PHYSICS DEPARTMENT
Nationwide the percentage of students majoring in Physics
is about 0.3%. At Williams the physics majors are 4% of the class, i.e. about
10 times the national average. The average number of majors per class at Ph.D.
granting institutions is 11 while at Williams the current numbers are 22 seniors
and 20 juniors. While these numbers are not large in absolute terms (there is
still plenty of opportunity for student/faculty interaction in and out of the
classroom), it does mean that Williams is a nationally significant producer of
future physicists. About half of our majors choose to go on to graduate
programs in physics, applied physics, astrophysics, engineering, computer
science, mathematics or other scientific fields (along with the odd composer or
economist thrown in for good measure). Currently we have five alumni studying
towards a physics Ph.D. at Harvard.
S. Charles Doret ’02 received the 2002 American
Physical Society Leroy Apker Award for his atomic physics thesis works Professor
Tiku Majumder. Charlie is presently a Ph.D. student at Harvard
University.
We are proud that one of our 2002 graduates, S. Charles
Doret, was selected as the winner of the 2002 LeRoy Apker Award. This national
award is given by the major professional society of physicists, the American
Physical Society “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.” Two awards are given annually and competition is quite
intense. The award was based largely on Charlie’s thesis work,
Precise Measurement of the Stark Shift in the
Thallium
6P1/2
7S1/2
378 nm Transition, with Prof. Tiku Majumder. Charlie received the award
at a ceremony at the March 2003 meeting of the APS in Austin, TX. In addition
to an honorarium for Charlie, the Physics department received an award of $5000
to support undergraduate research. Charlie is currently working towards a Ph.D.
in physics at Harvard University.
On April 11-12, Williams hosted a joint meeting of the
New England Sections of the American Physical Society and the American
Association of Physics Teachers. We had a fine turnout of some 131 participants
including 34 graduate and undergraduate students (plus many of our local
students who sat in on some portion of the meeting). Friday’s invited
talks were on “Quantum Bits.”
The Williams Inn provided a pleasant dinner after which
Prof. Richard Wilson of Harvard University gave a thought provoking talk on
“The Role of Physicists in Public Policy.” On Saturday, we had two
invited sessions, one on Ultrafast Pulses
Beyond the Visible Spectrum, the other on
Teaching of Physics. A list of the
invited talks can be found at the end of the Physics section.
The meeting also included contributed talks, posters
(included several by our own physics and chemistry students) and a series of
workshops for teachers.
The college has identified a number of curricular areas
where it wants to expand offerings. Of particular interest to the Physics
department are interdisciplinary courses and tutorials. These are both areas
where the department has already made a major investment of faculty time and
effort and we are hopeful that the college will be able to provide the resources
to support these efforts in the long run.
In the area of interdisciplinary courses, we are
currently offering 300 level courses on
Protecting Information: Applications of
Abstract Algebra and Quantum Physics (with the Math Department) and
Materials Science: The Chemistry and Physics
of Materials (with the Chemistry Department). In 2003-04, Prof. Aalberts
will be offering a new course on Computational
Biology (with the Computer Science Department). In addition we are
offering a course open to both science and non-science majors on
Science and Religious Experience.
The Physics Department has been an early and enthusiastic
supporter of tutorials. We have evolved a variation on the canonical tutorial
format, which works well for physics. The weekly cycle starts Thursday evening
when students read a chapter in the text (sometimes along with an article from
the literature). Friday, there is a one hour lecture/discussion session for the
whole class. Students then spend a few days working on problem sets. Tuesday
or Wednesday, each pair of students meets with the professor for an hour
presenting their solutions thus far and discussing any questions that have
arisen. Thursday, students turn in written solutions and the whole cycle begins
again. While this is a demanding schedule for students and faculty, we find
that the extra effort is well rewarded by the improvement in student’s
problem solving skills. We have converted our standard upper level courses on
Electromagnetic Theory, Classical Mechanics
and Applications of Quantum
Mechanics into tutorials. Most of our graduate school bound students
take at least two such tutorials.
