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<p align="center"><font color=#8000FF" size="6"><strong>Kansas
State University<br>
Department of Physics<br>
1998 Newsletter</strong></font></p>
<a name="editors_corner">
<hr noshade width="50%"><p>
<center>
<table border=2 bordercolor="red" cellspacing=10 cellpadding=10>
<tr valign=top>
<td><a href="#top">Go To Top</a><br>
<a href="#editors_corner">Editor's Corner</a><br>
<a href="#notes">Notes from the Department Head</a><br>
<a href="#phys_educ">Physics Eduation Research</a><br>
<a href="#jrm">J.R. Macdonald Laboratory</a><br></td>
<td>
<a href="#research">Research in Magnetic Models</a><br>
<a href="#semi">Semiconductors Research News</a><br>
<a href="#sorensen">Sorensen Directs CFF</a><br>
<a href="#hep">High Energy Physics</a><br>
<a href="#law">Law's Sabbatical</a><br></td>
<td>
<a href="#news">News Briefs</a><br>
<a href="#bottom">Go to Bottom</a><br>
<br>
<a href="http://www.phys.ksu.edu">Physics Home Page</a><br>
<a href="http://www.ksu.edu">KSU Home Page</a></td>
</tr>
</table>
</center>
<p>
<p><img src="oshea-bw.gif" align="left" hspace="10" vspace="5"
width="140" height="180" alt="Mick O'Shea">
<h2>EDITOR'S CORNER</h2></p>
Our campus and our physics department continue to be very active
places. I took a tour of our new library facility,
<a href="http://www.lib.ksu.edu/" target="_top">Hale Library,</a> and was
impressed with the amount of space that has been added for books and for
student study areas. Hale Library building dominates the center of campus
and is a "must see" for any visitor to our camput. I have heard rumors
recently that an addition to Durland Hall, which houses the Engineering
College, will be made.<p>
<a href="http://www.ksu.edu/sportsinfo/.football/" target="_top">The K-State
football</a> team had another great season and ended it with a
victory over Syracuse in the Fiesta Bowl on New Year's Eve. Manhattan
turned into a ghost town while Tempe, AZ and surrounding areas became a sea
of purple!!!!<p>
<i>By Mick O'Shea, Associate Professor</i><p>
<a name="notes">
<hr noshade width=50%"><p>
<img src="jim.gif" align="left" hspace="10" vspace="5" width="149"
height="163" alt="Jim Legg">
<h2>NOTES FROM THE DEPARTMENT HEAD</h2>
Another year has passed and as usual it's past time for me to write my
yearly column about the happenings in the <a
href="http://www.phys.ksu.edu/" target="_top">Department of Physics</a>. A
new Associate Professor, Martin Stockli, joined our faculty this year. As
many of you know Martin is not totally new; he has been a Research Associate
Professor in the Macdonald Laboratory. Our research funding remains
healthy, going over six million dollars for the first time in fiscal
1997.<p>
A university honor reflects well on the department. NSF had a new
competition for awards honoring a university for integrating teaching and
research in science and technology. <a
href="http://www.phys.ksu.edu/~dzollman/" target="_top">Dean Zollman</a>
and Provost Jim Coffman
were the co-PIs for the Kansas State award, one of ten given to Ph.D.-
granting institutions. It is also certainly true that the work of
<a href="http://www.phys.ksu.edu/gene" target="_top">Tom Manney</a>,
who retired this last year, contributed a lot of strength to our
case.<p>
Faculty and students continue to receive recognition for their
excellent performance. <a href="http://www.phys.ksu.edu/~depaola/" target
="_top">Brett DePaola</a> received the third Schwenk Teaching
Award from our Physics Club. <a href="http://www.phys.ksu.edu/~sor/"
target="_top">Chris Sorensen</a> received the <a
href="http://www.commercebank.com/" target="_top">Commerce Bank</a>
Award for Distinguished Graduate Faculty this spring; coupled with his
Undergraduate Teaching Award last year, he's pretty well swept the boards.
