Andrew Valentini

I am currently trying to write a modified theory of gravity in the ADM formalism and possibly derive the theory's gravitational radiation for my honors thesis in mathematics.

A link to my working (very incomplete at this point) thesis draft is linked here

I will provide attachments of my short (typically 5 minute) presentations given in my senior math research class:

Presentation 1

Presentation 2 (intended for a general audience)

Presentation 3 (15 minute talk)

During the summer of 2024, I was seleteced to participate in Penn State's Sustainable Physics REU, mentored by Dr. Sarah Shandera. I developed my own simulation of a quantum circuit and used it as a mathematical model to study the domain of positivity for individual qubit maps. I defined various thermodynamic and information-theoretic properties on the simulations and tracked how these properties evolved with the intent of identifying a relationship between non-completely positive maps and multi-particle entanglement.

My summer poster is linked here and notes taken during the summer will be linked here (beginning of August).

A working draft of my notes written over the course of the summer is attatched here.

Examples of my simulations and other work will be linked here (beginning of August)

Animation 1

In the spring of 2024, Dr. Joseph Anderson and I developed a new method for arriving at the pair correlation function for circular objects. Such an expression has been used in the context of materials theory since the 1980s from a stochastic geometric approach, but we have shown that there is an equivalent analytic perspective that can be applied to reach the same conclusion. This method provides the benefit of being able to generalize to higher order correlations easier than the original approach.

My poster is linked here

I am extending the work additional scenarios such as Gaussian and concentric loops and I plan to apply this work in the context of cosmic strings for my senior thesis in physics.

During the summer of 2023, I was selected to participate in Louisiana State University's Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program. I was mentored by Dr. Gabriela González on a project related to the classification and prevention of glitches. The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) uses search pipelines to detect gravitational waves from the inspiral of compact objects. These pipelines are designed to alert scientists when a gravitational wave event passes through the instrument. They are often tricked by sources of noise, however, meaning that the pipelines often mistake noise for a real gravitational wave event. I developed models that identify shared properties of these noise-caused alerts with the goal of providing a battery of tests that could be used to determine how likely a given alert was to be caused by sources of noise.

A folder containing a project report and a copy of my poster can be found at this link.

I have been involved in a research group dedicated to gravitational wave physics at Carthage College, directed by Dr. Jean Quashnock, for nearly four years now. The focus of the group changes with each year; we explored the math governing gravitational wave emission, developed models to visualize the binary infall over frequency space, and analyzed the binary system's component masses and final merger mass to demonstrate the system's radiated energy in the form of gravitational waves during my freshman year. In my sophomore year, the group focused on analyzing the dependence of overtones on the merger remnant's mass and spin and confirmed that the first overtone dominates the waveform of an event with code that Iara Ota developed. The group is currently examining population differences between LIGO's observing runs through the use of machine learning algorithms and traditional data science techniques. Our current work can be found in this repository.

PDFs of the group's posters are linked below:

2022 (1)
2022 (2)
2023
2024 (not the cleanest poster at this point...)

Read this article recently written about the gravitational waves research group at Carthage College.

I have primarily been involved with the software development and design of a project called MPG-FOSS, which seeks to measure the amount of propellant in a fuel tank under microgravity conditions, which is the framework of Modal Propellant Gauging (MPG), through the use of a Fiber Optic Sensing System (FOSS). Over the summer of 2021, I was selected to participate in this research at my home institution through NASA's Technology Transfer University (T2U) program. I primarily developed software to interface with a device that can measure the strain experienced by the FOSS due to sloshing propellant in a tank. This software can be viewed on the group's Github organization. I continue working with this project during the school year.

A link to the poster made from the group's 2022 summer work is given here.

I was additionally involved in a project called Magneto-Active Slosh Control during my freshman year. I designed CAD models for the experiment and helped determine that perpendicularly positioned coils on a propellant tank's wall would be inefficient in suppressing microgravity slosh.