EDITOR'S CORNER
It's December here in
Manhattan
but winter seems to be very
late arriving this year. The end of the semester however, is
arriving right on schedule. Students are very busy preparing for
their final exams and doing final class projects.
The addition to Farrell Library is taking shape. The builders are doing a good job of making sure the stonework matches the rest of campus. The art museum building on the south side of campus by McCain Auditorium is also taking shape and we are all looking forward to having an art museum on campus. In the world of K-State Football the Wildcats had a great season and beat Coloraro State in the Holiday Bowl in San Diego, California on December 29. Congratulations Wildcats!!
Mick O'Shea
Editor
NOTES FROM THE DEPARTMENT HEAD
Another year has passed and it's past time for me to write
my yearly column about the happenings in the
Department of Physics.
This has been a year for which Dickens' opening lines
are very appropriate: "It was the best of times, it was the
worst of times . . . " We hired an excellent young Assistant
Professor from
Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory,
Donna Naples. Gary Wysin was promoted to Associate Professor and
granted tenure. Our sponsored research support in fiscal 1995
was $4.299 million, as reported by the Office of Research and
Sponsored Programs. The
American Association of Physics Teachers
awarded Dean Zollman the Millikan Medal. But Associate Professor
John Giese died in July, 1995. A short article about John
appears
elsewhere
in the newsletter.
Like many other people, we continue to watch the ways in which the new Congress has been asserting itself. As I write this, we're into our second government shutdown and it's not clear how everything is going to play out. Everyone asks if the changes are going to severely affect our research funding. I knock on wood and say that we have seen some effects, but so far they are not catastrophic. At the same time, our Kansas legislature also had a large turnover last year and it appears that we may experience real problems with the state funding for the university and for the department. We're presently under a hiring freeze and we will have to defer one faculty search this year at least to next year, it appears.
In the meantime we've installed in Cardwell what our Vice Provost for Research likes to call the only supercomputer in Kansas, a Convex Exemplar parallel processing computer. It has sixteen processors at present and will expand to thirty-two processors next summer. Those of you unfamiliar with these newest computers can find a description in the January, 1996, issue of BYTE. This computer purchase was granted by NSF to an interdisciplinary computational group whose principal investigator is Talat Rahman.
In July, 1964 (just a few years before my time), A. B.
Cardwell hired a young Adolph (Ed) Holub as an Accountant I for
the department. On December 15, 1995, Ed retired as Accountant
II. As many of you know Ed was very important to the smooth
operations of the department, and I definitely had mixed emotions
as we gathered for his retirement party. I remember that I
really had to work hard to get Ed converted to using a computer
in his job; Ed liked the way he'd been doing things for over
twenty years. But he did recognize that he needed the speed of
the computer to keep up with the department's expanding budgets,
and it became indispensable in the last few years. I took great
delight in presenting Ed with his retirement gift from his fellow
workers -- a full-featured multimedia computer. What a change a
few years make! I'm sure there are many readers of this
newletter who join me in wishing Ed the best possible retirement.
Jim Legg
Department Head
JOHN P. GIESE
John P. Giese,
Associate Professor of Physics at Kansas
State University, died on July 23, 1995, of respiratory failure
due to
cystic fibrosis.
John was born Sept. 14, 1959, in
Leavenworth, Kansas. He earned his B.S. degree from KSU in 1982
(Magna cum Laude, Honors Program) and earned his Ph.D. from KSU
in 1986. He spent one year as a visiting research scientist at the
University of Aarhus
and one year as an ORAU postdoctoral
fellow at
Oak Ridge
before returning to join the KSU faculty in
1989 as an Assistant Professor. He was promoted to Associate
Professor in 1993.
John's early research at KSU was on electron capture from inner shells and from atomic hydrogen by highly charged ions. At Aarhus he and Erik Horsdal Pederson worked on angular distributions of hydrogen atoms formed from fast-proton bombardment of helium. They reported a peak in the ratio of double to single target ionization that helped to stimulate recent attempts to factor simple collisions into underlying two-body Coulomb mechanisms. He continued along similar lines at Oak Ridge with investigations of two electron excitations in helium by highly charged ions.