<a href="http://www.phys.ksu.edu/~cocke/"
target="_top">Lew Cocke</a> was named a University Distinguished Professor;
there are now four in the department. Jonathan Winkler has just
been awarded a Rhodes Scholarship.<p>
Again, these are only a few of the honors for people in the department. If
I tried to list all the achievements, I would take over the whole
newsletter and still, almost certainly, fail to mention one or two.
<p>
I was fortunate to see a few old faces on visits to KSU this last
year. Chuck and Betty Kay Hathaway brought their basketball team to play
KSU this winter. For those who've lost track, Chuck is now Chancellor of
the <a href="http://www.ualr.edu/" target="_top">University of Arkansas</a>
at Little Rock. There was a little time for reminiscing by various of us
old hands; it was really a pleasurable visit.<p>
Finally, there's been another change over the last couple of years.
Our major lecture halls, Cardwell 102 and 103, have been transformed into
"High Tech Classrooms." They really look and sound much nicer. Our only
question now is whether some of us old tech faculty can take full advantage
of the new bells and whistles. As problems go, that isn't bad!<p>
<i>By James Legg, Department Head</i><p>
<a name="phys_educ">
<hr noshade width="50%"><p>
<h2>PHYSICS EDUCATION RESEARCH</h2><p>
The <a href="http://www.phys.ksu.edu/area/peg/" target="_top">Physics
Education Research Group</a> at Kansas State University has
had an exciting year since we last reported on our efforts and
achievements. Professor Zollman gave a lecture entitled "Atoms Through the
Ages" at the Smithsonian Institute in May of this year as part of the 1996
Professor of the Year award by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement
of Teaching. He was honored at a reception during October of 1996 in
Washington, D.C., by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education.
A $5,000 cash prize, media exposure and a certificate of recognition were
included with the award.<p>
In February Professor Zollman and Provost James R. Coffman received an
award on behalf of the University for activities related to integrating
teaching and research in the sciences. This Recognition Award for
Integration of Research and Education was the first of such awards made by
the National Science Foundation. All 136 research universities in the
United States were eligible. K-State was one of only 10 research
universities in the nation to receive this one-time award. Each university
received a $500,000 reward to be spread over three years. In addition to
Zollman's work with teaching quantum mechanics the Award recognized Tom
Manney's efforts to bring contemporary genetics research to school
teachers. The <a href="http://www.phys.ksu.edu/gene" target="_top">
GENE</a> project has been part of the Department's effort in
this area for many years. A third component involved an elementary
education program of which Concepts of Physics is part.<p>
<h3>Software Design Awards</h3><p>
The Eighth Annual Computers in Physics Educational Software Contest
will award N. Sanjay Rebello, postdoc, along with Dean Zollman, Lawrence T.
Escalada and programmer Chandima Cumarantunge, first prize for "Energy Band
Creator". The group will also receive honorable mention for "Scanning
Tunneling Microscope" by N. Sanjay Rebello, Dean Zollman and programmer
Konstantin Sushenko, and "Wave Function Suite" by N.Sanjay Rebello and Dean
A. Zollman along with programmers Chandima Cumaranatunge and Gary Dong.<p>
The contest encourages excellence in educational software. Entries are
evaluated by a distinguished panel of judges, and Computers in Physics
provides cash prizes and honorable mentions to the winning contestants.
The awards will be presented at the 1998 Winter Meeting of the American
Association of Physics Teachers in New Orleans. This year will be the
second consecutive year in which the KSU Group has received both a top
prize and honorable mention in this contest.<p>
<img align=right src="zollman.gif" alt="Dean Zollman" width="152" height="231">
<h3>Zollman Sabbatical</h3><p>
Professor Zollman is on sabbatical leave from KSU this year. He is at
the <a href="http://www.Colorado.edu/" target="_top">University of
Colorado at Boulder</a> for the fall semester. He has
received a Fulbright grant to study at the federally funded Institute for
Science Education located at <a href="http://www.uni-kiel.de/"
target="_top">Christian Albrechts University</a> in Kiel,
Germany, next spring. While there, Zollman will work with Manfred Euler
who visited KSU in 1995.<p>
Professor Euler, like Zollman, has developed materials to help
students better understand physics. His work focuses on the physics and
biophysics of hearing, the perception of sound, waves and wave motion.
