FYAST FLYER
The Department of Physics & Astronomy
The University of Oklahoma
Volume 11, Number 2 · Spring, 2003 · Dick Henry, Editor; Sonya Brindle, Production
Website: http://www.nhn.ou.edu
FYAST FLYER
The Department of Physics & Astronomy
The University of Oklahoma
Volume 11, Number 2 · Spring, 2003 · Dick Henry, Editor; Sonya Brindle, Production
Website: http://www.nhn.ou.edu
BRAD
ABBOTT AND THE D0 PROJECT
by Mike Strauss
Brad Abbott has been the
co-convener of the D0 (D-Zero) B physics group for almost two years. The D0 detector is one of the two large
detectors at the Fermilab Tevatron, which is currently the highest energy
particle accelerator in the world. The
B physics group is responsible for using
this detector for
studying the properties of b quarks produced in p-pbar collisions at the
Tevatron. Currently there are over 15
graduate students and numerous post-docs and professors working on analyses in
this group. Organizing and directing
this many people, as well as keeping track ofvarious analyses, keeps Brad quite
busy.
Brad
Abbott during a restful moment outside of Nielsen Hall.
During
the past two years the experiment has undergone a transformation from building
and commissioning the upgraded detector to producing high quality physics
results. For the next few years the Tevatron will be the only laboratory in the
world capable of doing the kind of analysis done by Brad and his colleagues in
the B physics group, which makes this an exciting time to be working at the D0
experiment.
Ultimately, the B
physics analyses from D0 may help discover the source of CP violation, one
mechanism for producing the matter-antimatter anisotropy of the universe, or
find evidence
for particle-antiparticle
mixing in the B sector.
Current B physics
results from D0 were recently
presented at the APS/DPF
conference in Philadelphia. These
results included a measurement of the B lifetime, and observations of exclusive B decays and cross sections.
Brad recently presented
a seminar at Fermilab whichcovered many of the recent B physics results from
D0, as well as D0 analyses covering Quantum Chromodynamics, Electroweak
and Top physics, and
searches for the Higgs particle.
The detector is continuing
to collect data, and as the size of the data set increases the D0 collaboration
expects more exciting results.
Measurements of CP violation, B mixing, and rare B decays may place
tight constraints on the Standard Model of particles and fields, and may lead
to incredible new insights into the structure and origin of the universe.
\\\\\
NIELSEN HALL EXPANSION
by
Ryan Doezema
The
second addition to Nielsen Hall is about to be built! Formally known as “Phase II,” the addition is the second of three
steps in renovating and expanding our teaching and research facilities. Phase I, the beautiful teaching addition to
the west of old Nielsen Hall, was completed in spring 2000. The final phase will be the complete
renovation of old Nielsen Hall, built in 1948.
Phase
II will be connected to the south side of old Nielsen Hall, facing the South
Oval. The walkway between Nielsen Hall
and Gittinger Hall will be preserved as will a green space between the two
buildings bounded by Phases I and II on the west and east.
The
new addition will have three floors and a basement. All four levels will be connected to the old building by hallways
running north/south just to the east of the elevator shaft in the old building. The basement will provide new space for our
“junior lab.” It will also contain a
large mechanical unit to furnish “make up” air to basement laboratories to
replenish air exhausted by fume hoods.
The other three floors will provide 30 faculty offices and 3 small
conference rooms (one per floor). The
addition will be separated from the old building by an atrium, which will have
a Foucault pendulum and space for our daily tea.
Nielsen Hall was built in
1946 and was named after Jens Rud Nielsen (1894-1979) at his retirement in
1965. The view is to the SSW; Purcell is completely invisible in the
background.
Moving
faculty offices out of old Nielsen Hall will permit space reallocation, mostly
for research. The ultimate conversion
will take place when Phase III is funded, but already in Phase II some
improvements in addition to providing “make up” air will take place. Fire protection sprinklers will be installed
in the entire old building. Also new
mechanical units to provide heat and air to the old building as well as to the
new office addition will take the place of the current units. The second-floor library will expand by
about 75%, a new seminar room suitable for video conferences will be
constructed on the first floor, and each floor will have 2 new post-doc
offices.
The
construction of the addition is scheduled to be completed in less than a year
and the improvements to old Nielsen Hall should take less than 3 months. So we are hopeful Phase II will be finished
by the start of the 2004/2005 academic year!
