FIRST HAND EXPERIENCES

Academy Programs

High School

• Global Studies & World Languages Academy at Tallwood HS
• Health Sciences Academy
  at Bayside HS
• Legal Studies Academy
  at First Colonial HS
• Technology Academy
  at Landstown HS
• Visual & Performing Arts Academy
  at Salem HS

Elementary School

• Mathematics & Science Academy
  at Linkhorn Park ES (Gr. 3-5)
• Foreign Language Partial Immersion Academy at Christopher Farms ES (Gr. 1-4)

Advanced Academic Programs

High School

• Mathematics & Science Academy
  at Ocean Lakes HS
• International Baccalaureate Program at Princess Anne HS

Middle School

• Middle Years International Baccalaureate Program/ Plaza MS

All Academy and Advanced Academic Programs

• Application Process

Presently, I'm a graduate student at MIT working on my doctorate in particle physics. I work at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland on the CMS experiment – one of the subatomic particle detectors for the Large Hadron Collider (or LHC). I've been working here since summer 2007, and will continue for a couple more years while I finish my thesis, and perhaps beyond that in post-doctoral work. While it does take some adjustment to get used to living on the border of Switzerland and France, I really enjoy working here because the experiment is so exciting. What I love about doing physics is we're really pushing the boundary of human knowledge. The goal is to learn things about how the universe works that no one has ever known before.

Studying at Ocean Lakes High is when I really became interested in physics. Taking the advanced math and physics courses prepared and enabled me to study both in college. Since high school, my interest has grown in these subject areas. I'm very glad I got off to such a good start.

The LHC as a whole is a large, ring-shaped underground tunnel 27 kilometers around. Inside there are superconducting magnets cooled to a few degrees above absolute zero that are used to accelerate protons to 99.9999% the speed of light. There are two beams of these protons heading in opposite directions around the tunnel, and at four places there are points where the beams are crossed to collide them together. Once we start running, every 25 nanoseconds there will be a collision – it's the job of the detector at each collision point to measure the result of that collision. In doing so, we see particles that only exist for tiny, tiny moments.

My experiment, with one of those 4 detectors, is called CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid). It's a very large but very sensitive machine – 15 meters tall and 20 meters long. However, it allows us to measure where particles go inside down to micrometers. It's called "compact" because of how tightly packed and dense it is – even though machine is so large. Muons are one of the types of particles that live long enough to detect directly – they're like heavy versions of the electrons in normal atoms. And solenoid is the name of the big cylindrical magnet that forms the backbone of the experiment.

There are two main types of work for physicists here. We work on our experiment, to ensure all the hardware and software are ready to obtain results when we collide the proton beams. We also, as we like to say, work on "physics" – developing methods to analyze all data produced in order to find new particles and make measurements of what is actually happening when the protons collide. As a student, I help out where I can. I've supervised the installation of cables in the experimental cavern 100 meters underground, I've helped develop and test our ability to write out our data at over 100 gigabytes per second, and I've even used the control software to turn the detector on for taking data!

We're now hard at work preparing our analysis of the data that will be taken next year. This will be an important moment – the culmination of years and years of work by thousands of people, and I'm excited to be even a small part of it.