Prof. Zollman's work includes materials on waves and wave motion. They
will look at these two different sets of materials and try to bring them
together, focusing on making two different sets of teaching materials work
together to teach topics related to waves.<p>
<h3>Staff Changes</h3><p>
The Physics Education Group would like to note the departure of several
colleagues. Lawrence T. Escalada received his Ph.D. and is currently an
assistant professor at the <a href="http://www.uni.edu/index.html"
target="_top">University of Northern Iowa</a>. Heidi Mauk Gruner
completed her Ph.D. and graduated in May and is teaching at the <a
href="http://www.usafa.af.mil/" target="_top">U.S. Air
Force Academy in Colorado</a>. Teresa Hein also finished her Ph.D. and
graduated in May and is currently an assistant professor at <a
href="http://www.american.edu/" target="_top">American
University</a> in Washington D.C.<p>
Michael Thoresen has joined the Physics Education Research Group at
KSU as a postdoc. He is a recent graduate of the <a
href="http://www.arizona.edu/" target="_top">
University of Arizona</a> and
will be working on the Recognition Award for Integrating Research and
Education. <p>
<i>By Kim Coy, Physics Education Group</i><p>
<a name="jrm">
<hr noshade width="50%"><p>
<img src="richard.gif" align="left" hspace="10" vspace="5" width="147"
height="218" alt="Patrick Richard">
<h2>J.R. MACDONALD LABORATORY</h2><p>
The faculty of the <a href="http://www.phys.ksu.edu/area/jrm" target="_top">
Macdonald Laboratory</a> prepared its three-year
Renewal Proposal to the <a href="http://www.doe.gov/" target="_top">
U.S. Department of Energy</a>, DOE, in the Spring of
1997. The proposal is built on the success of our research program in
ion-atom collisions using the highly charged ion beams from the
tandem/LINAC, ION-ION, and CRYEBIS facilities.<p>
An outside review team consisting of five atomic, molecular and optical
scientists and two DOE contract monitors were at KSU in November to
examine the atomic physics programs in the Macdonald Lab. The preliminary
report from the review panel is that the internal research program is
outstanding and that the laboratory effort to maintain an outside user
program is also outstanding. It concluded that the laboratory user program
could benefit from additional resources.<p>
The panel also noted that the accelerator improvements provided by DOE ARIM
funds greatly benefited the laboratory and should be continued in the
future.<p>
We received notice from DOE during the first week of January 1998 that
our grant has been renewed for the next three-year period with small
increases in funding each year. All of us in the Macdonald Lab are excited
about these next three years and invite any of our past colleagues and
students to drop by and see us whenever possible.<p>
In my group we continue to make new discoveries in the area of
electron-ion physics from our experiments in ion-atom collisions. Recently
we have demonstrated the excitation of triply-excited states in
three-electron ions formed in electron-ion scattering. Triply-excited
states is a hot topic in neutral atom excitation. We also made the first
observation of super-elastic scattering in electron, highly charged
ion scattering. This observation takes advantage of metastable ion beams.