\\\\\
ALUMNI
NEWS
From Tom Miller:
A recent paper submitted to
the Journal of Chemical Physics,
"The Reaction HCl+ +CF4
=HCF4+ +Cl: Implications for the Heat of Formation of CF3+,”
by Eldon Ferguson, Tom Miller and Al Viggiano resulted from a collaboration
involving two former OU physicists.
Eldon received his PhD with J. Rud Nielsen in 1953. Tom was a professor
at OU from 1978 to 1994. Viggiano received his PhD with Eldon at the University
of Colorado in 1980 and presently directs the Plasma Chemistry Laboratory at
the Air Force Research Laboratory outside Boston, where the research was
carried out.
The paper resolves a
long-standing controversy over the ionization energy of carbon
tetrafluoride. The problem arises
because of the drastic geometry change that results when tetrahedral CF4
is ionized, yielding planar CF3+ plus a free F atom. (CF4+ itself is not
stable.) Conventional photoionization
or electron impact thresholds give vertical ionization energies rather than the
thermochemical adiabatic value.
This paper represents more
than 50 years of Journal of Chemical
Physics publication for Eldon going back to his thesis research papers from
OU. The dominant technique world wide
now for ion-molecule interaction studies is the "flowing afterglow"
method developed at the then NBS in Boulder, Colorado in 1965 by Eldon and two
of his PhD students from the University of Texas where he was professor from
1957 to 1962. The Boulder group used
the FA to elucidate the ion chemistry of the earth's ionosphere. It has subsequently been applied to a number
of astrophysical problems and to basic studies of reaction mechanisms,
thermochemical problems, organic chemistry, and to very sensitive trace gas
detection in medical and environmental situations. Chemical Abstracts
shows 1082 references on "flowing afterglow,” from Eldon’s original 1965
papers to recent ones from all laboratories.
The exact reference for
Eldon's article is: J. Chem. Phys., 118, 2130 (2003).
*****
Recalling Prof. Richard
Fowler and the Department, from Don Williams:
Dr. Fowler had a significant
impact on my life at the University and subsequently, just because of his
pragmatic approach and kind nature.
When I was there there was
an club called "The Engineering Physicists Club,'' or something like
that. About midway through my years
there he said to me
"Don, some day you are
going to be president of this club,'' and he turned out to be right.
I was also managing editor,
then editor, of the Sooner Shamrock, the Engineering magazine. That was interesting because if you were in
Engineering Physics, you
were sort of an outcast from the hard-hat engineers, but there I was.
Dr. Fowler also gave me a
full $1.00 per hour to work on a Naval Research Laboratory contract he had, and
that was twice the going rate at the time.
I also worked for Dr.
Neilsen, designing and building some test equipment for his research on Raman
Spectroscopy. [I'm probably one of the
few with a real semester hour credit in laboratory glassblowing]. I also taught
undergraduate Physics lab.
Finally, I had full access
to the Physics machine shop, and did modifications to my cameras, etc.
Dr. Fowler also wrote a
textbook on Physics, I think for undergraduate students, possibly for
non-physics majors. I have tried to
find a copy but
have been unsuccessful. I wanted it just as a memento. It was in the listing at the UCSD
Engineering library but was missing when I tried to get it, probably stolen.
I see that astronomy has
been added to the department name.
Turns out that after I did my Navy tour I went into industry and got an
M.S. from UCLA. My thesis was on a
Radio Astronomy research project I did with a large antenna in the Southern
California desert. Subsequently I was
invited to work in
The Netherlands on what was
then called the Benelux Cross Antenna Project, for their equivalent of our
National Science Foundation.
Don Williams
Spectrum Data Systems
3237 Via Marin
La Jolla, CA 92037-2937
email: sds@san.rr.com
*****
We
have received the following sad news from James Cafky:
“I
offer this information in an attempt to distribute sad news to fellow alumni
regarding Oliver S. Spencer, Ph.D., 1968, who died of cancer November 17,
2002. As a graduate student, Oliver
Spencer
was the third recipient of the Nielsen Award for graduate research. I shared indentured servant status with
Ollie during that time and applauded the award. Prof Colin Plint was Ollie's
Major Professor. Spencer had a long and
credible career in various roles as research scientist at IBM after departing
OU. We who were counted among his
friends during those years at OU realize at his death how much we treasured
then the experience of, and now treasure the memory of his enjoyment of life.”
