Swan Lake Remediation and Resource Recovery

The Swan Lake attraction at Brookfield Zoo is continually in a eutrophic state every year because of nutrient loading. This abundance of nutrients caused by goose droppings leads to an excess growth of duckweed and watermeal. The dissolved oxygen of the lake decreases drastically as a result of these plants covering the lake’s surface, restricting oxygen exchange between the lake and the open air and preventing sunlight from reaching underwater plants that produce dissolved oxygen, thus endangering the fish population. It is crucial to remove the duckweed to reduce nutrient levels and increase the dissolved oxygen in the lake

Detecting Dark Matter Induced Power in Quantum Devices

In the past few years, many mesoscale systems have been proposed as possible detectors of sub-GeV dark matter particles. In this work, we point out the feasibility of probing dark matter-nucleon scattering cross section using superconductor-based quantum devices with meV-scale energy threshold. We compute new limits on spin-independent dark matter scattering cross section using the existing power measurement data from three different experiments for MeV to 10 GeV mass. We derive the limits for both halo and thermalized dark matter populations.Comment: Contribution to TAUP 2023, University of Vienn

Gamification to Educate on Combined Sewer Overflows and Improve Water Conservation

The city of Chicago is equipped with combined sewer systems to prevent flooding during heavy periods of rainfall. These systems hold untreated wastewater and stormwater that is expelled into surrounding bodies of water, contaminating it. Delaying water usage during peak storm times can prevent combined sewer overflow into the Chicago River and Lake Michigan. User active measures in an application will be used to engage and educate students about water issues Chicago currently faces and how combined sewer overflow. Reducing and delaying student water usage overall, especially during times of large rainfall events, will allow the strain on wastewater treatment infrastructure to decrease

Dark Matter Search

The SuperCDMS SNOLAB is the first low-mass dark matter detector in the cryogenics system at SLAC. It is designed to be sensitive to detect dark matter down to 300 MeV in mass and resolve individual electrons-hole pairs from low energy scattering events in high purity Ge and Si crystals. The purpose is to simulate electrostatic fields within the detector medium and run detailed particle physics simulations to attempt to match simulation to observed detector response for the first time with detectors of this size using the GEANT4 simulation package, and SuperCDMS solid-state simulations. The simulation code is written in C++, my objective was to modify the probability of the electrons inter-valley scattering in the crystal. The previous function’s input was an electric field voltage the problem with this method was that it did not provide any underlining physics of the electron within the crystal. However, we added a physical model for the inter-valley scattering that instead intakes the energy of the electron and produces the probability of a particular electron’s propagation within the crystal. The results are still in progress and will be discussed in the poster. In conclusion, we hope that this new method will produce the same graphs as the previous method and in addition provides the underlying physics of the electron inside the crystal

Directional detection of light dark matter in superconductors

Superconducting detectors have been proposed as outstanding targets for the direct detection of light dark matter scattering at masses as low as a keV. We study the prospects for directional detection of dark matter in isotropic superconducting targets from the angular distribution of excitations produced in the material. We find that dark matter scattering produces initial excitations with an anisotropic distribution, and further show that this directional information can be preserved as the initial excitations relax. Our results demonstrate that directional detection is possible for a wide range of dark matter masses, and they pave the way for light dark matter discovery with bulk superconducting targets