Wright Lab graduate student Jacqueline “Jackie” Baeza-Rubio recently won one of the twenty Dean’s Emerging Scholar Research Awards awarded in 2024 by the Yale Graduate School. These one-time monetary awards can be used to help cover conference and/or research-related expenses. and are administered by departments and programs.
Baeza-Rubio is a second year Ph.D. student working under associate professor David Moore, searching for new interactions in a nanosphere precision levitation experiment. Baeza-Rubio explains that she is “searching for sterile neutrinos, a hypothetical fourth-flavor neutrino that may illuminate the mechanism by which neutrinos obtain their mass, using a tabletop radioactive nanosphere levitation experiment. Since neutrinos are electrically neutral, they weakly interact with matter, and very large-scale detectors are needed to see even a fraction of neutrinos passing through. However, in this set up the momentum of the emitted neutrino will be determined by measuring the recoil momentum when a neutrino is emitted from a levitated radioactive nanosphere. Furthermore, by looking for any deviations in the measured momentum relative to the expected momentum of a Standard Model neutrino, one can detect even a small fraction of mixing from a heavy sterile neutrino with the light antineutrino ejected in the system.”
Moore said, “It’s great to see Jackie recognized by the Dean’s office with this award, both due to her outstanding research accomplishments as well as her commitment to make the department a more inclusive and welcoming place for everyone.”
Four particles trapped by Baeza-Rubio in a radiofrequency Paul trap that is being designed to help load radioactive nanospheres into the optically trapping experiment. This research contributed to her award. Image courtesy of Jackie Baeza-Rubio.