Office of Undergraduate Research

Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/20157

Emphasizing equitable and inclusive access to research opportunities, the University of Maryland's Office of Undergraduate Research (OUR) empowers undergraduates and faculty to engage and succeed in inquiry, creative activity, and scholarship. This collection includes materials shared by undergraduate researchers during OUR events. It also encompasses materials from Undergraduate Research Day 2020, Undergraduate Research Day 2021, and Undergraduate Research Day 2022, which were organized by the Maryland Center for Undergraduate Research.

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Subject: search.filters.subject.Physics

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Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    HGCAL Electromagnetic Calorimeter Performance
    (2021-04) Garcia, Fred Angelo; Morrissey, Wil; Mehta, Samyak; Karagoz, Muge
    The High-Granularity Calorimeter (HGCAL) is an important component of the High Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC) upgrade for the CMS experiment. With electromagnetic (CE-E) and hadronic (CE-H) sections, these calorimeters are designed to withstand and operate in high radiation environments. We primarily studied the CE-E region at the TeV and GeV regimes. Motivations for this research include identifying software inconsistencies and calibration issues, as well as overall design limitations; it supplements efforts in shower leakage correction for the detector as a whole by investigating electron energy reconstruction. Using electron and positron particle gun simulations, generated with CMSSW (CMS Offline Software), our study tries to answer questions related to detector performance at specific regions of the HGCAL, focusing on pseudorapidity (η) ranges of 1.5 to 1.6 and 2.9 to 3.0 at two different energy values. We quantified the η dependence of electrons and found that not only are electron reconstruction energy resolutions energy dependent, they are also η dependent. We assert that this is an underlying detector geometry issue that may be addressed by future updates to HGCAL detector geometry, as well as more advanced reconstruction techniques. Hence, our next step will include conducting the same study with a sample simulated with updated detector geometries.
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    Comprehensive Multi-Timespan Analysis of Known AGN
    (2020) Riitano, Luca; Goodman, Jordan
    Only two sources of Very High Energy (VHE) gamma-rays (~50 GeV to ~10 TeV) from outside of the Milky Way have been detected by the High-Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) observatory. Although varying timescale analyses have been performed, a complete search of all multi-day time scales has not been executed. The primary sources of extragalactic VHE gamma-rays are Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN), supermassive blackholes at the center of other galaxies, actively feeding on matter. I propose a comprehensive analysis of known AGN in all multi-day time scales since HAWC began operations. Such an analysis would allow for limits to be placed on the frequency of AGN flares, and improve our understanding of AGN in the VHE regime. In order to determine the significance of the flux received, a False Alarm Rate (FAR) must first be established by analyzing the significance distribution of pseudomaps created by poisson fluctuating the background. This step requires the bulk of computing time and is nearly complete. The next step will be to run the program to determine the significance of known AGN on a comprehensive set of timescales.
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    E. coli biofilm adhesion to porous and nonporous surfaces in spaceflight conditions
    (2020) Raghu, Apurva; Fang, Michelle; Adam, Debbie; Gooya, Niki; Keppetipola, Pali; Serrano, Daniel
    Biofilms are communities of microorganisms that have the capacity to facilitate the development of diseases. Previous literature has found that biofilm growth is affected by surface properties: for example, in some cases there is reduced biofilm formation on porous surfaces compared to non-porous surfaces. As humans continue to explore space, understanding the behavior of biofilms in spaceflight conditions will become critical. Research has indicated that bacterial colonies within microgravity environments exhibit atypical behaviors of increased growth and virulency. To help shed some light on these aspects of biofilm growth, our study analyzed the formation and adhesion of E. coli on porous and nonporous 99.99% aluminum on Earth and in space. The experiment was conducted both on Earth and at the International Space Station to determine if the presence of gravity impacts biofilm physiology on these surfaces. E. coli growth on nonporous and porous aluminum were analyzed using scanning electron microscopy (SEM). Qualitative analysis reveals a possible size difference between the Earth and space bacteria. However, no significant qualitative differences were observed between gravity and microgravity samples on porous and nonporous aluminum surfaces. We are currently analyzing our samples to corroborate or invalidate the presence of structural differences on biofilms in porous vs. nonporous surfaces and Earth vs. space settings. Further research is required to assess the morphology of individual bacteria on these aforementioned materials and growth settings.