Summer 2010 Research Underway

Summer Research in the Physics Department has started. The largest group of students will begin their summers of work next week, but there are a few who started this week or earlier.

This afternoon, Kevin Krueger, who is working for Graham Peaslee (Chemistry) and Paul DeYoung, was running the accelerator at HIBAL in the basement of VanderWerf Hall.

Down the hall in the Microwave Lab, Andrew Bunnell, who is working for Steve Remillard, was using the wire bonder.

We look forward to many more students joining us next week and the weeks following.

Notre Dame Undergraduate Research Symposium

On Friday, July 31, Nick Wozniak and Alyssa Frey from the Surface Lab and Cam Recknagel from the Microwave Lab traveled to the University of Notre Dame with a group of Chemistry research students to participate in the Science and Engineering Summer Undergraduate Research Symposium.

The oral and poster sessions included research students from Notre Dame, the University of Michigan, and Hope College.

Hope College Summer Undergraduate Research Function Dinner

Evan Pease represented the physics department at the Hope College Summer Undergraduate Research Function dinner at the Haworth Inn and Conference Center yesterday. One student from each department gave a 5 minute summary of their work. Evan presented the fresh results from the Microwave Lab shown on this blog on July 7. Here is Evan’s presentation.

Microwave Lab

A SCIENTIFIC FIRST!!!
Evan Pease is measuring the even and odd order distortion signals from a superconducting microwave filter. He is using three input signals with a method being developed exclusively in the Hope College Microwave Lab called 3-tone intermodulation
distortion. This ground breaking research will help to establish the limits of superconductivity in microwave electronics and at the same time reveal new insights into the physics of high temperature superconducting materials. The graph to the right (click on it) shows the 3rd order nonlinearity, revealing a “nonlinearity catastrophe” at the superconducting transition temperature. Evan is measuring signals as small as 30 femtoWatts in this experiment.