Sept. 4, 2001

Physics Hosts Research Students

Students Analyze Data from DOE Facilities

For the 15th summer, the GW Experimental Nuclear Physics Group, led by Professor of Physics Barry L. Berman, has once again hosted a group of students, mostly from aboard, to conduct nuclear physics research. These students, both undergraduates and graduates, spent the summer analyzing nuclear-physics data obtained at the US Department of Energy’s Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility in Newport News, VA, and Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) in Upton, NY.

This year’s group included two undergraduate students from France, one from Scotland, and one from New Jersey. Students learn about the summer program from Berman and by word of mouth from previous participants.

During the summer, Sandrine Spyckerelle and Anne Lafont, undergraduate students at Ecole Nationale Superieure in Caen, France, analyzed Jefferson Lab data on deuterium (heavy hydrogen), and were able to identify several hundred thousand events on an important reaction channel that no one had looked at before, and which, according to Berman, eventually will yield very interesting results. Chris Murphy, an undergraduate student from Glasgow, Scotland, worked in GW’s Nuclear Detector Lab (NDL) using computer simulations to determine how to measure the polarization of a photon beam and compared his results with those obtained earlier at BNL. Courtney Konner, an undergraduate student from New Jersey at the University of Michigan, also worked at GW’s NDL repeating and improving greatly on the analysis of previous research done in England to find the probability for absorption of high-energy photons on the neutron.

These students were the guests of President Trachtenberg at a special lunch at the GW University Club on Aug. 15. GW experimental nuclear physics graduate students Sal Rodriguez, from Texas; Sasha Philips, from Sri Lanka; and Aziz Shafi, from Bangladesh, also joined the group. Rodriguez, who has been at GW only one year and who attended the Hampton University Graduate School at Jefferson Laboratory this summer, is just ready to begin his PhD research work. He learned about GW’s graduate program from a physics professor in Texas who previously was a postdoc and later assistant research professor with Berman at GW. Philips and Shafi are finishing up their PhD work this year; Philips, whose adviser is Berman, obtained his thesis data at Jefferson Lab, while Shafi, whose adviser is GW Professor of Physics William Briscoe, obtained his at BNL. All three have taught laboratory classes at GW, and both Philips and Shafi have won the coveted Futterman Prize for Excellence in Teaching as a Graduate Student.

 

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