This is the result of work with Peter Zavodsky, Research Associate, and
Gabor Toth, a former student, who is now a Research Associate at Western
Michigan, and also in collaboration with John Tanis, Professor of Physics
at <a href="http://www.wmich.edu/" target="_top">Western Michigan</a>.<p>
Two hot topics that we presented in our Progress
Report are the observation of new recoil-ion electron emission symmetries
observed in the ionization of atoms by low velocity projectiles and the
observation of new features in the electron emission spectra from high
velocity ions traversing a carbon foil. The former observation is the
result of the COLTRIMS work performed by Professor <a
href="http://www.phys.ksu.edu/~cocke/ target="_top">Lew Cocke's</a> group and
forms the thesis of Mohammad Abdallah.<p>
The latter topic on the electron emission from carbon foils featured very
narrow jets of electrons observed in the forward and backward emission
directions. The jets are interpreted as the channeling of electrons in
the plasma-like wake of the projectile track in the material. It offers
the opportunity to measure some properties of ions moving in solids that
have not been previously characterized. This work was done by Professor
Siegbert Hagmann and formed the thesis of Thorsten Zaepfel. It was a
collaborative effort with Professor Horst Schmidt-Boecking from Frankfurt,
Germany.<p>
I don't have space here to tell you more about what is going on in the JR
Macdonald Laboratory. As it is I have slighted some of my colleagues by
not mentioning their exciting work as well, however you can read all about
it in our recent Progress Report to DOE. It is a 161 page testament with a
very colorful cover. If you would like a copy, please write to me and I
will send you one.<p>
Best wishes for a successful and happy 1998.<p>
<i>By <a href="http://www.phys.ksu.edu/personnel/faculty/richard/html">
P. Richard,</a> Director, J.R. Macdonald Laboratory, Department of Physics,
Kansas State University, Manhattan, KS 66506-2604</i><p>
<a name="research">
<hr noshade width="50%"><p>
<img src="wysin.gif" align="left" hspace="20" vspace="5"
width="160" height="180" alt="Gary Wysin"><p>
<h2> RESEARCH IN MAGNETIC MODELS</h2><p>
We are mostly familiar with ferromagnetic materials (such as in
computer disks) where exchange forces keep microscopic magnetic moments or
spins aligned, and strong uniaxial or Ising-like anisotropic forces choose
the particular direction.<p>
There are other magnetic materials, however, where anisotropic exchange
interaction between spins makes the Z-axis a hard (high energy) direction,
causing them to prefer to lie in the XY plane. This gives rise to various
exotic spin configurations: vortices. A vortex is simply a region where
the spins point in a circulating pattern within the XY plane.
They are interesting not only because they are known to play the major
role in phase transitions, but also because they can move around like
particles, keeping their appearance. Gary Wysin spent the last
year on sabbatical at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG), in
Belo Horizonte, Brazil, continuing to investigate magnetic vortices.
There he worked with Beth Gouvea and Antonio Pires, who have continued
to do research on theory of magnetic vortices, and methods for
analyzing phase transitions in magnetic models.
The trip was funded partly by an NSF International Programs grant and also
by CNPq and FAPEMIG in Brazil. In one set of calculations, new schemes for
calculating the internal modes of vibration of vortices or other localized
spin objects were developed. Numerical calculations of the vortex normal
modes were compared with long-wavelength approximate methods of the UFMG
group, especially to study a localized mode of vibration that appears on
vortices in antiferromagnets. Monte Carlo calculations were used to study
the phase transition in models of chains of magnetic ions weakly coupled
together, what is really an anisotropic three-dimensional XY model. In a
collaboration with Brazil and Germany, localized solutions in
two-dimensional uniaxial spin models were studied. GMW also polished his
c-programming skills and developed a UNIX X11 program to demonstrate how
the spins in a two-dimensional XY model are updated in Monte Carlo and
spin-dynamics simulations (integration of dynamic equations for the spins).