We are very pleased to report that in support of our
efforts to teach tutorials and interdisciplinary courses, the college has added
a new tenure track faculty position to the department. Dr. David Tucker-Smith
will be joining us next year. A graduate of Amherst College, his Ph.D. is from
Berkeley and he is currently a post-doc at MIT. His research is in elementary
particle physics beyond the standard model. Next spring he will be teaching an
upper level course, Gravity, which will
introduce students to the General Theory of Relativity. This course will help
strengthen the astrophysics route through the major.
As we noted last year, the college has received an
extraordinarily generous bequest for the support of teaching and research in the
Physics Department. Mrs. Frances McElfresh Perry has left the college some 12
million dollars in honor of her father, Prof. William Edward McElfresh, who
taught at Williams 1902-1936. Prof. McElfresh was chair of the Physics
Department from 1905 until his retirement. At this point, the college is still
deciding how to use the very generous gift, but we are hopeful that a small
portion will be used to support summer students (in addition to those already
supported by the existing Somers and Synnott funds). This summer, the Bronfman
Science Center was able to be unusually generous in supporting summer students,
and we expect to have 18 students doing research with Physics faculty. We hope
that in future years the McElfresh gift can be used to support this high level
of student participation.
Assistant Professor Daniel Aalberts was awarded a
$155,183 grant by the National Institutes of Health for his proposal,
“Splicing, Folding, and Stretching Nucleic Acids.” This year, he
and Nathan Hodas ’04 modeled how intramolecular base stacking interactions
effect the physical properties of stretched DNA, investigated novel RNA
pseudoknot structures, and studied the statistical thermodynamics of DNA
“gene chip” microarrays. Aalberts and Jeff Garland ’03
developed the “finding with binding” method to identify RNA splice
sites, an approach that equals the best statistics-based techniques. His work
with John Parman ’02 and Noel Goddard (Rockefeller University) exploring
intramolecular interactions in DNA was published in
Biophysical Journal. This summer, Eric
Daub ’04 will join the Aalberts group to model alternative splicing in
RNA.
Aalberts taught
Particles and Waves---Enriched (PHYS
141), Mathematical Methods for
Scientists (PHYS/MATH 210, and
Statistical Physics (PHYS 302).
Aalberts is one of the founding members of the College’s new
Bioinformatics, Genomics, and Proteomics (BiGP) program. In fall 2003, he
offers a new course, Computational
Biology (PHYS/CSCI 315).
Aalberts advised the Society of Physics Students and
served on the Committee for Educational Policy. He sang with
student/alumni/faculty quintet “With and Without” and faculty
quartet “the Diminished Faculty,” performing in Thompson Chapel and
in classrooms. Aalberts was promoted to Associate Professor, with tenure, on 1
July 2003.
Associate Professor Sarah Bolton enjoyed her 2002-03
sabbatical leave. She spent the year in Williamstown, working in her lab with
honors student Sarah Nichols ’03. The two Sarahs continued the Bolton
lab’s studies of semiconductors using an ultrafast Titanium Sapphire
laser. The laser produces pulses of less than 20 femtoseconds in duration (20 x
10-15 seconds) - short enough to
take “snapshots” of electron motions and molecular vibrations. We
are using the laser to determine how these very fast motions are altered when
the electrons in a material are confined to two dimensions. This year the work
progressed significantly, as our new NSF grant allowed us to take measurements
with samples held at Liquid Helium temperature (4K). Working at such low
temperatures allows us to control all of the energy in the sample using the
optical pulse. This project will continue in the summer of 2003 with Jenni
Simmons ’05, Zophia Edwards ’05, and thesis student Jesse Dill
’04.
This year Professor Bolton again reviewed grants for the
National Science Foundation, in both the Engineering and Condensed Matter
Physics programs. She was also a reviewer for the journals
Optics Communications, Optics Letters,
and Physical Review.