Ollie's
partner, Mrs. Rosemary Spencer, lives at:
9819
Montyville Drive Manassas, VA 20111
\\\\\
IN THEIR DEFENSE
Fred Brown defended his
dissertation, “An Investigation of
the Properties of InSb/AlInSb Quantum
Wells,” on Sept. 18. Fred was Ryan Doezema's student. He's now
with Boeing in Midwest City.
In April, Bret McKinney
defended his thesis titled “Many-body dimensional perturbation theory for
quantum confined systems with a focus on atomic Bose-Einstein condensates.”
Brett was a student of Deborah Watson, and now is a postdoc at Vanderbilt
University.
\\\\\
primarily found in the outer regions of
the solar system disk, out past Neptune, in the general region covered by the
orbit of Pluto.
So what are
KBOs? At present, we think they are
some sort of icy bodies, probably related to comets. Astronomers have found at least 700 KBOs so far, out of perhaps
billions that exist, and each month more are found. The largest known KBO is
about 1200 kilometers in diameter- larger than the largest asteroid, and half
the diameter of Pluto. Perhaps KBOs larger than Pluto remain to be found- will
we then have more than 9 planets, or should we demote Pluto to KBO status and
have 8 planets?
The first
asteroid was discovered in 1801, but the first KBO wasn't found until 1992.
Why? Like asteroids, KBOs in the
optical are only seen by
reflected sunlight. Because of their much
larger distance from the Sun and earth a KBO is much fainter than a similar
sized asteroid. Advances in
telescopes, detectors, and lots of
sleepless nights on the part of astronomers were needed to finally start
finding KBOs.
For the past
7 years, Steve Tegler (Northern Arizona University) and I have been studying
KBOs. We use large telescopes in
Arizona and Hawaii to take images of KBOs, using CCD detectors and colored
filters. By comparing the brightness of
a KBO in different filters, we can measure its color. Why measure colors? Well,
to be honest, these objects are so faint that it is difficult to do much
else. We would much rather take spectra
of the KBOs, which are usually more physically diagnostic of astronomical
objects than are colors, but these objects are too faint to get usable spectra,
and the few spectra that exist basically just show reflected sunlight.
Bill Romanishin (right) and collaborator Steve Tegler (N. AZ. U.)
relax before another night of photon-gathering.
The highlight
of this research has been my five trips to the Big Island of Hawaii to use one
of the twin Keck 10 meter telescopes, the largest
optical telescopes in the world. I don't particularly enjoy going to Hawaii
to work (everyone else on the plane seem to be honeymooners or seniors with
their golf clubs). Observing is often stressful sometimes things go wrong- often weather, sometimes equipment. The
worst stress is making a mistake that wastes precious telescope time, when you
realize that one second of Keck time is worth about $1.25, or about $50,000 per
night!
After 120
nights on various telescopes, we have accurate colors for about 100 KBOs. We find that, in general, KBOs come in two
colors- gray, which
essentially reflect all wavelengths of
sunlight equally, and very red, which appear to absorb more of the blue
sunlight than the red sunlight.
This is saying something about the
surfaces of the various KBOs, but at present we don't know what! We are now
getting enough objects of different
KBO subgroups to hope to be able to say
anything useful. The most important
result so far is that the "classical KBOs" - those on circular orbits
well past Neptune- are all very red.
Besides
colors, our data are useful for constraining the sizes and shapes of KBOs, and
for refining their orbits so that they don't get lost in space. Steve and I are part of a team of
astronomers who have used the Hubble Space Telescope to discover 3 of the 8
known KBO binaries, or "double KBOs". Future study of these binaries will help pin down KBO masses and
densities. Our work on colors and shapes has resulted in three publications in
the journal NATURE, as well as others in the astronomical literature, and has
been supported financially by NASA and OU.
\\\\\
COLD ATOM RESEARCH
by Deborah
Watson
For the past five years my group in
theoretical atomic physics has been studying very cold collections of rubidium-87
atoms. These atoms are trapped in the
laboratory using magneto-optical traps and cooled using lasers and evaporative
cooling techniqes to temperatures within .000001 of absolute zero. Since
rubidium-87 atoms are bosons, such cold temperatures result in a collapse of
the atoms from a distribution of many quantum states into a single quantum
state, the ground state of the harmonic trap confining them. With identical
quantum wavefunctions that overlap, these atoms act as a coherent quantum matter wave.
