An overview of the research I participated in during my graduate studies. IMAGE SOURCE

Fatigue Fracture

Take a paperclip and bend it repeatedly. Eventually the paperclip breaks without warning. This is true for how metals often fail–catastrophically without warning. This is called fatigue fracture. The most famous example is the Tacoma bridge collapse of 1940.

I spent some time studying this with Professor Arun Jaganathan. Our goal was to find non-invasive methods to detect physical anamolies within a structure that may hinder the structure’s integrity and to predict the lifetime of the structure.

Unfortunately our project wasn’t funded but Professor Gabriela Petculescu, my professor undergraduate research on metal alloy characterization, was recently awarded a grant to determine aging of Navy ships.

Metamaterials – massive light

Metamaterials are materials engineered for a specific desired effect. They are most known for invisibility. Through some discussions on the topic with Professor Dentcho Genov, we arrived at the question ** Can we build a metamaterial that makes light massive?**

This question led to a multitude of research projects, such as generalizable inverse methods for metamaterials, complex branches of current methods, and the electron self-energy paradox.

The electron self-energy paradox says that the amount of energy needed to build an electron is infinite, which fundamentally disagrees with Einstein’s E=mc^2$E=mc^2$.