Emeritus Professor Stuart Crampton continued to teach his
interdisciplinary course, Science and
the Religious Experience. He has
received a $4000 grant from the American Scientific Affiliation to bring
distinguished speakers to campus next year to interact with this course and to
give public lectures on the general topic of the relationship of science to
religion. He continues as a consultant for the Sherman Fairchild Scientific
Equipment Program, and he has recently been elected Chairman of the Board of
Directors of Research Corporation, America’s oldest science-related
foundation.
Professor, and department chair, Kevin Jones continues to
collaborate with the Laser Cooling and Trapping group at the National Institute
of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, MD headed by Dr. William Phillips.
In collaboration with NIST scientist Dr. Paul Lett, Jones uses the cold atom
facilities at NIST to study collisions between atoms at <1/1000 degree above
absolute zero. Atoms colliding in the presence of laser light can
“photoassociate” to form molecules. From detailed study of these
photoassociation spectra one can learn about the nature of the atomic
collisions. The detailed understanding of the collision properties they have
derived from these photoassociation experiments is proving to be essential
background information for understanding other experiments on Bose-Einstein
condensates and for proposed experiments on quantum computation.
In the summer of 2002, Jones received a grant from NIST
to support Rachel Gealy ’04 as part of their Summer Undergraduate Research
Fellowship program. Working with Jones and Lett, as well as other visiting
scientists at NIST, she did experimental and theoretical work on a novel
non-linear optics effect. She was able to explain the somewhat curious behavior
of diffraction patterns formed when two laser beams cross in a liquid crystal
material. A paper based on her work is in the review process.
Jones (aided in summer 2001 by Sarah Iams ’04) and
several other NIST scientists have completed a series of measurements on the
very highest vibrational levels of the triplet ground state of the sodium dimer.
Although Na2 is one of the best
studied of all molecules, the new measurements are orders of magnitude more
accurate than earlier measurements where they existed and fill in an important
gap in our knowledge of the highest levels. This work has been accepted for
publication in the Journal of Chemical
Physics.
Aubryn Murray ’05 will accompany Jones to NIST in
summer 2003, supported by a grant from NIST, to continue experiments on
ultracold molecules. Jones and his colleagues have been able to produce and
detect ultracold ground state molecules. This work was reported in a 2002 paper
in The Physical Review. Thus far, the
molecules have not been trapped and simply fall to the bottom of the vacuum
chamber under the force of gravity. Using a large magnetic field gradient, it
should be possible to trap the molecules and, if all goes well, study collisions
between molecules and atoms at temperatures well below those accessible by other
techniques.
On the teaching side, Jones has been teaching our upper
level tutorials on electromagnetism and classical mechanics and is endeavoring
to develop polished course materials that can be passed along to future
instructors. He has also been revising some of the lab exercises in our
sophomore level Waves and Optics
course.
Jones was an outside reviewer for the Swarthmore College
honors program and for a number of research journals and granting agencies,
including Physical Review Letters,
The Journal of the Optical Society of
America, The Physical Review and
The American Journal of Physics.
During the summer of 2002, Associate Professor Protik
(Tiku) Majumder supervised four students in the summer research program.
Charlie Doret ’02, having graduated in June 2002, spent his
third summer in the lab. Charlie
worked on writing up a manuscript describing his thesis work measuring the
“Stark shift” in thallium using UV laser light, a thallium atomic
beam, and a high-voltage electric field. This paper was submitted in the summer
and appeared in print in Nov. 2002 in the journal
Physical Review A. As Charlie’s
thesis result built upon development work of his two predecessors in the lab,
this paper had additional co-authors Paul Friedberg ’01, and Andrew Speck
’00. Charlie also helped to introduce incoming thesis student Christopher
Holmes ’03 to the experiment and the apparatus. In July, Charlie and
Prof. Majumder presented two posters on work in the lab at the
18th International Conference on
Atomic Physics (MIT, Cambridge, MA). First-year students Josh Cooperman and Joe
Kerckhoff also joined the research group and completed a number of projects
associated with a new experimental effort to use thallium atoms to search for
time-reversal-violating forces.
