Aspiring Theoretical Physicist

Experience and Objectives

I am a PhD student at the University of Virginia in physics working with Prof. Simonetta Liuti. I am specializing in generalized parton distributions and nuclear femtography. I am also part of the EXCLAIM collaboration, which applies machine learning to exclusive processes in hadronic physics. As an undergraduate, I worked in nuclear femtography, lattice quantum chromodynamics, and solutions to systems of differential equations.

Research

Here are descriptions of some of the research I have done, along with some deliverables.

Nuclear femtography

I have worked with the UVA Femtography group, Femtonet, since the summer of 2021. The aim of Femtonet, and the Center for Nuclear Femtography (CNF) which supports it, is to image the internal structure of strongly interacting particles, from the single protons and neutrons to the atomic nuclei. Generalized Parton Distributions (GPDs), which are at the core of Femtonet’s work, bring together concepts from parton distributions and hadron form factors. As part of the group, I have performed analytic calculations of the cross section for polarized deeply virtual Compton (DVCS) scattering from both the longitudinally and transversely polarized proton. I contributed also to verifying the results of a Mathematica code produced by the collaboration that automates the calculation process. In performing Fourier transforms of GPDs that represent quarks and gluons in coordinate space, I have run and edited C/C++ code based on the Fastest Fourier Transform in the West (FFTW) library and made three-dimensional visualizations of the internal structure of the nucleon through gnuplot and Python libraries.

I presented our work on Fourier transforms of GPDs at this year’s Division of Nuclear Physics (DNP) meeting in a poster presentation as part of the Conference Experience for Undergraduates, and I gave a talk at the Southeastern Section of the American Physical Society in Tallahassee, Florida. For presenting similar material at an undergraduate symposium in physics and astronomy at UVA, I won second place for my talk.

Lattice QCD

My time as an intern at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (Jefferson Lab) as part of the Science Undergraduate Laboratory Internships (SULI) program run through the Department of Energy introduced me to lattice QCD. My work with Dr. David Richards concerned the lattice calculation of the Parton Distribution Functions (PDFs) of the pion. I explored whether the inclusion of moment calculations through the matrix elements of local operators in the least squares fitting (done with Python lsqfit package) of Ioffe time distribution data computed in lattice QCD yield improved parametrizations of pion and proton valence PDF. We found that for the available pion data, adding the first and second moments to the least squares fitting procedure produces smaller errors both on the PDF parametrizations and on moments of those parametrizations. For some more precise preliminary unpublished proton data we analyzed, the constraints from the moments are less significant.

I wrote a paper with Dr. Richards which I submitted to the program, and I gave a poster presentation to the SULI student cohort and researchers at Jefferson Lab in the HadStruct Collaboration on our findings. You can find a recording of my talk here, and you can read my poster here. I was mentioned in the July 2020 Jefferson Lab Theory and Computation highlights, and I presented my work at the 2021 Undergraduate Research Symposium at UVA.

Solutions to systems of differential equations

My aim with Prof. Juraj Foldes in the mathematics department at the University of Virginia (UVA) is to find the average time spent by particles around invariant trajectories such as equilibria, periodic and homoclinic orbits. One of the first configurations we have observed is a circle of uniformly distributed points sitting in a plane, where in one direction there is one unstable and one stable direction. For this particular system, the average time spent inside the circle is finite, even though there are two points on stable manifolds that spend an infinite amount of time inside the circle. More recently, we focused on more complicated regimes such as periodic orbits and related Poincare maps, where we used Mathematica and Python to simulate the dynamics. Currently, we investigate average properties of chaotic dynamics around homoclinics, which leads to interesting problems at the intersection of probability, ergodic theory, and dynamical systems.

Low-energy nuclear physics

Prof. Blaine Norum and I worked in low-energy nuclear physics. The project aimed at incorporating beam polarization in the interpretation of measurements of relative angular distributions for 2H(γ,n)H reaction below 18MeV. We completed a simulation through Python that allowed us to calculate thickness of target.

Contact Me

Email me at zap2nd@virginia.edu!