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PHYSICS CASEDepartment of Physics July 2005

A Message from Lawrence KraussThe past four years, since my last message to you, have been among the most exciting in the department’s history. Among the many highlights was

the remarkable Future of Cosmology Conference that brought the world’s most important cosmologists and astrophysics to Case. Stephen Hawking and Steven Weinberg each gave major public lectures. This conference inaugurated the new Center for Education and Research in Cosmology and Astrophysics. When it is fully endowed, CERCA, in coordination with the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, will lead an exciting program of research, education, and public outreach. National Public Radio’s Talk of the Nation - Science Friday was broadcast live from the conference. The meeting attracted journalists from around the world as well. The entire event was web cast and video archived so that you watch it on the web: www.phys.case.edu/events/cerca_video_archive.php

Many exciting internal changes have been going on at the same time as our high profile external events. We continue to recruit the best and brightest young faculty from around the world to

bolster our research program. Since the past newsletter, three new faculty have joined us, from Columbia University, University of California at Santa Barbara, and Princeton Universities. Two new endowed professorships have been created, thanks to generous donations from a private foundation, and the State of Ohio. The new Masters Program in Physics Entrepreneurship is flourishing, as is our newest undergraduate major program, a BS Major with a concentration in biophysics.

This past year was a very gratifying one for me personally. A visiting committee, composed of Nobel Laureates Steve Chu and Frank Wilczek, as well as distinguished scientists Barry Barish from Caltech and Eli Yablonovitch from UCLA, came to Case to review our programs and explore our strategic plan for the future. They came away very impressed by the developments of the past decade, and gave a strong recommendation to the University to continue our efforts to become one of the best mid-size physics departments in the country. I was particularly pleased to learn that they found our undergraduate program to be one of the best in the nation, and said we were the only institution they had ever visited where they could not induce the undergraduates they met to complain about any aspect of the program.

During the past 12 years I have had the opportunity to meet many of you, and have been

gratified by the support we have received. The programs we have developed would not

have been possible without your support. As we embark on new efforts to grow both

a Nanotechnology Center and our Astrophysics Center, and to raise funds to add on to

our already crowded Physics Building, I urge you to consider a gift to our department.

Now, perhaps more than ever, your contributions can make a real difference. You will find

attached to this newsletter an envelope which can help you direct your gift to one of these

many exciting programs. As always, I thank you for your continued support.

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The Future of Cosmology

Lawrence Krauss and Stephen Hawking

Kavli-Cerca ConferenceFor three days in October 2003, the Case physics department was at the center of the universe, figuratively speaking. The whole world was watching (literally, via webcast) the constellation of astrophysicists and cosmologists who gathered in Strosacker Auditorium for the Kavli-CERCA Conference on the Future of Cosmology. This unique event was sponsored by the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics and Case’s new Center for Education and Research in Cosmology and Astrophysics. What an incredible way for CERCA to come onto the scene!

Seventy-four of the planet’s most famous physicists tackled questions which will face cosmology, particle physics, and astrophysics in the next 25 years. These ranged from: “What are the prospects for the existence of extra dimensions?” to “What are the best tools to push the frontiers of astrophysics?“

There were sessions on the cosmic microwave background, supernovae as tools to measure dark energy and the acceleration of the expanding universe, and ultra-high-energy cosmic rays. Theorists and experimenters traded thoughts on dark matter, gravitational waves, inflation, string theory and structure in the universe. The session which garnered the most press coverage was that on the “anthropic principle”, in which strongly stated pros and cons were exchanged: can the argument be made that the universe is the way it is (i.e. characterized by numbers like G and e and Λ and a gaggle of “constants of nature”) because we wouldn’t be around to measure them if they were any different? Steven Weinberg claimed that the argument is worthy of pursuit and Stephen Hawking, in a sold-out lecture in Severance Hall, related the proposal to the fact that only 4 of the 11 dimensions of string theory – the ones in which we exist – have not been wound up upon

themselves to the point of irrelevance. Our students were wowed by the presence of Hawking on campus, and they packed Severance to hear his talk: “Brane New World”. Case was proud to present the 2003 Michelson-Morley Award to this world-renowned symbol of imaginative cosmology. Is the universe we know and love only one of many, and does it reside on an intersection of “membranes” in a many-dimensional space? You can watch the talk, and, in fact, most of the conference, by going to our website: www.phys.case.edu. (Go to EVENTS, then to CERCA, then to VIDEO ARCHIVE).