Prof. Majumder had a busy fall, teaching both PHYS 131
and PHYS 109, the latter being the course he developed some years ago with Prof.
Sarah Bolton in which students learn about sound and light and wave phenomena in
a small, interactive, hands-on format. In the spring, Prof. Majumder taught the
Quantum Mechanics tutorial, PHYS 402T to a large and hard-working group of 15
students. He also served this year as a member of the College’s Committee
on Priority and Resources.
The Majumder group continues to pursue high-precision
diode laser spectroscopy of thallium in their atomic physics lab. A better
understanding of the structure of this complex atom is essential to be able to
interpret recent precise measurements of parity nonconservation (i.e. the
“Weak” force) in thallium in terms of fundamental physics. With aid
from the new NSF grant supporting this research, a new postdoctoral research
associate, Dr. Michael Green, was hired and arrived at Williams in November from
Adelaide, Australia. The department is happy to welcome Michael to Williams!
He has quickly come up to speed on the experiments in the Majumder lab and
worked closely with thesis student Chris Holmes during the academic year.
Chris’ thesis work involved the development of a new method of
spectroscopy and signal processing designed to improve the detectability of a
weak transition in thallium. Chris worked on optical, electronic, and data
acquisition/analysis projects, and upgraded aspects of the thallium atomic beam
oven system. He demonstrated the potential of this new experimental method,
“two-tone FM spectroscopy”, by using a thallium vapor cell, and this
summer the technique will be extended to the atomic beam. Chris Holmes and
Michael Green attended the annual APS “DAMOP” conference in Boulder,
CO (May 2003) and presented a poster on the FM-spectroscopy work that comprises
Chris’ thesis.
Chris Holmes ’03 will be continuing work in the lab
for part of summer 2003, prior to beginning an M. Phil. degree in Philosophy of
Physics at Cambridge University, UK, this fall. We look forward to having
incoming thesis student, Mark Burkhardt ’04, as well as sophomores John
BackusMayes ’05 and Colin Bruzewicz ’05, join the research group in
June to work with Dr. Green and Prof. Majumder in pursuing the thallium
spectroscopy experiments this summer.
Associate Professor Jefferson Strait taught
Electricity and Magnetism (PHYS 201),
in the fall term and Electromagnetism and the
Physics of Matter (PHYS 132), in the spring term. He also taught a
course called Light, Color, and Vision
for the Berkshire Institute for Lifetime Learning (BILL). A lively group of
about 30 senior citizens attended the six lectures and viewed several of the
optics demonstrations from our department’s collection.
As an outreach project with the local public high school,
Strait arranged for the Advanced Placement Physics students from Mount Greylock
Regional High School to come to Williams on seven occasions to do experiments in
our new David Park Teaching Laboratory. These visits enabled the students to
use equipment that is unavailable at most high schools. Several of the students
commented that this opportunity significantly enhanced their appreciation of
physics. Mr. Kevin Forkey, the Physics Department Lab Supervisor, deserves our
thanks for setting up the equipment and for taking care of many of the details
of these visits.
Strait and his students have built an optical fiber laser
designed to produce pulses of light about one picosecond long. Unlike most
lasers, which use mirrors to confine light to the laser cavity, an optical fiber
laser uses a loop of fiber as its cavity. A section of fiber doped with erbium
serves as the gain medium. Strait and his students pump the gain medium with
1.06 µm light and it lases at 1.55 µm, conveniently the same
wavelength at which optical fiber is most transparent and therefore most
suitable for telecommunications. The eventual goal is to study how these short
pulses propagate in optical fiber.
In January, Paul Crittenden ’04 joined Strait to
work with the fiber laser and plans to complete an honors thesis next fall.
During the summer of 2003, both Matt Spencer ’05 and Paul will work in the
Strait lab.
