Project 8 hosts Genawi for second May Term Internship
Plots made by Asia Genawi of selected Project 8 simulated metadata, generated with a search engine in the Globus framework.
From May 19-30, the Project 8 experiment team at Yale again hosted Asia Genawi, now a graduating senior in high school at the Indiana Academy for Science, Math, and the Humanities at Ball State University in Indiana, for a May Term Internship. Genawi also did her May Term Internship in 2024 with the Yale Project 8 team and has been a member of the Project 8 collaboration since January 2024.
The focus of the 2025 work was to continue developing computational approaches to optimize the magnetic field from the background solenoid in Project 8. This project was an extension of her previous work to characterize the integration of the electron and atom traps in Project 8.
The goals of the 2025 work were to identify a set of solenoid currents that would provide a uniform magnetic field, while maintaining low, smoothly varying current values. To do this, Genawi and research scientist Penny Slocum wrote algorithms to optimize matrix calculations with least squares minimization, and tested customized additions to the calculation.
Genawi presented the work on a Project 8 working group call. Additionally, toward the end of the Internship, Genawi and Slocum worked to develop the data and metadata processing infrastructure within Project 8’s analysis framework.
Genawi will continue to work on this project over the summer with the Yale team, and will attend Columbia University in the fall of 2025.
Karsten Heeger, Eugene Higgins Professor and Chair of Physics and director of Wright Lab is the principal investigator of the Yale Project 8 group. The science goal of Project 8 is to utilize a novel technique (CRES) to perform a precision measurement of the yet unknown neutrino mass. The Heeger group performs R&D on antenna and cavity prototypes; develops algorithms for event reconstruction and analysis; and performs simulations to optimize the detector resolution.
Overlaid plots of the optimized magnetic field (red) and currents (blue) in solenoid array with length 5 m and radius 0.7 m. Plot made by Penny Slocum, using tools developed with Genawi.