Stories of Hope: Hope Astrophysicists

Seeing Stars

Time travel, long imagined by writers and dreamers, is not as far-fetched as you might believe. Sure, it seems fantastical and improbable — the imaginings of which are only meant for postulations and movies — but astrophysicists do it all the time.

And so did Hope College freshman Jeff Engle in the summer of 2016 at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. All it took was expensive, highly powered, one-of-a-kind stellar equipment called the Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope. That and funding and guidance from the Hope College physics department and Professor Dr. Peter Gonthier.

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Seminar: Celebration of Undergraduate Research and Creative Performance

Hope’s Celebration of Undergraduate Research and Creative Performance is a culminating event for many students to showcase their work to students, faculty, family and community members.

Friday, April 21, 2017
Richard & Helen DeVos Fieldhouse
2:30–5 p.m.

This Month in SPS

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This Week: April 12th Physics Elemental Battleship

Join us for game time to play the well known game Battleship … with a twist. Also, start preparing your armada to come vote for you for officer election next week.

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Next Week: April 19th Liquid Nitrogen Ice-cream Party & Officer Elections

Come join us for the last SPS meeting of the year. We will be making ice-cream with liquid nitrogen. What else could you possibly want to do on a Wednesday afternoon? While you please your taste buds, you can also please your ears to the melodious tone of the various potential officer speeches.

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Last Week: April 24th Physics Finals Review Session

AAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH, FINALS!! PHYSICS!!!!! Let us help you prepare for your physics finals by supplying example problems, answering questions, and sustaining your caloric intake. Expect food, physics, and Jason.

Seminar: Dr. Clement Burns

Probing High Temperature Superconductors with X-rays

Friday, April 7 at 3 pm in VW 104

Clement Burns Ph.D., Western Michigan University

Superconducting materials display a variety of unusual phenomenon, including the ability to carry electrical currents without resistance and the expulsion of magnetic fields from their volume.  Many of these systems are well understood, but over the last couple of decades several new classes of exotic superconductors have been discovered which cannot be explained with current theory.  In this talk I will discuss recent work using a free electron laser x-ray source at the SLAC accelerator laboratory to study the high temperature superconductor YBa2Cu4O7-x. Electrons in these systems show a new type of charge order which competes with the superconductivity, and this charge ordering may play an important role in the properties of these materials.