In the fall, Professor William Wootters taught a new
course, Seminar in
Modern Physics (PHYS 151), which is
designed for first-year students with unusually strong physics backgrounds. He
also joined Professor Susan Loepp in co-teaching for a second time the
interdisciplinary course Protecting
Information: Applications of Abstract Algebra and Quantum Physics
(MATH/PHYS 316). Loepp and Wootters are in the process of writing a textbook
for their course, to be published by Cambridge University Press.
On the research side, Wootters worked with Naila Baloch
’03 and Sarah Iams ’04 on independent research projects: Naila
studied the subadditivity of entropy, while Sarah explored the mathematics of
maximally symmetric quantum measurements. Wootters also supervised Kate Gibbons
’03 in her thesis project on phase space representations of discrete
quantum systems, which Gibbons and Wootters are currently writing up for
publication. In the summer of 2003, Wootters will be working with John Mugno
’05, Josh Cooperman ’05 and Matt Hoffman ’04 on three research
projects in quantum mechanics.
Assistant Professor Dwight Whitaker taught
Introductory Quantum Mechanics (PHYS
301) in the fall term for the second
year. In the spring, he taught The Physics of
Everyday (PHYS 100) which featured Whitaker and some students walking
across hot coals as part of a student group research project. During winter
study, he taught Electronics PHYS 015
s.
During the summer of 2002, Prof. Whitaker worked with
Leon Webster ’04, Jed Doench ’04, and thesis student Naim Majdalani
’03 on constructing a Magneto-Optical Trap (MOT) of rubidium-87 atoms.
The MOT contains approximately 1 billion rubidium atoms at a temperature of a
few hundred microKelvin. During the academic year, Naim and Whitaker worked
towards transferring these cold atoms into a dipole trap where they can be
further cooled to form a Bose-Einstein Condensate (BEC) - a new form of matter
where quantum mechanical nature of the atoms becomes apparent. At extremely low
temperatures, these clouds of atoms will begin to behave like one
“super-atom” rather than as a collection of individual particles.
This summer his lab will continue towards making a BEC
with the help of Justin Brown ’05 and thesis students Leon Webster
’04 and Sarah Iams ’04. In the spring of 2003, Whitaker was awarded
a $45,000 grant from the Research Corporation to support this research. He will
also be working with Zachary Kung ’04 to update the laboratories in PHYS
301. Next year this course will feature a new lab to observe the hyperfine
spectrum of rubidium atoms using diode lasers.
Staff Physicist and Coordinator of Science Facilities,
Bryce Babcock, traveled to Hawaii in August 2002 with Professor Jay Pasachoff
and a group headed by Professor James L. Elliot of MIT to participate in
observations of Pluto’s atmosphere using several telescopes at Mauna Kea,
These observations have led to an article in Nature in July 2003, and two other
publications are in progress. He also collaborated with Professor Pasachoff on
a total solar eclipse expedition to Ceduna, Australia in December 2002. (For
further details regarding these experiments and other publications, see the
Astronomy departmental and faculty publications sections.)
In addition to his work developing research and
instructional laboratory apparatus for the sciences, Babcock serves on the
Animal Care, Safety, WilliamsScene and Science Executive Committees. He
continues as editor of the
Report of
Science at Williams, the annual review
of science activities at Williams, which is provided in both print and
web-accessible versions.
Class of 1960 Scholars in Physics
Naila A. Baloch |
Naim M. Majdalani |
Jeffrey A. Garland |
Sarah R. Nichols |
Kathleen S. Gibbons |
Kristen L. Shapiro |
Nathan O. Hodas |
David R. Ticehurst |
Christopher D. Holmes |
|
PHYSICS COLLOQUIA
[Colloquia
are held jointly with Astronomy. See Astronomy section for additional
listings.]