Deborah
Watson, shown here testing the strength of hyperspace.
Many
condensates in laboratories today are dilute enough to describe using simply a
mean or average potential. Our group is interested in
condensates that are denser or have
stronger interactions which require that every two-body interaction be
accounted for exactly. We would
like to
describe the breakdown of the mean-field approximation since this will help to
elucidate the microscopic dynamics of condensates and should help to bridge the
gap between dilute condensates and the regime of
superfluidity/superconductivity where strong interactions make first-principle
treatments difficult. Since most condensates have a million or more atoms
today, this results in 1012 interactions. I am happy to report that my group has found a way to keep track
of all 1012 interactions without significantly lengthening the time
for a graduate student to get a Ph.D.
We take advantage of the high degree of symmetry in a condensate to
determine the effect of all 1012 interactions on ground state
energies and excitation frequencies.
Most of our work is done using paper and pencil instead of computers,
and we readily admit to using more than our fair share of paper and pencils from
the office supplies. I am fortunate to have graduate students that write very
small. After several years of effort (and three small papers) we are in the
process of publishing two or three large papers on our method and initial
results. The first paper will be
published in Annals of Physics because of its broad applicability to any
many-body system under quantum confinement such as quantum dots, atoms, optical
lattices as well as Bose-Einstein condensates.
The first student to work in this new area
within my group just defended his dissertation on Friday April 25, 2003. A
second student, Blake Laing is extending this work to cylindrical traps that
are
common in laboratories. My postdoc Martin Dunn is now trying to
characterize the nature of the fundamental excitations of the condensate. This
work has been funded by the Office of
Naval Research.
\\\\\
OU
HEP GROUP TO HOST FALL WORKSHOP
"QFEXT03,"
the Sixth Workshop on QUANTUM FIELD THEORY UNDER THE INFLUENCE OF EXTERNAL
CONDITIONS, will be held at
The
University of Oklahoma September 15-19, 2003, at the OCCE Forum Building. This
is a continuation of a series of workshops of the same
title
held at the University of Leipzig in 1989, 1992, 1995, 1998, and 2001.
Topics
Include
#
Macroscopic Quantum Effects--Theory and Experiment
* Casimir effect
* Bose-Einstein condensation
*
Quantum Hall effect
#
Quantum Effects in Nontrivial Backgrounds
*
Kinks, vortices
#
Quantum Field Theory at Finite Temperature and Density
* Dynamics of phase transitions
#
Formalism of Quantum Fields in Bounded Regions
*
Heat kernel expansions and related mathematical techniques
*
Branes, extra dimensions, and quantum cosmology
The
International Advisory Committee consists of
*
Michael Bordag, University of Leipzig
*
Bodo Geyer, University of Leipzig
*
Robert Jaffe, MIT
*
Kimball Milton, University of Oklahoma * Umar Mohideen, University of California, Riverside
*
Vladimir Mostepanenko, A. Friedmann Lab., St. Petersburg
*
Peter van Nieuwenhuizen, SUNY Stony Brook
*
Serge Reynaud, CNRS Paris
while
the Local Organizing Committee is
*
Kimball Milton
*
Ron Kantowski
* Chung Kao
*
Kieran Mullen
*
Yun Wang
Sponsors include:
*
The University of Oklahoma
o Office of the Provost
o The Vice President for Research
o The College of Arts and Sciences
o The Department of Physics and Astronomy
*
Oak Ridge Associated Universities
*
National Science Foundation
Proceedings will be published by Rinton Press.
We
are in the process of collecting a large number of invited and contributed
plenary and parallel session talks. We
hope there will be substantial
participation
from overseas, the State Department and WHO willing, and we are offering travel
support to several leading physicists from Russia
and the FSU. Thanks to NSF, we will be able to support travel by junior US participants. Keep tuned to our web page, http://www.nhn.ou.edu/qfext03/ for late breaking details.
\\\\\
RESEARCH NEWS
Publications
I.
Brevik, K. A. Milton, and S. D. Odintsov, “Entropy Bounds on R x S3 Geometries, Ann. Phys., 302,
120--141 (2002).
K.
A. Milton, “Constraints on Extra Dimensions from Cosmological and Terrestrial
Measurements,” Grav. Cosmol., 8, 65--72
(2002).
