Accelerated Particles vs. Metastatic Cells (New Mexico Supercomputing Challenge)

Kevin Clay, Ryan Cortez and Jeremy Wright, V.

Sue Cleveland High, Rio Rancho, NM (New Mexico Supercomputing Challenge)

TITLE: Accelerated Particles vs. Metastatic Cells

ABSTRACT: Cancer is often a highly debilitating disease in most animal species. Radiation and chemotherapy are common modern treatments, yet these can prove harmful and can leave lasting consequences even after their treatment. Particle accelerators allow for high amounts of energy to be delivered through small spaces and allow for accuracy on the atomic level. This project was initially intended to model the collisions of various particles with cancerous cells, collisions that could be replicated in the real world with actual cancerous tissues in a particle accelerator to create enough heat to kill the cell. This model, coded and visualized in NetLogo, would display particle motion and make calculations to determine whether a cancerous entity the particle would collide with would be destroyed by the heat (a reflection the real world would hopefully represent). Our final project, while limiting in particle variability, does accurately track electron motion at near-light speeds (including accounts for mass-variations at such speeds) and displays gradients of energy transfer during collision with metastatic (cancerous) cells. Our program tackles this task from a mainly physics based point of view.

Back to Swarmfest2010_program