2002 Michelson-Morley Award Anyone who reads Physics Today has enjoyed the delightful, thought-provoking articles by Frank Wilczek of MIT. He has a way to make physicists think about their field in entirely new ways and from new, unifying perspectives. In his M-M lecture, Prof. Wilczek described how a picture of the structure of matter arose from the logical development of logical ideas

Wilczek on the World’s Numerical Recipe and how wonderfully it has all been confirmed by experiment. Wilczek’s friends at CWRU were delighted this past fall when he was one of the three recipients of the 2004 Nobel Prize in physics. Frank invited two physicists to the Nobel ceremonies to represent all his colleagues, and we were pleased that one of these was Lawrence Krauss, pictured here with Wilczek just after the awards had been made.

The 2003 Michelson Lecture Biology: Molecule by Molecule

Steven Chu of Stanford University was our 2003 Michelson Lecturer. His title was “What can we learn from looking at biological processes, one molecule at a time?” Professor Chu shared in the 1997 Nobel physics prize for his work on developing laser techniques for trapping cold atoms or molecules in magnetic fields. In his Michelson Lecture, he discussed the application of this technology to fundamental biological problems. Chu described a variety of interesting experiments that have shed new light on biological processes including the activity of RNA, DNA folding, and the manufacture of proteins.

Post-doctoral StarsMichelson Lecture Series – an ongoing successThe Michelson Post-doctoral Lecture series continues to bring outstanding young researchers to spend a week in the department, to give three seminars and a colloquium. This format allows our students and faculty to take advantage of extended interactions with a young expert in the field. The scholars are chosen from among nominees suggested by senior physicists worldwide. In 2002, the sixth participant in the series was Re’em Sari of Cal Tech who told us about new observations of gamma ray bursts and extrasolar planets. The 2003 lecturer was Brian DeMarco, from the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder. He spoke on the intriguing quantum behavior of an atomic Fermi gas and quantum computing using trapped ions.

In April 2004, Karsten Heeger of Lawrence Berkeley Lab brought us up to date on the new and exciting results coming from two neutrino experiments. Each experiment has shown that neutrinos oscillate from one flavor to another, a behavior which requires that they have non-zero mass.

The 2005 lecturer was Yaroslav Tserkovnyak of Harvard who described the exciting new field of nanostructures, in particular on the role of magnetism in these submicron systems. He outlined a series of potential experiments in which mesoscopic structures are expected to exhibit remarkable quantum mechanical properties.

The lectureship program is organized by Glenn Starkman (gds6@case.edu), who would be delighted to receive nominations from our alumni.

Kudos galoreLawrence Krauss was the winner of the 2004 Oersted Award, given annually by the American Association of Physics Teachers. The AAPT’s “most prestigious award” recognizes notable contributions to the teaching of physics. Former recipients include Feynman, Rabi, Bethe, Sagan. As recipient, Lawrence presented an address at the Ceremonial Session of the AAPT Winter Meeting. His modest and timely title: “A State of the Universe Address”. As we reported in the last newsletter, Krauss earlier received the APS Lilienfeld Prize and the AIP Gemant Prize, and so has become the only person to win all three of these top physics prizes.

Lawrence Krauss Continued from page 1After 12 years as Chair I shall be stepping down in July, so this will be my last newsletter message to you all. My colleague Cyrus Taylor will assume the chairmanship this summer. When I first wrote to you, I had just arrived here with great plans. Carrying out these plans, with the support

of my distinguished colleagues, has been one of the most satisfying aspects of my entire academic career. It has been an honor and a privilege to serve as Chair and to represent my colleagues both within the university and around the world. I will leave the chairmanship comfortable in the knowledge that Case Physics will continue to make a mark around the world.