E.
J. Lentz, E. Baron, D. Branch, and P. H. Hauschildt, “Detectibility of Hydrogen
Mixing in Type Ia Supernova pre-Maximum Spectra,” Ap. J., (2002), 580 374--379.
E. Baron, P. Nugent, D. Branch, P. H. Hauschildt, M. Turatto, and E. Cappellaro, “Determination of Primordial Metallicity and Mixing in the Type IIP Supernova 1993W,” Ap. J. (2003), 586, 1199--1210.
J.
P. Halpern, K. M. Leighly, H. L. Marshall, “An Extreme Ultraviolet Explorer
Atlas of Seyfert Galaxy Light Curves: Search for Periodicity,”
2003
ApJ 585 665.
K.B.
Kwitter, R.B.C. Henry, & J.B.
Milingo, “Sulfur, Chlorine, and Argon Abundances in Planetary Nebulae. III.
Observations and Results for a Final Sample,” Pub. Astr. Soc. Pacific, 115, 80
(2003).
D. Branch, K. M. Leighly, R. C. Thomas, and E. Baron, “The Spectrum of the FeLoBAL Quasar FBQS 1214+2803: A Resonance-Scattering Interpretation,” ApJ, 578, L37 (2002).
S.
Benetti, D. Branch, M. Turatto, E. Cappellaro,
E. Baron, et al., “The Exceptionally Bright Type Ib Supernova 1991D,” MNRAS, 336, 91 (2002).
K. Hatano, D. Branch, Y. L. Qiu, E. Baron, et al. “On the Spectrum of the Peculiar Type Ia Supernova 1997br and the nature of SN 1991T-like Events,” New Astr., 7, 441 (2002)
H.
Schatz, R. Toenjes, K.-L. Kratz, B. Pfeiffer, T. C. Beers, J. J. Cowan and V.
Hill, “Thorium and Uranium Chronometers Applied to CS 31082-001,” Astrophys.
J., 579, 626 (2002)
J.
W. Truran, J. J. Cowan, C. A.
Pilachowski and C. Sneden, “Probing the Neutron-Capture Nucleosynthesis History
of Galactic Matter,”
Pub.
Astr. Soc. Pac., 114, 1293 (2002)
C. Sneden and J. J. Cowan, “The Genesis of the Heaviest Elements in the Milky Way Galaxy,” Science, 299, 70 (2003) V. Barger, F. Halzen, D. Hooper, and C. Kao, “Indirect search for neutralino dark matter with high energy neutrino,” Phys. Rev. D65, 075022 (2002).
S. Dawson, D. Dicus, and C. Kao, “Searching
for the Higgs bosons of minimal supersymmetry
with
muon pairs and bottom quark,” Phys. Lett. B545, 132 (2002).
Dipak
Munshi, and Yun Wang, “How Sensitive Are Weak Lensing Statistics to Dark Energy
Content?" ApJ, 583, 566 (2003).
M.
Viel, S. Matarrese, Tom Theuns, D. Munshi, and Yun Wang, “Dark Energy Effects
on the Lyman-alpha Forest,” MNRAS, 340, L47 (2003)
B.
Abbott, P. Gutierrez, M. Strauss, et.al., D0 Collaboration have published the
following 12 articles:
“Search
for the production of single sleptons through R-parity violation in p anti-p collisions at s**(1/2) =
1.8-TeV. ,” Phys.Rev.Lett.89:261801, 2002.
“Improved
W boson mass measurement with the D0 detector,” Phys.Rev.D66:012001,2002.
“A
Direct measurement of W boson decay width,”
Phys.Rev.D66:032008, 2002.
“Search for R-parity violating supersymmetry in dimuon and four jets channel,” Phys.Rev.Lett.89:171801, 2002.
“Search
for leptoquark pairs decaying to neutrino neutrino + jets in
p
anti-p collisions at s**(1/2)=1.8-TeV,” Phys.Rev.Lett.88:191801, 2002.
“A
Search for the scalar top quark in p anti-p collisions at s**(1/2) = 1.8-TeV,” Phys.Rev.Lett.88:171802, 2002.
“Measurement
of the ratio of differential cross-sections for W and Z boson production as a
function of transverse momentum in p anti-p collisions at s**(1/2) = 1.8-TeV,”
Phys.Lett.B517:299-308, 2001.
