Matthew McEneaney
Bio
I am a 5th year physics PhD student in the group. I grew up in Suffolk, Virginia and did my undergrad at William & Mary in the colonial capitol of Virginia. I participated in the 2019 summer TUNL REU program with Professor Vossen and enjoyed it so much I decided to apply for the graduate program. I've been in Durham since all the COVID craziness in 2020. In my free time I enjoy hiking at Eno River and other parks as well as playing ultimate frisbee.
Research
Most of my research is focused around Lambda hyperons which act as natural spin polarimeters since their polarization is imprinted in the cross-section of their decay products, most of the time a proton pion pair. Using this fact, we can study the polarization of Lambdas produced from electron scattering off a nucleon target in different polarization configurations, e.g. polarized electron and unpolarized target, unpolarized electron and transversely polarized target, etc. This gives us access to the spin structure of the Lambda hyperon, which is too short lived to be studied by direct electron scattering on a hyperon target.
Repositories
- CLAS12-Analysis
- This repo does most of the front end work by reading HIPO files, selected unique combinations of particles by PID or charge, and calculating some generic kinematics.
- CLAS12-Trains
- This repo is a bit of a standalone project to compute Lambda hyperon kinematics and add them to given input HIPO files in a new bank 'REC::Kinematics'. This is mostly useful for evaluating the kinematic effects of python ML algorithms since these computations would take an unreasonable amount of time in python.
- slurmtools
- This small repo has some useful tools for managing SLURM jobs using text files to keep track of job IDs.
- LSpinTransfer
- This repo does most of the actual analysis work. It includes functions for Lambda hyperon invariant mass fits and kinematically binned generic asymmetry analyses.
- hipopy
- This repo provides an easy interface for reading HIPO files in python.
- This is a python package also available on PyPi.
- rgh_simulation
- This repo has some generic job scripts to run CLAS12 simulation and reconstruction pipelines for RGH.
- cvtml
- This repo is a bit of an abandoned project that I lost time for. However, it does have some nice examples of deploying a PyTorch GNN in C++ and Java.