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Four Groups: Four ContinentsWith the addition in 2002 of John Ruhl, and just this year of Tom Shutt, the department now has four “experimental astrophysics/cosmology” groups. Including RA’s and grad students, the combined program involves about forty physicists! John is a major player in several large collaborative experiments which measure

the cosmic microwave background radiation. In the Boomerang experiment, an enormous helium balloon has flown at 37 km altitude in 10-20 day trips around the south pole. It carried a 1.3 m telescope with detectors held at 0.3 K to reduce noise. The results have vastly improved the mapping of the tiny fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background, thus providing valuable clues to the formation of structure and the composition of the universe. The group is also part of a collaboration using a ground-based 3 m telescope called ACBAR (also at the south pole) which has even better angular resolution. Preliminary results on structure in temperature distribution across the sky support the big-bang plus inflation theory. Coming next

The Expanding Astrophysics Programis a 10 m ground-based telescope, components of which are being designed and built at Case. John, who did his BS at Michigan and his PhD at Princeton in 1993, has been appointed full professor.

Our newest colleague is the Agnar Pytte Professor, Tom Shutt. At one time Tom worked at UC Berkeley with Dan Akerib in the search for “weakly interacting massive particles” (WIMPs). He joined our department just recently, coming from a position at Princeton. Tom’s work at Case will involve a WIMP search experiment in

direct competition with Akerib’s Cold Dark Matter Search (CDMS). Called XENON, the new experiment will be set up in an enormous laboratory under the Apennines in central Italy. The detection techniques for the two experiments are different, but each has a technological trick to pull out the WIMP events from the sea of background electron and photon induced events. Tom did his BS at Texas A&M and his PhD at UC Berkeley.

In April 2005, the APS Forum on Physics and Society further honored Krauss with the presentation of the Burton Forum Award. The citation reads: “for major contributions in defending science in the schools through his efforts in combating the opponents of teaching evolution, and for continuing to enhance the public understanding of contemporary physics.” The acceptance speech, given in Tampa at the April 2005 meeting of the APS, was titled: “Science Under Attack: Intelligent Design”. Among other recent recognitions of achievements by our colleagues was the selection in 2004 of Bob Brown as the recipient of the AAPT award for Excellence in Introductory College Physics Teaching. For the past several years, Bob has recreated the way he teaches his physics classes, making “significant departures from the way he used to do things.” For example, every ten minutes or so, the class breaks for an exercise that reflects on the subject matter just presented, giving Brown feedback on how well he has taught and how much his students have absorbed. To top this, Brown has been selected as a finalist for the 2006 Cherry National

Teaching Award given by Baylor University. Each of the three finalists for this award will receive $15K and will present a series of lectures at Baylor University. The finalist’s home department will receive $10K to foster the development of pedagogical skills. The top winner, to be announced in Spring 2006, will receive the tidy sum of $200K, and an additional $25K for the department. In recognition of his excellent teaching, Phil Taylor was honored with the Northeast Ohio Council on Higher Education award, adding that to his APS Ohio Section’s William Fowler Award for distinguished research in physics.

In a somewhat different area, the Ohio Conference of the American Association of University Professors presented the 2004 Robert E. Kennedy Award for Academic Freedom to Bill Fickinger in recognition of his contributions to the well-being of the university’s AAUP Chapter and its support of the principles of tenure, academic freedom and faculty governance at CWRU.

Ultrafast Optics and Time-domain Spectroscopy

Our experimental condensed matter program moved into an exciting new area of research in 2002 when Jie Shan, the department’s second woman professor, was appointed the Warren E. Rupp Assistant Professor. Her field is ultrafast optical spectroscopy. This

work involves the use of ultrashort gigawatt laser pulses (100 femtoseconds in duration or 0.03 mm in length) to investigate electrical charge transport in insulators and in nanoscale structures. With very short bursts of electromagnetic energy one can “pump/probe” normally insulating materials which are rendered conductive by photoexcitation. Another application of time-domain spectroscopy is the study of the response to an electric field of charge carriers confined within nanostructures.