“Search
for single top quark production at D0 using neural networks,”
Phys.Lett.B517:282-294, 2001.
“Direct search for charged Higgs bosons in decays of top quarks,” Phys.Rev.Lett.88:151803, 2002.
“Hard
Single Diffraction in pbarp Collisions at 630 and 1800 GeV,”
Phys.Lett.B{531},52, 2002.
“Search
for mSUGRA in single-electron events with jets and large missing transverse
energy in pbarp Collisions at sqrt(s)=1.8 TeV,” Phys. Rev. D
66,112001,
2002
“ttbar
production cross section in pbarp collisions at sqrt(s)=1.8 TeV,” Phys. Rev. D
67, 012004, 2003
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Meetings
Attended
Jean
Claude Chokomakoua attended the 2003 Annual Conference of the National Society
of Black Physicists(NSBP) and Black Physics Students, from February 12 to
February 15 2003 in Atlanta-Georgia, as well as the American Physical Society
(APS) March meeting in Austin, Texas.
Bahman.Roostaei
attended the APS March Meeting,
March
3-7, Austin,TX.
Chung
Kao attended the International Conference on 20 Years of SUGRA and Search for
SUSY and Unification (SUGRA20), March 17--21, 2003, at the Northeastern
University, Boston, Massachusetts.
Ed
Baron went to the SNAP Collaboration Meeting, March 13-16, 2003, LBL, Berkeley,
CA.
Ryan
Doezema attended the American Physical Society March Meeting, Austin, TX.
Xiaojian
Zhang attended the American Physics Society
April, 2003, meeting in Philadelphia.
Karen
Leighly, Darrin Casebeer, Larry Maddox attended 201st American Astronomical
Society meeting, Jan 5-9 Seattle, Washington.
Aida Nava attended Eighth Texas-Mexico Conference on Astrophysics, Oct 30-Nov 1, Mexico City.
Kim
Milton attended “Casimir Forces: Recent Developments in Experiment and Theory,”
Harvard/Smithsonian, November 14-16, 2002.
John Furneaux attended the 225th National Meeting of American Chemical Society held in New Orleans, LA, from March 23th to 27th, 2003
Dick
Henry attended the meeting on the Origin and Evolution of the Elements, Feb.
16-21, Carnegie Observatories, Pasadena.
John
Cowan attended the workshop on Nuclear Astrophysics at the Limits of Stability,
2002
Fall Meeting of the Division of Nuclear Physics Meeting of the American
Physical Society, East Lansing, MI
(October 2002). He also
participated in the JINA Workshop on The r-process -- New experimental,
theoretical and observational opportunities, Gull Lake, MI (October
2002); the Third International Conference on Fission and Properties of
Neutron-Rich Nuclei, Sanibel Island, FL
(November 2002); and The Origin
and Evolution of the Elements, Pasadena, CA
(February 2003).
\\\\\
Presentations
Jean Claude Chokomakoua spoke at the 2003 Annual Conference of the National Society of Black Physicists(NSBP) and Black Physics Students on “Exotic Ferromagnetism in two dimensional electronic system.” He also gave a talk on “Ising Quantum Hall Ferromagnets in InSb Quantum Well” at the APS March meeting in Austin.
Chung
Kao spoke on “Discovering Higgs bosons of Minimal Supergravity with Muons,” at
the International Conference on 20 Years of SUGRA and Search for SUSY and
Unification (SUGRA20).
Yun
Wang gave an invited seminar titled
“Dark
Energy Search Using Type Ia Supernovae,”
University
of Michigan, Jan 2003.
Dick
Henry gave an invited talk on “Element Yields of Intermediate-Mass Stars,” Feb.
19, at the conference on Origin and Evolution of the Elements, Carnegie
Observatories, Pasadena. He also presented a colloquium on “The Cosmic Origin
of Nitrogen,” March 26, at Northeastern State University.
Bahman
Roostaei presented a paper by Kieran Mullen and himself titled “Polarization
Transition of Interacting Quantum Rings,” at the March APS meeting.
John
Furneaux presented the poster “Structural Investigations of Crystalline and
Solution Phases of the Monoglyme:LiSbF6 System,” Varuni Seneviratne, John
Furneaux, and Roger Frech, at the 225th National Meeting of American
Chemical
Society held in New Orleans, LA, from March 23th to 27th, 2003.
