While many of her peers are working in laboratories on campus, Ruth Duggan '08 chose to travel to New Mexico to pursue her summer research. Duggan, a physics major from Oakland, Calif., is working on the NPDGamma experiment at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Her Hamilton project advisor, Assistant Professor of Physics Gordon Jones, helped build a cell that Duggan is using in her research.
"The NPDGamma experiment is designed to observe and measure the weak interaction, one of the fundamental forces in physics, which has never been measured as accurately as is projected for this experiment," said Duggan. The premise of the experiment is that the strength of the weak interaction can be related to the asymmetry of the direction of gamma rays produced by neutrons colliding with a hydrogen target.
In order to perform this experiment, a polarized neutron beam is needed. The cell that Jones worked on is used to create this beam of neutrons that all have the same spin (either up or down); this means that the beam is polarized, and the neutrons will interact correctly with the hydrogen target.
Duggan enjoys working on such an important experiment. "It is on the cutting edge of experimental physics, and we are attempting to discover something that is vital to understanding all interactions on the atomic level," said Duggan. She is also enjoying meeting other students at the laboratory "who are interested in the same things as I am." However, while she had hoped that the experiment would be built when she arrived and she would be working on running the experiment and gathering data, Duggan found that it is not quite complete and has been helping to put the finishing touches on it, which "has given me real insight into what experimental physics is like," she said.
When Duggan returns to Hamilton in the fall she will be analyzing data she and other researchers collect this summer. "Doing this project has gotten me more interested in nuclear physics, and I will now most likely do something in this discipline for my thesis."
Outside of the physics lab, Duggan is a writer of the popular "Thumbs Up/Thumbs Down" column in The Spectator.
-- by Laura Trubiano '07
