Northwestern High-Energy Physics Lab

Worked on ARIADNE, an experimental physis project meant to failtate the detection of axions, hypothesized to compose dark matter. Dark matter is a fairly abstract concept in astrophysics, but the gist is that our universe is only 5% regular matter (stuff that we can touch and see), 30% dark matter, and 65% dark energy (the glue that binds dark matter and matter). Axions are extremely sensitive and pass through most matter, thus their detection can only normally be done in extremely isolated underground areas.

The purpose of ARIADNE was to propose a novel method using heavy hydrogen to detect axions through perturbations in the atomic structure when rotating the hydrogen at a very specific wavelength.

My contribution was the development of python and labview code to control the mahinery that rotated the heavy hydrogen, to ensure that it maintained a consistent and measurable speed while being reliable and not breaking due to software issues.