Originally from China, Jie completed her undergraduate work at Moscow State University and, in 2001, her doctorate at Columbia. She has been granted an NSF CAREER award which will support her research for five years. Her research program at Case complements Ken Singer’s work in non-linear optics and Kathy Kash’s in nanotechnology.

New EmeritiSince our last newsletter, Keith Robinson, Tom Eck, and Arnie Dahm have been appointed professors emeriti. Keith and his wife, Margi, are looking forward to quality time, traveling and enjoying their grandchildren. You can often

find Tom Eck, working in his physics department office – especially if you operate under Samoan Standard Time. Arnie, now Institute Professor Emeritus, is continuing his research on electrons on the surface of liquid helium films.

Hoffman and McGervey40 years in the department

We are saddened to inform you of the deaths of two of our colleagues, Dick Hoffman and John McGervey. Each served the department for forty years!

Hoffman, who did both his undergraduate and graduate work at Case, created a program in thin films and surface physics in which no fewer than 40 doctoral students earned their degrees. Some studied the properties of magnetic films such as those used in information storage devices. Others used the latest technologies in ultra-high vacuum systems and surface science spectroscopies to study layers only a few atoms thick. Hoffman’s pioneering work led ultimately to new applications in coatings, adhesives, catalysis, interfaces, and modern microelectronics.

McGervey, who joined Western Reserve in 1960, developed an experimental program in which positron annihilation was used to study electrons in matter. His studies included the determination of electron momentum distributions in crystals, voids and imperfections in metal, and radiation damage in reactor containers. Eight of our PhD graduates worked on these projects in his laboratory. John was the driving force for many years behind the department’s program to train high-school physics teachers. Dozens, more likely hundreds, of Ohio’s physics teachers fondly remember John’s enthusiasm for teaching teachers to teach physics.

Physics in businessCyrus Taylor and the Entrepreneur MSWe introduced you to the Physics Entrepreneurship Program (PEP) in the 2001 newsletter in which students, typically with a physics background, take courses in technology-related physics topics and a core of courses in the Weatherhead School of Management. The students each submit a physics master’s thesis involving an entrepreneurially oriented project, typically associated with an internship in a sponsoring company or with a student-designed research project. The program was recognized in

2003 as a national leader in entrepreneurship education with the awarding of a prize from the Roundtable of Entrepreneurship Education. This group consists of top business, science and engineering faculty from leading American universities.

For more information or for ways to support PEP, visit http://pep.case.edu or contact cyrus.taylor@cwru.edu.

Kudos Galore Continued from page 3

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Physics “senior project program” leads the collegeIn the mid-1990’s, the physics department initiated a policy of requiring that all our majors do a senior project. With the university’s adoption of SAGES (Seminar Approach to General Education and Scholarship) for the entering class of 2005, this policy now extends across the university. The Physics Department’s Senior Project program served as a model for the SAGES Capstone program. In fact, Gary Chottiner was appointed to serve as the Capstone Coordinator for the University and charged with implementing the program in time for the first group of pilot SAGES students, due to graduate in 2006. You can read more about the SAGES Capstone program on the web at www.phys.case.edu/SAGEScapstones.

The Physics Department’s Senior Project web page contains the abstracts from all of our majors for the past six years. You will be impressed by the variety and sophistication of these year-long undertakings. www.phys.case.edu/undergrad/Senior%20Projects/.

Physics majors have the opportunity to pursue a senior project with appropriate mentors from any institution in the world. Recent graduates have worked at University Hospitals, NASA-Glenn and IBM-Burlington VT - as well as with several different science, engineering and humanities departments on campus. Any alumnus of the department who would like to explore the possibility of mentoring a physics senior project student should contact Gary at gary.chottiner@case.edu.

