Physics and Astronomy Seminar

Fall 2006 Schedule

Tuesdays 11:30 am (refreshments at 11:20 am)
217 Lathrop Hall

TRAVEL DIRECTIONS FOR SPEAKERS

• August 29:            Department Mixer: Say hello and meet new friends and faculty.

• September 5:        Summer Student Research Presentations:  Michael Nitzberg '08 "Study of Crater Formation in Granular Media"; Devin Edwards '07 "Breathers and Vortices in Josephson Junction Ladders"; Bryce Gadway '07 "Using Quantum State Tomography to Purify a Bell State"

• September 12:    Summer Student Research Presentations:  Brendan Mullan '07 "Galaxy Interactions in the Hubble Deep Field: Shrimps and Antennae"; Dobromir Kamburov '07 "TBA"; Jason Smith '07 "Dynamic FRET in the Presence of Coexisting Membrane Domains"

• September 19:      Mark Semon (CU'71), Dept. of Physics, Bates College "Thomas Rotation in Special Relativity:  When v₁ + v₂ ≠ v₂ + v₁"

• September 26:      Henry Sztul (CU'01), Physics Ph.D. Student, Institute for Ultrafast Spectroscopy and Lasers, NASA Center of Optical Sensing and Imaging  "Icicles and Doughnuts:  A Discussion of Optics at the Institute"

• October 3:             Summer Student Research Presentations:  Peter Shively '08 "Optical Monitoring of Quasar 3C 345 and Exponential Outbursts"; Katy Fallows '08 "Optical Variability of Blazar 3C 279"

• October 10:           Richard Mallozzi, Ph.D., Magnetic Resonance Specialist, GE Global Research,

   "Magnetic Resonance Imaging: Physics and Applications"

• October 17:          No seminar, mid-semester break.

• October 24:          Summer Student Research Presentations:  Nikhil Fernandes '08 "Amplitude Crossover in Small Junction Ratchets"; Nikolay Zhelev '09 "Trapping and Rotating Objects with Laguerre-Gaussian Beams"; Konstantinos Vilaetis '08 "Nanosieves made by Laser Interference for Pinning Magnetic Vortices on Thin Superconducting Films"; Ushnish Ray '08 "Classical and Quantum Ratchets with Josephson Junctions" 

• October 31:         Richie Patterson, Professor of Physics, Cornell University, "Big Messages from Small Particles:  How we detect elementary particles, and what they tell us about nature"

• November 7:        Summer Student Research Presentations: Alison Andrews '07 "Testing of a Purity Monitor for the XENON Dark Matter Search"; Santiago Reyes '08 and Charles Bwalya '07 "Probe Partitioning FRET and Lipid-Raft Mixtures" Sean Baumann '08 "Diffraction Patterns of Lauerre-Gauss Beams in Integer and Non-Integer Modes"

• November 14:      Dr. Craig van Horne, Physician and Brain Expert, Brigham and Women Hospital, Boston, MA, "Biophysical Considerations of Deep Brain Stimulation:  A Strange Landscape"

• November 21:      No seminar, Thanksgiving break.

• November 28:     Alan Grossfield, Biomolecular Dynamics and Scalable Modeling, Blue Gene Project, IBM T. J. Watson Research Center "The role of the environment in rhodopsin function: Insights from molecular dynamics simulation" (combined seminar with Chemistry)

Spring 2007 Schedule

• January 23:      Patrick Crotty, Department of Neurological Surgery, University of Virginia Health System  “Energy, Information, and Evolution:  The Optimization of Biological Nervous Systems for Energy Consumption and Information Rates”

• January 30:      Kingshuk Majumdar, Assistant Professor of Physics, Berea College, KY,  "Ultra-cold bosons in an optical lattice"

• February 1:      Darrell Schroeter, Department of Physics, Occidental College, CA, "Flatland : Physics in Two Dimensions"

• February 6:      Lea Ferreira dos Santos, Department of Physics and Astronomy, Dartmouth College, "Exploring the Quantum World: From Entanglement and Chaos to Quantum Computers, Transport, and Control"

• February 13:    Lea Vacca (CU'02), Graduate Program, Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics, University of Rochester, "The Effects of Conformational Dynamics on Cytochrome c Function"  (combined seminar with Chemistry and Biology departments) (held in 209 Lathrop)

• February 20:    Erin Sheets, Assistant Professor of Chemistry, Penn State University, "Life as a Lipid: Rafts, Dynamics & Interactions"  (combined seminar with Biology)

• February 27:     Student Summer Research:  faculty will discuss their summer research plans.

• March 6:          No seminar (APS March meeting)

• March 13:        No seminar, mid-semester break.

• March 20:        Electronics Arcade:  Physics 282 Electronics and Instrumentations Presentations (to be held in 157 Lathrop) - light lunch provided

• March 27:        Christopher Gerry, Professor of Physics, Lehman College (CUNY), "Quantum Precision Measurements: The Entanglement Advantage"

• April 3:            Kurt Andresen, School of Applied and Engineering Physics, Cornell University "Electrostatics in Biology: Simple Equations, Complex Behavior"

• April 10:          Woo-Joong Kim, Department of Physics & Astronomy, Dartmouth College, "Exploring Casimir Effects in Quantum Vacuum: Is Vacuum Really Empty?"

• April 17:          Joe Shiang, GE Global Research, Corporate Research and Development, "Organic Light Emitting Devices for Lighting: New Approaches"

• April 24:          Douglas Durian, Professor, Physics & Astronomy Department, University of Pennsylvania, "Unified force law for impact cratering in loose granular media"

Other Events in Spring 2007

• April 13-15:    Retirement Celebration for Professor Shimon Malin (for details, click here)