I'm a seventh year graduate student in the physics PhD program at Columbia University in New York City.
I work on the HiRes cosmic ray detector, an experimental astroparticle physics collaboration exploring the extreme high energy spectrum of cosmic rays. What does that mean? Well, we're studying particles entering the atmosphere with tremendous amounts of kinetic energy by looking at the ensuing shower of particles that they produce on contact with the atmosphere. For some images and animations illustrating this, see Hajo Drescher's page.
This is interesting physics since particles have been observed with energies much higher than current theory predicts. We believe that cosmic rays are protons, possibly from outside the galaxy. Protons with energies above 50 EeV are expected to interact with the CMB and thus not travel very far without losing energy (the so-called GZK cut-off). The AGASA collaboration did see events above the GZK energy, thus we would like to know
- Are the AGASA results reproducible with different techniques?
- Is there any preference in the arrival directions of Cosmic Rays?
- Are high energy cosmic rays protons, photons, neutrinos or something else?
I am writing a thesis on the composition of cosmic rays detected by Hires under the direction of Prof. Stefan Westerhoff.
I have been organizing some of the C++ code I have written so far which may be useful to other C++ programmers, especially astro- and astroparticle physicists.
I also dabble in film making, with my friends at Potato Riot Pictures. Our most recent short film is Relic Hunter - a tale of time travelling madness.