PHYS 166 “About physics” An overview for freshmenTwo years ago, our physics majors requested that the department design a course that would let them know, as freshmen and before they choose a major, how one becomes a professional physicist and what types of employment opportunities are available to physicists. This seemed like quite a reasonable request and perhaps one that should be addressed by every department on campus. The physics department’s answer is a new one-credit course, PHYS 166 – Physics Today and Tomorrow. The instructor in charge of the course for its first two years has been Chuck Rosenblatt. He gives the first lecture, The Physics Enterprise, describing the history of careers and funding in physics and

The undergrad physics program Gary Chottiner, director of undergraduate studies

how we ended up with such a wide variety of professional opportunities. Each week a different speaker from academia, government or industry talks to the class about how his or her career evolved and what he or she does on a daily basis. The first year it ran, the class drew 45 students; this year 55 are enrolled. Alumni of the department who would like to speak to this class should contact Prof. Rosenblatt. rosenblatt@case.edu

Talks for Spring 2005 were: The Nanotechnology Juggernaut; The Noble and Nobel MRI: A Simple View of It and Its Increasingly Rich View of Us and Our Brain; Outward Bound, Living and Working in Microgravity; Physics Getting Down to Business; Gravity Waves in the Cosmic Microwave Background; Global Climate Change; Molecular Optics and Electronics; Dark Matter in the Universe; Femtosecond Spectroscopy; Quantum Liquids; Physics in Other Dimensions; Shape of the Universe; Quantum Computing.

Students join curriculum committeeTwo years ago the department decided to add an undergraduate physics major to the committee that oversees our undergraduate programs. The Physics and Astronomy Club was asked to nominate someone for this post. Michael Minar, a senior Engineering Physics major, was the first to serve. His successor, for the current academic year, is Adam Light.

Both Michael and Adam were charged with representing the interests of all our undergraduate majors. The students organized formal and informal meetings to discuss changes that their representatives later proposed to the department – most of which were adopted. The committee also routinely requires that faculty proposals affecting our majors be vetted by the students via their committee representative. Two examples of innovative changes initiated by the student reps were the creation of PHYS 166 and a revision of our senior-level major requirements. As a result, several courses formerly specified for the senior year have been replaced by menus of courses, thus allowing a student to choose topics of special interest. More details at: www.phys.case.edu/undergrad/programs/.

Measuring upOutcome assessmentThe university and the physics department are in the process of formalizing the procedures by which we

evaluate the success of our programs. The entire University recently underwent an accreditation review. In the past, undergraduate courses have been assessed largely by student evaluations. About 5 years ago, the department added an exit survey for our graduating seniors, asking them a variety of questions about their experience in the department. A similar survey has been planned for our majors to be taken seven years after graduation. This survey may in fact be distributed to alumni more than seven years out.

Have you ever figured that if space is curved, the light from your flashlight might just come around and hit you in the back? Glenn Starkman has. But he also figured that it would take a while for the round trip. Better than that would be to find evidence in the sky of light emitted at a single place coming toward us from opposite directions in the sky. This would be possible if the universe is small enough and has interesting topology – there is more than one route from one place to another that is short enough to be traveled in the age of the universe.

The light he has chosen was emitted from the “surface of last scattering” about 300 Kyr after the big bang, and has been traveling through the universe essentially unimpeded throughout the intervening 13-14 billion years. That light, cooled to 2.7K microwaves by the expansion of the universe, has just been measured over the full sky by the WMAP satellite, and tiny fluctuations have been observed. What if the identical pattern of fluctuations were to be observed on opposite sides of the sky? It turns out that

The department has also instituted an annual Town Hall meeting of our majors, an event from which faculty are excluded! Students are asked to discuss positive and negative features of their experience in the department and to suggest changes. The student rep to the Undergraduate Curriculum Committee subsequently presents a synopsis of the meeting to the Committee.

the patterns to look for will lie along circles in the sky. Starkman and three colleagues cranked up all the computer power they could commandeer and have crunched away at the WMAP data. In a Phys. Rev. Letter in May 2004, they announced bad news and good news. The former is that they observed no such patterns in the sky, the latter is that the “nondetection rules out the possibility that we live in a universe with topology scale smaller than 24 Gigaparsecs.” Now, don’t you feel less closed in?

