Duke University Physics Department
Undergraduates Travel for Summer Research: Danielle Riggin
This past summer, undergraduates from the Duke physics department worked alongside physicists at research hotspots around the world, contributing to work on neutrino detection, the Higgs boson, a next-generation telescope, and more. In the process, they not only learned how to apply classroom concepts to real-world problems, but also gained insight into themselves and their plans for the future.
Danielle Riggin, a junior from Rhode Island, spent part of her summer two kilometers underground in the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNOLAB) in Ontario. Riggin, who is majoring in physics and minoring in computer science, worked on the HALO project, which is designed to detect neutrino bursts created by supernovae. Getting to the underground lab required donning mine gear, descending two vertical kilometers in a mine-shaft elevator, walking two horizontal kilometers, then showering and putting on a clean suit and a hairnet before entering the lab. “The underground lab was a huge surprise,” she said. “It was incredible, and it was so amazing being there and being able to talk to people from all the other experiments.”
Belowground, she helped outfit parts of the detector, which consists of helium-filled tubes surrounded by lead blocks. Aboveground, she wrote code for a computer simulation that will help determine the efficiency of the detector. “It was cool to get to apply my computer-science experience to research,” she said. “And it was really fun. I would spend all day coding and go home and code more.” Riggin’s project was funded through an NSF grant of her advisor Prof. Scholberg.
Read the full article by clicking the link below.
Undergraduates Travel for Summer Research: Danielle Riggin
This past summer, undergraduates from the Duke physics department worked alongside physicists at research hotspots around the world, contributing to work on neutrino detection, the Higgs boson, a next-generation telescope, and more. In the process, they not only learned how to apply classroom concepts to real-world problems, but also gained insight into themselves and their plans for the future.
Danielle Riggin, a junior from Rhode Island, spent part of her summer two kilometers underground in the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNOLAB) in Ontario. Riggin, who is majoring in physics and minoring in computer science, worked on the HALO project, which is designed to detect neutrino bursts created by supernovae. Getting to the underground lab required donning mine gear, descending two vertical kilometers in a mine-shaft elevator, walking two horizontal kilometers, then showering and putting on a clean suit and a hairnet before entering the lab. “The underground lab was a huge surprise,” she said. “It was incredible, and it was so amazing being there and being able to talk to people from all the other experiments.”
Belowground, she helped outfit parts of the detector, which consists of helium-filled tubes surrounded by lead blocks. Aboveground, she wrote code for a computer simulation that will help determine the efficiency of the detector. “It was cool to get to apply my computer-science experience to research,” she said. “And it was really fun. I would spend all day coding and go home and code more.” Riggin’s project was funded through an NSF grant of her advisor Prof. Scholberg.
Read the full article by clicking the link below.