Research Interests
Since joining the Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics, Linda Kelley has been involved primarily with experimental projects in high-energy astrophysics. Her recent efforts have been directed towards the construction of the Milagro detector. Kelley is interested in analog electronic design and with UCSC faculty members David A. Williams and David Dorfan, she designed and implemented high speed analog electronics for this detector. Milagro is nearly complete, and efforts are turning towards the analysis of data from this new instrument.In addition to her work on Milagro and previous high-energy astrophysics projects, Kelley has also been involved with a small collaboration of physicists on an experiment to measure the Landau-Pomeranchuk-Migdal (LPM) effect in dense media. The LPM effect predicts that the production of low energy photons by high-energy electrons should be suppressed in a dense medium. When an electron interacts with a nucleus and emits a bremsstrahlung photon, the longitudinal momentum transfer between in electron and nucleus is very small. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle requires that the interaction must take place over a long distance, thus scattering of the electron during this interaction distance can cause photon suppression. This experiment was performed in End Station A at SLAC using a parasitic electron beam which Kelley and her collegues developed for this purpose.
Collaboration Involvement:
Milagro
Selected Publications
Evidence for TeV Emission from GRB 970417a, R. Atkins et al., Astrophys. J. Lett. 533, L119 (2000).TeV Observations of Markarian 501 with the Milagrito Water Cherenkov Detector, R. Atkins et al., Astrophys. J. 525, 25 (1999).
Search for Ultra-High-Energy Radiation from Gamma Ray Bursts, D.E. Alexandreas et al., Astrophys. J. Lett. 426, L1 (1994).
An Accurate Measurement of the Landau-Pomeranchuk-Migdal Effect, P.L. Anthony et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 75, 1949 (1995).
Bremsstrahlung Suppression due to the Landau-Pomer-anchuk-Migdal and Dielectric Effects in a Variety of Materials, P.L. Anthony et al., Phys. Rev. D56, 1373 (1997).
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