But Starkman wasn’t content to stop looking at the edge of the observable universe. Hoping to be able to see imprints of the universe’s topology from somewhat beyond the surface of last scattering, he and his colleagues looked to see how the modes in which the universe is oscillating line up. Much as the vibrational modes of a musical instrument depend on the instrument’s shape, if the universe has

Starkman’s UniverseCircles in the Sky

Continued on page 11Circles in the Sky

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Bill Fickinger, emeritus since 1999, is working on a history of physics research at CWRU, starting with the Yale grads in the 1830’s at Western Reserve in Hudson, and the Michelson period at Case in the 1880’s, through the age of Miller and Mountcastle up to the 1940’s, the rapid expansion of the

two departments in the 1950’s, their merger in 1967, and on into the 1990’s. The 300 page book with 200 figures includes descriptions of the research and the names of all our graduates and titles of all doctoral dissertations. It should be ready to distribute in the fall of 2005. In a related

“history” project, Bill has taken on the organization and preservation of the department’s collection of century-old physics apparatus. He gave an invited talk to the Acoustical Society of America last spring on Dayton Miller’s analysis of sound waves. Miller, it turns out, had spoken on the same subject at the first New York ASA meeting 75 years earlier. Another project which Bill has enjoyed the the editorship of this newsletter.

Tilted liquid crystalsDesigner light switchesChuck Rosenblatt and his group have made some interesting discoveries in the fabrication of special purpose liquid-crystals (LC’s). Typically, a single pixel in an LC “light-valve” consists of two parallel transparent conducting polarizing planes. Between these two planes is the LC material, long stringy molecules characterized by a “director” or principle axis. The interior surfaces of the planes are prepared by coating them with a “polyimide alignment layer”, which is then scored with microscopic grooves. This aligns the LC molecules in contact with the surface and controls the angle between them and the substrate. When a voltage is applied across the sandwich, the polymers adjust to minimize the free energy of the system. This affects the amount of rotation of the plane of polarization of the transmitted light, and thus the net transmission through the sandwich. Millions of these little on-off switches are found in the typical LC TV screen. And of course they are at the center of such things as optical switching and data transmission.

Many LC devices require the anchoring of the polymers to the interior surfaces to be at specific angles. Chuck’s group found that they could control the attachment angle by

Two members of John Ruhl’s lab traveled to the South Pole to work on the ACBAR experiment this past “summer”: i.e. November and December. It was postdoc Jon Goldstein’s fifth time at the Pole and grad student Zak Staniszewski’s first. The journey to the South Pole includes a series of commercial flights to Christchurch, New Zealand and two military contract flights from there. The first military

Physics research at C(&)WRU 1830-1990

modifying the “baking” and “rubbing” preparation of the surfaces. Some of Phil Taylor’s students have been able to quantify the LC-surface interaction with new computer-intensive models. Rosenblatt has recently signed a multi-year research agreement with Nissan Chemical Industries to perfect this technology.

Nanoscale PhysicsThe physics department has been at the forefront of a campus-wide initiative on nanoscale science and technology. The initiative involves almost 70 faculty from across many units of the University including, arts and sciences, medicine, engineering, management, and dentistry. Ken Singer is leading the campus-wide effort, and Lawrence Krauss is leading the planning of a medical nanotechnology facility on the new west quad research park. Many members of the condensed matter faculty in the department are involved in nanoscale physics research. As part of this initiative, the department has been awarded an Ohio Eminent Scholar Professorship by the state to recruit a distinguished researcher in the area of nanoscale physics. The state funding provides for one-half of the normal endowment for a senior faculty member, and the department is seeking donors to complete the endowment.