He developed an interest in ion-ion collisions and established a close collaboration with Erhard Salzborn and Frank Melchert at the Justus-Liebig University at Giessen, Germany. Building on this collaboration, he originated at KSU a project to study collisions of highly charged ions with highly charged ions. John was responsible for the building up of the only facility in the United States for the study of such collisions. This facility was just reaching completion at the time of his death.
In addition to his many research contributions in ion-atom collisions, he took great interest in undergraduate teaching. He helped to develop new curricula and new courses in physics and gave much of his time to talk to and encourage young physics students. He spent his entire adult life with the full awareness that he had less time to spend on earth than most have, and he was always in a hurry to get on with life so as to miss as little as possible.
A John Giese memorial scholarship fund has been set up, and we expect to award the first scholarship this spring. Recipients will be outstanding students, active in the physics club and departmental research. In this way, we can honor some qualities that made John such a special person.
NEWS FROM THE MACDONALD LABORATORY
The good news from the Macdonald Laboratory for this year is tempered by the loss of
Professor John Giese. He was a friend to everybody and the driving force
on the
ion-ion collision facility. He was directing two graduate students,
Chun-Yen Chen and Allen Landers. In addition, Frank Melchert from the
University of Giessen,
who was on a one-year Humboldt Fellowship, worked with John on the construction and
the installation of the ion-ion facility.
FUNDING
In spite of hard times for government funding of research, the Lab continues to fare well. We are operating on the first year of a three-year Department Of Energy grant. The first year funding level is $1.8M. We also received a $621K from DOE from the Accelerator and Reactor Improvement and Modification fund. This money allowed us to relocate the He compressor for our LHe production plant to a new building located off of the accelerator roof, in order to reduce the noise and vibration in the Lab, and to perform upgrades to the Tandem, LINAC, and CRYEBIS. We have submitted a second request for ARIM funds for FY-96.
The personnel associated with the laboratory are 12 faculty, 4 research associates, 14 graduate students, 6 undergraduate students, and 10 staff members.
VISITORS
The number of visitors, users, and collaborators during the last two years has been visibly up. We have had Prof. Eduardo Montenegro, Pontificia Universidade Catholica Do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Prof. S. L. Varghese, University of South Alabama; Dr. Reinhard Dörner, Feodor Lynen Fellow, and Dr. Joachim Ullrich, G.S.I., Germany; Dr. Hiro Tawara, National Institute for Fusion, Japan; Dr. Mititaka Terasawa, Himeji University, Japan; Prof. Burkhard Fricke and Dr. Peter Kürpick, University of Kassel, Germany; Prof. Jean Pierre Briand, University of Paris, France; Prof. Steve Lundeen and Dr. Charles Fahrenbach, Colorado State University; Dr. Yohko Awaya, Dr. Tadashi Kambara, and Dr. Yasuyuki Kanai, RIKEN, Tokyo, Japan; and Prof. Eugene Rudd and Dr. George Kerby, University of Nebraska.
RECENT NEWS
Other recent news of note:
- Tracy Tipping, Lab Safety Officer, has been elected Director of the Accelerator Section of the National Health Physics Society for a three-year period;
- Chunlie Liao, a graduate student of Prof. Siegbert Hagmann, accepted a position at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California;
- Lokesh Tribedi, Research Associate, received an award for the outstanding Ph.D. Thesis in Physics in India.
- Baby Huey, our dear old 3 MV single-ended Van de Graaff accelerator, all 6,200 pounds, found a new home at Western Illinois University. Prof. Vickie Frohne (Ph.D. KSU 1994 with Prof. Lew Cocke) will oversee its installation and operation at Western Illinois University.
- Drs. Peter Kürpick and his wife, Ulrike, both received fellowships from Germany to work two years at K-State. Peter is working with Prof. Uwe Thumm and Ulrike is working with Prof. Talat Rahman in condensed matter theory.
