DEPARTMENT OF PHYSICS, BAYLOR UNIVERSITY Our own Dr. Dwight Russell is slated to receive recognition for his teaching at the commencement ceremony on May 17th. Dr. Russell is to be honored with an Outstanding Faculty Award for Teaching by Tenured Faculty. Part of the nomination for Dr. Russell reads: “Dr. Russell has taught numerous graduate and undergraduate courses since he joined the Baylor faculty in 2001. Most notably, he has been teaching PHY 1455, Descriptive Astronomy, since Spring 2002 and it has come to be one of the most popular laboratory sci- ence courses on campus, filling its maximum enrollment of 300 students each semester. Students who have had Dr. Russell as an instructor in a course speak very highly of him. However, Dr. Russell is just as devoted to encouraging and mentoring stu- dents in their research activities. He has directed the research efforts of students and teachers in the Physics REU (Research Experience for Undergraduates) and RET (Research Experi- ence for Teachers) programs. Dr. Russell has been very active in the Texas Section of the American Physical Society (TSAPS), serving as Chair-elect and Chair in the last two years. As part of these duties he organized the student award competition and helped establish the Robert S. Hyer Award for students and their research advisor. The wholehearted support of his stu- dents and colleagues for his nomination for this honor speak volumes for how deserving he is.” Be sure to congratulate Dr. Russell the next time you see him. The entire department is very proud to have him as a part of our community! Dr. Dwight Russell to receive Teaching Award April Fool’s Day brings Classroom Demo And speaking of Dr. Russell, it seems he had a good bit of fun on April Fool’s Day “demonstrating” how a worm- hole works, theoretically allowing nearly instantaneous travel between two distant points in space. The demonstra- tion involved the two doors at the front of the lecture hall. For those of you who would like to see the demonstration, the department has actually posted a video of it to You- Tube. You can either visit the YouTube website and search for “Baylor wormhole” or type in/follow this link to the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wi1ZGL3bMV4 MAY/JUNE 2008 VOLUME 2, ISSUE 5 PHYSICS NEWSLETTER Special points of interest: • Alumni Bio of Chuck Willingham • Summer plans of department faculty • Service assignment changes for faculty • Presentations at society meetings • Papers published Inside this issue: Early dates in May 2 Alumni News 2 Graduating Seniors 3 Phase Transitions 4 Wedding Photos 4 Out and About 5 May & June Calendars 6 Dr. Russell will receive the recognition during the May Commencement ceremony.
Transcript
DEPARTMENT OF PHYSICS, BAYLOR UNIVERSITY
Our own Dr. Dwight Russell is slated to receive recognition for his teaching at the commencement ceremony on May 17th. Dr. Russell is to be honored with an Outstanding Faculty Award for Teaching by Tenured Faculty.
Part of the nomination for Dr. Russell reads: “Dr. Russell has taught numerous graduate and undergraduate courses since he joined the Baylor faculty in 2001. Most notably, he has been teaching PHY 1455, Descriptive Astronomy, since Spring 2002 and it has come to be one of the most popular laboratory sci-ence courses on campus, filling its maximum enrollment of 300 students each semester. Students who have had Dr. Russell as an instructor in a course speak very highly of him. However, Dr. Russell is just as devoted to encouraging and mentoring stu-dents in their research activities. He has directed the research efforts of students and teachers in the Physics REU (Research Experience for Undergraduates) and RET (Research Experi-ence for Teachers) programs. Dr. Russell has been very active in the Texas Section of the American Physical Society (TSAPS), serving as Chair-elect and Chair in the last two years. As part of these duties he organized the student award competition and helped establish the Robert S. Hyer Award for students and their research advisor. The wholehearted support of his stu-dents and colleagues for his nomination for this honor speak volumes for how deserving he is.”
Be sure to congratulate Dr. Russell the next time you see him. The entire department is very proud to have him as a part of our community!