Professor William Wootters
“Quantum Entanglement As a Resource for
Communication”, Summer Seminar – July 2002
Dr. Kees Storm, University of Pennsylvania, Class of 1960
Scholars Program
“Strain Hardening in Biopolymer
Networks”
Dr. Ronald Walsworth, Harvard University, Class of 1960
Scholars Program
“The Story of ‘Stopped
Light’”
Dr. Benjamin Schumacher, Kenyon College, Class of 1960
Scholars Program
“Entropy, Randomness and the Physics of
Computation”
Dr. Todd Stievater ’95, Naval Research Laboratory,
Class of 1960 Scholars Program
“Nonlinear Spectroscopy of Single Quantum Dots:
Quantum Computing in Semiconductors”
Dr. Peter Swain, McGill University, Class of 1960 Scholars
Program
“Stochastic Gene Expression in Single
Cells”
Dr. Alan Palevsky, Raytheon Systems Company, Class of 1960
Scholars Program
“Satellite Communication”
Nathan O. Hodas ’03, Williams College
“Why Good Traffic Goes Bad: Simulating Highway
Traffic Flow”
Jamie Williams, N.I.S.T. – Gaithersburg, MD
“Creating Vortices in a Dilute Bose-Einstein
Condensate”
Dr. David Smith, M.I.T. – Cambridge, MA
“The Hierarchy Problem and Physics Beyond the
Standard Model”
Dr. Gary Felder, Canadian Institute for Theoretical
Astrophysics
“The Very Early Universe”
Dr. Sima Setayeshgar, Princeton University
“Twist and Buckle: Spatiotemporal Patterns in the
Heart”
Dr. Vangal N. Muthukumar, Princeton University
“Superconductivity in Doped Mott
Insulators”
Dr. Joshua Winn, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for
Astrophysics
“Measuring the Universe with Gravitational
Lenses”
Dr. Susan Ginsberg, American Physical Society, Class of
1960 Scholars Program
“From Lewis and Clark to Nanotechnology” How
Science Policy REALLY Works”
Christopher Elkinton ’98, University of Massachusetts
– Amherst
“Deep Water Offshore Wind Energy”
Dr. James Dunlop, Yale University, Class of 1960 Scholars
Program
“Recreating the Big Bang at RHIC: 10^12 Degrees in
the Shade”
Professor Sarah Bolton
Part I: “Fast, Cheap, and in Control: Laser Science
at Fifty”
Part II: “Ultra Fast Spectroscopy: Capturing Motion
in a Trillionth of a Second”
Sigma Xi Research Lectures – March
13-14, 2003
Dr. Robert Hallock, University of Massachusetts, Class of
1960 Scholars Program
“The Magical World of Two-Dimensional
3He Corks on a Shallow
4He Ocean”
Professor Daniel Aalberts
“Hidden Markov Models”, Bioinformatics,
Genomics, Proteomics (BiGP) group
Dr. Kerwyn Casey Huang, M.I.T. – Cambridge, MA, Class
of 1960 Scholars Program
“E. Coli’s Division Decision: Modeling
Min-protein Oscillations”
Dr. George Benedek, M.I.T. – Cambridge, MA, Class of
1960 Scholars Program
“The Physical Basis of Protein Condensation
Diseases: With Application to Cataract and Alzheimer’s
Disease”
Dr. Elizabeth Simmons, Boston University
“Why Is This Quark Different from All Other
Quarks?”
Professor Protik (Tiku) Majumder
“Frequency Measurement: History and Some New
Developments”
Physics Dept. Summer Seminar Series – June
2003
New England Sectional Meeting: The American Physical
Society and the American Association of Physics Teachers
Prof. Bill Wootters, Williams College
“Quantum Entanglement: How a Former Paradox Is
Becoming a Technology”
Dr. David Branning, University of Illinois
“Creation, Manipulation, and Measurement of
Photonic Qubits”
Prof. David Mermin, Cornell University
“Teaching Quantum Mechanics to Computer
Scientists”
Prof. Xi-Cheng Zhang, Rensselaer Polytechnic
Institute
“Terahertz Wave Sensing and Imaging”
Prof. Philip Bucksbaum, University of Michigan
“Ultrashort X-ray Pulses”
Prof. Stuart Crampton, Williams College
“Teaching Advanced Physics to Non-Majors Using
Interactive Computer Movies”
Prof. John Hubisz, North Carolina State University
“My Adventures Reviewing the Physical Science in
the Most Popular Physical Science Texts in U.S. Middle Schools.”
