Student Research Information

This page has some links to background reading, as well as example code that can help you learn about my research. If you have any questions I would be happy to discuss them!

General Information

If you think you may be interested in working on a research project (or just want to learn more), I encourage you to reach out! Even if you have no coding experience and limited background in physics, I can provide you with some introductory material to help you learn more and decide if you'd like to pursue a research project.

If you would like to work with me on a project over the summer, the most important factors that I will consider are:

• Demonstrated interest, commitment and enthusiasm. (For example, interest and enthusiasm mean taking initiative to read articles, reaching out to ask questions about unfamiliar concepts, trying out my example code, etc.)

• Ability and desire to work collaboratively and reliably.

It's also very helpful if you have taken Physics 64 (Scientific Computation) or a CS course, and/or the physics journal club course (Physics 62), but the specific courses you've taken are not as important as the above factors. The general reading and my example code below are great starting points to learn more.

Background Reading

Here are some links to relevant articles that cover just some of the many exciting things going on in neutrino physics. It's okay if you don't understand everything in them! These are all available through the library, and if you're on campus you should be able to access them without logging in.

General articles:

• "The Enigmatic Neutrino" by Don Lincoln and Tia Miceli - A general overview of neutrinos, from their discovery to upcoming experiments: https://aapt.scitation.org/doi/full/10.1119/1.4928345

• "Astrophysical High-Energy Neutrinos" by Peter Mészáros - More specific than the previous article, covering possible sources of neutrinos and multimessenger observations: https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/full/10.1063/PT.3.4043 

• "Astronomy and Astrophysics with Neutrinos" by Francis Halzen and Spencer Klein - covers similar territory to the above article: https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/full/10.1063/1.2930733 

Some recent observations which are relevant to my work:

• "Observation of high-energy neutrinos from the Galactic plane" (2023) https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adc9818 

• "Evidence for neutrino emission from the nearby active galaxy NGC 1068" (2022) Published article: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abg3395 Accompanying perspective (less technical): https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ade4190 

• "Neutrino emission from the direction of the blazar TXS 0506+056 prior to the IceCube-170922A alert" (2018) Published article: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aat2890 

Example Code

Here is a google drive folder with some useful code. The point source analysis example contains a Jupyter notebook which I put together to illustrate how analysis of IceCube data is done (it uses some data and code that I modified from IceCube's NGC 1068 data release, to make it easier to interpret and faster - though slightly less accurate - to run). Trying this out is a great starting point if you are interested in working on a research project with me.