Dr. Dwight Russell to receive Teaching Award
April Fool’s Day brings Classroom Demo
And speaking of Dr. Russell, it seems he had a good bit of fun on April Fool’s Day “demonstrating” how a worm-hole works, theoretically allowing nearly instantaneous travel between two distant points in space. The demonstra-tion involved the two doors at the front of the lecture hall. For those of you who would like to see the demonstration, the department has actually posted a video of it to You-Tube. You can either visit the YouTube website and search for “Baylor wormhole” or type in/follow this link to the video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wi1ZGL3bMV4
MAY/JUNE 2008 VOLUME 2, ISSUE 5
PHYSICS NEWSLETTER
Special points of interest:
• Alumni Bio of
Chuck Willingham
• Summer plans of
department faculty
• Service assignment
changes for faculty
• Presentations at
society meetings
• Papers published
Inside this issue:
Early dates in May 2
Alumni News 2
Graduating Seniors 3
Phase Transitions 4
Wedding Photos 4
Out and About 5
May & June Calendars 6
Dr. Russell will receive the recognition during the May Commencement ceremony.
At 6:00 a.m., Friday May 2, members of the Physics Department will be preparing breakfast for the homeless at First Lutheran Church, 1008 Jefferson. Breakfast will be over and the dishes washed in time for everyone to enjoy kola-ches and doughnuts at the SPS Friday morning coffee and doughnut hour.
On Friday, May 2, the Society of Physics Students will host a luncheon honoring our graduating seniors: Matthew Benesh, Kyle Lartigue, Meagan Vaitses, and Pamela Vo. At the luncheon, Sigma Pi Sigma will be inducting two new members, Kristin Combs and Eric Bunch.
Dr. Jay Dittmann has been invited to give a presentation this Friday, May 2, during a series of seminars for faculty and staff on advisement. The event is called "Day of the Advisor". Dr. Dittmann will speak on advisement from a profes-sor's perspective.
Dr. Jeffrey Olafsen has been invited to give a presentation at the International Symposium on Complexity in Materials far from Equilibrium being held at Virginia Tech from May 14th to May 16th. Dr. Olafsen will be giving a presenta-tion on recapturing thermostatistical descriptions of materials that are driven far from equilibrium, discussing results from a variety of experiments that are carried out in his lab here at Baylor University.
Early Events !
Alumni News Editor’s note—In our ongoing efforts to highlight alumni who have contacted us again to bring us up to speed on where they are and what they are now doing, we focus on another connection that has recently been re-established with the department.
Charles (Chuck) E. Willingham, Jr. received his BS degree in Mathematics and Minor in Physics from Baylor University in 1975. He followed this with a MS in Engineering at UT Austin in 1977. Charles then spent 12 years at TXU Energy in Dallas, TX performing reac-tor physics analysis and providing reactor operations support for the Comanche Peak Nuclear Power Plant near Fort Worth, TX. For the past 19 years, Chuck has been working at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington, focusing on prolif-eration issues of foreign nuclear materials and international border security.
The laboratory is operated for the benefit of the Department of Energy. He has com-pleted over twenty publications and presentations on nuclear related topics including papers for the Nuclear Science and Engineering Journal and International Reactor Physics meetings. His wife was recently (2006) back in Waco as part of a reunion and the couple enjoy visiting Texas whenever possible.
The website at www.pnl.gov has many interesting links, including job opportunities as well as Breakthroughs, their online magazine. Articles include telling the difference be-tween earthquakes and explosions that occur across the globe.
“There are a number of
opportunities for students
(actually graduate
students for that matter) at
national laboratories”
Page 2
PHYSICS NEWSLETTER
As they prepare to fling their green and gold afar, we would like to take one more opportunity to wish our graduating seniors all the best in their future endeavors. Our prayers go with Matthew Benesh, Kyle Lartigue, Meagan Vaitses, and Pamela Vo.
