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Physics doctoral student earns Marie Curie Fellowship
Dange using award to work on particle detector project at CERN
A physics doctoral student at The University of Texas at Arlington received a prestigious fellowship to study high energy physics by helping with construction of a key particle detector element.
Atharva Dange, a third-year Ph.D. student in the lab of Jaehoon Yu, professor of physics, is one of 11 early stage researchers to receive a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellowship via the Research and Innovation Staff Exchange (RISE) project.
He is participating in the INTENSE project at CERN headquarters in Switzerland. INTENSE is an interdisciplinary research and training program which allows students to work on research and development for experimental particle physics, particle accelerators and particle detectors, and which promotes collaboration between U.S. and European researchers.
“I was pleasantly surprised and delighted at receiving the fellowship,” Dange said. “I was also extremely thankful for my supervising professor, Dr. Yu, for allowing me to grab this opportunity.”
At CERN, Dange is involved in research and development of the ProtoDUNE-Vertical Drift (VD), which is a Liquid Argon Time Projection Chamber, a special type of particle detector which uses liquid argon within its cryostat to monitor particle interactions.
The ProtoDUNE program is designed to test and validate the technologies and design that will be applied to construction of the DUNE (Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment) Far Detector, which will shoot beams of neutrinos from Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois, 800 miles through the Earth to detectors deep underground at the Sanford Underground Research Facility in South Dakota.
“I am involved with the construction, installation and commissioning of the field cage of ProtoDUNE-VD, an integral component of the detector,” he said. “It is responsible for creating and maintaining a stable electric field within the detector, to allow for charged particles to drift towards the anode, so that we receive a signal event.”
Dange said that his future work will include data taking and analysis of the detector, once its construction is complete and it is ready for operation. With the valuable hardware experience he has gained, he noted that this work will be a part of his dissertation project.
“The award of this highly competitive fellowship reflects upon the importance and high quality of Atharva’s work at CERN and upon the outstanding mentorship of our colleague Jae Yu,” said Alex Weiss, professor and chair of the UTA Department of Physics. “On behalf of the department, I would like to congratulate Atharva and Jae and to thank them for their efforts which have resulted in this prestigious fellowship.”
Dange said he became interested in high energy physics because he “wanted to investigate the small world of atoms and understand how physics operates at large energy scales.” He said he was further motivated to study go into the field because of UTA classes he took such as like quantum mechanics and particle physics, along with the encouragement of his professors.
He received his bachelor’s degree in physics from UTA in 2020 and decided to stay at UTA for his doctoral studies because of its strong physics program and because of UTA’s status as an R1 research university, he said.
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