Associate Chairman Ken Singer

flight is an eight hour trip to the coastal Antarctic McMurdo Station. After a 24-hour layover at McMurdo, a three hour flight takes passengers to the South Pole Station.

ACBAR is a two meter telescope used to look at the fine details of the Cosmic Microwave Background anisotropies. Because ground based telescopes have to see through the water vapor of the Earth’s atmosphere, it is advantageous to locate microwave experiments at a high and cold site. The 10,500 ft. altitude of the South Pole and the extreme temperatures make even basic life difficult. A typical day included four to six 15 minute

walks in the -30 F weather from the main station to the experiment. Since the experiment’s first light in 2001, members from the Ruhl lab have joined collaborators from Caltech, Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon each winter to update and maintain the experiment. This year, the group had to change and characterize detectors and replace a broken Helium refrigerator. The two spent an interesting Thanksgiving at the Pole, but they were back just in time for the rest of the Holiday season.

Postdoc Goldstein (left) and grad student Staniszewski spent two

months in Antarctica working on the latest CMB detector.

Case: Antarctica Campus

Supercomputers analyze exotic materialsMagnetic semiconductors and non-linear optics

Walter Lambrecht, along with several other department members, has been awarded a powerful computer cluster by the Ohio Supercomputer Center. The cluster consists of 24 parallel processors in a configuration which allows users to carry out efficient parallel computations.

The cluster is primarily used by Walter’s “Electronic Structure Group”. His graduate students and postdocs carry out computer intensive simulations of point defects and dopants in semiconductor materials. Of particular interest are magnetic impurities in semiconductors and their interactions. With this research, they join a worldwide

search for novel “magnetic semiconductors”. Such materials are believed to be of great promise for a new era in electronics, coined spintronics because it will make use of the spin degree of freedom of the electron.

Another area of active research is the study of new types of semiconductors, especially materials which hold promise for nonlinear optical conversion applications. Lambrecht’s group has developed a methodology to predict their optical properties and the consequences of defects. Close cousins of these materials are being considered for photovoltaic applications.

Rolfe Petschek and his students are using the new “Ohio Cluster” for quantum chemical calculations of novel organic molecules in search of a new type of superconductors, and Phil Taylor’s students are using it for simulations of complex polymers and liquid crystals.

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Drafted Director DanTwo years ago, the department had the good fortune to appoint Major Daniel Schultz, US Army, PhD, as the new director of the undergrad labs. Dan has superbly met the challenge of meeting the high standards set by his predecessor, John Fons. Dan did his PhD at U. Wisconsin and was most recently on the physics faculty at West Point. With everything running smoothly in the intro labs (yes, we still require two semesters of labs for the engineering and science intro courses), the “real world” intervened, and Dan was invited to join his former colleagues somewhere in Afghanistan. His regular emails to the department indicate that he has not lost his sense of humor even though his descriptions of day-to-day operations have given new meaning to the word snafoo. John Fons, by the way, is now enjoying a tenure track faculty position at the University of Wisconsin, Rock County.

Alumni in the newsOne of these days you might have a digital light processing device sitting in your living room. The DLP is the latest in a series of micromirror systems in which light beams are directed by tiny moveable mirrors. The mirrors, tens of microns across, can be rotated ± 10 degrees, to put an image on a TV or movie theater screen. The new technology is largely the creation of Larry Hornbeck, who has been with Texas Instruments for thirty years. Alumnus Hornbeck did his PhD on the Fermi surface of magnesium alloys with Bill Gordon in 1974.

William Bassichis, who completed his PhD under Les Foldy in 1964, has just recently been named the first “Presidential Professor for Teaching Excellence” at Texas A&M. He has been on the Aggie Faculty since 1970 and has befriended students of intro physics world wide through his text “Don’t Panic”. An innovative and popular teacher, Bassichis spent spring 2004 teaching undergrads in Qatar.

