jon ameel

I am a second year physics PhD student at the University of Michigan studying experimental particle physics. I currently work on the K0TO experiment which is a high energy physics experiment located at the J-PARC research facility in Tokai, Japan. K0TO aims to discover and measure the rare neutral kaon decay $K_L^0 \rightarrow \pi^0 \nu \bar{\nu}$ (neutral kaon decays to neutral pion and neutrino antineutrino pair). This decay has a Standard Model predicted branching ratio of 2.8 x 10^-11 and the Standard Model predicts that this decay will occur via the golden decay mode. The goals of the K0TO expierment are to discover and measure 100 events in order to investigate CP violation in the quark sector. The University of Michigan's focus on K0TO is the Data Acquisition System. The K0TO experiment began taking physics data in 2013. I have a B.S. in Physics from Agnes Scott College with minors in Mathematics and the Spanish language. My undergraduate research background includes exoplanetary transit detections through optical observations (2011-2013, Agnes Scott College), computational research in radio astronomy focusing on the formation of ultracompact massive star forming regions (2012-2013, Agnes Scott College), an experimental study of the temperature dependence of the ADCs for the K0TO Experiment's data aquisition system in the field of high energy particle physics (REU Summer 2013, University of Michigan), simulation models in Geant4 of Cerenkov production from radioactive decays (2013-2015, Agnes Scott College), and hardware construction of the quench protection system for the ALPHA2 Experiment at CERN (REU Summer 2014, CERN).