- For the fourth consecutive summer, we have hosted graduate students from the University of Dresden, Germany. Enrico Langer is spending three months of research training with Dr. Martin Stöckli on the CRYEBIS in the JRM Lab.
- Also for the fourth consecutive year, the Macdonald Lab hosted undergraduate students from around the U. S. in the NSF REU summer trainee program. Prof. Larry Weaver was in charge of the program, doing an outstanding job lecturing these students and quizzing them during oral reports on their research projects.
Pat Richard
Director, Macdonald Lab
Bose-Einstein Condensation
One of the major academic perks these days is the opportunity
of taking a sabbatical leave. In this one year period you are
supposed to do new things and come back with fresh ideas. In the
past six months I did run my first 10K in Bolder
Boulder
and had my first ski lesson in
Breckenridge,
thus fulfilling the
requirement of doing something new. As for the fresh idea, it is
still to germinate. But in the past six months, the atomic,
molecular and optical (AMO) physics community did have a big
breakthrough in achieving Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC), a
subject that we first learned in statistical mechanics. What is
amazing is that BEC is possible even for the ideal gas. While BEC
can be said to have been seen in superfluid helium and in
superconductors, the interparticle interactions in these systems
are quite complicated. What the AMO physicists have achieved is
quite close to an ideal gas and it may open up the possibility of
understanding BEC theoretically.
The race for BEC started in the early 80's with the major effort on spin polarized atomic hydrogen. This system was chosen because two such spin polarized hydrogen atoms cannot form a molecule. The practitioners can reach temperature of a few hundred degree micro-Kelvins, but that is still about a factor of three too hot for the expected BEC to occur. Besides, one of the major problems is how to FIND them even if the condensate is formed.
Laser cooling is a technique which has progressed greatly in the last decade. Using a few beams of lasers the cooled atoms, usually the alkali atoms, can be placed in a magnetic optical trap. Well, people in the game can reach very low temperature, but the number of atoms in the trap, or the density, was not high enough. For BEC to occur, the de Broglie wavelength should be comparable to the interparticle separation.
This summer the group of Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman at JILA reported the first BEC for Rb-87. They achieved this by reaching a temperature of a few hundred nano-degree Kelvin by combining with evaporative cooling. The latter basically is to let the hotter atoms in the trap leave and thus to lower the temperature, a method used originally for the spin polarized hydrogen. They observe the formation of the condensate by turning off the laser and let the gas in the trap expand and then measure the velocity profile. The atoms in the condensate all in one state and expand with zero initial velocity, in comparison with atoms in the regular phase which have nonzero thermal velocity distribution. The velocity profile at different temperature clearly signals the onset of BEC.
Following the JILA's report in July, Randy Hulet at Rice University reported BEC in Li-7 in August, and Ketterle at MIT reported BEC in Na in November. Stay tuned, every laser cooling laboratory is in the game.
What can one do with the BEC condensate? It is a new state of matter. It is a coherent state of atoms. Who knows? The art of achieving BEC still has to be improved. At JILA the condensate has about 2000 atoms, while at MIT the number now is about 100 thousands. One can think many properties of superfluid helium can be explored in these condensates. But the challenge is to find new possibilities. For sure better theoretical understanding for BEC will emerge. Maybe nothing useful will come out, but the technique of achieving nanodegree Kelvins temperature probably will become "routine" and many high precision experiments can be anticipated.
I probably can follow this story closer if my students and postdocs do not keep sending me papers to read. The internet is great for you to reach someone, but it is also hard for you to get away. Jim, can this be counted as half a sabbatical then?
Chii-Dong Lin
University Distinguished Professor of Physics
CONDENSED MATTER PHYSICS GROUP
The Condensed Matter Group has been very busy with a wide
variety of activities highlighted by the hosting of the Midwest
Solid State Theory Conference which was held at Cardwell Hall in
October
(see related article).
This conference was a great
success and brought scientists from around the country to "sweet
home Kansas". Conference chair Talat Rahman and co-chairs Amit
Chakrabarti and Gary Wysin worked hard running the show and are
to be congratulated on a job well done.
