Events

In January of 1610, exactly 400 years ago, Galileo turned his newly constructed telescope toward the heavens and was the first to observe the 4 moons of Jupiter that are now known as the Galilean moons. This observation, along with his later studies of the motions of sunspots and the phases of Venus, spelled the death of the Ptolemaic view of an Earth-centered universe, which was replaced with the Copernican heliocentric model.

The research seminar is required for 1st year graduate students, but anyone is welcome to attend.

Please note location of this seminar - Valley Library.

The research seminar is required for 1st year graduate students, but anyone is welcome to attend.

This talk will begin with a primer on solar cell basics including how one deduces the maximum energy conversion efficiency that is possible for an ideal (single junction) solar cell. I will then compare crystalline silicon solar cell technology with the leading thin film based technologies. Finally, I will examine one particular method that my research group has found to be useful for characterizing the electronic properties of thin-film semiconducting materials.

Magnonic crystals attract special attention in view of their applicability for both fundamental research on linear and nonlinear wave dynamics in artificial media, and for signal processing in the microwave frequency range. We have concentrated our efforts on the experimental and theoretical investigation of one-dimensional magnonic crystals which can be realized as a spin-wave waveguide whose properties change periodically in space along the spin-wave propagation direction.

This seminar is offered for 1 credit as Introduction to Research, PH607, Section 4, CRN 24127. It is scheduled in Winter term only! New graduate students and graduate students who have not joined a research group should register for credit. Drop-ins by other interested parties are welcome.

Dark matter is widely anticipated to be composed of
particles beyond the Standard Model. I will discuss the
astrophysical evidence, experimental and observational constraints,
and some theoretical ideas on what dark matter could be.

We develop a quantitative description of giant asymmetry in reflectance, recently observed in semicontinuous silver films. A developed scaling-theory-based technique adequately explains the spectral properties of semicontinuous composites, as well as provides insight into the origin of an experimentally observed absorbance anomaly in the vicinity of percolation threshold.

This seminar is offered for 1 credit as Introduction to Research, PH607, Section 4, CRN 24127. It is scheduled in Winter term only! New graduate students and graduate students who have not joined a research group should register for credit. Drop-ins by other interested parties are welcome.

Heisenberg’s Uncertainty principle and tree growth? Planck’s law and global warming? Ergodic hypothesis and meteorological towers? Odd pairs? The discipline of Environmental Physics takes fundamental laws and principles well-known and studied in physics and places them in the context of what’s surrounds us – our environment. Their application allows us to answer a broad spectrum of questions ranging from the basic energy and mass exchange between the atmosphere and the vegetation to highly complex interactions between landuse change and the predicted Earth’s climate.