Matthew Pevarnik
Senior
Major: Physics
Matthew Pevarnik helped set up one of the largest science experiments of our time. The summer before his senior year at Rensselaer, the physics major interned in Switzerland at the Large Hadron Collider with the European Organization for Nuclear Research (otherwise known as CERN), where scientists hope to create a series of mini Big Bangs.
How do you follow that up?
“After working at CERN during the summer, I came off a physics ‘high’ so to speak and really wanted to continue with some sort of particle physics research,” he explained. After talking to several professors, Pervarnik was referred me to Assistant Professor of Physics, Joel Giedt. “After talking with Dr. Giedt for a little while, we eventually drew up a project and it took off from there.”
Pevarnik considers it a bonus that this research counts towards the Undergraduate Research Participation course.
Since beginning research with Giedt this fall, Pevarnik made rapid progress understanding the extraction of neutrino masses and mixings from the very interesting ideas of warped extra dimensions. He developed a Maple program that studies regions of the parameter space of these models, and is currently extracting distributions of the smallest of the mixing angles, from randomized scans.
But research just isn’t what you do in the laboratory. To get course credit, he had to write a research paper. “I had no idea what writing a research paper was like, and it was extremely beneficial just to go through the motions with Dr. Giedt guiding me,” he said.
He was also required to present his findings at the end of the semester. “Just having to think about presenting your research to someone else really helps you understand your project more,” he said.
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