Summer Research Experience at the Nevada National Security Site: An MLE Approach to Metrology of Laser Propagation Axes
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I will give a brief overview of my experience as a graduate associate in science at the Nevada National Security Site (NNSS) last summer. The NNSS (formerly known as the Nevada Test Site) is a 1360 square mile facility owned by the National Nuclear Security Administration, located north of Las Vegas, NV.
During the 10-week program, my research advisor Dr. Daniel Champion (a UA Mathematics alum) guided me on a project to recover the spatial parameters of multiple laser beams emitted from an optical diagnostics probe. Determining the direction of each beam is critical in collecting accurate measurements of target objects.
We applied a maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) method to recover beam axis orientations for the probe. The MLE resulted in a beam orientation having angular separation from ground truth of less than 1.7 degrees on average.
To determine the variance of the estimators, we used Monte-Carlo simulation to populate a sample distribution of recovered parameters. This resulted in a 0.07 degree standard deviation of angular separation from ground truth, averaged over the beams.
This work was done by Mission Support and Test Services, LLC, under Contract No. DE-NA0003624 with the U.S. Department of Energy. DOE/NV/03624--1042.
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