DeMeritt Hall Room 325,
Department of Physics
University of New Hampshire,
Durham, NH 03824-3568, USA

Professional Interests:

My research focusses on the field of Nuclear and Particle Physics as principal investigator of the Nuclear and Particle Physics Group in the Physics Department at UNH. Currently I am involved in electron and photon scattering experiments at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (TJNAF or Jlab), more specifically in Hall-B using the CLAS detector.

I am one of the spokespeople for the recently approved "Heavy Photon Search" experiment (HPS), E12-11-006, which will search for the heavy photon (a.k.a. "dark photon" or A'), a possible candidate of dark matter. We hope to have a test run in 2012 and the full run shortly after the Jlab upgrade.

Previous experiments include the A rated experiment E04-010, "Search for exotic cascades with CLAS using an untagged virtual photon beam." (approved January 2004). This experiment aims to confirm the existence of the exotic cascade pentaquark particle. It took data within a year of being proposed, during the EG3 run period. Data taking ended February '05 and has been analyzed, and the paper is in preparation. Besides searching for the exotic pentaquark a lot of other interesting physics will be extracted from this dataset, among them the high-t behavior of the phi(1020) meson. Another experiment that is nearly finished is E02-110, "Q2 Dependence of Nuclear Transparency for Incoherent Rho Electroproduction", part of the EG2 run group. This experiment aims to measure the effects of Color Transparency on a rho particle that is escaping from the nucleus. One of our UNH student, Lorenzo Zana, analyzed this data for his thesis.

Other projects include work on ClasTool, an analysis package. And work on GEMC, a GEANT4 simulation package for the CLAS12 detector and other experiments. We are also setting up a Silicon Vertex Tracker test lab at UNH.

A current side project is the search for Graviational Waves in the data collected by the LIGO and Virgo gravitational antennas, in collaboration with a group at NIKHEF. The project involves using Graphics Processors to speed up the calculations for searching for continuous gravitational waves from asymmetric neutron stars that are part of a binary star system.

Computers:
The sysadmin wiki.
The Endeavour computer.
Cacti on roentgen (limited access)

Courses Taught:
Physics 400: Freshman Seminar , Fall 02, 03.
Physics 401: Introduction to Physics, algebra based. Fall 12,13.14
Physics 408: General Physics II., Spring 03, Spring & Fall 04. (link to original web site S03)
Physics 701: Introduction to Quantum Mechanics I. Spring 05 Spring 06 Spring 07 Spring 10
Physics 702: Introduction to Quantum Mechanics II. Fall 05 Fall 06 Fall 07 Fall 10
Physics 806: Graduate Student Seminar. Fall 10, Spring 11
Physics 943: Graduate Quantum Mechanics I, Spring 08, Spring 09, Spring 11
Physics 944: Graduate Quantum Mechanics II, Fall 09, Fall 11