Week of February 12th

Unfortunately, Dr. Bellis' son was still under the weather, so I did some more independent research from school. My first task was to read and understand the Wikipedia page for a cross section in particle physics. There was a lot of scary calculus and formulas, but eventually I understood the basic concept.

In particle physics, a cross section is simply the probability that two particles will interact. Say that you're randomly throwing darts at a target on the wall, with the hope that some of them will hit the target. A cross section is equivalent to the probability that the dart will interact with the target and not the wall (which is basically the ratio of the area of the target and the area of the wall).

The cross section of a particle determines how long that particle will annihilate (which means to convert into radiant energy). Cross sections are used the WIMP (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles) Theory of dark matter, so I'm sure that taking the time to understand this concept will serve me well when I go back to my internship.

In addition to learning about cross sections, I also started researching the current dark matter experiments going on right now. There are about 5 different major experiments, each of which use different elements to detect WIMPs. In my next meetings with Dr. Bellis, I'll start reading the papers that each of these experiments have published, but right now I just wanted to get an overview of the current research. Here's a great video I found about one of the dark matter labs:

I'm looking forward to meeting with Dr. Bellis again!