Undergraduate Research Opportunities at LANPh

Contact: Areg Danagoulian (aregjan@mit.edu)

Currently we have four UROP openings at LANPh:

1. Warhead Verification (WV) with Electrical Cryptography

2. Neutron Resonance Transmission/Capture Analysis — to learn more see here.

3. Measurements of activation at a cargo scanning facility and detector characterization. The tasks consist of the following:

   1. 100% high purity germanium Canberra detectors for gamma spectroscopy

   2. EJ-309 liquid scintillators for gamma/neutron counting.

   3. Spectroscopic measurements of activation of the radiator and collimator at the Massport Passport Systems cargo scanner. This task requires using spectroscopic detectors to determine whether there is activation, and determine the concentrations of the various isotopes.

4. WV protocols’ resilience when under attack by Deep Learning methods.

   1. Use ML methods to probe the information content of data from WV measurements in a hypothetical arms control verification exercise.

   2. Identify weaknesses in the cryptographic privacy system

   3. For more, see here and here