Congraduations! Page 3
VOLUME 2, ISSUE 5
Dr. Lorin Matthews has agreed to become our department's Recruitment Coordinator. She has recently organized a list of pro-spective physics majors for us to telephone. She is also arranging for our departmental brochure (which she assembled last year) to be professionally printed. If you have any suggestions for improving our recruitment effort, please contact Lorin. Dr. Dwight Russell has agreed to take over Lorin's former responsibility for computer laboratories and inventory. He will make sure that we have the necessary software licenses to support our teaching and research efforts. Dr. Greg Benesh, the department chair, would also like to thank Drs. Wickramasinghe Ariyasinghe (Ari), Lorin Matthews, and John Vasut for serving as a nominating committee for the outstanding faculty awards. For the first time in many years, deserving faculty members from our department were nominated in several of the categories. Congratulations to Dr. and Mrs. Abdou Abdel-Rehim on the birth of their baby daughter, Maraam, who was born on Wednesday, April 23rd. Congratulations to Mr. & Mrs. Samantha Hewamange, whose daughter, Senithi Chanulya, was born on April 28th. Sam Hewamanage has been accepted to attend the Third CERN-Fermilab Hadron Collider Physics Summer School that will be held at Fermilab from August 12-22, 2008. Sam has been awarded funding support and will be participating free of charge. University Scholar Windrik Lynch successfully defended his thesis, "Laser Beam Profiling from an Electrically Stimulated W-well Semiconductor," on April 29. This work was directed by Dr. Linda Olafsen. Dr. Linda Kinslow and Dr. Rizalia Klausmeyer (Chemistry) served as committee members. Dr. Anzhong Wang will this summer pay a visit to the State University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to work together with some col-laborators there for about two months (middle of May to Middle of July). Then, he will pay a visit to the Institute of Theoretical Physics, Chinese Academy, Beijing for one month. Dr. Walter Wilcox and his postdoctoral fellow, Abdou Abdel-Rehim will be traveling to Williamsburg, VA to attend the XXVI In-ternational Symposium on Lattice Field Theory, July 14-19, 2008. Mike Hutcheson is working on configuring the HP cluster (Kodiak) for submitting performance data to the “Top 500” list of the world’s fastest computers. The additional air conditioning capacity has been installed to enable running on all 1024 processors. Joe McCulloch accepted the job of the BSB machinist on Friday, March 31. Joe has experience in upgrading machine shop equipment to handle command and control (CnC) software. Welcome aboard, Joe! A couple of pictures from Matthew & Emily Benesh’s wedding reception!
Phase Transitions … Page 4
PHYSICS NEWSLETTER
• Dr. Gerald Cleaver was a coordinator and panel discussion member of the 26-27 March Wheaton College (Wheaton, IL) 2-day symposium, entitled String Theory and the Multiverse: Philosophical and Theological Impli-cations. At the symposium Gerald presented a 60 minute lecture on The String Landscape and Multiverse, the Anthropic Principle, & Anselm’s Ontological Argument. On March 28th Dr. Cleaver also presented the lecture at Valparaiso University, Valparaiso, IN. On April 10-12 Gerald represented Baylor as one of 16 universities form-ing the North American String Vacuum Project (SVP). The first meeting of the North American SVP collaboration was held at the University of Arizona in Tucson. The goal of the SVP is to develop a better understanding of gen-eral properties of the vast string landscape through better coordination and more open sharing of research find-ings between string model research groups. The European community formed a similar SVP collaboration ear-lier this year and sent a representative to the U. of Arizona meeting. At the meeting Gerald presented a 60 min-ute lecture on Further Systematic Investigations of the Heterotic String Landscape (at Baylor). On April 15th Ge-rald presented a condensed version of the lecture at the American Physical Society Conference in St. Louis. In May/June Gerald will be teaching a minimester graduate special topics course on String Cosmology. This sum-mer Gerald will continue researching heterotic strings and string cosmology on campus. He will conclude the summer by attending Strings ’08 at CERN, in Geneva, Switzerland, 18-23 August.
