Physics Ph.D. Candidate Rosin Receives Award from U.S. Department of Energy

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Physics Ph.D. candidate Guy Rosin was recently named one of 47 young scientists in the nation to receive the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Science Graduate Student Research Program award, which prepares graduate students for STEM careers critically important to the DOE Office of Science’s mission by providing graduate thesis research opportunities at DOE laboratories.

Rosin, of Watertown, Mass., is working on his doctorate in high-energy physics in the Carlo Dallapiccola lab and will be studying at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island from October this year until Sept. 1, 2019. The DOE award provides support for travel to and from the laboratory and a monthly stipend of up to $3,000 for general living expenses while at the host DOE laboratory.

During his year at Brookhaven, Rosin will work on upgrades to the ATLAS program, one of seven particle detector experiments at the Large Hadron Collider, a particle accelerator at CERN in Switzerland. As he explains, “ATLAS detects all kinds of particles and interesting physics, and lets us look at collisions. It’s elementary physics, looking at the nature of what the universe is made of.”

“It’s very exciting,” he adds. “I’ll be working with some of the best scientists in the world in this field. It’s a big honor.”

Rosin’s advisor Dallapiccola says, “I’m very excited that Guy will have this opportunity to work on cutting-edge techniques while working on hardware components of one of the world’s foremost particle detectors. His having received this prestigious national award is a testament to his tremendous hard work and promise as a rising scientist in the field.”

At Brookhaven, Rosin will collaborate with DOE scientists Stefania Stucci, Dave Lynn and Alessandro Tricoli as part of a team that over the next 10 years will increase the number of collisions taking place at the collider to increase its total luminosity 10-fold.

Specifically, ATLAS’s inner detector will be replaced with a new detector called the inner tracker or ITK to discover new particles and measure their interactions and properties such as mass with higher accuracy. “The upgrade is needed because when you increase luminosity by 10 times you also increase the radiation,” Rosin explains, “and the current inner detector was not built to withstand that level of radiation. So we will be upgrading it.”

The three-part detector’s inner segment allows investigators to follow the tracks coming out of the collision, he explains. Surrounding that layer is a calorimeter, which allows them to identify the type of particle being emitted, while the outermost layer is made up of a muon spectrometer that can identify these heavy, stable electrons that are able to fly all the way out of the detector.