This is a past event.

Thursday, April 1 @ 4pm – Zoom

Michael Foetisch  [Advisors: Timothy Eisele, Jacek Borysow] will present: 

Hydrated Mineral Excavation through Water Jet Comminution

Water has considerable value in future space exploration, as it can be electrolyzed both to serve as a source of oxygen for human explorers, and for liquid fuel for chemical rockets. In-situ water extraction from extraterrestrial sources can avoid the considerable expense of lifting water from the surface of the earth. Our current research focuses on a novel hydrated mineral extraction system using a recirculating high-pressure water jet. These extracted minerals are then capable of being calcined to release their bound water. Testing to date has confirmed that a 5000 psi water stream is capable of excavating gypsum from rock, and that the resulting gypsum is suitable for calcination..

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Andrew Puyleart [Advisor: Dr. Brian Fick] will present: 

Searching for Anomalous Showers Using Binary Classifiers

The standard model of particle physics is incomplete. Experiments to probe for missing pieces of the standard model, like the Large Hadron Collider, are limited by the amount of energy they can produce in proton-proton collisions. The Pierre Auger Observatory's fluorescence detectors provide a way to view collisions between cosmic rays and atmospheric particles which reach energies above what can be produced in modern particle physics experiments. The resulting air showers produced by these collisions can be examined for clues into hidden sectors of particle physics. In this talk I propose techniques to measure an air shower’s profile shape that can be used by machine learning algorithms to classify an air shower as a typical or an anomalous event.