If you want to try it out, you can download the source from his web
page (www.phys.ksu.edu/~wysin/xmc.zip).<p>
Graduated student Dimitre Dimtrov also made the trip to UFMG and spent
one month there making simulations to measure the lifetimes of vortices
while he wasn't enjoying the churrasco. He has finished his KSU PhD
degree, with the Thesis: "Numerical Studies of Surface Effects in Fine
Magnetic Particles and Lifetime of Vortices in Two-dimensional Easy-plane
Magnets." Now he works at Los Alamos National Lab with Alan Bishop in the
theoretical division.<p>
<i>By <a href="http://www.phys.ksu.edu/~wysin/"> Gary Wysin</a>,
Associate Professor</i><p>
<a name="semi">
<hr noshade width="50%"><p>
<img src="jlin.gif" align="right" hspace="10" width="136" height="180"
alt="Hongxing Jiang">
<img src="jiang.gif" align="right" hspace="10" width="136" height="180"
alt="Jinyu Lin">
<h2>SEMICONDUCTORS RESEARCH NEWS</h2><p>
Our semiconductor research group, led by Hongxing Jiang and Jingyu Lin
has just completed building a MOCVD system (see picture) for the growth of
epitaxial films and quantum well device structures of III-nitride wide
bandgap semiconductors. The price tag for similar commercial systems is
between 3/4 and 1 million dollars.<p>
Several visiting professors from Beijing University have helped a great
deal during the process of building the MOCVD system.<p>
As everyone probably already knows, the competition for
III-nitride semiconductor research is extremely severe, as these materials
offer great potential for applications in high-power and high-temperature
electronics and uv/blue light emitters. This new state-of-the-art growth
system together with the existing optical and electrical characterization
facilities in our laboratory will place us in a unique position to make
important contributions to the exciting nitride field.<p>
The funding for our III-nitride semiconductor research is still going
very strong. With an additional Department of Defense equipment
grant, we added a $140,000 streak camera to the laser spectroscopy set-up,
which improved the time resolution of our optical measurement facility to
about 2 picoseconds.<p>
One of our graduate students, Matt Smith, defended his Ph.D. thesis in
March 1997 and accepted a postdoc position at the Air Force Institute of
Technology.<p>
<i>By Hongxing Jiang, Associate Professor and Jinyu Lin, Associate
Professor</i><p>
<a name="sorensen">
<hr noshade width="50%">
<img src="sorenson-2.jpg" align="left" hspace="20" vspace="5"
width="140" height="180" alt="Chris Sorensen">
<h2>SORENSEN DIRECTS PROGRAM FOR COMPLEX FLUID FLOWS</h2><p>
<a href="http://www.phys.ksu.edu/~sor/">Chris Sorensen</a>
has been busy with two major service related projects this
past year. First, he is the Director of the <a
href="http://www.mne.ksu.edu/cff">Program for Complex Fluid
Flows</a>, an eight-member collaboration of physics and engineering faculty at
KSU. The purposes of CFF is to bring together faculty with interests in
complex fluids, i.e., turbulence, reacting flows, polymers, multiphase
flows, flames, etc. The Program is actively seeking avenues for joint
funding and establishing an interdisciplinary graduate student training
program. One recent success was the award of an NSF EPSCoR grant to
establish "The Kansas Program for Complex Fluid Flows" in which five
faculty from Wichita State University and the National Institute for
Aviation Research and one from university of Kansas will join our team.
This promises to be an exciting new academic program for the State of
Kansas.<p>
Sorensen's other major activity was to serve as the Conference Chair
for the Sixteenth Annual Meeting of the <a href="http://www.aaar.org">
American Association for Aerosol</a>
Research, October 12-17 in Denver, CO. This was a year long project and
took a lot of time; but it was well worth it, with 588 attendees and over
500 papers, the conference was the most successful to date.<p>
Sorensen is still active in research and teaching.<p>
<i>By Chris Sorensen, Professor</i><p>
<a name="hep">
<hr noshade width="50%"><p>
<table>
<tr valign=middle><td><img src="hepsmall.gif" alt="HEP Logo" width="89" height="77">
</td><td><h2>   HIGH ENERGY
PHYSICS</h2></td><tr>
</table><p>
Kansas State <a href="http://www.phys.ksu.edu/hep/">high energy</a>
physicists spent much of 1997 either going to "the Lab", coming back from
"the Lab", or, more to their liking, taking data at "the Lab."<p>
"The Lab" is <a href="http://www.fnal.gov/">Fermi National Accelerator
Laboratory</a> (Fermilab), located an
hour or so west of Chicago-- or just a mile north of Aurora for you Wayne
and Garth fans.<p>
All the comings and goings were focussed at running two neutrino
experiments, "DONUT", a small experiment designed to directly observe the
tau-neutrino for the first time, and "NuTeV", a "Rutherford scattering"
type experiment using the very high energy sign-selected neutrino beams at
Fermilab. Arduous efforts in these eighteen month experiments were
successful on all fronts.<p>
<h3>Donut</h3><p>
Nature appears to have provided us with three families of electron-like
objects - the electron, muon, and tau. Each of these charged particles
has an associated neutral neutrino particle, making a total of six
fundamental leptons. Of these, only the neutrino partner of the tau has
yet to be directly observed. DONUT should have a sample of 20-50 events
buried in their raw data that will display the clear signature of a tau
lepton in the final state - direct evidence of an interacting tau-neutrino.
