Naperville student interns at Europe's CERN lab
A Naperville student with dreams of working on the frontier of physics took a step that is "an entirely new level of cool" toward such a career this summer.
Naperville North High School graduate Cari Cesarotti, 21, worked as one of roughly 18 interns from the U.S. in a program at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, in Switzerland and France.
But Cesarotti, who is finishing her last semester as a physics major at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, didn't just clock in and space out at the internationally renowned physics lab. She worked on an ongoing experiment to detect proof beyond a gravitational pull that dark matter - a type of particle called the dark photon - exists. To top that, she even had coffee with CERN's head scientist, Director-General Fabiola Gianotti.
"I walked away a better physicist after talking with her," Cesarotti said. "Never had I met someone who was so devoted to uncovering the truth of the universe, someone so genius and so humble at the same time."
But how did a lowly intern score such a meeting?
A simple email.
"Timidity is not my strong suit!" Cesarotti says.
But science is, says her high school physics teacher and robotics team coach Mark Rowzee.
"She's a fantastic student, and really has taken every opportunity she could see on the horizon or created some opportunities," Rowzee said about the student who was captain of his robotics team when the squad made the national championships.
"She just takes a really calculated look at everything she does, and she made physics her passion."
Within physics, Cesarotti is passionate about particle physics, mainly the search for dark matter. She says she's learned in three years of Cornell classes that scientists have observed a gravitational pull that proves dark matter has mass and therefore exists. They just haven't been able to spot dark matter on its own yet.
That's the simplest explanation she can muster to explain the highly technical, constantly evolving field she plans to pursue in graduate school and beyond. But she's a step ahead, as she already has been conducting research in particle physics as an undergraduate.
Working on an experiment called MMAPS, or Missing Mass A-Prime Search, Cesarotti has been helping to run simulations for an experiment that eventually will be conducted on an accelerator at Cornell, looking once again for the elusive dark photon.
Sometimes the work can cause disillusionment because so little progress is made, but Cesarotti doesn't see it that way. Neither does her mentor.
"Even if it's not the hottest frontier, who cares? You're still doing true science," Rowzee said about the field his former pupil is pursuing. "You're hypothesizing something and looking for evidence for it and carving through data, combing for this possibility. If it happens, then you're off to the races."
The race truly is on at CERN, Cesarotti said.
There, she found an unimpressive landscape of basic buildings that house - or rather, hide - amazing scientific equipment engaged in pioneering work to sleuth out the dark photon.
"It's not a very advanced-looking building," she said about the space in France, where she worked about a 15-minute drive from the main CERN lab.
"Then you get to go downstairs and you see all these beautiful detectors - 300 meters of super-sophisticated electronics. It doesn't look like much at the surface, but that's really because CERN is really all about the science. It doesn't care about the aesthetics; it just wants to figure things out."
And so does she. The passion started when she joined Rowzee's robotics team and realized it was a chance to search for solutions that might not exist. If the team wanted to build a robot to throw a basketball into a hoop but had only certain parts, no one could know whether reaching the goal would even be possible. Challenges like that ignited her passion.
"In classes, you learn things everyone already knows. You learn facts, you learn equations - but these aren't surprises," she said. "In physics club, you learn to do problems that don't necessarily have known solutions. Being in research is really a lot of that."
During her summer at CERN, so was trying to buy lunch.
Physicists at the lab, despite their international countries of origin, communicate mainly in English, and they speak with a comfortable level of fluency in the tongue. But other workers at grocery stores, cafes or the post office inside the sprawling lab's campus spoke only French. Cesarotti speaks no French, so meals were a challenge.
"I'd look at the menu and think, 'Gee, I wonder what I'm eating today?'" she said.
But at CERN, she lived, breathed and ate physics. Her housing was right on campus - a five-minute walk from her office - and she worked long hours. Usually she'd be working at a computer, coding and calculating equations for experiments the lab could run to try new ways to find dark matter.
Other times, she'd be monitoring computer screens showing output from the experiment in progress. Always, she'd be networking with professional scientists and learning their lingo, preparing to forge further into the unknown, where there might not be answers.
"I really love particle physics. I think that's one of the most exciting frontiers in physics now," she said. "Even if we're not on the right track, that's an extremely exciting time to be in physics - when you're on the cusp of a revolution."