Kansas
State University
Department of Physics
1999 Newsletter
Campus is very quiet now that the fall semester is over. Several changes have occurred or are occurring on campus during the last year. A section of the engineering building was named Rathbone Hall for the long time dean of engineering Donald Rathbone, who recently retired. A major remodeling project for the K-State Union was also begun.
To everyone's great satisfaction the Wildcats played great football having one of their best seasons ever, winning nine of their ten games and going on to the Alamo bowl. The Wildcats lost to Purdue in the Alamo bowl, a disappointment but nevertheless a great season for the Wildcats. The Cats finished out the season 11-2 and were either 9th or 10th in the nation depending on whose poll you looked at.
By Mick O'Shea, Editor
NOTES FROM THE DEPARTMENT
HEAD
Chander Bhalla has entered into a three-year phased retirement plan. In the summer, Donna Naples decided to accept an offer from the University of Pittsburgh. As a consequence we are conducting faculty searches for an atomic theorist and for a high energy experimentalist.
Because of the late departure of Donna, we needed help teaching our courses. Fortunately for us, John and Margaret Spangler were in the process of retiring back to Manhattan, and I was able to persuade John to help us out in teaching this year. It has been interesting teaching recitations for John again.
Physics faculty continue to receive recognition for their excellent performance. Chander Bhalla received the Schwenk Teaching Award from our Physics Club. Talat Rahman received the Commerce Bank Award Award for Distinguished Graduate Faculty this spring. Talat is also Faculty Senate president this year, a job that I felt like I barely survived last year. Talat is doing a great job, and shows much more aptitude for the job than I had.
Cardwell Hall continues to be altered; this process is not always an unmixed blessing. Our expanding research continues to require increasing laboratory space, which is not easy to find in Cardwell Hall. To improve fire safety and to provide disabled access for our three large lecture halls, a new (big) corridor was carved out of our lecture demonstration preparation room. Life is more cramped, and setting up large demonstrations requires more planning and effort.
We are talking about changing the format of our Engineering Physics course. We are talking about retaining the lectures but combining the recitations and laboratories into a studio environment. Most of the available research says that doing this will result in the students having improved understanding of important concepts. It will be interesting to see how the changes will go and whether they will result in significantly better understanding by the students.
By James Legg
The
J.R.Macdonald laboratory is in the second year of its current three
year operating grant from the
U.S. Department of Energy. It is now
an official national DOE user facility, with users from various parts of
the U.S., Europe, and Japan.
A program advisory committee, consisting
of four outside experts in ion-atom and ion-surface collisions and one
internal member, invite proposals every six months. The proposals are
evaluated and awarded on the basis of scientific merit, and the
experiments are scheduled during the following period.
Outside pressure
on the facilities has been high. The two major facilities, the CRYEBIS
ion source and the Tandem-LINAC accelerator, are heavily scheduled by
both in-house and external users. Proposals typically request more
running time than is available, but nearly all experiments with strong
scientific merit are accommodated.
A major transition in the atomic physics faculty in the department has
been the appointment of Martin Stockli to associate professor of physics.
Martin, who was the father of our CRYEBIS ion source, now has teaching
duties added to his already too busy schedule. This has required that we
find additional help for the daily management of the EBIS. We were
fortunate to be able to attract Charles Fehrenbach, who was previously a
research associate from Colorado State University living at K-State, to this
position. We are also in the process of interviewing candidates for a new
theory faculty position in the K-State atomic physics group.
We have been invited to present a special exhibit on the JRM facilities at
the March centennial meeting of the American Physical Society
in Atlanta.
Our major display, which has been coordinated by Tracy Tipping, Kevin
Carnes, Vince Needham and Martin Stockli will allow attendees to take a
virtual tour of
the laboratory and to operate our CRYEBIS ion source from Atlanta using the
internet.
CRYEBIS Research
Research projects abound. At the CRYEBIS, five beamlines are being
heavily used.
Tandem-LINAC projects
The Tandem-LINAC facility is similarly heavily used. Here are some current
projects:
These projects, as well as much more information on the laboratory,
can be viewed at the JRM web page. The URL is
http://www.phys.ksu.edu/area/jrm. We have Vince Needham to thank for
putting up and maintaining this page.
