In fifth grade, I joined a FIRST Lego League robotics team, and although my team of all first-years placed dead-last at our first ever competition, I was completely hooked. This was the beginning of my obsession with robotics. I would go on to do 8 years of FIRST robotics, through 12th grade … Having seen my programmer-teammates code elaborate autonomous routines and automations for the robots I designed, I naturally became curious about the software that controlled the robots as well.

From the time I picked up Basher Science’s Physics: Why Matter Matters! in third grade, understanding how the most fundamental physical processes create the reality of our universe has wholly fascinated me. The ability to mathematically and scientifically explain why something happens, from a single subatomic interaction to the inescapable pull of a black hole, is what drew me to the field of physics. My exploration took the form of documentaries, MinutePhysics videos on YouTube, books, and, when I entered high school, classes that allowed me to develop my understanding of the field in a more comprehensive way.

Last year, the researcher outlined the mathematical basis of a new quantum secure direct communication (QSDC) protocol. QSDC protocols are methods of information transfer which gain security from the use of quantum mechanical effects. Due to the measurement principle, quantum communication reveals eavesdroppers with a probability arbitrarily near unity. In a world where traditional encryption is increasingly threatened by quantum computers and Shor’s Algorithm, QSDC protocols provide impregnable security to banking transfers, diplomatic wires, and general communications.

A recently emerging and novel method of the observation of galaxies is through Integral Field Unit (IFU) Spectroscopy. Spectroscopy - in contrast to photometry which measures the total brightness or flux of light - allows us to see the amount of light observed at each discrete wavelength within the observed range. Accordingly, since many physical processes are associated with the absorption or emission of light at specific wavelengths, we are able to measure these processes in distant objects through spectroscopy … In this work, I seek to apply some of the unique forms of analysis permitted by IFU spectroscopy to the phenomena of dwarf interactions.

The future of science and technology lies in the quantum properties of matter, with fields such as condensed matter physics having already produced innovation like nanotechnology and quantum computation. Superconductivity, the property of some materials to show no electrical resistance at extremely low temperatures, and magnetic exchange coupling, the interaction of ferromagnetic materials over space, have in past research shown tendencies to interact with one another in interesting ways. Should that relationship be better understood, it would enable us to utilize them to improve practical applications of technologies such as maglev trains.

Previous studies have shown that the cosmic expansion is accelerating despite the gravitational attraction between matter, caused by a mysterious source of energy denoted as dark energy. A cosmographic test of whether it exists in the form of a cosmological constant or more general dark energy was performed with Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms using the SCP Union2.1 supernova compilation. By fitting polynomials to Hubble series expansions, the Hubble Constant (H0), the deceleration parameter (q0), and the jerk parameter (j0) can be estimated … This study focuses on the effects of MCMC algorithms and model-building uncertainty the dependence of results based on fitting functions used.

Then finally, after several years of messing around in the theoretical space inside my head, I came across a specific topic where further research could be of legitimate use: space based solar power (SBSP). SBSP is exactly what it sounds like: solar power but in spaaace! Large solar panels are launched into orbit, specifically geosynchronous Earth orbit, and beam collected energy, via microwaves, back down to Earth for use. It’s clean and efficient; considering the existential threat of climate change, it’s exactly the kind of energy source we need.

My advice to high school students looking to work on a research project that combines science and mathematics is to be invested in learning a lot of new things and keep an open mind as high schoolers, there’s a lot of mathematics we are unfamiliar with, and sometimes it’s easy to get overwhelmed. However, I would say that the beauty of combined science and math research is that you learn so much about mathematical theory that can be applied to the science a double-pronged approach, if you will!

One of the great remaining mysteries of modern physics is the accelerating expansion of the universe. It has been proposed that dark energy is responsible for this phenomenon. In order to understand dark energy, it is necessary to compute the energy density of the vacuum that arises from the fundamental theories that describe the universe. The vacuum energy density appears in Einstein’s theory of general relativity as the famous cosmological constant, and was first introduced in order to establish a static universe.

My project originated long ago, when I was barely an infant. Almost every day I visited the Museum of Natural History and had lunch underneath the blue whale after touring the museum, paying special attention to the dinosaurs. Ever since I was young, dinosaurs have held that special interest for me, not in the sense of big scary monsters of a world long gone, but more in the sense of marvels of nature, amazing creatures at the zenith of evolution … when the time came to design my research project, I knew there was only one choice.

It wasn’t until my sophomore year in high school, however, that I became interested in astronomy. I had heard from other students at my school about the Science Internship Program, which gives research opportunities to high school students and is run by UC Santa Cruz Astronomy and Astrophysics Professor Raja GuhaThakurta. I discussed possible projects with Raja, who became my mentor, and ultimately decided on my project, a search for very distant galaxies, because I thought it would be exciting to look back in time.

I’ve lived in the small town of Burnt Hills, New York for all of my life. Starting at a young age I developed a love for science. In my spare time I would polish rocks in my rock tumbler. I spent hours digging around my gravel driveway trying to pick out the quartz among the limestone. I also enjoyed analyzing fingerprints with my toy forensic kit. At one point I actually wanted to become a forensic anthropologist (the show Bones was a favorite of mine).

