UNM Physics & Astronomy Ph.D. student awarded data research opportunity via the DOE-INFN Exchange Fellowship
June 3, 2023 - Trinity Moody
Joey Sorenson, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Physics & Astronomy at The University of New Mexico, has been awarded the U.S. Department of Energy and the Istituto Nazionale de Fisica Nucleare (DOE-INFN) Summer Students Exchange Scholarship. He is one of only 11 recipients in 2023.
The DOE and INFN collaborate to promote interactions between student scientists from the United States and Italy. INFN is an organization that is well-known globally for promoting basic scientific research, and has close ties with DOE in many areas of interest, such as particle physics.
Sorenson will travel to Genoa, Italy, in September and October 2023 to work with INFN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and ATLAS group. He will be involved in the assembly and testing of 3D modules, developing a system test for module electrical qualification on a support structure, and optimizing the mechanical and thermal qualification of the support structure.
Sorenson is using ATLAS data to search for physics processes beyond the Standard Model and developing new detectors for particle tracking. Analyzing the recorded particle collision events resulting from the LHC requires complex data-acquisition and computing systems.
ATLAS is one of two general-purpose detectors in the LHC. Weighing in at 7,000 tons, ATLAS detector is the largest volume particle detector ever constructed. The European Council for Nuclear Research houses ATLAS in an underground cavern near the small village of Meyrin, Switzerland. More than 5,500 scientists from 245 institutes in 42 countries work on the ATLAS experiment.
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