Mines grad student selected for DOE research program at Livermore National Laboratory

A Colorado School of Mines graduate student has been selected for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science Graduate Student Research (SCGSR) program.

Connor Bray, a PhD student in physics, is one of four graduate students who will be hosted by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, where he will have access to world-class supercomputing resources and training on the experimental tools necessary to prove the accuracy of the simulations he’s developing. Bray said this access is a critical component to his doctoral thesis.

“These simulations will provide insight into the most intricate details of our superconducting quantum sensors and will improve the sensitivity of our measurement by up to two orders of magnitude,” Bray said.

His research focus is on convergence – conservation laws and symmetries. At Mines, Bray is part of the Electroweak Interactions Group, located in the Department of Physics and headed by Associate Professor Kyle Leach.

Conducting research at Livermore will give Bray the opportunity to work with the Rare Event Detection Group’s Stephan Friedrich, deputy group leader, and Geon-Bo Kim, staff scientist, to operate the superconducting detector system and help scale the sterile neutrino search to large detector arrays. Bray will also be working with Vince Lordi to improve and scale up his Monte-Carlo simulations.

The DOE selected 65 graduate students, representing 29 states, for the 2021 SCGSR program. Through world-class training and access to state-of-the-art facilities and resources at DOE national laboratories, SCGSR prepares graduate students to enter jobs of critical importance to the DOE mission.