbital parameters objects such as satellites or planets. See https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/celestial-calculations for more ideas.