If seen, these events will complete the direct identification of all of the
basic building blocks of Nature that we know about: the six leptons and
their six quark cousins.<p>
A notable KSU effort on the experiment was the construction and deployment
at Fermilab of two large area, precision drift chambers. These chambers
were built in the Physics High Bay Facility here in Manhattan, with most of
the hands-on work performed by KSU under-graduates under the direction
of Noel Stanton.<p>
KSU efforts at Fermilab were directed by Ron Sidwell, and included major
contributions from research scientist Mikhail Kubantsev, post-doc Shoichi
Yoshida and grad student Patrick Berghaus. In addition the
newly-established Electronics Lab, funded by an NSF EPSCoR grant,
supported the detector construction with circuit boards and voltage
distribution modules.<p>
<h3>NuTeV</h3><p>
NuTeV was also heavily engaged in the detector construction business
at the High Bay. Donna Naples, post-doc Dave Woods, and grad student Drew
Alton led an able team of undergraduates in the construction of two
very-large-area "jet" chambers. These devices, funded by Naples' DOE
Outstanding Junior Investigator Award, were then moved to Fermilab and
successfully tested in the NuTeV calibration beam.<p>
Our KSU crew of post-doc Todd Adams and grad students Jesse Goldman and Max
Goncharov meanwhile spent thousands of hours operating the NuTeV neutrino
detector and its beam lines.<p>
NuTeV's goal was complementary to DONUT. Rather than measure properties
of building blocks, the leptons, it concentrated on aspects of the forces
that hold the blocks together. Specifically, NuTeV logged a large,
well-calibrated data set that should help understand the strong nuclear
force (which holds protons and neutrons together) and the weak nuclear
force (responsible for radioactivity) at a level that begins to approach
that of our understanding of the electromagnetic force.<p>
All graduate students are back in Manhattan and busy with the data analyses
that will lead to their theses. This work will be done using a powerful
computing network we have built up using ordinary (cheap) PC's running
either Windows NT or Linux, thanks to help of our undergraduate
computer guru Clay Crouch. We look forward to a wealth of physics results
emerging from K-State over the next eighteen months from the neutrino
experiments, and from ongoing analysis of charm physics by grad students
Shih-Wen Yang and Daniel Mihalcea!<p>
<h3>Staff Changes</h3><p>
We close with an update on personnel. We lost our crack team of
Smiths: Beth, our administrative assistant, and Jeff, our computer systems
manager. Both have gone on to excellent private sector jobs in Ohio.
