2019-2020 Senior Honors Theses
Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/10657/6786
This collection contains theses produced by Class of 2020 Honors students
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Browsing 2019-2020 Senior Honors Theses by Department "Physics, Department of"
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Item A Dosimetric Evaluation of MiniPIX Performance Using In-situ and Simulated Environments(2020-05) Masek, Reed B.Space weather is becoming increasingly relevant as human activity in space and around grows. Primary contributors to this space radiation are galactic cosmic rays (GCRs) which continue to mystify scientists with their high energies and unknown origins. Despite the unknowns, active monitoring of the radiation environment beyond the Earth’s surface is important for the safety of commercial airlines and astronauts. This thesis examines the use of a MiniPIX camera as a relatively low-cost, portable radiation dosimeter used on-board high altitude balloon flights under the High Altitude Student Platform (HASP). The MiniPIX was housed within a miniature container designed to replicate the structure of the International Space Station (ISS). The goal of this construction is to model a complex and exotic environment, such as the ISS, using a simplified representation in attempt to reduce the high dependence of simulations for monitoring the dose received by human on commercial flights or in space by generalizing this methodology to other applications. Its performance is compared to simulations executed by the FLUKA transport code which strive to replicate the atmospheric environment and GCR sources during the HASP missions. The use of the simulations in this context is to validate the configuration flown on the balloon. The results from the simulations are not directly comparable to those from the balloon, but characteristic features within the simulated data are present. Lastly, results from experiments and simulations performed by others are examined and compared to the results from the HASP mission and the simulations performed in this study.Item Hermite-Gauss Quadrature with Generalized Hermite Weight Functions and Small Sample Sets for Sparse Polynomials(2020-04) Vu, Brian-Tinh D.This thesis derives a Gaussian quadrature rule from a complete set of orthogonal lacunary polynomials. The resulting quadrature formula is exact for polynomials whose even part skips powers, with a set of sample values that is much smaller than the degree. The weight for these quadratures is a generalized Gaussian, whose negative logarithm is an even monomial; the powers of this monomial make up the even part of the polynomial to be integrated. We first present Rodrigues formulas for generalized Hermite polynomials (GHPs) that are complete and orthogonal with respect to the generalized Gaussian. From the Rodrigues formula for even GHPs we establish a three-term recursion relation and find the normalization constants. We present a slight modification to the Christoffel-Darboux identity and the Lagrange interpolation polynomials, and proceed to derive the roots, weights, and estimate of the error for the generalized Hermite-Gauss quadrature rule applied to sufficiently smooth functions. We illustrate the quadrature rule by applying it to two examples. Finally, we apply a major result from compressive sensing relating a matrix's coherence and sparse recovery guarantees to the quadrature setting.Item Searching for the Quantum Chromodynamic Critical Point(2020-04) Mroczek, DéboraUnder extreme temperature and density conditions, the quarks and gluons that are normally confined to nucleons are able to move freely in a state known as the quark-gluon plasma (QGP). Currently, droplets of QGP can be created experimentally using heavy-ion collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory and at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. It is known from first principle quantum chromodynamics (QCD) calculations that the transition from nuclear matter to the QGP is a crossover if the system has a net baryon density of zero, which has been consistent with experimental results. One of the key questions in the field is whether QCD exhibits a first-order phase transition at large baryon densities. In this scenario, a critical point would mark the end of the crossover phase transition and the beginning of the first order line. In this thesis, I detail my study of the implications of the presence of a critical point on the QCD phase diagram. In the first part of this work, I construct a family of equations of state matching lattice calculations at low baryon density, and including a critical point in the correct universality class. I then employ the equation of state I developed in the analysis of a possible critical point signature that can be detected experimentally at RHIC. I also use a Feed-Forward Neural Network to identify critical point configurations that result in inconsistent thermodynamics.Item Van der Waals Interactions in the Hadron Resonance Gas Model(2019-08) Boggs, AaronThe Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP) and its phase transition on the Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) phase diagram have been at the forefront of high energy physics research for the past few decades. In order to study the QGP and its thermodynamic behavior, many experiments have been undertaken to recreate this state of matter at particle colliders like the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN and the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at the Brookhaven National Laboratory. In addition to experiment, several theoretical models of the QGP have been developed which can then be compared to experimental results. In this thesis, we attempt to successfully implement one of these models, the ideal Hadron Resonance Gas (HRG) model, along with an extension of the model which includes van der Waals type interactions between pairs of baryons and antibaryons, called the Van der Waals Hadron Resonance Gas (VDW-HRG) Model. In order to determine if our implementations of the two models were successful, we compare our results for several observables at zero chemical potential to the results obtained in [1]. The observables calculated include the system's pressure, energy density, entropy density, the speed of sound, and the speci c heat at constant volume. After determining that our implementation of the VDW-HRG model was successful, we then venture out into nite chemical potential and again calculate the system's pressure, energy density, entropy density, number density and the second order uctuation of baryon number using the VDW-HRG model. Our results at nite chemical potential using the VDW-HRG model qualitatively behave as one would expect them to on the QCD phase diagram, further verifying the success of our implementation.