Lew Cocke Associate Director
for Research Planning
Uwe Thumm is continuing to
work on the theory of ion-surface collisions, ion-cluster interactions, and
slow electron--atom collisions. Drs. Bogdana and Cristian Bahrim joined him
in February as post doctoral research associates. Both got their PhD
(equivalent) degrees at the University of Paris XI specializing in the
theory of ion--surface interactions (Bogdana) and the theory of slow
ion--atom collisions (Cristian).
Bogdana is developing a new, non-perturbative
ab-intio ion-surface scattering calculation that includes an interesting
new continuum discretization method to represent continuous solid state
electronic wave functions.
Cristian is working on the interaction of slow electrons with Alkali
atoms within Uwe's relativistic R-matrix approach. Motivated by very
recent experiments, Cristain is now extending this method to investigate
photo-detachment of negative ions.
During April and May, Uwe was joined by one of his German
collaborators, Jens Ducree from the University of Muenster, to continue
work on a computer simulation that by now reproduces various recently
measured observables during the interaction of highly charged ions with
metal and insulating surfaces. Another visitor, Priv. Doz. Dr. Uwe Wille
from the Hahn-Meitner Institute in Berlin, came to our department in
October in order to work with Uwe Thumm on the emerging field of ions
interacting with thin metallic films.
During the past summer, Uwe (again) spent several weeks in Europe
to collaborate with colleagues at the Manne Siegbahn Institute in
Stockholm on interactions of ions with Buckyballs (C60)
and in Berlin to
continue a collaboration on ion-surface scattering theory. During this
trip he gave invited talks in Stockholm, Sweden; Aarhus, Denmark;
Freiburg, Germany;
Copenhagen, Denmark; and at the 12th International Workshop on Collisions
involving Atomic Clusters, held in Sonderborg, Denmark in June.
In January 1999, Uwe presented an invited talk at the 12th
International Workshop on Inelastic Ion--Surface Collisions, on South Padre
Island, Texas.
Uwe's work is well funded. Apart from being attached to the Macdonald
Laboratory block grant, he has his own NSF grant and recently received an
award from the DOE office of fusion energy to investigate the simultaneous
interaction of atoms and negative ions with both static and laser external
fields.
Partner European institutions
include:
Partner American institutions include:
Students become part of an effort linking international students by
computer and bringing them together periodically to work face-to-face.
Using state-of-the-art digital technologies--the Internet, world wide web,
and desktop video--students will produce a CD based on the science,
technology, and cultural aspects of the bicycle. Individual student projects
range from a bicycle designed for the disabled to investigating the safety
of different designs of bike helmets to developing an understanding of the
way bikes are used in different places.
Student will spend approximately three months at their host institution
during the project and work with fellow team members to study and test
bicycle design or other projects, including the cultural aspects of
bicycles.
The project is a multinational effort to collaborate on the adaptation
and creation of pedagogical materials. Since the bicycle is a
highly developed yet simple device, students and faculty can use materials
developed in a variety of countries and create new materials using
contemporary multimedia.
This effort began almost 15 years ago when Robert Fuller and Dean Zollman
created the videodisc Energy Transformations Featuring the Bicycle.
At about the same time, the PLON Project in The Netherlands developed the
Traffic teaching module and the British Open University developed a course
on Materials and Structures that featured the bicycle. These efforts were
independent of each other. Since that time these groups have worked
together to combine instructional materials from these and other countries,
and they are looking to produce more of these materials.
Two grants are supporting the student and faculty involvement in this
project. The U.S. participation is supported by the Fund for the
Improvement of Post-Secondary Education. The European universities receive
funding from the European Commission.
For more information
Check out our web site at
http://www.phys.ksu.edu/perg/bicycle
By Kim Coy, Physics Education Research Group
Interactions between ions and surfaces are not yet well understood
at a microscopic level despite their importance for applications in surface
chemistry (catalyses, corrosion prevention), accelerator design, and
controlled fusion devices. Similarly, the detailed understanding of
electron--transfer and electron emission in collisions between ions and
fullerenes is of relevance for future applications. These collisions
yield information on the physical and chemical properties of fullerenes
that may enable the successful syntheses of new materials (fullerene
chemistry).
