Physics Undergraduates Present at APS Conference

Nineteen Carnegie Mellon University undergraduates in the Department of Physics attended the American Physical Society's Conference for Undergraduate Women and Gender Minorities (CU*iP), and three were awarded for presenting at the conference.

"It was a neat combination of opportunities," said Gillian Ryan, associate teaching professor and director of undergraduate affairs in the Department of Physics. "We had more senior students with research experience who got to share what it's like to be an active researcher with this undergraduate community. In the same cohort, we had second year students learning more about what it means to be a physicist, and they got to interact with both their own upper-level classmates as well as peers from other schools across the country."

CU*iP was held at Fermilab outside of Chicago, allowing students to tour the facilities and to learn from researchers working in particle physics.

Besides attending talks from established physicists, students presented their own work in poster sessions throughout the conference, with six being awarded for their work. Out of the four top presenters, three award winners were from Carnegie Mellon: Gwyneth Luster, Anna Engel and Yuqing Lin.

"They're wildly talented young scientists, and we are exceptionally proud of their accomplishments," Ryan said. "To have our students win three of the four top prizes in a competition that spans multiple universities really speaks to the level of talent and dedication our students show us on a daily basis."

Gwyneth Luster

Luster, a senior, presented on her work helping to build and test a radio telescope, which picks up radio wavelengths from the first stars. She primarily worked on software that allowed the telescope to pick up the radio signals that she, her advisor Physics Professor Jeffrey Peterson and other students working on the project could review.

After completing the software and the telescope, Luster and Peterson traveled to Lunar Dry Lake in Nevada, to confirm that the telescope worked and that the site was far enough away from other radio signals to pick up on the interstellar signals. Though the site was noisier than expected, she said the telescope was able to pick up on the signals the team wanted.

"We got a lot of data in the FM radio band, so we were able to see the signals and know the telescope was working and doing what we designed it to do," Luster said. "That was really uplifting and told us we were headed in the right direction."

Luster said she plans to continue her research by testing the telescope at a different site, potentially in South Africa or Canada. In the meantime, she will publish a paper on the work in spring 2025.

Anna Engel

Engel, a senior, shared her work related to an open source computational tool called Multiple Scattering Theory (MuST). MuST calculates the electronic structures of solid-state materials to evaluate their properties.

While working as an intern at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC), Engel said she realized that the program could superconducting transition temperatures of different materials. Superconductors exhibit zero electrical resistance below a critical temperature, enabling energy transfer without loss. However, most superconductors require extremely low temperatures to function, so researchers are interested in finding materials that can achieve superconductivity at higher temperatures.

Engel started by creating a method to calculate superconducting temperatures for single elements. After cross-referencing the results with previously established literature, she moved on to analyze more complex alloys. She used PSC resources, including the Bridges-2 supercomputer, to conduct her research.

"We wanted to work toward creating a method that can actually predict the temperature when a material becomes superconducting, but it has gone so much further," Engel said. "There are a lot of parameters you can change with this method, and that's why it's such an interesting problem."

Engel plans to publish her findings later this year.

Yuqing Lin

Lin, a junior, investigates how to make quantum computing experiments easier to control. Quantum computing harnesses the concept of superposition, where an electron can simultaneously exist in multiple separate states simultaneously, to allow a computer to process multiple potential outcomes at once.

Lin said testing quantum computing is extremely difficult because it requires precise controls with a myriad of steps to manipulate the quantum states. Researchers also need to account for noise in the data and potential errors. While at an internship at Fermilab during summer 2024, Lin created a computational tool that allows researchers to send the signals faster and with fewer steps.

"I found this project really interesting because I got to work with a system that has a physical meaning, but I could use my computer skills," Lin said. "It was half theory, half computation, and it's not just algorithms. It's actually quantum physics."

Lin was able to computationally test her work while at Fermilab for her internship, and in simulations, her tool worked as designed. She said she hopes to continue working in further internships with Fermilab so she can test her work on their quantum computing system.