Spring 2023 Distinguished Professor - Dr. Petra Huentemeyer

I got my PhD in particle physics from the University of Hamburg in Germany working on research at the Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire, better known as CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, or the place where the world wide web was invented to allow scientists around the globe to share information. I was always interested in fundamental science. What are the fundamental forces at work in our Universe, in our daily lives? What is matter? What is time? You can study these questions at the smallest scales known to humans, at accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Or, you can study them at the largest scales, in our Galaxy and beyond. As a beginning student I was drawn to this type of science by the promise of participating in the quest for finding the theory of everything, which in German is referred to as the ‘‘Weltformel’’ (literally ‘‘world formula’’). This ambitious goal remains out of reach to this day. The aspiration for it however has led to amazing and sometimes terrifying technological and societal advancements ranging from nuclear weapons, missiles, and combustion engines to X-ray tubes, MRI scanners, little computers in our hands, and solar cells on our roofs. Pushing the limit in experimental research continues to inspire me, while I try to be conscientious and challenge myself on questions of social and ethical responsibility.

Teaching taught me to be more precise and intentional with my language, avoid technical terms before I properly introduced them. Students also sometimes asked questions that I did not think about in enough detail, motivating me to look at a problem in my research from a different vantage point (which sometimes leads to new insights).

Advancements in computing power and data acquisition system (DAQ) electronics  make is possible to collect, process, and store data with a precision and in amounts previously not possible. We can process data in real time to send alerts to observatories around the world so that they can immediately observe regions in the sky with intriguing signals. We can store large amounts of data at two computing sites at the University of Maryland (UMD) and the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM, about 10 PB of data at each site), that are connected through a high-speed internet connection and are mirroring each other. The advancement in computing and DAQ allow us to handle large amounts of signals/triggers, hundreds of millions per second, which in turn allows to operate observatories at very high altitudes where cosmic radiation is much higher than at sea level.

 

The majority of researchers in my field also now agree to foster and follow principles of open science (i.e. sharing data and methods as much as possible among your peers from other projects around the globe) to maximize science output. 

 

All this taken together, allows us to perform deeper and more complete surveys of our Galaxy and beyond with ever improving image and energy resolution. As a result, we are able to test fundamental laws of nature at extreme limits never reached before. 

 

Forming and fostering international collaborations and sustaining principles of open science are challenging in a world with many conflicting geopolitical interests. International collaboration is almost always needed to secure the necessary funding and find the best locations for constructing a facility in astronomy, astrophysics, and particle physics. Open science is required for make scientific progress.

Michigan Tech has excellent graduate and undergraduate students. The Physics Department, particularly our chair, has been extremely supportive ever since I joined the university. Two main concerns for continued success in my field are proximity to an airport/flight connections, and lack of hotel rooms when planning collaboration meetings or workshops for more than 100-200 scientists. I have not explored the possibility of Michigan Tech becoming a computing center for one of the projects I am involved in. Usually bigger schools like UMD/UNAM (see above) take on that responsibility. It would be interesting to see if it is possible to maintain a computing facility here that handles ten-of-hundreds of PBs of data and allows for data sharing with an international collaboration of scientists.

 

We got funding last year to continue our research with the HAWC Observatory until at least 2025. My colleagues at UMD submitted a proposal to continue HAWC operations until 2026. Unsurprisingly, there are still plenty unanswered questions about how our universe works.

 

At the same time, Michigan Tech – in the U.S. – is leading an R&D project for a facility called the Southern Wide-Field Observatory (SWGO). More information can be found at swgo.org. The collaboration consists of 80 research institutions from fourteen countries and supporting scientists from 10 additional countries and plans to build a next generation ground-based gamma-ray observatory at a high-altitude location in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, or Peru. The SWGO would be the first of its kind in the Southern Hemisphere and have a spectacular view on the Galactic Center. Last year, I went on an exploratory trip with a team of eleven researchers from the U.S., Latin America, Europe, Asia, and Australia to evaluate potential observatory sites. We are currently working on a report to summarize our findings. 

 

We are funded to work on SWGO R&D by the NSF (participating organizations are Michigan Tech + subawards to UMD, U Wisconsin – Madison, Michigan State, and University of Alabama). Last year we submitted another proposal to NSF with seven subawards, growing the effort by adding the University of Utah, University of Rochester, and the New Mexico Consortium, which would support colleagues at Los Alamos National Lab to work on SWGO R&D.