David Mathews Headshot

David G Mathews

Fast Neutron Spectrometry and Imaging Scientist

David Mathews is a Fast Neutron Spectrometry and Imaging Scientist within the Radiation Imaging and Advanced Diagnostics Group (RIAD) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). He holds a PhD in Physics from the University of Kentucky (UK) where he conducted research for the Nab experiment, a fundamental neutron physics experiment at ORNL. His thesis project was on the development of a high-performance custom DAQ system developed using National Instruments FPGA hardware/software for the Nab experiment, as well as on extracting a beyond the standard model physics parameter from the beta decay spectrum of Calcium-45. As a post-doctoral researcher at ORNL, he developed massive Monte-Carlo particle scale spin-tracking simulations for the nEDM@SNS experiment leveraging both CPUs and GPUs on cutting edge computing technology from AMD and Nvidia. Presently he works within the RIAD group at ORNL developing FPGA firmware, high-throughput data processing routines, and detector hardware for a variety of projects. 

  • MacAdam Fellowship - University of Kentucky Physics Department
  • DOE SC-GSR
  • University of Kentucky - Bachelors in Physics - 2016
  • University of Kentucky - PhD in Physics - 2022
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  • A Flexible Data Acquisition System Architecture for the Nab Experiment
  • Delta-Rice: A HDF5 Compression Plugin optimized for Digitized Detector Data 
  • Precision pulse shape simulation for proton detection at the Nab experiment
    • Physics Review C 107, 6 (2023)
    • L. Hayen, et al.
  • High Performance Data Acquisition and Analysis Routines for the Nab Experiment
    • PhD Dissertation for the University of Kentucky (2022)
    • D. G. Mathews
  • Using Nab to determine correlations in unpolarized neutron decay
    • Hyperfine Interact 240, 1 (2019)
    • L. J. Broussard, et al.
  • The Nab experiment: A precision measurement of unpolarized neutron beta decay 
    • EPJ Web Conf., 219 (2019) 04002 
    • J. Fry, et al.
  • Analytic saddlepoint approximation for ionization energy loss distributions 
    • Nuclear Instruments & Methods in Physics Research Section B Beam Interactions With Materials and Atoms, 2017, Volume 207 
    • Sky Sjue, Richard George, David Mathews