Audrey Farrell
Hometown: Hamilton, NY
Academic Department: Physics
Research Advisor: Navid Vafaei-Najafabadi
Current research in high energy physics depends upon the development, construction, and maintenance of large particle colliders such as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. These machines allow for experimentation at the energy scale of trillions of electron volts, which allows for the development of our understanding of elementary particles. However, they are massive and costly to operate. Plasma wakefield accelerators (PWFAs) have shown the potential to sustain accelerating fields up to three orders of magnitudes higher than conventional accelerators, allowing electrons to acquire equivalent energies in less than one meter that an RF accelerator would require multiple kilometers to achieve. Farrell hopes to contribute to the development of ionization-injection methods in PWFAs, in hopes of contributing to the creation of “designer” beams that could advance our understanding of fundamental physics.
Farrell has also been the recipient of a URECA Grant, NSF REU, Presidential Scholarship, and National Merit Scholarship.
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