Laurie KenneyWesleyan’s Green Street Teaching and Learning Center has received a $12,500 grant from the Petit Family Foundation to support the center's Girls in Science Summer Camp. Green Street Director Sara MacSorley accepted the gift from Dr. William Petit. The Green Street Girls in Science Summer Camp will take place August 3 - 7 and will be open to girls entering grades 4, 5, and 6. Erika Taylor, assistant professor of chemistry, assistant professor of environmental studies, Ruth Johnson, assistant professor of biology, and Christina Othon, assistant professor of physics, will participate in the five-day program, covering topics from biochemistry to physics and culminating…
Olivia DrakeChristina Othon and Erika Taylor, along with physics graduate student Nimesh Shukla, Lee Chen ’15, Inha Cho ’15 and Erin Cohn ’15, are the co-authors of a paper titled “Sucralose Destabilization of Protein Structure” published in The Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters, March 2015. Othon is assistant professor of physics and was PI on the paper. Taylor is assistant professor of chemistry, assistant professor of environmental studies. Sucralose is a commonly employed artificial sweetener that behaves very differently than its natural disaccharide counterpart, sucrose, in terms of its interaction with biomolecules. This research suggests that people may need to think about the impact…
Lauren Rubenstein#THISISWHY For many years, pilots in the Air Force, scientists conducting research with high-powered lasers, and others have struggled to protect their eyes and sensitive equipment from being damaged by intense laser pulses. In many cases, this was achieved by intense power filters, which offered protection, but self-destructed. Now they have a solution, which provides protection without damaging the filters themselves, thanks to a research collaboration between the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) and a team of researchers in Wesleyan's Physics Department. The research, led by Tsampikos Kottos, the Douglas J. and Midge Bowen Bennet Associate Professor of Physics, is included…
Lutz Huwel, professor of physics, and Thomas Morgan, the Foss Professor of Physics, are the co-authors of an article titled "Investigating the dynamics of laser induced sparks in atmospheric helium using Rayleigh and Thomson scattering," published in the Journal of Applied Physics, Volume 117 in January 2015. The paper describes the use of two laser systems to prepare and study a helium plasma, and draws on an extensive international collaboration. The electron density and temperature of the plasma are measure as a function of time and space with high precision. The work has important impact in the area of laser induced…
A study co-authored by Graduate Research Assistant Eleana Makri and two other Wesleyan researchers is a topic of a Oct. 20 article published in Scientific Reports. Due to the ultrahigh-speed and ultrawide-band brought by adopting photons as information carriers, photonic integration has been a long-term pursuit for researchers, which can break the performance bottleneck incurred in modern semiconductor-based electronic integrated circuits. The article states that "recently, Makri theoretically proposed the concept of reflective power limiter based on nonlinear localized modes, where a nonlinear layer was sandwiched by two reflective mirrors, thus increased the device complexity." The report is based on Makri's study, titled "Non-Linear Localized Modes Give Rise…
Tsampikos Kottos and Ali Basiri, a Ph.D. student in physics, are co-authors of a paper titled "Light localization induced by a random imaginary refractive index," published in Physical Review A 90, on Oct. 13, 2014. Kottos is the Douglas J. and Midge Bowen Bennet Associate Professor of Physics. In the paper, the authors show the emergence of light localization in arrays of coupled optical waveguides with randomness.
Paul Hanakata '14 was named a finalist for the American Physical Society's prestigious Leroy Apker Award, the highest prize offered in the United States for an undergraduate thesis in physics. He will compete to win the award this month. The Apker Award was created to recognize outstanding achievements in physics by undergraduate students, and thereby provide encouragement to young physicists who have demonstrated great potential for future scientific accomplishment. At Wesleyan, Hanakata received high honors for his Wesleyan thesis titled, "Cooperative Dynamics in Supported Polymer Films," under his advisor, Francis Starr, professor of physics and director of the College of Integrative Sciences. In…
Fifth graders from Snow Elementary School in Middletown toured Wesleyan's astronomy, biology, chemistry, physics and scientific imaging departments on June 18, 2014. Students also visited the Joe Webb Peoples Museum and Collections in Exley Science Center. (more…)
Reinhold Blümel, the Charlotte Augusta Ayres Professor of Physics, and physics graduate student Yunseong Nam are the co-authors of "Robustness of the quantum Fourier transform with respect to static gate defects," published in Physical Review A, Issue 89, in April 2014. The quantum Fourier transform (QFT) is one of the most widely used quantum algorithms, ranging from its primary role in finding the periodicity hidden in a quantum state to its use in constructing a quantum adder.
Mike SembosThe U.S. Air Force has taken a keen interest in the recent work of Tsampikos Kottos, the Douglas J. and Midge Bowen Bennet Associate Professor of Physics. Kottos, along with Graduate Research Assistant Eleana Makri, Hamidreza Ramezani Ph.D. '13 (now a postdoc at U.C. Berkeley) and Dr. Ilya Vitebskiy (AFRL/Ohio), has come up with a theoretical way to build a more effective, reusable power limiter. Generally speaking, the function of a power limiter is to protect a sensor — be it the human eye, an antenna, or other sensitive equipment — from high-intensity radiation, like that generated by high-power lasers. Kottos, Makri, Ramezani…
Tsampikos 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.…