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Amartya Sengupta, a graduate student in the Department of Physics, College of Arts and Sciences, has been awarded a prestigious Monte Carlo General Education Network (MCgen) Fellowship to study phenomena at the intersection of particle physics and cosmology.

The fellowship will allow Sengupta to spend six months at the associated Large Hadron Collider physics program at the University of Cincinnati. According to MCgen, the fellowship is a mentoring program that is an “integral part of a learning process to apply acquired skills to concrete problems.”

During his time at the University of Cincinnati, Sengupta will work under the guidance of senior members on projects that will have an immediate impact on the particle/nuclear physics community.

“Although dark matter remains invisible to optical detection, its presence is well-supported by cosmological and astrophysical evidence,” Sengupta explains. “My research aims to improve the accuracy of Monte Carlo (MC) generators, which are essential for developing experimental searches and accurately interpreting data.”

Sengupta says being chosen for the MCgen fellowship was incredibly validating. “I feel honored, excited and deeply motivated by the opportunity to work on such impactful research,” he says. “This fellowship marks a significant milestone in my academic career, and I look forward to contributing to our collective understanding of fundamental physics.”

At UB, Sengupta is part of the Current High Energy Physics and Cosmology group of graduate students, postdocs and research staff. The group combines experimental faculty working on collider physics (research tool in particle physics by accelerating particles to very high kinetic energy and letting them impact other particles) with theoretical faculty. Together, they investigate issues in particle physics, astrophysics (the branch of space science that uses the principles of physics and chemistry to understand the universe) and cosmology (the branch of physics dealing with the nature of the universe).

Sengupta also worked with Dejan Stojkovic, professor of physics and Sengupta’s PhD faculty adviser, on a research paper that will publish in one of the leading journals in cosmology and astrophysics after its peer review this spring. The paper explores potential astrophysical signals that might indicate violent, large-scale transformations occurring in the universe. These are so-called “cosmological phase transitions,” where the universe undergoes a fundamental symmetry change — analogous to water freezing into ice or evaporating in vapor.

“Such transitions have dramatically reshaped the universe in its past history, and if one was happening now, it would have catastrophic implications for life on Earth,” Stojkovic explains. “Despite the low probability, the severity of this scenario justifies rigorous investigation. To detect possible signatures of such an event, we analyzed the expected properties of high-energy particles originating from deep space, which could be observed using current ground- and space-based observatories.

“I am certainly very proud of Amartya being selected for this fellowship,” Stojkovic says. “This is a very competitive field with a large number of researchers from the top U.S. schools working with much larger budgets on the same topics.

“Winning this award in such a highly competitive environment is certainly a big success for our student, our Department of Physics and our university.”