Politics and Scientific IntegrityCERCA Conference on Science and SocietyIn October of 2004, CERCA sponsored its first symposium on science and society. The topic was the question of openness and cooperation between the government and the scientific community. As a follow up to a well publicized letter addressed to the administration by more than 5000 scientists, including four dozen Nobel Laureates, the panelists called for a science policy based on science rather than on political agenda. Participating with host, Lawrence Krauss, were Nobelists Peter Agre, biochemist from Johns Hopkins; Sidney Altman, biologist from Yale; and Leon Lederman, director emeritus of Fermilab. Among the topics on which the government and the vast majority of the scientific community disagree are stem cell research, global climate change, national defense and nuclear weapons issues, and the selection of unqualified administrators of

Circles in the SkyContinued from page 7

interesting topology, its modes should reflect it’s shape -- the details of its topology. What they found has surprised not just them, but everybody. Not only do the modes line up with each other -- contradicting the predictions of standard cosmological theory -- they line up with the solar system! For example, the low frequency modes seem to avoid the plane of the solar system and to vibrate more strongly below that plane than above. This means that what we’ve seen of the lowest modes probably isn’t cosmological after all -- rather it probably comes from some material in or near the solar system. When the contribution of this material is taken into account, that will leave even less of those lowest modes -- a new and disturbing mystery for cosmology. By the way, Glenn, newly appointed as full professor, will be at Oxford next year, thanks to a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Expanding astrophysics programContinued from page 4

We introduced Dan Akerib in our last newsletter. He has been promoted to full Professor and has been spending this year on sabbatical at U. Chicago and Stanford. He writes: “…we are happy to report that our group, together with our CDMS collaborators, now has the world’s best upper limit in the search for WIMPs. Our experiment has now been running for over two years in the Soudan Mine in Northern Minnesota. We anticipate maintaining a world-leading position for the next couple of years.” The WIMP race at Case is now underway. The fourth component of our astrophysics program, led by Corbin Covault, studies the energies and directions of very high energy cosmic gamma-rays. The ongoing experiment measures Čerenkov radiation from electron showers produced high in the atmosphere. The experiment uses two-hundred 36 m2 steerable mirrors which look at the night sky over New Mexico. Construction of an even more elaborate experiment is well underway at the Auger Southern Observatory in Argentina. Sixteen hundred water Čerenkov counters spread over 3000 square kilometers, all exquisitely timed, will measure the energy and direction of incoming gammas, some of which have energies of 1020 eV (100 exaelectronvolts) . The Case group is responsible for the global positioning system components which are the

key to the directional sensitivity of this enormous, multi-national project. Our colleagues travel far and wide to intercept three different cosmic messengers: microwaves, WIMPS, and gamma rays. When considered along with the research of our theoretical cosmology/astrophysics programs, they position Case among the world’s leading centers of astrophysics and cosmology.

2005: the World Year of PhysicsAPS Selects Campus as Historic Site

As part of the international celebration of the World Year of Physics, the APS Forum on the History of Physics has designated the site of the 1887 Michelson-Morley experiment as a National Physics Historical Site. The APS website explains: “The purpose of the Historic Sites initiative is to raise public awareness of physics. We believe that unexpected encounters with an attractive plaque that identifies an important and interesting event in the history of physics will be an effective way of getting physics before the general public. Also, we recognize the initiative will benefit physicists by increasing their own awareness of important past scientific advances, hence of their membership in the historic evolution of their profession.”

Not satisfied with a simple “plaque”, we have placed a full scale model of the experiment in the new east lobby of the Rockefeller Building, along with suitable descriptions of the nature of the experiment and its remarkable and unexpected results. The refurbished model was originally built by Don Schuele for the 1987 MM centennial. We plan a dedicatory celebration sometime next November when representatives from the APS will visit. In fact, we are in the preliminary stages of planning a multi-faceted “event” to complement the MM dedication and, coincidentally, the hundredth birthday of the Rockefeller Building.

The full-scale replica of the 1887 Michelson-Morley experiment, complete with metallic strings which trace out

the orthogonal light paths.

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