Honors Theses

Date of Award

5-2026

Document Type

Undergraduate Thesis

Degree Name

BS

Department

Physics

Faculty Mentor

Martin J. Frank, Ph.D.

Advisor(s)

Ryan Benton, Ph.D. and Tom Johnsten, Ph.D.

Abstract

Fermilab’s NOvA (NuMI Off-axis 𝑣𝑒 Appearance) experiment focuses on understanding the behavior of neutrinos and how they affect the cosmos. A sub-focus of the NOvA experiment is the search for magnetic monopoles. These elusive particles have not yet been observed in nature, leaving their behavior to be mysterious. The Far Detector, located in Ash River, MN, is integral in the search for these particles. This project is on simulated magnetic monopoles with speeds thousandths the speed of light, with focus on the role of slicing algorithms in event reconstruction using the NOvA experiment’s reconstruction algorithm. Using sample data, analysis occurred using ROOT, a data analysis framework created by CERN. The performance of the two slicing algorithms were assessed on four metrics: total slice hits, ADC distributions, slice time, and the number of high-energy slices per event. They performed on two datasets: Cosmic and MC Monopole. Results show that Slicer4D outperformed WindowSlice on the cosmic dataset, while WindowSlice outperformed Slicer4D on the MC Monopole dataset. The results suggest that improving the time parameters for Slicer4D’s clustering method or perhaps combining the two slicing algorithms may increase detection of simulated monopoles. This thesis project contributes to the ongoing research towards discovering physical evidence of magnetic monopoles.

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