Browsing by Subject "Physics and Astronomy"

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
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    Accelerating a Simulation of Type-I X-ray Bursts from Accreting Neutron Stars
    (2012-04-18) Mackey, Mark
    The goal of my project was to develop an optimized linear system solver to shorten the runtime of a computer simulation. The simulation was created to study the thermonuclear burning of Type I X-ray Bursts in low-mass X-ray binary star systems (LMXBs). To study these systems, thousands of X-ray bursts need to be simulated. Currently, the simulation can complete around one X-ray burst per day. I worked on accelerating the main bottleneck of the simulation by using very powerful graphics cards (GPUs) instead of the central processing unit (CPU) to perform the necessary calculations. I made steady progress over the summer towards this goal and eventually developed a solution that was four to five times faster than the original code.
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    Improving Performance of a Multiplexed Dark Matter Detector via Infrared Isolation
    (2021-05) Spahn, Gabriel, C
    Microwave Kinetic Inductance Detectors (MKIDs) are superconducting microresonators that are most commonly used for microwave detection in astronomy. They have potential for use as phonon detectors in cryogenic dark matter searches, but their implementation faces a number of technical challenges. Among these issues is the potential for higher-temperature infrared photons to reach the superconducting substrate and consequently degrade the quality factor of the MKID’s resonance. This thesis details the design and construction of epoxy-based filters meant to mitigate this effect, and finds that their installation in the readout system for an Al MKID increased its quality factor by an average of 12% across a range of operating temperatures and powers.