Ed Baron presented the talk: “Supernovae as Cosmological Probes,” Colloquium at Oklahoma State University, Oct., 2002. He also presented “An Introduction to the Spectral Fitting Expanding Atmosphere Method (SEAM),” Talk at SNAP Collaboration Meeting, Berkeley, CA, March 29, 2003.
Ryan Doezema presented: “THz Spectroscopy of InSb Quantum Wells,”
Colloquium
at U. Arkansas, Fayetteville, AR, January 28, 2003.
Karen Leighly's group presented the following posters at the AAS meeting in January in Seattle: “An XMM-Newton Observation of the Bright Seyfert 2 Galaxy NGC 6300,” L. A. Maddox, K. M. Leighly, A. Nava, C. Matsumoto, D. Grupe; and “Dependence of emission line ratios and strengths on the spectral energy distribution,” D. Casebeer and K. M. Leighly; “HST and Chandra Observations of Quasar PHL 1811,” K. M. Leighly, J. P. Halpern, E. B. Jenkins.
Aida Nava, Larry Maddox, Chiho Matsumoto, Karen Leighly, D. Grupe presented the poster “An XMM-Newton Observation of the Bright Seyfert 2 Galaxy NGC 6300,” Oct. 30-Nov 1, at the Eighth Texas-Mexico Conference on Astrophysics, Mexico City
Xiaojian
Zhang presented “Study of opposite side
B flavor tagging at D0,” April 5, 2003, at the APS Philadelphia meeting.
Kim
Milton presented "Calculating Casimir Energies in Renormalizable Quantum
Field Theory," Harvard/Smithsonian workshop listed above; also at Stanford
Linear Accelerator Seminar on December 5, 2002, and at Washington University on
April 3, 2003.
John
Cowan presented four talks recently: “The r-Process: Observations, models and
unresolved issues,” at the Workshop on Nuclear Astrophysics at the Limits of
Stability; “The r-Process, stellar abundances and ages, and unanswered
questions,''
at
the JINA Workshop on The r-process -- New experimental, theoretical and
observational opportunities; “R-Process Abundance Signatures,” at the Third
International Conference on Fission and Properties of Neutron-Rich Nuclei; and
“Advances in r-Process Nucleosynthesis,”
at the workshop The Origin and Evolution of
the Elements, Pasadena, CA.
\\\\\
Grants News
Chung Kao (P.I.) and the High Energy Physics Group “Searching for Higgs Bosons and New Physics at Hadron Colliders,” U.S. Department of Energy EPSCoR State-DOE Laboratory Partnership Award, $450,000 for 3 years (Fall 2003-Summer 2006)
K.
A. Milton, “Nonperturbative Quantum Field Theory,” US Department of Energy,
$97,000
K.
A. Milton, “Quantum Field Theory Under the Influence of External Conditions,”
National Science Foundation, $5000
K.
A. Milton, “Quantum Field Theory Under the Influence of External Conditions,”
Oak Ridge Associated Universities, $5000
C.
Matsumoto, K. M. Leighly, T. Kawaguchi,
“Study of the UV-X-ray Properties of Luminous
Narrow-line
Quasars,” NASA XMM-Newton Cycle 2, $56,406.
T.
Kawaguchi, K. M. Leighly, C. Matsumoto,
“PG 1448+273: The hottest Accretion Disk Among Active
Galactic
Nuclei,”
NASA
XMM-Newton Cycle, $28,999.
K.
M. Leighly, C. Matsumoto,
“Testing
for X-ray Periodicities in Active Galaxies,” NASA Astrophysic Data Program,
$25,009.
K.
M. Leighly, D. Grupe, D. Casebeer, “Survey Observations of Soft X-ray Selected
AGN,” NASA FUSE Guest Investigator Cycle 4,
$63,800.
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Research
Travel
Karen
Leighly went to Johns Hopkins University, Oct 25, for a FUSE Observers Avisory
Committee meeting. In addition, she went to the NASA Goddard Space Flight
Center on Feb 14 to serve on a HEASARC Users Group meeting.
Jean
Claude Chokomakoua and Sheena Murphy traveled to the National High Magnetic
Field Laboratory(NHMFL) in Tallahassee,
Florida, April 7 to April 13, to conduct a number of experiments aimed at elucidating the effect of electron density on
Quantum Hall Ferromagnets in InSb Quantum Wells.