Other group news includes two more years of NSF EPSCoR funding for Materials Science Research. This project involves the Department of Chemistry as well and brings a total of $1.7 million over a five year period. A campus-wide group of "calculationalists" (see related article) led by Rahman with Chakrabarti and Wysin obtained NSF funding for a new, state-of- the-art computer system for their theoretical machinations. Finally the "microscopic" experimentalist are happy with their (actually used - "hey buddy wanna buy a watch") new Philips CM12 electron microscope which will allow them to get an enlarged view of Nature at 750,000 X.
I am also pleased to report that Condensed Matter continues to thrive in the Physics Department at KSU with eleven extramural grants totalling over $1.8 million.
Chris Sorenson
Professor of Physics
Bruce Law gave an invited lecture on the "kinetics of
wetting layer formation" at the 1995
Gordon Conference
on the Chemistry and Physics of Liquids, at Holderness, New Hampshire.
He also received an NSF grant to study "Interfacial Phenomena at the Surfaces of Critical Ionic Mixtures". Critical Ionic mixtures exhibit unusual mean field behavior in the bulk which is not understood theoretically. The surface behavior of these mixtures has never been studied before.
Hyuk Pak and Bruce Law recently developed a new surface microscope which can measure the thickness of films on surfaces with monolayer thickness resolution and micron spatial resolution. They have applied for a patent for this device.
Mick O'Shea attended the 2nd International Symposium on Metallic Multilayers during September in Cambridge, England and presented a paper on magnetism in rare-earth multilayers and nanoscale particles. Prabhath Perera, a graduate student of O'Shea's earned his Ph.D. degree on "Magnetism In Very Thin Metallic Layers".
The semiconductor research group at KSU Physics led by
professors Jingyu Lin and Hongxing Jiang has further expanded the
capabilities of their laser facility. Currently, the laser
system has a tunability in the spectral region between 280-620 nm
(from red to UV), repetition rate from single shot to 76 MHz,
average UV power up to
1W, and time resolution down to 7 ps. This pulsed picosecond
laser system has the highest average UV power in the world for
semiconductor research. Today's KSU semiconductor group is one
of the few groups in the world who can carry out research on the
dynamics of fundamental optical transitions in almost all types
of semiconductors. This unique facility has been recognized by
many semiconductor research groups across the nation, which has
resulted in active collaborative research programs with other
universities, government laboratories, and industries.
This group has also established active collaborative research programs with a few of the nation's top crystal growers of today's hottest semiconductor materials, the group III-nitride wide band gap semiconductors (GaN, InGaN, A1GaN). These include APA Optics, Inc. and Honeywell Technology Center. Optoelectronic devices based on III-nitride including light emitting diodes (LEDs) and laser diodes, which are active in the UV/blue region, have many applications, for example, in display, lighting, indicator lights, traffic signs and traffic signals. The UV/blue laser diodes are crucial for high density optical read and write technologies. Electronic devices based on III-nitrides are capable of operating at high temperature and high power conditions. In the past 12 months, these joint efforts on III- nitrides have resulted in 7 publications in Applied Physics Letters and an invited paper at the Fall Meeting of the Materials Research Society. Additionally, these collaborative efforts have also provided some support to graduate students from industries and at the same time an opportunity for the group to work with industrial researchers and to identify critical practical problems so that our graduate students will be better prepared for the outside world.
From June until August Talat Rahman worked in the Material
Science Division at
Argonne
under the Faculty Participation
program. Dr. Kara also accompanied her as a Research Associate.
They continued their work on finite temperature studies of
metallic systems.
Chris Sorensen continues to do particle physics: soot particles, their optics, morphology and formation mechanisms; and very small magnetic particles. His work is supported by NSF and NIST. His most recent student, Jiangping Chen, defended her Ph.,D. thesis in July and is now a post-doc at the University of Alabama doing magnetics research.
In December
Dr. Gary Wysin
received a new grant from the
National Science Foundation International Programs, titled ``U.S.