Beth has been ably replaced by Kathleen Pierce, our new A.A., helped
along by super-student Nicole Lorentz. Post-doc Dave Woods left our
group for a job in industry, and we welcomed new post-doc Todd Adams. We
also graduated two students, Arun Tripathi, who has taken a post-doc with
UCLA at Fermilab, and Frank Steffan, who completed a Master's degree and
returned to Germany for further study. Finally, Donna Naples has added a
new political portfolio to her activities here: she was elected by the
national membership to the executive board of the Division of Particles
and Fields of the APS.<p>
<i>By Tim Bolton, Associate Professor</i><p>
<a name="law">
<hr noshade width="50%"><p>
<img src="law.gif" align="left" hspace="20" vspace="5"
width="130" height="180" alt="Bruce Law"><p>
<h2>BRUCE LAW SPENDS PART OF SABBATICAL IN EUROPE</h2><p>
Bruce Law spent 2.5 months in Europe visiting and collaborating with
various colleagues. He was mainly based at Department de Recherche
Fondamentale sur la Matiere Condensee, Commissariat a l'Energie Atomique a
in Grenoble, France where he worked with Jean-Marc Petit and Daniel Beysens
on a new theory of adsorption-induced colloidal aggregation.<p>
For the past 12 years Beysens and co-workers have observed that colloidal
particles, placed in a homogeneous binary liquid mixture, segregate out of
solution on approaching the phase separation temperature of the liquid
mixture. Up until now no coherent theoretical explanation has been
available which could explain these experimental findings. This work could
have important implications for many industrial and biological processes
where colloidal particles play an important role; if any impurities (which
are always present) are surface active they may be able to screen the
repulsive interaction thus causing colloidal aggregation.<p>
Bruce Law has developed a new type of surface microscope called an
ellipsometric microscope. It has the ability to study the thickness
variation of thin films on surfaces very precisely. This instrument has
monolayer thickness resolution and micron spatial resolution and can
collect data from 250,000 points on a surface in a matter of a few seconds.
The instrument will be used to study the influence of surface
interactions on the shape of very thin liquid droplets. Such a study
will be important in the understanding of surface wettability,
lubrication, and friction.<p>
<i>By Bruce Law, Associate Professor</i><p>
<a name="news">
<hr noshade width="50%"><p>
<h2>NEWS BRIEFS</h2><p>
<h3>K-State Hosts 45th Midwest Solid State Conference</h3><p>
The Department of Physics hosted the 45th Midwest Solid State Conference
October 3-4, 1997. This conference draws together faculty and graduate
students from midwestern universities to exchange ideas on areas of current
research interest in Condensed Matter Physics.<p>
Attendance was approximately 70 people, and papers spanned Biophysics,
Semiconductors, Magnetism, Surfaces and Liquids. The conference was
organized by Drs. Mick O'Shea and <a
href="http://www.phys.ksu.edu/~amitc/" target="_top"> Amit Chakrabarti</a>
with lots of assistance from Marilyn Woodward in Continuing Education and
was sponsored by the Department of Physics, Graduate School and the College
of Arts and Sciences. Although a lot of work, this conference was well
worth the effort since it brought in a number of invited speakers who were
expert in their fields.<p>
The conference also gave our graduate students some experience in
presenting their results at a physics conference. Out students gave eight
of the total of 39 presentations at this conference.<p>
<h3>O'Shea Attends Materials Science Conference</h3> <p>
Mick O'Shea attended the First Conference on Materials Science at
Mu'tah University in Jordan November 1-4, 1997, as an invited speaker.
Mu'tah University is currently building up its research in the physical
sciences and this conference was to bring scientists together to discuss
research topics of interest to Mu'tah University.<p>
The sessions were long with lots of invited papers with a number of them in
Arabic and French. They were still understandable since the mathematics
used is a universal language!<p>
I also had a few hours each day for sightseeing and a great highlight
was to see Petra, a city carved into sandstone. It had numerous houses
carved out of solid sandstone and a number of larger temples. Remember the
temple in "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom"? It's in Petra (at least
the outside shot used in the movie is)! I look forward to my next visit to
Jordan which I hope is not too far into the future.<p>
<h3>European Colloid and Interfacial Science Conference</h3></p>
Amit Chakrabarti was a Keynote Speaker of the 11th European Colloid
and Interfacial Science (ECIS) conference which took place on
September 15-19, 1997 in Lunteren, Netherlands. Chakrabarti also gave
invited talks in University of Wageningen and University of Groningen in
the Netherlands.<p>
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