Caitlyn Stone-Whitehead

Caitlyn Stone-Whitehead is a Ph.D. candidate from the Electroweak Interactions Group at the Colorado School of Mines. She is at SLAC as an awardee of the DOE Office of Science Graduate Student Research program. 

Caitlyn’s dissertation work focuses on developing modeling strategies for simulating radiation interactions directly in superconducting materials. This work is critical for beyond the Standard Model physics searches that utilize superconducting targets (BeEST, SALER, Ricochet Q-Array).As a part of this effort, Caitlyn has been involved in the development of phonon refraction physics and new materials in G4CMP. The aim of her work at SLAC is to model the quenching factor and pulse shape differences from nuclear recoils compared to photon absorption in Superconducting Tunnel Junction (STJ) detectors used for the BeEST and SALER experiments. 

To get a more well-rounded perspective on superconducting detectors, Caitlyn also aids in the modeling of the BeEST HVeV detectors, the next generation of Transition Edge Sensors (TESs) for Ricochet, and radioactive backgrounds in the Colorado Underground Research InstitutE (CURIE) for testing and deployment of superconducting devices and detector technologies.