Physics Department

Recently Yong-Chul Yoon (’18) and Elizabeth Lindquist (‘17) (now married) stopped by Hope College for a brief visit.  They are both pursuing PhDs.  Elizabeth is at Boston College in the Curriculum and Instruction program.  She’s focusing on Math, Science, and Technology education with a focus on metrics and physics/engineering learning.  Yong is at MIT in the Health, Science, and Technology program. He’s specializing in optical medical devices and currently working on Optical Coherence Tomography technology and imaging development. 

Gabe Balk and TJ Mann joined an international collaboration to study r-process nuclei (141, 143, and 145Cs) at Argonne National Laboratories with the CARIBU system. The Nuclear Group contributed two key pieces to the experiment: the tape target drive and control system and the barrel-shaped beta detector which has fibers to direct detector light out of SuN to photomultiplier tubes.

Alex’s paper is the 5th peer-reviewed publication with a physics major as the lead author. Influence of columnar defects on magnetic relaxation of microwave nonlinearity in superconducting YBCO resonator devices, Physica C: Superconductivity and its Applications 583, 1353849 (2021).  DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.physc.2021.1353849

The astrophysics research group is hard at work developing compact analytics that describe Compton scattering in strong magnetic fields in the magnetospheres of a group of highly magnetized neutron stars known as magnetars.  Such strong magnetic fields are not accessible in terrestrial laboratory experiments and therefore provide unique environments for testing the physics of quantum electrodynamics.

Here Kam is hard at work making sure that the spin dependence of the algebra correctly includes the spin dependence of the electron as it is either aligned parallel or anti-parallel to the external magnetic field.  Though the initial state is anti aligned, there are two states to keep track of their spins – an intermediate virtual state and a final state after the scattering takes place.

William is mainly programming in C++ developing efficient algorithms to integrate complicated expressions associated with the lifetime of excited Landau states of electrons in strong magnetic fields.

Jon is helping with algebraic gymnastics.  He joined out group with the challenge to improve his math skills.  He is making significant contributions.

On June 15, 2021 at 4:07 pm, the first mouse was placed near the end of Hope College’s Tandem Van de Graaf particle accelerator to receive a small dose of neutron radiation amounting to ~1/15th of a daily radiation dose if the mice were on the Moon. To study the effects of low dose radiation, Neuroscience students Parker and Corine will look for behavioral changes of mice over time. Three minutes later at 4:10 pm, Forest operates the accelerator remotely and starts the simulated space radiation. The space radiation is created in a reaction involving the 3.4 MeV proton beam and a Lithium Fluoride crystal.