Projects

The following is a collection of project reports from various pieces of assessment I have completed throughout my undergraduate degree. 

Honours

 As part of my Bachelor of Philosophy degree at the ANU, it is a requirement to take an honours year. The physics honours course at the ANU consists of a semester of coursework studying a broad range of advanced physics followed by a research project. My research project involved attempting to improve the sensitivity of Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (AMS) measurements of manganese-53  to employ in meteorite analysis and the near-Earth supernovae search. My final thesis, titled: 'Remodelling a multi-anode ionisation chamber detector for accelerator mass spectrometry of 53Mn', can be found here.

Undergraduate Work

In Theoretical Physics (PHYS3001), which I took in 2016, we were given two major projects:

• The first was a systematic analysis of the Duffing Oscillator as a chaotic system. I really enjoyed this project, not only for the beautiful graphs we created (like the one on the right) but also due to the beauty of chaos theory. My final report can be found at Theoretical Project 1. 
• The second project looked at any topic or problem we had only partially covered in the course. I chose to look in depth at the Twin's Paradox of Special Relativity which had always fascinated me. In particular, I aimed to solve it numerically using just special relativity, which I had often heard was impossible.  However, I discovered a numerical solution consistent with logic and special relativity. You can find my report at Theoretical Project 2.

Figure 1: An animation of the time evolution of the Poincare section for the Duffing Oscillator.

In 2016, I also took an Advanced Studies Extension for Atomic Physics (PHYS3031) which is a short 30 hour project related to the course material. In particular, I investigated the theoretical possibilities of enhancing the Hexagonal Boron Nitride Vacancies discovered by Tran et. al. (2015) with a fibre microcavity similar to that examined by Albrecht et. al. (2013). The context of the project was to look at the best current single photon sources to see how far off technological implementation was. My report can be found at Atomic ASE.

In 2014, I took two philosophy courses as electives; Fundamentals in Philosophy (PHIL1004) and Philosophy of Science (PHIL2057). For Philosophy of Science, we were required to write two major essays. The first I wrote on the Problem of Induction, where I covered Hume's and Goodman's versions. The second I wrote on the Fallibility of Observation covering the concept of theory laden observation and Chalmer's counterexample. 

Advanced Studies Courses

For the Bachelor of Philosophy degree (PhB), we are required to do three Advanced Studies Courses which are 6 unit semester long research projects. Below are some of the research courses I took through my undergraduate years:

1.  In my first ASC, I worked with Professor Martin Asplund on writing a Python interface to his 3D hydrodynamic models of the solar atmosphere. As I had no previous experience with Python, the project largely centered around learning to use Python and learning the fundamentals of programming however with the added astronomical context. The final report can be found at Stellar Atmospheres ASC.
2. For my second ASC, I worked with Dr Christian Wolf on analysing the Skymapper deep field images of Centaurus A. Whilst we had initially hoped to look at Star Formation Discontinuities in nearby galaxies with the Skymapper's unique filter set, due to time constraints, we instead focused on determining the Spectral Energy Distributions for a few features of Centaurus A. The final report can be found at Centaurus A ASC.
3. In my final ASC, I worked with Dr Benjamin Buchler and conducted a preliminary investigation into optical vortices. Although optical vortices are now a well studied phenomena, the project took me through the process of establishing an optical experiment and connecting the known theory to my observations. The final report can be found at Optical Vortices ASC.