Bicycle Project Unites Students
Around the Globe
Nineteen ninety-eight marked a year of great change for K-State high
energy physics (KSU-HEP) as the group leaped from specialized fixed-target
experiments to the high energy frontier of the D0 proton-antiproton
annihilation experiment at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory's
Tevatron collider.
As so often happens in science, this did not come about by following a
simple straight-line path. The year started on a high note as the
data-taking phase of two successful neutrino experiments (called NuTeV and
DONUT--never mind the acronyms) at the Fermi Laboratory (Fermilab)
ended.
COSMOS
Alas, this auspicious beginning was followed by an unexpected jolt:
the premature ending of the K-State-led COSMOS neutrino oscillation experiment.
COSMOS was cancelled due the withdrawal from the experiment by a large
contingent of physicists from Japan.
Conceived by Bill Reay, Ron Sidwell, and Noel Stanton nearly a decade ago,
COSMOS would have shed much light on the central problem of neutrino mass
and a host of other problems in neutrino physics. Others have borrowed
many experimental ideas of COSMOS, and it is not improbable that this
project will resurface in the future.
COSMOS's demise also precipitated the departure of assistant professor
Donna Naples for a faculty position at the University of Pittsburgh. Donna
simply did not want to give up on neutrino physics, and the opportunity to
join like-minded colleagues at Pittsburgh, her alma mater, made it too
tough for her to stay in Manhattan.
Our group has now suffered firsthand an all-too familiar phenomenon at
K-State: a young scientist develops her talents and establishes her credentials
(including a DOE Outstanding Junior Investigator award) in the friendly
environs of Manhattan only to be lured away by attractions of the academic
free market. A search for Donna's replacement is now actively underway, and
we have an outstanding pool of candidate replacements. We certainly wish
Donna well at Pittsburgh.
DO Project
Meanwhile, even before the official end of COSMOS, we had begun receiving
overtures from leaders of Fermilab's D0 project. Freed of other
obligations, our group enthusiastically joined this world-class physics
collaboration.
The D0 experiment studies collisions between protons and
anti-protons at a center-of-mass energy of two trillion electron volts: the
highest energy yet achieved in collisions using accelerators. It is a
collaboration of over 400 physicists from dozens of universities, particle
accelerators, and national laboratories spread throughout the world.
Making
a splash in such a large operation is no mean feat, but within weeks of
joining, K-State's Bill Reay was offered a leadership position in the
construction of D0's sophisticated silicon tracking system. Fermilab
wanted Bill so much that they picked up his entire salary and gave him
a place to live at the lab for a year to entice him into joining the
project's management team. Bill has put a lot of miles on his
plane commuting between Manhattan and Chicago these past 12 months!
The Department of Energy (DOE), our main funding agency, gave K-State
a big
vote of confidence by renewing the group's research contract for three more
years. K-State received overwhelmingly positive reviews in a tough new DOE
judging procedure that pitted us in head-to-head competition with schools
such as MIT and the University of Michigan. With support from the NSF
EPSCoR program, Fermilab, K-State, and the Department of Energy, our yearly
research funding has reached $1.1 million.
The entire group is now
actively involved in D0 silicon efforts. Ron Sidwell is in charge of test
stands, Noel Stanton is designing and testing very low-mass signal
cables, and Tim Bolton is overseeing an upgrade of the
High Bay Detector Facility. This building, which formerly held the
university's motor pool, was renovated into a modern laboratory over
the past three years using funds from the DOE, K-State, and the city of
Manhattan.
Over a $150,000 of drift chamber tracking detectors were built in the high
bay for the NuTeV and DONUT experiments. The facility is now being
outfitted with a semiconductor-class clean room and a double-shielded low
noise electronics alcove, in preparation for large-scale D0 silicon work.
In addition, the physics shop uses the south end of the high bay for its
computer-controlled milling machine, and we have even found room in the
north end of the building for K-State's solar car club to build this year's
edition of their sun-powered racer.