The title of my paper was “The Sky’s the Limit- An Investigation of Cloud Cover on Major League Baseball Performance.” My research project was inspired by a genuine passion for the game of baseball and my desire to learn more about its subtle nuances. I often wondered how much weather variables such as sun, clouds and shadows affected the outcome of a game or individual player performance. My curiosity prompted me to do some preliminary research to identify whether these questions were previously investigated.

Imagine being plunged perpetually into a silence where the ubiquity of sound is irrelevant. That is the world which many students in my high school experience. My inspiration for this project really came from the students in my high school’s Deaf and Hard of Hearing (DHH) program. My school has a department which offers a high school education to DHH students across Orange County. The students in this program take many of the same classes as the other students, using an interpreter to understand the lectures.

Ever since Galactic Cosmic Rays were detected by Victor Hess 100 years ago (Hess 1912), their origin has been a mystery; what stellar object is powerful enough to accelerate particles into TeV energy ranges, and how does it release so much of them? Galactic Cosmic Rays are capable of releasing high energy X-rays and gamma rays, with energies up to GeV, as they travel through the interstellar medium. By studying the spectral patterns of the emitted X-rays and gamma rays, we can gain insight into the nature of the Cosmic rays themselves.

My inspiration came at breakfast one day, when CNN switched to a story about the Icelandic volcanic eruption that had grounded air traffic across Europe (due to the abrasive, potentially explosion-causing action that debris has in engines). My immediate thought was, “Someone should fix that.” … I always am asked whether foreign object damage, FOD, is really that major a problem, because most people have seen a few news reports on jets crash-landing after bird strikes or other major accidents, but they don’t know that thousands of these incidents, albeit more minor, happen yearly.

Despite my enthusiasm for science, I was initially nervous about conducting research, and I was hesitant to apply for the Research Science Institute. I had always assumed that meaningful research was in the domain of Ph.D. professors and graduate students, far outside the reach of high school students like me. Given the complexity and dangers of nuclear energy, I thought that this would be especially true for the area in which I was assigned to work.

Physarum polycephalum is an organism that one cannot help but find interesting. This single-celled amoeboid is able to self-organize and self-optimize without the help of any sort of central nervous system. It can find the shortest path connecting any number of food sources, solve mazes created by physical barriers, and create paths that avoid light. I was introduced to this organism by my mentor, a member of the Laboratory of Mathematical Physics at The Rockefeller University in Manhattan, New York.

My interest in physics was born rather serendipitously in middle school when I stumbled upon the popular physics section of my local library. In no time at all, I told you the qualitative details of Young’s double slit experiment and how it contradicted certain previous classical notions of physics, but I could not have have taken a simple integral to save my life. So, due mostly to my lack of mathematical sophistication, I didn’t do much physics until my junior year of high school.

Pragmatically, the inspiration for this project is drawn from a series of backpacking excursion I embarked upon with my brother and father two years ago, which in the end totaled approximately 120 miles. Now the golden maxim of backpacking is to pack frugally. So, every day as I repacked my backpack, I would glare angrily at the extra weight of fire by friction set material I had to carry with me because it made the overall weight of my bag very onerous.

Looking up at night, it is easy to get lost in the grandeur of the view. Space seems infinite and the myriad stars inspire a multitude of feelings. Ever since I can remember, I wanted to understand the great mysteries of the universe first getting excited via buzz words like “black holes” and “curved space time.” Such fascinating ideas easily captivated my childhood curiosity . . . My interest started to become more tangible in elementary school when the school’s librarian recommended me to read Stepehen Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time.

From the very beginning of civilization, humans have pondered their future through innumerable myths and legends. Through the times of the ancient Greeks’ tales, with their stories of oracles prophesying the ruin of empires, and the Middle Ages, with seers like Nostradamus appearing to peek into the future, the idea of an ultimate destiny has become an obsession for many. Only nowadays do we have the scientific tools coupled with ultra-fast processing power necessary to make a well-substantiated picture of the distant future of the Solar System, which seems harbor large uncertainties for this planet.

Cold Fusion has been an active research field in the quest for next-generation energy. In Andrei Lipson’s CR-39 experiments, oscillating deuterium atoms or other particles were accelerated (collective acceleration effect) through an electric field and collided with each other to undergo fusion. Another procedure conducted by Roussetski involved the bombardment of TiD2 with a Deuteron beam. In all these scenarios of fusion research, a significant bottleneck is the detection of reactant molecules.

I hear like an 85-year-old man, but I am not alone. Twenty-five million Americans are already affected by hearing loss (Hearing lost statistics), and this staggering number is expected to double by 2050 (qtd. in Schmid), especially considering how many students are currently damaging their ears by the combination of loud music and earphones. What they do not realize is that sound has a physical force that damages the stereocilia, the delicate hair cells in the cochlea that pick up vibrations.

As I opened up the local section, I saw an image of a tennis racket strung in a strange fashion. This intrigued me, so I decided to read the article. I soon discovered that several years earlier a local woman named Madeline Hauptman had co-patented a diagonally strung tennis racket featuring opposite pairs of equidistant strings strung in a diagonal fashion. She claimed that as a result of this congruency of string length, vibrations are more evenly dispersed following a tennis shot, reducing the level of vibration directed onto a given player’s forearm and possibly preventing tennis elbow.

One of the most exciting days of work occurred when I discovered that I could apply programming skills I acquired in my linear algebra class to my project. I needed a program that could graph in three dimensions, was easily manipulated, and used a color gradient to show height differences. MatLab, a matrix-based programming environment, fit that description perfectly. Read More