General Information
| Student: | Adriana Scanteianu |
|---|---|
| Office: | CoRE 417 |
| School: | Rutgers University |
| E-mail: | adriana.scanteianu@gmail.com |
| Project: | Bohmian Mechanics: Photon-Electron Collision |
Project Description
Our project is about modeling an interacting system containing one photon and one electron in one space and one time dimension in Minkowski space-time. Once the initial model is created, we will be using MATLAB software to investigate how varying certain parameters change the trajectories of the photon and the electron in the interacting system. We hope to also investigate changes in momentum and energy after the photon and electron collide in order to compare our model to Compton's Scattering Experiment of the 20th century and make rigorous the mathematics of what happens during the photon-electron collision.
Weekly Log
- Week 0:
- Welcome to DIMACS! We are currently learning how to make websites...
- Week 1:
- This week, Max and I have been working on plotting the evolving probability density of a photon's location over time, and the probability current of the photon's location using the photon wave function found by Prof. Kiessling and Prof. Tahvildar-Zadeh in 2017. This probability current will be used to plot the Bohmian trajectories of a photon given different intial conditions.
- Week 2:
- Max and I have been trying to plot the Bohmian trajectories of an electron given different initial conditions. Changes in initial conditions and parameters have led to the following pretty pictures of electron motion.
- Additionally, here are some videos on the evolving probability density function of a photon and an electron's location!
- Week 3:
- On Monday, we visited Nokia Bell Labs. This was very cool, I had always wanted to visit the (former) Quietest Room In The World. We tried many sound experiments there, including one where we sang Happy Birthday so we could hear how voices meshed together when there was almost no echo. As for the research, Max and I have worked on modeling the non-interacting system, where a photon and an electron are guided by the same wave function but do not "notice" each other. Below is the evolving probability density of photon and electron in the non-interacting system
- Week 4:
- Finally, we are getting to the interacting system. To model the interacting system, we are adding a boundary condition discovered by Prof. Tahvildar-Zadeh and Prof. Kiessling in 2018 to the non-interacting system. This boundary condition forces the photon and electron to "notice" each other when they are occupying the same space and time, that is, when they are colliding.
- Week 5:
- This week, we met with Prof. Tahvildar-Zadeh (aka Prof. Shadi) every day to prepare for next week when he will be away. We made lots of progress in debugging our interacing-system model, and are starting to add parameters that we will eventually vary. Here is the evolving probability density movie of the interacting case!
- Week 6:
- Prepping for the final presentation this week! Here are some pretty pictures of varied parameters. Below on the left is an image of the difference between the photon and electron's trajectories in the interacting system (solid lines) as compared to the non-interacting system (dotted lines). On the right, some of the electron's parameters are varied, which in turn changes the electron's trajectory and the interaction between photon and electron.
- Week 7:
- We are finally starting to compare our findings to the results of the Compton Scattering Experiment. In other news, Prof. Shadi brought Belgian chocolate back from Europe for us!
- Week 8:
- This week we have been writing up our final paper! Here are 100 trajectories from the interacting case being plotted on top of each other. In other news, it is our final week. Thank you to everyone who made this experience possible, from Prof. Shadi to Max to the Rutgers Math Department and the NSF.
- My Mentor
- My Coworker