OFF-CAMPUS PRESENTATIONS
Professor Daniel Aalberts
“DNA Molecular Beacon Kinetics and Single-Strand
Stacking Energies”
University of Massachusetts, Amherst; Istanbul
Technical University
“Single-Strand Stacking Free Energy from DNA Beacon
Kinetics”
American Physical Society March Meeting in Austin, TX
“Ultrafast Photoisomerization: The First Step in
Vision”
Istanbul Technical University
“Dichterliebe” by Robert Schumann and
Heinrich Heine
Istanbul Technical University
“An Evening of Gershwin Songs” with Cathy
Johnson (soprano) and Jane Jenkins (piano) Sweetwood Continuing Care Community
– Williamstown, MA
Professor Sarah Bolton
“Squeezing Semiconductors: What Ultrafast
Measurements Tell Us about Mesoscopia”
Bates College –
Lewiston, Maine – February 7, 2003
Professor Kevin Jones
“Photoassociation of Ultracold Atoms: That’s
a Hard Way to Make Molecules, Why Bother?”
Union College –
Schenectady, New York – October 2002
“Two Color Photoassociation Spectroscopy of the
Triplet Ground State of
Na2”
July 2002
International Conference on Atomic Physics, Boston, MA
J.D. Weinstein, K.M.
Jones, and others (presented by Weinstein)
Professor Protik (Tiku) Majumder
“Precise Atomic Structure Measurements in Thallium
and Tests of Fundamental Physics” University of Connecticut –
Storrs, CT (invited AMO seminar) – March 31, 2003,
Yale University
– New Haven, CT (invited AMO seminar) – April 1, 2003
Professor William Wootters
“Sharing Entanglement”
The Sixth
International Conference on Quantum Communication, Measurement, and Computing,
MIT – August 2002
“Entropy and Subentropy”
Feynman
Festival, University of Maryland – August 2002
“Speculative Physics from Speculative
Philosophy”
Quantum Foundations in Light of Quantum Information,
University of Montreal – September 2002
“Quantum Entanglement as a Resource for
Communication”
Union College – February 2003,
SUNY Albany
– April 2003
“Phase Space Representations of Systems of
Qubits”
Perimeter Institute, Waterloo, Ontario – March
2003
“Picturing Qubits in Phase
Space”
Symposium honoring Charles Bennett, IBM Watson Research Center
– May 2003,
Dartmouth College – May 2003
Professor Dwight Whitaker
“The People’s BEC: Towards a Condensate for
the Masses”
Simon’s Rock College – Great Barrington
– October 2002
POSTGRADUATE PLANS OF DEPARTMENT MAJORS
PHYSICS
Jeffrey A. Garland |
B.A. program in Classics
as a Herschel Smith fellow at Cambridge |
David A. Lavy |
Teaching high school |
Naim Majdalani |
Accepted to Ph.D. program
in physics |
Sarah R. Nichols |
Ph.D. program in physics
at SUNY Stony Brook |
Kristina M. Weyer |
Seeking employment
particularly in renewable energy technologies |
ASTROPHYSICS
Naila A. Baloch |
Undecided |
Wei-Li Deng |
Travel |
Kathleen S. Gibbons |
M.A. at Columbia University
in the philosophical foundations of physics |
Christopher D. Holmes |
Masters in History
and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge University, England, then physics
graduate school |
Kristen Shapiro |
Working in the Astronomy
Department at the University of Leiden in The Netherlands for a year,
then astrophysics graduate school |
Megan VanDyke |
Moving to Australia |