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Sophomore Year G.O.A.L.S.

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Global Awareness

Through my undergrad career, I plan to take coursework that helps to cultivate an understanding of different cultures and global human interactions. Even right now I am enrolled in a Mongol history course, one I wouldn’t have expected to take, but I appreciate having the opportunity to learn about the history of a culture different than my own.

Original Inquiry

I have been involved in physics research since my freshman year. I’ve written scripts for plotting and simulation as well as a handful of snippets of code for use in a broader scope. This year I have been writing scripts and have built an algorithm for evolving dipole antennas using genetic programming. Additionally, this summer I will be doing nuclear physics research at Duke University.

Academic Enrichment

I will continue to take challenging coursework; all of my physics and math coursework will be honors and/or above the 5000 level starting this fall. Furthermore, I am taking more courses than are required by my major and minor. I also plan to sit in on some extra math and physics classes that I may not be able to actually enroll in.

Leadership Development

I’ve been a part of the fencing club since freshman year, and am one of the more experienced fencers in the club. Although I do not hold an officer position, I have helped to acquaint newcomers and offer advice to beginning fencers. Aside from fencing, in my research group I am part of a small genetic programming “sub-group”, where I have more or less spearheaded our work since the beginning of the year.

Service Engagement

Like last year, I again volunteered at the Chilly Open (a fundraiser for children’s charities) with the fencing club. The event benefits charities such as the Children’s Hunger Alliance and the Down Syndrome Association of Central Ohio.

Year 2: Genetic Algorithms, Antenna Modeling

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I am now halfway through my second year at Ohio State and in Dr. Connolly’s research group. The InIceMC project that I worked on as a freshman is still ongoing, but I am now involved in a different project, one that uses genetic algorithms to optimize antenna design.

Genetic algorithms borrow the biological concepts of populations, mutations, and natural selection to discover solutions to a problem. For our purposes, we are using genetic algorithms to design an optimally sensitive dipole antenna for ARA.

Our particular algorithm behaves in the following manner: first, the algorithm starts with an initial population of 5 antenna designs. Then, we determine the sensitivity of each antenna design using antenna modeling software. Once this is done, each individual of the population is assigned a “fitness score” based on its sensitivity. These fitness scores are then fed back to the genetic algorithm, which then selects the individual with the highest fitness score and mutates it to create the next generation of individuals.

The biggest hurdle we face is the lack of automation with this task; our antenna modelling software can unfortunately only be run manually through a graphical user interface. Additionally, even the parts of the process that could be automated have not been thus far.

I have been working on several parts of this project. One of the first of my more concrete contributions is developing the code that extracts the simulation data from our antenna modelling software and calculates the individual’s fitness score (called “makehandshook.cpp” — found here on GitHub). I am also currently working on a script that can be used to automate the entire process of running through several generations of the genetic algorithm. I believe I will be able to cut down the number of manual steps from about 15 steps per generation to 1 or 2 per generation. This script will be uploaded to the same GitHub repository at a later date than the time of writing, and will most likely be named “XF_Loop.sh”, or some similar title.

This experience has helped me to improve my bash skills, and get a refresher on C++ programming (before writing makehandshook.cpp, I hadn’t written any C++ since April). It has also been my first exposure to working with genetic algorithms, and I had the opportunity to write a fitness function for the antennas in the population.

From here on out…

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Due to my neglecting this page, many important details of my freshman year are not catalogued on this page.

Going forward, I will make an effort to keep track of my involvements so that this page is much more informative and coherent!

Meeting Art McDonald!

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On March 9, 2017, Nobel laureate physicist Art McDonald visited Ohio State. I had the extraordinary opportunity to attend two of his talks. The first was a session where physics students could learn more about him and his work and ask questions, and the second was an evening lecture open to the public.

Dr. McDonald received the Nobel in 2015 for the discovery that neutrinos change flavors (there are 3 types, or “flavors” of neutrinos), which implies that they have mass. The reasoning is quite fascinating — if neutrinos are massless, then they can travel at the speed of light. If that is the case, then they have no way to “keep track of” the passage of time, so they cannot change flavors. So the fact that they change flavors meant that they had mass. I hadn’t known before that the Standard Model had predicted neutrinos to be massless.

All in all, I learned quite a lot about what the “real world” of physics is like, and got some perspective on how long experiments take (this particular experiment ran for over a decade). I even got to ask him a few questions, and took a selfie with him!

Year 1: Simulation/Plotting

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During my freshman year, I was involved in the InIceMC group, a collaboration with the University of California, Irvine, seeking to merge the Askaryan Radio Array (ARA) detector with the Antarctic Ross Ice-Shelf ANtenna Neutrino Array (ARIANNA) detector. The aim is to merge the projects into a single detector, and in order to do this we need to determine the optimal configurations for the detector — such as spacing of antennas, depth of the detector’s location in the ice, et cetera.

My work was in simulation, mainly with ShelfMC, ARIANNA’s simulation package. There were five parameters for ARIANNA that we varied in our simulations, testing thousands of different detector configurations. Then, I wrote scripts that would navigate the outputs from the simulation, and generate plots of the output data. You can see my scripts (“colorplot.sh” and “colorplot_loop.sh”, with details and instructions in “colorplot_instructions.txt”) on GitHub here.

This research was my first exposure to several things: using a UNIX-based operating system, using the command-line interface, as well as bash and ROOT scripting. I started the year entirely new to these things, but by the end had learned enough that I wrote colorplot.sh and colorplot_loop.sh, which are bash scripts that write and execute ROOT scripts.

The presentation for a recent talk on our neutrino detector work can be found here.

Service Engagement

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On August 27, 2016 — my second Saturday at Ohio State — I participated in Community Commitment and spent the day volunteering at a community garden. I plan to continue involvement in the community during my undergraduate career, perhaps volunteering in animal shelters or food pantries.

Leadership Development

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I will try to be involved activities different from those I have previously been involved in, and thus gain new experiences whenever possible. If I find an organization I particularly enjoy — as I’m certain I will — I will be as involved as possible in it, whether that means becoming an officer or something else entirely.

Academic Enrichment

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I know that I will be challenged in my courses through all four years at Ohio State, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. I plan to take the honors version of classes when they are available, and I intend to take more than the minimum of courses required by my major, hopefully taking some graduate-level physics courses as well.

Currently I am majoring in physics, but it is likely that I will add at least a minor to supplement my major.