My Research Interests

My research interest is broadly accelerator physics and beam dynamics. Accelerators propel physics and society forward, and more than just literally. The basics of an accelerator is it speeds up particles, typically charged particles using strong electric fields.  In order to do high energy physics you need high energy interactions! To do particle physics you need to find and create the particles you're interested in. To study nuclear interactions you need to access the energy of the nucleus. In order to get an X-ray you need to create an X-ray! These are all possible due to accelerators. 

 My favorite kind of beam is one that I can do research with. At Michigan, I work with ZEUS (Zettawatt-Equivalent Ultrashort pulse laser System), ie a really powerful laser BEAM. Though not an accelerator by itself, when the laser hits plasma it pushes the electrons out of its path, creating a strong electric field (due to a lack of negative charges in the plasma). This strong electric field can be used to accelerate electrons! So then by routinely placing electrons in the "wake" of (behind) the strong positive plasma the laser causes we create a Laser-Plasma Accelerator. Neat! This technology is still relatively young, and that means there's lots of work to be done. 

The laser plasma interactions and laser beam dynamics are by themselves exciting to their own end. Can you cut a laser beam in half? If you did, does it carry the same amount of energy?  What if you could divide the laser into 100 parts, how would they behave? This is essentially high harmonic generation. We don't use knives to split a beam, but rather diffraction gratings, which are bumpy slabs that cause the laser light to bounce off into a certain arrangement of differing paths. These harmonics- or smaller waves of the laser light, are not well understood. One of my first projects is to explore the behavior of high harmonics of XUV (Highly ultraviolet light) pulses using a certain device called a Neeley spectrometer. 

Past Research Projects

Nuclear Astrophysics at the FRIB

In the center of pre-supernovae stars numerous reactions occur, building up to the explosion. One important reaction that can help determine behavior of the star is the rate of electron capture reactions (electron goes into the nucleus and combines with a proton to make a neutron and release energy through neutrino emission). The nuclear shell model describes a nucleus as having different levels of energy for a nucleon to occupy with different possibilities of likelihood. By using the nuclear shell model my group calculated the temperature dependence of the rate of electron capture reactions. These results were published "Finite-temperature electron-capture rates for neutron-rich nuclei around N=50 and effects on core-collapse supernovae simulations".

The Stepping Stone Puzzle 

The Stepping Stone Puzzle is a one person mathematical game played on an infinite square grid. The goal of the game is to get to the highest number possible on the grid, while obeying the games rules.

The rules are as follows:

1. To setup the game you place n 1's on the board (in any squares you choose)

2. To place the number k, the adjacent 8 squares (orthogonal and diagonal) must add up to exactly to k.

3. Numbers must be placed consecutively (must have a 2 on the board before you place a 3).

4. You can only place each number once (excluding ones).

 The research on this puzzle was highlighted in depth on the Youtube Channel Numberphile, in the 17 minute long video "Stones on an Infinite Square Grid".

We reasoned that for each n amount of starting ones there must be a maximum value you could get to. By considering the set of these maximums we could create a sequence of integers (being the best possible score of the stepping stone puzzle, starting with n ones).  My good friend and lead-creator of the puzzle, Tom Ladouceur and I  calculated the first few entries to this sequence and submitted it to the online encyclopedia for integer sequences (the OEIS), where it was published and expanded on. The original sequence is A337663 , and some adaptations are A340000 , A342431 , and A342434. The results are  included in the paper by Sloane"A Handbook of Integer Sequences" Fifty Years Later and the puzzle was the subject of  Al Zimmermann's Programming Contest from August-November 2023, which had more than 200 programmers compete to add the most to the sequence .