• Baylor grad students Samantha Hewamanage and Martin Frank, along with Dr. Jay Dittmann, attended the April Meeting of the American Physical Society in St. Louis, Missouri, from April 12-15, 2008. Sam gave a presentation entitled "Search for Anomalous Production of Gamma + Jets + Missing Transverse Energy," which describes a signature-based, model-independent search for physics beyond the Standard Model at the Fermilab Tevatron collider. This analysis is being peformed by Sam with Nils Krumnack, Jay Dittmann, Ray Culbertson, and Sasha Pronko. Sam was awarded a $300 Graduate School Travel Award to provide partial support for travel expenses. Martin Frank and Sam Hewamanage each recently completed a 3-month term of duty as "ACE" for the Collder Detector at Fermilab experiment. The CDF experiment collects data from proton-antiproton collisions almost constantly, and a three-person shift crew is on duty 24 hours a day to operate the detector, monitor the experi-mental apparatus, and verify the data quality. The "ACE" is the member of the shift crew in charge of controlling the data-taking systems for the 5000-ton detector. Not an easy job! Congratulations, Martin and Sam! Jay Ditt-mann, leader of the Experimental High Energy Physics group, was awarded a 3-year grant renewal totaling $240,000 from the U.S. Department of Energy. This grant provides support for Baylor's participation on the CDF experiment at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, IL. Jay recently served as the leader of the review committee for an analysis of momentum correlations of particles in hadronic jets produced in proton-antiproton collisions. This measurement, entitled "Two-particle momentum correlations in jets produced in pro-ton-antiproton collisions at 1.96 TeV" was recently accepted for publication in Physical Review D. As leader of the review committee, Dr. Dittmann thoroughly reviewed the data analysis and edited significant portions of the publication.
• Dr. Lorin Matthews will assist in directing the summer REU/RET program, mentor two students in the High School Summer Scholars Research Program, and present paper and posters at the 37th COSPAR Scientific As-sembly, Montreal, Canada, 13 - 20 July 2008.
• Dr. Linda Olafsen will be working on a summer sabbatical, "Non-Destructive Measurement of Layer Thickness and Refractive Index in Semicondutor Heterostructures." In addition to this project, which will extensively utilize new step-scan Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy equipment, optical pumping characterication of several semiconductor quantum well laser structures will be performed. Graduate students Angela Douglass and Alex Price will join her in the Semiconductor Laser Optics laboratory to accomplish this research. Linda delivered the Condensed Matter Seminar in the Department of Physics at Texas A&M University on April 23. The title of her talk was "Resonantly Pumped Optical Pumping Injection Cavity Lasers."
• Dr. Walter Wilcox attended the USQCD consortium “All Hands Meeting”, April 5 and 6, 2008 at Thomas Jeffer-son National Lab. The proposal, “External Field Simulations Using Dynamical Clover fermions”, for 292,500 CPU hours on Jefferson Lab clusters (computer resourses dedicated to lattice QCD) was presented by Dr. Frank X. Lee, his collaborator from George Washington University. 256,000 CPU hours were awarded. Walter has re-ceived an additional 200,000 CPU hours from the Texas Advanced ComputingCenter (TACC). This became avail-able due to Baylor’s acceptance as a member of the High Performance Computing Across Texas (HiPCAT) con-sortium.
• Accelerating Universe in Randall-Sundrum Models of Two 3-Branes. A. Wang, R.-G. Cai, N.O. Santos, Nucl. Phys. B797, 395-430 (2008) [arXiv:astro-ph/0607371].
Out and About … Page 5
VOLUME 2, ISSUE 5
DEPARTMENT OF PHYSICS, BAYLOR UNIVERSITY
May 2008 SUN MON TUE WED THU FRI SAT
UG Research Presentations April 30 4pm & May 2 3pm E.125 BSB
