David PesciThis issue, we ask “5 Questions” of Greg Voth, associate professor of physics. Q: Professor Voth, what are your primary areas of research and how did you become involved in them? A: My research group studies turbulent fluid flows and flows of granular materials. These complex systems have a wide range of environmental and industrial applications, but fundamental understanding of these systems has been held back because of the difficulty of measuring rapidly changing flow fields. Advances in high speed digital imaging over the past two decades have opened new ways to measure the trajectories of particles transported by these…
Olivia DrakeThe Wesleyan McNair Program assists students from underrepresented groups in preparing for, entering, and progressing successfully through post-graduate education. The program provides guidance, research opportunities, and academic and financial support to students planning to go on to Ph.Ds. All fields of research leading to a Ph.D. are eligible. In efforts to prepare undergraduates from diverse backgrounds for graduate studies, the McNair Program hosts a series of research talks. These talks are designed for interested, non-expert, students. They are free and open to all students. The next McNair Research Talk will take place from noon to 1 p.m., Friday, April 15…
This issue, we ask “5 Questions” of Bill Trousdale, professor of physics, emeritus. He recently lectured on “Global Warming and Energy Options" and "The Pros and Cons of Nuclear Energy." Q: Professor Trousdale, you researched solid state physics at Wesleyan for 30 years, retiring in 1989. Did you always have a side interest in energy creation, consumption and global warming? A: Yes for almost as long as I can remember, in the early 1950s when I learned about the second law of thermodynamics. I was appalled by burning oil at 2,000 degrees to maintain a house at 72 degrees. That…
Christina Othon, assistant professor of physics, is the co-author of "Hydration Dynamics at Fluorinated Protein Surfaces," published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107 in 2010.
The American Physical Society awarded Chia Wei "Wade" Hsu ’10 with its prestigious LeRoy Apker Award for his achievements while at Wesleyan. The American Physical Society awards the Apker Award to only one student from a Ph.D-granting institution each year. Reinhold Blümel, the Charlotte Agusta Ayres Professor of Physics, calls it a "mini-Nobel Prize." The award provides encouragement to young physicists who have demonstrated great potential for future scientific accomplishment. “This means that Wade out-competed students from MIT, Stanford, Harvard, Princeton and CalTech,” says Wade's former advisor Francis Starr, associate professor of physics. “He’s the best of the best.” On…
The Department of Physics welcomes Christina Othon as an assistant professor. This semester, Othon is teaching a graduate level course called Advanced Topics in Condensed Matter. It is an introductory soft condensed matter physics course that encompasses the physical, mechanical and thermodynamic properties of liquids, colloids, polymers and biological systems. She’s also teaching an upper-level undergraduate laboratory called Experimental Optics, where students learn about the propagation of light, diffraction and polarization. In her own research, Othon uses ultrafast fluorescence spectroscopy to investigate changes in protein-solvent interactions during protein structural transitions. She has also investigated the modificatio (more…)
Tom Morgan, professor of physics; John Wright Ph.D '06; Jack DiSciacca '07 and Jonathan Lambert (who attended Wesleyan 2002-2010) are the co-authors of an article published in The Physical Review A, June 2010. The publication focuses on the first observation of the semi-classical scattering dynamics of a Rydberg electron with its molecular core. The system is molecular hydrogen veiled in a strong electric field.
Tsampikos Kottos, assistant professor of physics, received a grant worth $116,634 from the Department of the Air Force for a study titled “Ab initio approach to nonlinear dynamics of collective excitations in networks of coupled optical Microresonators.” The grant will be applied through July 2013. The grant is shared with CUNY College.
Carl West ’11, Tsampikos Kottos, assistant professor of physics, and Tomas Prosen of the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia, are the co-authors of an article titled “PT-Symmetric Wave Chaos,” published in Physical Review Letters 104 in 2010. "This work studied the universal properties of this crossover and demonstrated that a simple scaling function could embody the effects of such dramatically different changes as increasing the system size, varying the initial energy, or having varying degrees of imperfections / disorder in the system," West explains. "While these results were obtained from a toy model, they carry direct applications to optics where…
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Tsampikos Kottos, assistant professor of physics; Joshua Bodyfelt Ph.D '09; and Mei Zheng '10 are the co-authors of the paper "Fidelity in Quasi-1D Systems as a Probe for Anderson Localization," published in Acta Physica Polonica A, Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Quantum Chaos and Localisation Phenomena, Warsaw, in 2009. They wrote the paper with Ulrich Kuhl, and Hans-Jürgen Stöckmann, who are collaborators from the University of Marburg. This publication is part of the conference proceedings for a workshop at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw where Kottos presented this past summer. The combined theoretical and experimental work done in this…