Olivia DrakeTsampikos Kottos, the Douglas J. and Midge Bowen Bennet Associate Professor of Physics, received a $575,000 grant from the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research's Multidisciplinary University Research Program (MURI). MURI is a basic research program sponsored by the U.S. Department of Defense. The award will support Kottos' study on “PT-Summetric Optical Materials" through April 2017. During this time, Kottos will develop a theoretical framework for Parity-Time (PT) Symmetric Optics using mainly polymetric platforms. Additionally, efforts will be made towards identifying other platforms/areas where PT-Symmetric ideas can be applied. Kottos will be coordinating his research with faculty at the University of…
Natalie Robichaud ’14Hamidreza (Hamid) Ramezani Ph.D. ’13, recently won the Biruni Graduate Student Research Award. The award aims to promote and recognize outstanding research by a physics graduate student of Iranian heritage who is currently studying in one of the institutions of higher education in the United States, seeking originality, thoroughness, a teamwork spirit and ownership among the candidates. The honor comes with a cash award. Before graduating with his Ph.D. from Wesleyan in November, Ramezani studied cosmology and gravitational physics while earning his master’s degree at the University of Tehran. He completed his bachelor study in solid state physics at Sahed University.…
Three Wesleyan faculty members received endowed professorships for the 2013-14 academic year. Tsampikos Kottos, associate professor of physics, is being honored with the Douglas J. and Midge Bowen Bennet Chair. The Bennet Chair, endowed in 2007, is awarded for a five-year term to "a newly tenured associate professor exhibiting exceptional achievement and evidence of future promise." Ashraf Rushdy, professor of English, professor of African-American studies, is being awarded the Benjamin L. Waite Professorship in English Language, first appointed in 1911. Philip Scowcroft, professor of mathematics, is receiving the Edward Burr Van Vleck Professorship in Mathematics. The Van Vleck chair was…
Research on PT-symmetric optics by Tsampikos Kottos, associate professor of physics, was mentioned at the 2012 Spring Review of the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. In this meeting, program directors from AFOSR Scientific Directorates presented briefings that highlighted basic research programs beneficial to the U.S. Air Force. The review took place March 5-9. Kottos's work appears on page 26 of this presentation.
A paper written by two faculty members and three undergraduates was published in the American Physical Society's Physical Review A, Volume 84, on Oct. 13. Their paper was one of six highlighted in the publication's Physics Focus and This Week in Physics. The paper is titled "Experimental study of active LRC circuits with PT symmetries." The authors include Tsampikos Kottos, associate professor of physics; Fred Ellis, professor of physics, Joseph Schindler '12, Ang Li '13 and Mei Zheng '10. The abstract of the paper is online here.
Tsampikos Kottos, associate professor of physics, received a grant worth $140,121 from the National Science Foundation on Sept. 1. The grant will support a project titled "IDR:Novel Photonic Materials and Devices based on Non-Hermitian Optics" through August 2014. Kottos is collaborating with faculty from Southern Methodist University, University of Central Florida, University of Arkansas and Yale University.
David PesciWesleyan is pleased to announce that during its most recent review, the Board awarded tenure to four faculty effective July 1, 2011. Ulrich Plass, associate professor of German studies, joined the Wesleyan faculty in 2004 as assistant professor. Plass is a specialist in German literature, literary criticism, and critical theory, with a particular focus on the works of the German philosopher Theodor Adorno. He conducted his undergraduate studies at the University of Hamburg, Germany; his M.A. is from the University of Michigan, (more…)
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…
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…
Tsampikos Kottos, assistant professor of physics, and physics and mathematics major Gim Seng Ng '08 are co-authors of "Avalanches of Bose-Einstein condensates in leaking optical lattices," published in New Journal of Physics, 11, 073045 in 2009. The paper is about novel properties of Bose-Einstein condensates (ultra-cold atoms) in open systems. This project constituted a large part of Ng's senior honors thesis in physics.
Tsampikos Kottos, assistant professor of physics, is the co-author of "Exponentially Fragile PT-Symmetry in lattices with Localized Eigenmodes," published in Physical Review Letters 103,030,402 in 2009. The paper discusses the effects of disorder on a previously excluded class of quantum mechanical systems.