VIRTUAL STUDENT SCHOLARS SYMPOSIUM 2020 PRESENTATIONS

Physics and Astronomy - Poster Presentations

High School Division

Measuring the Cosmic Ray Flux in a Building using the Berkeley Lab Cosmic Ray Detector
Radman T. Zarbock, Athenian School

The Berkeley Lab Cosmic Ray Detector is a scintillator-photomultiplier detector that measures cosmic particles that pass through its two scintillator paddles. In this project, the cosmic ray flux inside of a building was measured. The cosmic ray flux is the number of cosmic rays that pass through an area in a period of time. In the building, a direct relationship between cosmic ray flux and floor level was measured. This suggests that the cosmic rays were attenuated as they passed through the matter in the building. In addition to this, several other experiments involving the detector will be presented, such as testing the detector’s capability to measure radiation from thorium and measuring cosmic ray flux as a function of elevation.

Undergraduate Division

Analysis of Electro-Scattering off of a Deuteron Target
Justin Dickovick, Fairfield University

One of the biggest questions in physics at the moment is: what is the quark structure of the nucleons that make up the matter that we are familiar with? Specifically, can we describe the measurable characteristics of nucleons in terms of their most basic building blocks? This question can be answered by measuring generalized parton distributions (GPDs), which are correlated momentum-space distributions of quarks in nucleons. GPDs can be studied by looking at the deeply virtual Compton scattering (DVCS) reaction, which consists of an electron scattering off a nucleon, resulting in the production of a photon, the scattered electron, and the scattered nucleon. Jefferson Laboratory, a medium energy particle accelerator laboratory in Newport News, VA, has a large experimental program devoted to studying DVCS on protons, neutrons, and deuterons using an electron beam up to 10.6 GeV of energy. In this poster, I will present the analysis of coherent DVCS for the deuteron channel. In particular, I will describe the identification of particles, steps to select the exclusive e d → e’ d’ 𝛄 reaction, and the procedure to extract the beam spin asymmetry, which is sensitive to the DVCS process and GPDs of the deuteron.

Graduate Division

Study of a Highly Collimated Flow from a High-mass Protostar: Preliminary Results
Tatiana M. Rodríguez, New Mexico Tech

High-mass protostars are important for many ﬁelds in astronomy; they enrich the interstellar medium, they regulate star formation in galaxies, and they give birth to pulsars and black holes. Despite their important role in our universe, we know very little about how they are formed.
ISOSS J23053+5953 SMM2 is a unique example of a high-mass protostar in its rapid accretion phase that is so young that it has not yet formed a hot molecular core region. In fact, Birkmann et al. (2007) estimated the age of the central object (via Spectral Energy Distribution ﬁtting) to be ∼ 5000 yr. It is known that as a consequence of the accretion process the stellar winds produce a jet that gives rise to an outﬂow of the surrounding material. The extreme youth of SMM2 makes it an ideal case for studying the jet-outﬂow relation at the early stages of high-mass stellar formation. We have carried out continuum and line emission observations of the ISOSS J23053+5953 region: our Very Large Array continuum data reveal the presence of compact ionized gas at the center of the SMM2 core, likely arising from a thermal jet, and our Submillimeter Array data show a highly collimated CO outﬂow clearly associated with SMM2. These observations allow us to study the nature of the jet-outﬂow system in this extremely young high-mass protostar, and discuss its implications for high-mass star formation theories.

VIRTUAL STUDENT SCHOLARS SYMPOSIUM 2020 PRESENTATIONS

Physics and Astronomy - Poster Presentations

High School Division

Undergraduate Division

Graduate Division

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