One Aggie’s Search for Fundamental Truths

Iain Bisset, a doctoral student in Texas A&M University’s Department of Physics and Astronomy, recently began a prestigious eight-month research fellowship at Los Alamos National Laboratory to pursue his thesis topic on primordial black holes and nonstandard neutrino physics. Neutrinos are very low mass, weakly interacting particles that are so difficult to detect they were nicknamed “the ghost particle.” 

Texas A&M and Los Alamos have a long partnership history. Researchers from the institutions have collaborated on projects in disciplines ranging from robotics to statistics. Some of the researchers were directly supported by the LANL Collaborative Research Program Award that explicitly pairs a Texas A&M and Los Alamos researcher together to increase the number and depth of collaborations between the institutions. Texas A&M is also a founding member of the organization that acts as operations and management organization for Los Alamos. 

To earn this prestigious fellowship, funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, Bisset developed a research proposal that originated from a collaboration supported by the Strategic Transformative Research Program (STRP) within the College of Arts and Sciences. The project brought together Dr. Bhaskar Dutta, Bisset’s thesis advisor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, and Dr. Samiran Sinha of the Texas A&M Department of Statistics to develop novel approaches for model discernment in neutrino phenomenology. Phenomenology is the branch of theoretical physics concerned with developing models of new physics, which are as strongly constrained by real-world data as possible — phenomenology, the study of phenomena. 

This article was originally posted on the College of Arts & Sciences website.