Aram Apyan
Physics Undergraduate
While attending Evanston Township High School in Chicago's northern suburbs, Aram Apyan was laying the computational groundwork for a project that a few years later, would earn him the first author position on a journal article that is causing a stir in the world of particle physics. The article, "Detecting Neutrino Magnetic Moments with Conducting Loops," which appears in Physical Review D (1 Feb 2008, 77 037901), suggests a novel approach to the elementary particle. "Neutrino masses are one of the big mysteries of particle physics," says Apyan. "It is still not clear whether they have masses or not and since these particles are very hard to detect, we proposed a new method to detect these particles and to measure their masses. The method relied on magnetic properties of neutrinos."
Apyan, who was influenced by the work of his father, a visiting scholar in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Northwestern University, and second author on the neutrino paper, finds that IIT’s physics program is just the right fit for him. "IIT has a great physics department with many research connections to nearby Argonne and Fermi laboratories. There are numerous research opportunities that undergraduates can become involved in," he says. A member of the Society of Physics Students, Apyan plans to attend graduate school, focusing on theoretical physics.