Work at Argonne on Dark Energy Survey

As an undergrad at Loyola University I was selected to be a part of the Science Undergraduate Laboratory Internship (SULI) at Argonne National Laboratory as part of the High Energy Physics Group working on the Dark Energy Survey with Steve Kuhlman.  The summer internship got extended into a year long position. During this time I constructed ring resonators using semiconductor processing techniques in the Center for Nanoscale Materials cleanroom environment to eliminate effects of Hydroxyl emission lines found in earth-based telescopic data on highly redshifted Supernovae. This data is being used to discover dark energy and dark matter.  I tested ring resonators for quality using UV Filmetric measurements and through optical microscopy. I modeled components of the ring resonator (cantilever and waveguides) using MIT Electromagnetic Equation Propagation (MEEP) and analyzed results using ParaView, an interactive scientific visualization program, to maximize their efficiency. We have successfully modeled the construction of the cantilevers and waveguides and created wafers with waveguides and are performing corrective action on constructed ring resonators as the waveguides are not suitable. 

Results were presented at the Argonne High Energy Physics Symposium (July 2015) and at Lemont High School (September 2015). We also published a paper in the Astronomical Journal.