Electronics Design Laboratory
Another spin-off of KSU-HEP, the Kansas State Electronics Design
Laboratory has also developed into a fine research facility. Started by the
high energy group with funding from the NSF-EPSCoR program, EDL provides
advanced electronic support for research and teaching at K-State.
Headed by engineer Tim Sobering, EDL has already designed and built a good
deal of electronics for our KSU-HEP D0 effort, and has completed a
number of projects for other groups both inside and outside the physics
department. In fact, the EDL reputation extends beyond the university.
Acting Vice-Provost for Research Ron Trewyn will soon discuss EDL
activities with Kansas senator Pat Roberts.
NuTeV
Meanwhile, graduate students Drew Alton, Jesse Goldman, and Max
Goncharov are busy analyzing NuTeV data as part of their Ph.D. thesis
projects. Under the supervision of Tim Bolton and post-doc Todd Adams,
Drew, Jesse, and Max have already produced preliminary measurements that
they presented at last year's APS conference. Todd and Tim were
selected by the NuTeV collaboration to present some of the
experiment's first results at the prestigious International
Conference on High Energy Physics, held in Vancouver, British Columbia
this past summer.
Todd will shortly depart for the tough assignment of presenting more NuTeV
results at a conference in the French Alps. We have a fourth student,
Patrick Berghaus, living at Fermilab. Patrick works with Bill Reay, Ron
Sidwell, and K-State senior post-doc Mikhail Kubantsev on instrumentation
for D0, and also analyzes data from the DONUT experiment.
Two other graduate students, Daniel Mihalcea and Shih-Wen Yang, left
us this year with their degrees--the very first Ph.D.'s awarded for high
energy physics at Kansas State University. Daniel and Shih-Wen wrote
theses concerning the investigation of an important type of decay of
"charmed" particles. Daniel has accepted a post-doc position with the
University of Oklahoma, and Shih-Wen now works for Lucent Technologies in
New Jersey. We are sure they will enjoy success in their new
undertakings.
Tim Bolton, High Energy Physics
|
Chakrabarti presents at APS meeting
Amit Chakrabarti gave an invited talk at the March 1998 Meeting of the
American Physical Society in
Los Angeles on thin films of a special type of polymer called block
copolymers.
He also gave another invited talk
at the Dow Chemical Corporation in Freeport, Texas. The subject matter of
this talk was phase behavior of polymer blends, which have major industrial
applications.
|
News from Talat Rahman's Group
Talat Rahman was the recipient of the 1998 Commenrce Bank Distinguished
Faculty award, and also was elected a Fellow of the American Physical
Society.She spent a busy summer at the Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Gessellschaft, Berlin, Germany, at the invitation of Professor Gert Ertl, who is one of the directors of the institute. Talat was engaged in a joint experimental and theoretical study of anharmonic effects at metal surfaces.
Of particular interest were the measurements of surface thermal expansion, and temperature dependent vibrational frequencies on the closed-packed surfaces of Ag, Cu, Ni and Pd. Experimental techniques like low energy electron diffraction and He-surface scattering were complemented by molecular dynamics simulations using realistic interaction potentials.
September 1998 brought news that Talat had received a three-year grant from the US Department of Energy to examine the phenomena of friction and adhesion at the atomic level. This will be a collaborative theoretical and experimental effort between Dr. Rahman's group at K-State and Dr. Salmeron's at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, University of California-Berkeley.
Hongxing Jiang and Jingyu Lin plan Chinese conference
Hongxing Jiang and Jingyu Lin visited China between July and August, 1998.
They co-organized, with Peking University, the "International Topical
Meeting on III-V Nitride Materials and Devices". The meeting went
well and covered recent progress in these very exciting semiconductor
materials.
Many wonderful sightseeing programs--including the Great Wall, the Forbidden City, etc.--were also arranged.
The metalorganic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD) in the semiconductor group has been running for more than six months. High crystalline quality and purity GaN and AlxGaxN epilayers have been produced by the system. They are now planning to upgrade the system for the purpose of growing GaN related multiple quantum wells and superlattices.
With an additional DoD grant, an inductively coupled plasma (ICP) dry etching facility has just been installed. This quarter-million dollar system will enable them to fabricate many optoelectronic devices and structures down to 1 micron size.
