Starting in the Fall of 2007, I began work with Prof. Williams on cosmology related research. As the research developed, it focused more specifically on gravitational lensing in the infall regions surrounding clusters (or any large, generic gravitating system). Current work involves developing a computer simulation to model multi-plane gravitational lensing. The simulation works by shooting millions of rays of light through a distribution of mass that bend and deflect their trajectories. The pattern of the rays at the source plane, and the mapping of small regions of those sources back to the original image plane, may yield new understandings of the effects of substructure on observations.

During the Spring and Summer of 2007, I did some work on passive polarimetric infrared sensing. We were able to extract both the index of refraction and the surface normal vectors of a target both in simulations and in physical experiments. The result of the work was published as a chapter in a recent book.

Cerenkov Radiation

Since early 2004 I have been engaged in research towards a low energy, tunable source of centimeter wave, coherent Cerenkov radiation for use in physical and electrical research applications. Using a 3 KeV electron gun and a piece of titanium dioxide, a small quantity of microwave radiation was generated. Current work is focused on showing that this signal was indeed Cerenkov radiation and not some aberration of the experimental setup. The theoretical underpinnings of the experiment are also being investigated.

Other Research

Since mid-2003 I have been working on a broadly capable genetic algorithm and graphical user interface, written in both Matlab and Objective-C. Current research includes the effects of population size on optimization speeds and the potential for self-optimizing algorithm routines. Starting in early 2005 I began to investigate MTI-type radar for use in target tracking. This led me to begin to formulate a comprehensive data model that will, once completed, be able to generate highly realistic MTI radar datafor use in the development and testing of new tracking algorithms.