Meet Columbia's Ambassador to the Fermilab

Most Columbia postdocs’ stomping grounds are in Morningside Heights; places like Koronet Pizza, Riverside Park, the Hungarian Pastry Shop and the Cotton Club jazz bar.

Not so for Daisy Kalra, a postdoctoral fellow who is stationed at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, also known as Fermilab, a high-energy particle physics laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, about an hour outside of Chicago. Other than a brief orientation at Columbia’s Nevis Laboratories in Irvington, New York, at the start of her postdoc, Kalra has been stationed for the length of her postdoc at the Illinois lab, where she serves as a kind of permanent Columbia ambassador to one of the particle accelerator’s experiments.

Columbia News caught up with Kalra to discuss her work, and her job helping oversee Columbia’s work on the Short-Baseline Near Detector (SBND), which just spotted its first neutrinos.

What does the Fermilab’s Short-Baseline Near Detector (SBND) aim to find out?

The Short-Baseline Near Detector (SBND), one of the three detectors in the Short-Baseline Neutrino program, aims to determine whether additional types of neutrinos exist beyond the three already known in the Standard Model. SBND also aims to study and better understand neutrinos in general, such as how they interact with matter, by using high-statistics neutrino data. Neutrinos are unique elementary particles which are everywhere and barely interact with other particles, making them useful probes for early universe cosmology.

To step back for a second: The Standard Model of particle physics is a model used to explain our universe. It describes what makes up matter, what the smallest particles are, how they interact, and what holds them together. While the model is quite complete, there are some phenomena it does not explain, for example the non-zero mass of neutrinos, and the existence of dark matter.

Imagine the Standard Model as a puzzle that is mostly complete, but has a few missing pieces and some that don’t seem to fit in. What we’re doing is looking for those missing pieces, which could tell us new information about the puzzle, and thus of the universe as a whole.

One missing puzzle piece is the question of whether there are additional types of neutrinos. The Standard Model suggests that there are three types of neutrinos, but there is a lot of experimental evidence that hints that there may actually be more.

The Short Baseline Near Detector (SBND) using an intense beam of neutrinos aims to search for new types of neutrinos. If we discover more than the three types we already know about, it will provide crucial information about the Standard Model and the universe more broadly.

What has the experiment found so far?

In July, the SBND detector detected its first neutrinos from the Fermilab beam, which was really exciting. Then the accelerator had to be shut off because of planned upgrades until October. So what we are busy working on now is analyzing the data we collected in July, better understanding and calibrating our detector, and validating our analysis pipelines. Along the way, we are developing important tools and techniques and preparing our system to collect physics quality data when the beam comes back in October. After the beam comes on, we plan to run as much as we can for the next few years, to collect enough statistics to carry out our physics analyses with high statistical power. 

What is Columbia’s role in the experiment?

Columbia provided the Time Projection Chamber (TPC) readout electronics for the experiment. The detector is collecting signals from the beam and atmosphere and we need to decipher that information in order to draw meaningful conclusions from it. There is a full pipeline in place (“data acquisition system”) that collects and deciphers signals and saves that information, which is then used by researchers. The TPC readout electronics is one of the important components in this pipeline. A big part of my job is overseeing the TPC readout electronics as well as the data acquisition system.

What drew you to this area of study? Did you always know you wanted to be a physicist?

I’ve always been curious about how the universe works, but my interest really took off in high school when for the first time I read about supernovae—how stars end their lives, emitting an incredible amount of light. I was so amazed by it that it sparked a desire in me to learn more about the universe.

I didn’t always know I wanted to be a physicist. I just knew that I loved figuring out how things work. Over time, I realized that physics, especially studying neutrinos, was the perfect way to satisfy my curiosity and solve puzzles that no one has cracked yet. It’s like being on a never-ending treasure hunt, where every clue brings us closer to understanding the universe.

What does a day in the life look like for you at Fermilab?

I live onsite, in Fermilab housing. There’s a whole campus here with a gym, a tennis court, a basketball court, a cafeteria, and more. I’ve been here for nearly seven years; I first came as a visiting fellow during my PhD. It’s a fun place to be, especially in the summer, when people from all over the world come to do research.

I’m mostly on campus during the week but on weekends there’s a lot to do around Batavia, including a mini golf course. I also like to visit Chicago whenever I can.

What do you do when you’re not working?

I play piano as much as I can; I try to play every day. I also like to bake cakes, especially apple cake.