Ph.D. candidate in physics · University of Michigan

Ethan Todd

Nuclear measurement, detector physics, and the software around them.

$ nix develop github:ewtodd/Analysis-Utilities
ROOT 6.38 · CUDA 13 · analysis-utilities ready
$ root -l fit.cpp+
unbinned EML fit · 4.1M events
  GPU doEval ......... 6.2 s
  # was ~2 min on the OpenMP path
Detector physics C++ · CUDA · Nix 7 publications Ann Arbor, MI ORCID 0009-0003-5162-9044
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01 · Work

Nuclear measurement, and the software that makes it defensible

I am a physics Ph.D. candidate at the University of Michigan, working in the Applied Nuclear Science Group and, since summer 2026, with the Low Energy Physics Group at Argonne National Laboratory. The measurements I work on are low-rate and background-limited: an ionization yield at a few hundred electron volts of nuclear recoil, a 68.75 keV transition sitting under a Compton continuum, an (α, n) cross section reconstructed from four digitizers that were never synchronised.

What those have in common is that the physics result is only as good as the chain that produced it. So I write that chain: binary readers that keep up with disk, waveform processing that is the same on every run, likelihood fits whose components are chosen by a search rather than by hand, and a build system that makes any of it reproducible on someone else’s machine a year later.

The code is open, documented, and pinned with Nix. The API references are generated from the same commit that builds the libraries, and the fleet that serves them is described in its own repository too.

03 · Publications

Selected publications

Newest first. The full list, with presentations, teaching and awards, is on the CV.

  1. Super-Lindhard Ionization from 254 eVnr Nuclear Recoils in Germanium

    A. R. L. Kavner, E. Todd, M. Babicz, et al.

    2026 under review

  2. Digital Pulse Processing for Mixed-Field Ionizing Radiation Detection in Rare-Event Nuclear Experiments

    V. Fondement, J. Bae, F. Rahman, et al.

    Fusion Science and Technology 2026 in press

  3. Updated 78mBr 2→1+ Lifetime from Isomeric Decay Cascade in Active Target

    V. Fondement, E. Todd, I. Jovanovic

    Nuclear Physics A 2026 doi:10.1016/j.nuclphysa.2026.123485