Thursday, March 2nd, 2000 at 3:30pm in Willamette 350
Sean Walston
An Intuitive Introduction to Feynman Path Integrals
The Feynman Path Integral formulation of quantum mechanics is much more elegant and intuitive than the usual operator formulation, and the Young double slit interference experiment provides a neat starting point. Armed with little more than intuition and the classical principle of least action, we will construct the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics essentially from scratch. Then, by deriving Schrodinger's equation, we will connect path integrals to the ordinary formulation of quantum mechanics which everyone is more accustomed to.
Wednesday, March 29th, 2000 at 4:00pm in Willamette 240
Karl Saunders
Stretching and Squeezing One's Way to Two New Glassy Phases of Smectics in Aerogel.
A smectic is a phase of liquid crystal consisting of rod-like molecules called nematogens. It is liquid-like in two dimensions and crystal-like in a third. In work done by Toner and Radzihovsky it was found that confining a smectic to a disorded medium such as aerogel(which is basically a very low density mess of rigid silica strands) greatly affects and possibly destroys the phase.My research examines how the smectic in aerogel is affected when a strain(i.e. a stretch or squeeze) is applied to the aerogel strands. I found that the strain ensures that the smectic phase is not destroyed and, in fact, leads two new glassy phases of smectic(one for a stretch and one for a squeeze).
Wednesday, April 5th at 4:00pm in Willamette 318
Dan Deponte
What I Do For a Living
Some day, helium atom scattering might be used to investigate surface dynamics on sub-micron length scales. In this talk I will discuss coherent optics, scattering experiments and possibly two-particle correlations in degenerate boson beams.
Monday, April 10th at 12:00pm in Willamette 350
Parvez Anandam
A Gentle Introduction to Particle Physics
I give a general overview of a few topics in elementary particle physics. I aim to convey more the excitement of studying particle physics than any actual calculational aspect of it.
Wednesday, April 19th, 2000 at 4:00pm in Willamette 240
Dave Mason
Strange Stuff
Dave is working with the NuTeV collaboration at Fermilab, which used neutrino and anti-neutrino beams to study electroweak interactions and nucleon structure. This talk will address such questions as: What's NuTeV? Why would anybody want to use a weakly interacting particle to study QCD? and How much of me is strange quarks?
Thursday, April 27th, 2000 at 12:30pm in Willamette 350
Betsy Raymond
Investigating the Surfaces of Liquids: Is It Chemistry or Physics?
I plan to talk about the technique we use to investigate liquid surfaces, vibrational sum frequency generation. I'll talk some about the theory behind what we do, (i.e. non-linear optics) and some about what information we learn about these not well understood surfaces (i.e. a little bit of physics, a little bit of chemistry, a little bit of something in between).
Wednesday, May 3rd, 2000 at 4:00pm in Willamette 240
Sean Walston
The Planck Spectrum, Riemann Zeta functions, and Modern Cryptography
Bose's derivation of the Planck spectrum will be used to motivate the Riemann zeta function and the Riemann zeta function's relation to prime numbers will be established. This will lead to a discussion of the RSA encryption algorithm and how its security relies on prime numbers and the difficulty of prime-factoring large integers. Quantum computing and its implications for public key cryptosystems will be considered briefly. Finally, quantum cryptograpy will be discussed.
Tuesday May 9th, 2000 at 12:30pm in Willamette 240
Junichi Sakurai
The Hunt for Low Surface Brightness Galaxies
Low Surface Brightness (LSB) galaxies started to be studied in the 80's. However, LSB galaxies were not cataloged until recently because it was difficult to distinguish them from the sky background. Despite the many LSB galaxy surveys in the last decade, there are many uncataloged LSB galaxies out there and more questions than answers about LSB galaxies. I will talk briefly about LSB galaxy characteristics and a detection technique we developed.
Not that easy!
Wednesday, May 17th, 2000 at 4:00pm in Willamette 240
Frank Jones
Diodes, Barriers, and Patches--A Semiconductor/Conjugated Polymer Interface
This talk will be an overview of the chemistry and physics of semiconductor/conjugated polymer interfaces. The electrical characteristics of these devices are comparable to a semiconductor/metal interface, also known as a Schottky diode. Temperature dependent studies of the InP/poly(pyrrole) diode show characteristics of an average potential barrier to charge transport, with small regions of lower barrier heights.
Wednesday, May 24th, 2000 at 3:00pm in Willamette 240
Sharon Sessions
A Local Field Theory For Disordered Quantum Ferromagnets
We are interested in the quantum ferromagnetic trasition in a system of disordered electrons. I will begin this talk by explaining what this means, and continue by presenting the model used to describe the system, as well as some of the results of our calculation.
Wednesday, May31st, 2000 at 4:00pm in Willamette 240
Tom Loftus
Laser Cooling Neutral Ytterbium
I will review the basic approaches to laser cooling and trapping neutral atoms and then discuss specific experiments we have performed with Ytterbium. This atom is replete with multiply colored, optically distinguishable transitions having wildly different natural widths. By exploiting these properties, we have demonstrated simultaneous trapping of Fermion-Boson and Boson-Boson mixtures, unique in-situ methods for probing trap dynamics, and new pathways to continuously loaded metastable state magnetic trapping.
Last modified: Tue May 30 09:28:48 PDT 2000
By Rauha Rahkola
Email: rrahkola@darkwing.uoregon.edu