Kim
Milton traveled to UCLA on September 30-October 4, 2002, to gather archival
material from the Special Collections Department of the UCLA Research Library
for his new book on Electromagnetic Radiation, based on Schwinger's World War
II work at the Radiation Lab at MIT, but never published. He also went to
Washington University, St. Louis, March 31-April 4, 2003,
to
work with collaborator Carl Bender on development of non Hermitian quantum
field theories.
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Visitors Hosted
Yun Wang hosted Bhuvnesh Jain, from Univ. of Pennsylvania. They discussed possible collaboration on weak lensing.
Sally
Dawson, Brookhaven National Laboratory, visited Chung Kao, March 5-7, 2003, to
work on the search for Higgs bosons at hadron colliders.
Kim
Milton hosted Carl Bender, Washington University, St. Louis, October 14-18, as
they worked on PT symmetric Hamiltonians. In addition, Henry Kelly, Federation
of American Scientists, visited Kim on November 7 to work on science policy.
Peter Nugent was a guest of Ed Baron's on January 27-31, 2003 They worked on the use of Type II supernovae as distance indicators.
John
Cowan has hosted three visitors recently: Jim Truran (Univ. of Chicago) came in
January to work on several nucleosynthesis projects;
Al
Cameron (Univ. of Arizona) came and
presented a seminar in March; and Chris Stockdale, NRL, and former graduate
student returned in March to work on some radio and X-ray observations of
extragalactic supernovae. Chris also presented the Nielsen Award colloquium.
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TEACHING NEWS
Kim
Milton writes: “This semester I have been using my Electrodynamics II class as
a proving
ground for the new book I am writing on Electromagnetic Radiation. In particular, based on fragmentary notes of the late Julian Schwinger,
I
have been lecturing on waveguide theory, variational methods, and radiation
theory, subjects which have vast application. Over one hundred
typed
manuscript pages have resulted so far.
I plan to send the completed manuscript to Springer Verlag in the summer
of 2004.”
Aida Nava updates us on the
improvements going on at the OU Observatory: “We finally got the supports for
the 8-inch telescopes at the OU observatory! Now we just have to pick the one
with the right orientation so that the finderscope
can be used!!!” Improvements to the Observatory will continue through the summer.
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SUMMER PLANS
From
Kim Milton: “I have been invited to speak on non-Hermitian, PT invariant gauge
theories
at the First International Workshop on Pseudo-Hermitian Hamiltonians in Quantum Physics in Prague, Czech Republic, in June, and on Casimir Energies at the 10th Marcel Grossmann Meeting in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in July.”
In
June Brett McKinney, fresh from his thesis defense in April, will start work at
Vanderbilt University as a postdoctoral fellow in
bioinformatics
and biomathematics.
Concerning
her summer plans, Karen Leighly says, “Some people may remember Toshihiro
Kawaguchi - he was a student from Kyoto University who visited OU for 5 months in summer and fall 2000. During the
time he was here, we wrote a proposal for observing time
using the XMM-Newton X-ray satellite. Our proposal was successful and the object was observed in early February this year, so Toshi plans to return for 1.5 months this summer to analyze the data. Toshi is now a postdoc at the Meudon Observatory in France.”
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CONGRATULATIONS STUDENTS, FACULTY!!!
Members of the
Department received the following awards this spring.
FACULTY
Presidential
Professorship
Mike Santos
Jr.
Faculty Research Award
Lloyd Bumm, Chung Kao
STUDENTS
2003
Nielsen Prize-Rollin
Thomas
2003
Fowler Prize-Carl
Frederick Carlsson
2003
Karcher Awards- Santosh
Niranjan Shah, Daniel Joshua Stark, Jack Allen Franklin
Awards In Engineering Physics
Roy B
Adams Scholarship
Reeves,David
Cuba
& Ted Webb Scholarship
Basset,Gareth
J
Clarence Karcher
Deen,David
Harwood,Stanton
Morgan,Jordan
Nguyen,Tuan
Pat
on The Back
Bares,Christopher
Bottoms,Karen
Chong,Jer Min
De Berry,Butch
Ehrhart,John
Franklin,Jack
Graham,Jeremy
Hewitt,Matthew
Hoggan,James
Howell,Douglas
Marshall,Aaron
Mc Combs,Devin
Mc Guffey,Christopher
Nall,Timothy
Oathout,Nathan
Parry,Adam
Schram,John