MSU鈥檚 Bhattarai awarded RISE summer internship
Contact: Mary Pollitz
STARKVILLE, Miss.鈥擬ississippi 哔哩传媒 rising senior Swarup Bhattarai will spend his summer studying a rare nuclear phenomenon with a research group at Germany鈥檚 Justus-Liebig University Giessen.
As a part of the prestigious Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst-Research Internships in Science and Engineering, or DAAD-RISE internship, Bhattarai will search for the existence of double-alpha decay.
鈥淪cientists have studied standard alpha decay, where an unstable nucleus releases one single particle, for over a century,鈥 Bhattarai said. 鈥淚 will be investigating a theoretical model where a nucleus simultaneously emits two alpha particles in opposite directions. This process is so rare that calculations predict it occurs only once every 30 million decays of the isotope Radium-224.
鈥淚f successful, this discovery would provide deep insights into the complex dynamics of matter inside the atomic nucleus and test the very limits of our current physics models,鈥 he explained. 聽
Bhattarai, a physics major from Nepal, previously served as an undergraduate researcher with MSU鈥檚 Geosystems Research Institute and currently researches nuclear astrophysics with MSU and low-energy precision physics with MSU and MIT Laboratory for Nuclear Science. He credits the MSU Department of Physics and Astronomy and GRI with the support needed to earn this recognition.
鈥淚t takes a lot to be patient to train an undergraduate to do effective research work, and I think the only reason that I got accepted into this prestigious internship program is because of the skills I鈥檝e gained as a mentee,鈥 he said.
Bhattarai credits the entire team with GRI, Physics and Astronomy Department Head Jeff Winger and Prajwal MohanMurthy from MIT for helping him gain his extensive research experience.
MSU nominations for scholarships and opportunities like DAAD-RISE are managed by the university鈥檚 Office of Prestigious External Scholarships and Director David Hoffman. For more information, visit .
Learn more about the MSU Department of Physics and Astronomy by visiting . For more information about the RISE Germany program, visit .
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