Andrew Valentini

In every year of my undergraduate, I engaged in gravitational wave research. At Carthage College, I have worked with the gravitational wave physics group led by Dr. Quashnock and have engaged in a range of research in the field. Working with the Carthage group early in my development prepared me for success by allowing me to develop technical skills and, most importantly, exposed me to the importance of considering a field's history and the essentially social nature of physics research. In this reflection, I detail my most transformative year with the group.

Throughout my junior fall semester and into the academic year's JTerm, I Independently studied general relativity, primarily from Bernard Schutz's textbook and Scott Hughes' recorded lectures on the subject. I began this process in the most challenging semester of my undergraduate, so this process was also extremely developmental in my ability to manage a range of responsibilities and work for extended periods of time. I spent hours at the whiteboards in the math lab during this semester, and had a great opportunity to formalize my knowledge by writing an overview of general relativity and cosmology in Dr. Anderson's Experimental Physics class.

During the summer between my junior and senior year, I participated in Penn State's physics REU, mentored by Dr. Sarah Shandera. In this, I programmed a quantum circuit simulation from scratch and derived the condition on single single qubit maps called non-complete positivity to arrive in our class of circuits. I then tracked the arrival of these non-completely positivite maps along with thermodynamic and information-theoretic properties I went on to define on the circuit. I determined nearly no correlatioe exists between the arrival of these maps and spikes in properties that measure two-particle entanglement. Not having taken quantum mechanics before this experience, I had to quickly come up to speed with the relevant material. I dealt with a good deal of frustration during this experience but came out being proud of what I had been able to accomplish. In this reflection, I primarily give a detailed explanation of my work.

For my senior thesis in mathematics, I am writing a modified theory of gravity called Scalar-Tensor-Vector Gravity in the ADM Formalism. Most importantly, this experience has been my first attempt at independently designing a research problem in theoretical physics and attempting to carry it out myself. Though I'm still not convinced the problem is entirely well-posed, I have at least strenghtened my knowledge of general relativity and learned more differential geometry along the way.