-- Brazil Collaboration:
Excitations in Two-Dimensional Magnets.'' The travel grant for
$20,000
will support visits for Dr. Wysin and a student to Brazil during
the next three years. They will collaborate with Beth Gouvêa and
Antonio Pires at
Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais
in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, on problems related to vortices and solutions
in magnets. In addition, the Brazilian funding agency
CNPq
will pay for visits of the Brazilian colleagues to KSU.
During May and June Gary Wysin hosted magnetism experts Boris Ivanov and Alexei Kolezhuk from Kiev, Ukraine, to work on studies of the internal dynamics of magnetic vortices. They combined numerical diagonalization calculations with an analytical normal mode analysis of the way in which the spin degrees of freedom in a magnetic vortex vibrate. A new mode localized on vortices in antiferromagnets was found. Professor Ivanov's visit was funded by a COBASE (Collaboration in Basic Science and Engineering) grant from the National Research Council. Other colleagues visiting KSU and working on related topics during the summer included Armin Volkel from the University of Toronto and Beth Gouvêa from the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Belo Horinte, Brazil.
HIGH END COMPUTATIONAL AND VISUALIZATION FACILITY
A high-end computing and scientific visualization facility,
funded by the National Science Foundation with matching funds
from KSU has been in operation since September 1995. It is
housed in Cardwell Hall. The PI's for this project are Talat
Rahman, Physics and Rodney Fox and Ken Shultis from
Engineering.
The facility has already become the computational workhorse for
five faculty members in Physics and
seven in
Chemistry,
Mathematics and
Engineering
whose research
interests range from Modeling of Novel Materials, Atomic and
Molecular Science to Fluid Dynamics.
At the heart of the facility is a state-of-the-art Symmetric Multi-processor consisting of thirty two processors of the Convex Exemplar SPP1000/1200 series. This is a 'shared-memory' system and is designed to perform fast mathematical operations using either the serial or the parallel architecture. This will serve as the server for large scale simulations and parallel algorithm development. The system can be upgraded to a maximum of 128 processors to accommodate future research and research training initiatives. Clusters of high-end workstations capable of performing high quality graphics and visualization have also been added.
COMPUTATIONAL PHYSICS GETTING BOOSTED
Many members of the KSU physics faculty make their livings using computers to perform calculations and analyze the resulting data. During the past year we got more great advancements. The groups of Chakrabarti, C.D. Lin, Rahman and Wysin have added a total of five new Sun Sparc-20 workstations to the net. These machines have two CPUs, each of which is about 3 to 4 times faster than the older Sparc-2 CPU's.
23RD MIDWEST SOLID STATE THEORY CONFERENCE HELD AT KSU
In October 1995 the Department hosted the annual Midwest Solid State Theory Symposium, attended by researchers from the region, elsewhere in the U.S. and also Europe. Highlights were sessions on high-temperature superconductors, with Jack Dow of Arizona State, R. Klemm of Argonne, Tony Leggett of Illinois, and George Levin from Kent State, recent developments in large scale computational methods, with Lubos Mitas of NCSA, Richard Martin of Illinois, Norm Troullier of Minnesota, Kai Ming Ho of Iowa State, Bjork Hammer of CAMP, Denmark and a session on Statistical Mechanics of Condensed Phases with Elizabeth Behram of Wichita STate, Vladimir Antropov of Ames Laboratory, Aniket Bhattacharya of Michigan State and Paul Parris of Missouri Rolla. Michael Wortis of Simon Fraser was the keynote speaker. The Symposium was organized by Talat Rahman with the help of Amit Chakrabarti and Gary Wysin, and was funded by The Department of Physics, The College of Arts and Sciences, and the Graduate School. Next year's Symposium will be held at University of Illinois.
COSMOS, an international collaboration of 34 universities
led by Bill Reay with Ron Sidwell, Noel Stanton, Tim Bolton, and
Donna Naples, will search for evidence of oscillations of
muon-type neutrinos to tau-neutrinos at an unprecedented level of
sensitivity. Observation of such oscillations would compel the
tau-neutrino to have a mass in the range of a few thousandths of
a percent that of the electron-- enough to provide a major source
of the missing ``dark matter'' in the universe. COSMOS and its
companion experiment
The
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