Future physicist isn't throwing away opportunities for work and play
5/2/2012
By Megan Dutill '13
College Relations Intern
Note: This week, the Schreyer Honors College is showcasing five Schreyer Scholars who are members of the spring 2012 graduating class. A women’s hockey player who has attacked her studies and her activities with the same zeal she’s shown on the ice. A student who is completing the requirements for so many majors (four) along with a graduate degree that he has had to complete his graduation forms the old-fashioned way – on paper – because the computerized system doesn’t have enough fields to accurately reflect his academic record. A budding physicist who found time to complete two honors theses in between spending a summer in Switzerland working on the collider and competing on Penn State’s ultimate Frisbee team. A geography major who fielded marriage proposals while conducting her thesis research in Africa. And an environmental advocate who is leaving Penn State and its residence halls a bit greener than when he arrived on campus. Today: Matt Jaffe, the future physicist and ultimate Frisbee fanatic – and author of two honors theses.
Matt Jaffe doesn’t just do one thing at a time. Last summer, he simultaneously researched high energy physics in Switzerland with “the biggest accelerator ever built,” the Large Hadron Collider, and played for the Geneva ultimate Frisbee team in the Swiss National Championships.
Instead of writing one honors thesis, Matt wrote two – in two different colleges.
And the Schreyer Scholar didn’t even stick to just one degree. This weekend, Matt will be graduating with degrees in physics and math from the Eberly College of Science and engineering science from the College of Engineering.
“I just really wanted all of the things, and if you really want it you’ll make it work,” Matt says.
That includes writing not one, but two, honors theses in one year: One for engineering science, as part of the major requirement, and one for physics, because he wanted to. “It wasn’t really a big deal,” Matt says. “I had been working with both of the topics throughout the year, so writing it up was really just taking what I had in my notebooks and head and putting it on paper.”
It may not be a big deal to Matt, but Dr. Rick Robinett, Matt’s honors physics adviser, says it isn’t exactly common. “I’ve never seen it happen since I’ve been here, in 25 years,” he says. “The fact that you have two complete bodies of work that both faculty are agreeing are worthy of an honors thesis – I’ve never seen that happen.”
It actually does happen – this spring, Matt and another student, Ce Zhang, also in the Eberly College of Science, are graduating having completed two honors theses -- but it is indeed rare.
For his physics thesis, which Matt describes as “very theoretical,” he created and solved difference equations to explore the consequences of the loop quantum gravity theory.
"Inherent of the theory is breaking space into chunks, so you can be at A or at B and there’s no such thing as being in between,” Matt says. "I worked on generating and solving a particularly relevant non-linear difference equation that would hopefully model the interaction of these lattice points of space, so that we could see how quantum fluctuations could lead to structure formation of the universe – planets, stars, galaxies – and see if that was a viable theory.”
For Matt, the process has been fun. "I honestly just really like studying and working with physics,” he says. "I like the way that everything works out and really complex things can be modeled and understood. It’s a beautiful thing.”
Matt’s engineering science thesis also involves physics but in a more hands-on way. He wrote about his experiments with high energy physics last summer as an undergraduate research assistant at CERN, Switzerland, while working with the Large Hadron Collider.
He worked at CERN through a prestigious undergraduate research program with the University of Michigan. While more than 800 students applied for the opportunity, only 10 were selected.
"The environment there was pretty intense,” Matt says. "There were 300 students from around the world, and everyone there was so smart. The scale of the experiments was unbelievable, and the more you learned about it, the more impressive everything was.”
Matt had the chance to work with a multi-billion dollar accelerator to measure particle decays to look for indirect evidence for physics theories. He studied a "particular rare decay that shouldn’t happen,” although certain theories suggest that it could.
"Either finding or excluding this decay would find theoretical direction as to ways to fix the standard model of physics,” Matt says. "We don’t expect to see any, and that makes it difficult because you need to quantify how much you don’t see – how much you see other decays and not this decay.”
While Matt knew that he wanted to go to graduate school for physics, his research at CERN made him realize that he wants to focus on high energy physics.
"It’s just so fundamental,” he says. "There’s really nothing more basic than trying to study the smallest building blocks of everything and how they interact. Those things at the smallest scale then have dominant effects even at the largest scale, so it’s totally overarching.”
Yet in the midst of working 12-hour days at CERN and writing two theses at Penn State, Matt still found the time to dedicate to his favorite sport: Ultimate Frisbee. Over the summer, he went to one practice with the Geneva team and was promptly recruited to play with them at the Swiss National Championships. He spent his senior year as the captain of Penn State’s club team and earned a spot on the brand-new professional team in Philadelphia for this summer.
"It’s a huge passion of mine,” Matt says. "It’s just so fast-paced and dynamic. There’s so many parts of different sports that I like combined into one sport: jumping in basketball, diving to catch, having some kind of field sense and being smart of the field, running and sprinting – there’s just nothing better.”
Matt competed against 150 other athletes for one of the 25 spots on the Philadelphia Spinners team. The tryout conditions – running for hours in 20-degree weather with 20 mph winds – convinced several athletes to give up, but not Matt. "I’m pretty stubborn," he says.
He will be taking his passion and skills to the University of California at Berkeley this fall. There he’ll be continuing his study of physics to prepare for a doctoral degree. And coincidentally -- or would that be intentionally? – Berkeley just happens to have one of the best ultimate Frisbee teams competing on the collegiate circuit, too. Looks like Matt will be making the best of both for a long time to come.