My name is Joelle-Marie Begin, and I am enrolled in an undergraduate program in physics at McGill University. I would like to express my gratitude to the donors that made it possible for me to receive a McGill Alumni and Friends Science Undergraduate Research Award and do research this summer.
I have been interested in physics since middle school, and decided to pursue my undergraduate degree in physics simply because I wanted to learn as much as possible. I have loved my time here at McGill; all my classes are very challenging and I have learnt a lot about how the universe works, from our human scale, to the tiniest particles, to the largest objects in the Cosmos. I met my advisor Professor Adrian Liu when he taught a first year physics course that I was enrolled in. In the first lecture, he told us a bit about his research, and I found it fascinating; I then reached out to him to do an internship over the summer.
Working with the McGill Cosmic Dawn Intensity Mapping Group this summer has been a pivotal point in my career and my perception of myself as a physicist. Being able to participate in group meetings, have discussions with graduate and postdoctoral students, and attend conferences has been an amazing opportunity. My experience this summer has assured me that, indeed, I want to continue down the academic path. This internship has allowed me to experience what it truly is like to participate in the process of developing new ideas and solving real life problems; it has been an incredibly stimulating environment and I have developed a lot as a scientist.
In Professor Liu's group, we're interested in an epoch of the universe known as Cosmic Dawn. This is the time when the first stars and galaxies were born, and the universe became full of light. In cosmology, we're interested in telling the complete story of our universe, from its formation to the present; maybe this study of the past can tell us something about the future. Cosmic Dawn is a time period of this story that is yet to be experimentally observed, leaving a large gap in our picture of the universe's history.
The reason that this epoch is so hard to observe is because it happened more than 13 billion years ago. One of the ways we can study the universe is by detecting light from distant sources. Due to its finite speed, it takes light a while to reach us; thus, by looking far away, we look back in time. In order to study Cosmic Dawn, we have to look very far away. The problem is that by virtue of being very far away, the signal is very weak, which means that our instruments have to be incredibly sensitive in order to detect light from Cosmic Dawn. Pictured is the Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array (HERA) telescope, which hopes to achieve this feat. Professor Liu is one of the founding members of the project, and many members of our group work on analyzing data from the telescope.
My research is more on the theoretical side of things. I look at simulations of what we expect the data to look like, and develop statistical tools for extracting information from the data. It is important to test our tools in “clean” environment, provided by simulations, in order to have an idea as to what we should expect, and to predict what sort of information the observations will give us.
I have absolutely loved my project this summer. I have learned a lot about cosmology and astrophysics, as well as improved my programming skills by a huge amount. All the networking events I had the opportunity to attend this summer have resulted in me getting more involved in the physics community here at McGill. I love my project so much, and the results are promising enough, that I will continue to do research with Professor Liu by taking the Undergraduate Research Project course this semester. We hope that by the end of the year, the results are publishable.
I would like to thank again all the donors that have made this experience possible, and that have contributed to my development as a physicist as well as my conviction that this is what I want to do for the rest of my life.