2024 COES Design and Research Conference

Lantharion – Using UV LEDs to Identify Fluorescent Compounds

Team Member: Ben Allen, MyLe Hoang, Gavin Soniat, Jake Stelly

Sponsor: LaSPACE, Institute for Micromanufacturing (IfM), and Center for Applied Physics Studies (CAPS).

Fluorimetry is an analytical technique used for chemical compound identification and analysis. However, conventional fluorimeters are often expensive, energy-intensive, produce high amounts of heat, and are difficult to transport because of their weight and size. This device aims to address these challenges by developing a specialized fluorimeter optimized for a specific range of excitation and emission wavelengths. The excitation wavelength ranges cover most conjugated organic compounds. This project aims to develop a proof-of-concept fluorimeter capable of exciting fluorescent compounds in the near UV range of 350-400 nm and generate emission spectra in the visible range to facilitate rapid optical characterization of compound samples. The design is structured into three key subsystems: Excitation Assembly (EXA), Emission Capture Assembly (ECA), and Data Processing (DP). EXA includes four UV LEDs, a microcontroller, and a BJT-based circuit. ECA includes sample housing and a spectrometer for fluorescence detection. Finally, DP features an algorithm designed to minimize noise and source reflections, ensuring accurate spectral analysis. These compact and energy-efficient devices have significant potential for use in resource-constrained environments such as spacecraft and remote field applications. Additionally, the low cost of specialized LED-based fluorimeters can make this technology more accessible, enabling broader adoption across various industries.

Investigating the Non-Linear Dynamics of Hurricanes and Their Intensification

Team Member: Breyana Adams

The ability to predict catastrophic disasters is paramount to the safety of citizens living in coastal areas. With hurricanes, weather in general, tending toward turbulent behavior, every hour counts. By analyzing the wind speed, minimum pressure, and surface water temperature time series, we can reconstruct the hurricane intensity phase space to further examine the dynamics of the system. Lyapunov exponents show the rate at which trajectories converge, or diverge, over time and helps to establish the stability of a dynamic system. Positive values can indicate chaos while negative ones indicate a stable system. By doing this time series and phase space analysis, the different ranges of predictability per parameter can be determined. The Sugihara-May correlation will be employed to further analyze the phase space reconstruction. This correlation showing decay indicates a chaos in the dynamics of the system. Utilizing the results, the dimension in which the chaos occurs can be estimated (Sugihara). This will be accomplished by examining a few hurricanes that have made landfall in the Gulf of Mexico.

Modeling Recurrent Nova Eruption Rates using MESA

Team Member: Madison Bernice

Recurrent novae are explosive phenomena that occur on the surfaces of white dwarfs in close binary systems, triggered by the accumulation and ignition of hydrogen-rich material transferred from a companion star. The frequency of these eruptions is known to depend sensitively on both the mass of the white dwarf and the rate of mass accretion. This project aims to investigate how nova recurrence timescales vary as a function of these two parameters using the stellar evolution code MESA (Modules for Experiments in Stellar Astrophysics). We are constructing a grid of models with varying white dwarf masses and accretion rates to simulate recurrent nova behavior and analyze the dependence of eruption frequency on system characteristics. Preliminary results are expected to confirm that higher mass white dwarfs and increased accretion rates lead to more frequent nova events. These simulations will contribute to a better understanding of nova progenitors and the conditions that may lead to Type Ia supernovae. Ongoing work includes expanding the model space and preparing comparisons with observational data from known recurrent nova systems.

DSLR Photometry of Variable Stars

Team Member: Thomas Matthew Palmer

Typically, photometry involves the use of Johnson-Cousins lenses, but photometry databases are beginning to allow the use of DSLR tri-color in place of these lenses. This method of photometry is cheaper and more accessible than more traditional forms, allowing for easy integration into undergraduate courses. In the case of visible photometry, the tri-color green will be extracted from the data file of the image. The program ASTAP will be used to convert the NEF files to a usable file type, along with extracting the green channel. Using the program AstroImageJ we can convert the data into a light curve for a specified star. The particular system of interest is W Ursae Majoris. This system has a short orbital period of approximately eight hours, allowing for the construction of a full light curve of the orbit quickly.

Determination of the Strong Coupling Through Measurement of Jet Azimuthal Decorrelation

Team Member: Jesse Webb

Sponsor: NSF and US-ATLAS

The strong coupling constant is one of the fundamental quantities of the Standard Model, describing the strength of quark-gluon interactions. In high energy hadron-hadron collisions, it is proportional to the ratio of cross sections for multijet events and can be determined by the measurement of related quantities (R3/2, R4/2, R∆φ). The strong coupling constant is typically reported at the energy scale of the mass of the Z-boson, with the recent world average value 0.1183±0.0009 and a relative uncertainty of 0.8%. By comparison, the value of the electromagnetic coupling constant is known to an uncertainty of 32 parts per billion, an incredible difference in precision. It is therefore necessary to refine the measurement of αs(mZ) for improvements in quantum prediction and subhadronic understanding.The quantity R∆φ is defined as the fraction of events with leading jets having some minimum azimuthal decorellation, characterized by a dijet azimuthal opening angle less than ∆φMax, and it is an ideal candidate for measurement of αs due to its inherent bias mitigation and leading order proportionality. In this study, R∆φ is calculated and analyzed using data collected at the ATLAS detector in Run 2 of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. The collision events are at a center-of-mass energy of 13 TeV and an integrated luminosity of 140 fb−1. Preliminary results for the transverse momentum dependence of azimuthal jet decorrelations are presented with the aim of leveraging R∆φ as a determination of the strong coupling constant.