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Jessica Hanzlik is a third year student majoring in Physics and French who has conducted high energy physics research with Professors Richard Hughes and Brian Winer on the top quark. She also spent a year working with Dr. Andrew Heckler and Dedra Demaree in the Physics Education Lab.
What advice would you give to current undergraduates who want to get involved in research?
First of all, don’t assume that it takes a certain “type” of person or personality to conduct research. As a freshman, I certainly didn’t think that doing research was something I wanted to do or would enjoy. I was completely wrong. The opportunity to delve more deeply into a topic than anyone ever has before is invaluable, and it’s fun!
Pay attention in class, even in your non-major classes, and take note of those topics that make you say, “Hey! That’s really cool! I want to know more about that.” If you can figure out what you’re passionate about, chances are that someone at OSU is already researching it or can help you figure out how you can become an expert in that topic.
And, give it time. Give both the process of finding the opportunity to research and doing the research itself time. Often, because research is essentially creating new knowledge, there is a long lag-time between when you start doing research and when you even start to understand what’s going on. That’s normal.
What specifically do you research? What projects are you currently working on?
I work in Ohio State’s High-Energy Physics Lab, where I research the top quark. The top quark is one of the fundamental particles of nature, and one way it is created is through proton-antiproton collisions at Fermilab, a particle accelerator located outside of Chicago. There, physicists accelerate beams of protons and antiprotons around a large track until they are moving at close to the speed of light. This gives them sufficient energy so that when the beams of particles collide, new particles not seen since the first few instants after the Big Bang are created.
My project involves using an advanced computer algorithm, called an artificial neural network, to study the top quark’s properties. My goal is to train this neural network to be able to distinguish the processes which produce the top quark and its anti-particle, the antitop quark, from other, similar processes. Once it can do that, we will have a new measurement for the cross-section of top-antitop quark production, a measurement which will tell us how often we can expect top-antitop quark pairs to be produced, and it may also be useful as a tool for searching for undiscovered particles which mimic top-antitop production.
Can you explain how you actually conduct your research?
Most of my research is done on computers, and it involves modifying already-written computer code so that it looks for the specific properties of the top quark that I want to find or so that it examines processes that match criteria I specify. These computer programs run on data collected at Fermilab, so members of my collaboration, CDF (Collider Detector at Fermilab), regularly travel to Chicago to collect the right type of data from the millions of proton-antiproton collisions happening there daily.
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