Research

Interferometry at the Institute for Quantum Computing

I worked on characterizing silicon for a future grating interferometer experiment. This experiment, in Dmitry Pushin's group, will use neutrons to measure the gravitational constant.

For certain silicon crystals to be used as sensitive optical gratings, we need to understand its properties - in particular, its birefringence (an often small change in refractive index that depends on light polarization). Using a NIR laser and simple optical setup, I did measurements on several silicon samples, measuring birefringence with high sensitivity ($\sim 10^{-6}$).

Plasma Stability at General Fusion

General Fusion's approach to nuclear fusion is to first inject a plasma into a cavity surrounded by liquid metal; this cavity is then collapsed using pistons, which squeezes and heats the plasma and induces fusion reactions.

With Aaron Froese and the simulations team, we studied ways to optimize the characteristics of a hot plasma that is being compressed. When we subject plasma to increased temperatures and densities for fusion to take place, we want to ensure that it will remain stable and behave in a useful way.

ATLAS

I spent around 6 months working on the ATLAS experiment, a large particle collider experiment at CERN.

Most recently, with Pierre Savard and Lukas Adamek at the University of Toronto, we developed ways to estimate and quantify the measurement uncertainty of the Higgs boson mass, an important parameter of interest that ATLAS observes.

Before that, with Alison Lister and Colin Gay at my home university, we developed machine learning methods to distinguish a specific kind of quark (top) decay from large quantities of background data.

LHCb Statistics

For half a summer at Imperial College London, I worked with William Barter on the LHCb experiment, also located at CERN. We used and developed statistical methods to see if the differences between two samples of particle decay data are statistically significant. Such methods are useful for seeing how matter and antimatter behave differently, a central problem in physics.

NEWS-G Dark Matter Search at SNOLAB

For a summer at SNOLAB, with Pierre Gorel, I worked on simulations of a new dark matter detector called NEWS-G. We were interested in seeing the effects of a neutron radiation calibration source on the detector performance, and investigated signal processing options to discriminate between dark matter and other signals.

Commissioning the EMMA Spectrometer at TRIUMF

EMMA is a recoil mass spectrometer at TRIUMF, Canada's national lab for accelerator physics. At EMMA, after an energetic particle beam is collided into a target, the resulting nuclei (recoils) are sorted and classified based on their mass and charge. It allows us to study a lot of different nuclear reactions, especially astrophysical ones.

I worked with EMMA's principal researcher, Barry Davids, for one summer on running simulations and gauging EMMA's operating characteristics. I sometimes work part-time with the EMMA group during the school year.