Students present research at the 19th annual undergraduate physics symposium

The Department of Physics 19th Annual Undergraduate Research Symposium at Arizona State University took place on April 8 this year, with judges including ASU alums and researchers Jason Holmes, Justin Shaw and Tyler Glembo. Three students were awarded for their presentations.

Physics and mathematics freshman Josh Grunksi-Flores received the Department of Physics Research Award for his project titled “CORE Pair Spectrometer.” Grunski-Flores’ project was based around his pair spectrometer design for the CORE Group.

“CORE is going to be like this has a whole bunch of different detectors minus designing one part of that is specifically called a pair spectrometer. Its job is to measure the energy of photons that come from a collision. The goal is to help us understand some things that we don't fully understand about physics quite yet,” Grumski-Flores said.

“I was completely not expecting to win this award, especially since I'm just a freshman,” Grunski-Flores said. “I'm very, very, very honored for earning this award.”

Physics junior Max Pezzelle received the Department of Physics Research Award for his project “The Classical Double Copy.” Pezzelle decided to pursue the project after listening to ASU grad student Tucker Manton speak about the classical double copy at a colloquium event.

“It was discovered in 2014 that certain solutions of the Einstein equations could be written in a certain way. You could write those solutions as two copies of two electromagnetic fields, which are way simpler to find than solving Einstein’s equations. So that idea is called the double copy because you take two copies of an electromagnetic field and you get a gravitational field,” Pezzelle said.

Pezzelle said winning this award means a lot to him.

“It gives me a huge amount of encouragement. As a theoretical physicist, you choose the problems you want to do carefully, and I felt like this was a problem that I could really contribute something to, and winning this award makes me feel like I’m doing the right thing,” Pezzelle said.

Read more and view the presentations here.