Events

Screen reader software provides blind people fairly good access to e-mail, web text, and most electronic text documents. Until recently that access did not extend to math and scientific formulas or to figures. It does now. I will give a sneak preview of a collaborative project between ViewPlus and the American Physical Society that provides full access to APS journals, including the math and graphics. The APS has the most advanced publishing technology of any modern publisher (Of course, they are physicists!).

A brief introduction to nanotechnology will be followed by a description of two recent projects. In the first, atomic layer deposition (ALD) was used to coat carbon nanotubes (CNTs) with a thin film of ZnO. ALD is a highly conformal deposition technique in which films are deposited on a surface one monolayer at a time. CNTs are well known to have excellent field emission properties. ZnO is a versatile wide bandgap transparent semiconductor material with unique piezoelectric, UV photo luminescent (PL), gas sensing, and field emission properties that hold much promise for nanotech applications.

Thin films of wide band-gap semiconductors are deposited by the pulsed laser deposition method. Optimal deposition parameters for the individual compounds are reported. A family of p-type BaCuQF (Q = S, Se, Te) ceramics with a layered crystalline structure is investigated for active and passive device applications. Epitaxial films of BaCuTeF are grown in-situ on single-crystal MgO substrates. These films exhibit a maximum hole mobility of 8 cm2/Vs and conductivity of 167 S/cm. The band gap of BaCuTeF is 3 eV, much higher than 2.3 eV expected from powder results.

Sixty years ago, Linus Pauling revolutionized the way chemistry was taught in university classrooms when he published his 1947 college textbook, General Chemistry. It soon became the standard introductory chemistry text used in universities all over the world, and it secured his place in the public mind as a major scientific figure of the 20th century.

Nanoparticulate materials provide attractive building blocks for designing materials with tunable properties. In this presentation, the inter-relationships of structure and processing of nanoparticulate systems on their physico-chemical properties will be examined. The nanoparticulate systems that will be presented include examples from three broad material categories: polymers, ceramics and metals. Specific systems that will be discussed are cellulose nanocrystals (polymer), silicon carbide, (ceramic) as well as palladium (metal).

Research on the teaching and learning of physics suggests principles that can guide the development of classroom environments where students have the opportunity to take on a more active role in their own learning and to develop a robust conceptual understanding.

When a tsunami arrives a coast, it often breaks offshore and forms a bore. In my talk, I first address a fundamental question, how vorticity (fluid rotation) is generated and leads to the formation of a turbulent flow in a bore (defined as a quasi-steady broken water wave of an infinite wave length) propagating into a quiescent water of a uniform depth. Then, the similar question can be asked for some extended conditions, which includes backwash flow caused by the earlier tsunami runup, for example.

N/A