My name is Louis Varriano, I'm a physics undergraduate in my second year,
and my advisor is Dr. Yuri Kamyshkov.
I'm involved with theoretical physics research
looking at what the structure of dark matter is.
Research and UT's relationship with ORNL 
was one of the major factors in my decision, even to apply.
Its proximity and its interconnectedness with it's faculty
have been really, really beneficial to my education.
So, about 4 percent of the universe we know about,
that's what we call luminous matter.
The rest is made up of 75 percent dark energy 
and about 23 percent dark matter,
and those two things we don't really understand them.
Dark matter is this kind of unknown entity
we're not really sure what it is.
We know it exists, we don't really know what it looks like,
or how it interacts with other things.
We know dark matter interacts gravitationally with ordinary matter
and so that's one of the key components
of any models that you can come up with.
The model I work on is called the mirror matter model
which theorizes that dark matter
has the same structure as ordinary matter.
So the interactions between the dark matter particles,
which we think exist,
are the same and identical to
the ones that exist in our ordinary universe.
It's really thought provoking
and it's really imaginative,
 which is exciting in an undergraduate experience
because our curriculum is mostly set in stone.
We learn the very basics of what
the basics of physics look like
and we don't really expand beyond that 
besides what's been done the past couple hundred years.
So doing this research, is really on the tip 
of what our knowledge is and that's really exciting to do.
My name is Louis Varriano.
This is my research.
