Fall 2024 Physics Colloquium
Thursday, September 12th
Welcome Back Picnic
Learn about our Physics & Astronomy department and being a Physics major. Get to know everyone, ask questions and EAT!
Noon
Tome Outdoor Classroom (Rain Location: Tome 115)
Grilled BBQ lunch provided
Thursday, October 31st
Emma Lothrop '25 - "Physics and STEM Applications at an Environmental Company"
The vast majority of items we dispose of cannot be recycled because they are comprised of films, layered materials, or composites. But by identifying the component materials, separating them, and assessing the overall environmental impact of the process, we can begin to find some solutions. Over the summer, I interned with TerraCycle’s R&D team. I worked in the lab as part of a small R&D team to identify plastics and worked remotely to conduct lifecycle analyses. I also had the opportunity to hear from others through lunch-and-learn talks and other interns’ project presentations.
Noah Lape '26 - "Seeing Physics at Extreme Conditions"
Emergent quantum phenomena such as superconduction and colossal magnetoresistance manifest when materials are put under pressures higher than those found at the center of the Earth. We achieve these pressures in the lab using a Diamond Anvil Cell (DAC), a device that functions as a diamond vice and squeezes materials. We characterize material properties using a combination of electrical resistivity, magnetic susceptibility, XRD, and Raman measurements. But in order to better understand the lattice structure that gives rise to fascinating properties we need to take higher resolution spectra and collect more light from our DAC. We designed an optics system to do just this and attempted to experimentally verify it's effectiveness. Increasing light collection from our DAC will allow us to characterize the structures of materials we were previously unable to and has some promising applications in allowing us to preform high resolution microscopy in the DAC for the purpose of analyzing biological organisms that have been "frozen in time" through flash pressurization.
Noon
Tome 115
Pizza provided
Thursday, November 21st
Adam Baldoni '19 - "A Novel Target Material for Optical Neutrino Detectors"
Since the late 1960s, optical detectors have been a common method for detecting neutrino interactions. Two common target materials for these detectors are pure water and liquid scintillator, each having advantages and disadvantages. A new material, water-based liquid scintillator (WbLS), has been developed over the last decade at Brookhaven National Laboratory and combines the advantages of its constituents while minimizing their disadvantages. Small-scale, tabletop experiments have been done with WbLS, but ton-scale tests need to be performed before scaling up to a kiloton-scale WbLS detector. This talk will give an overview of three ton-scale WbLS detectors currently in operation, detailing their design and the physics underlying how these detectors work.
Noon
Tome 115
Pizza provided
Thursday, December 12th
Professor Pearson & Professor Hamilton-Drager
Careers Talk
Noon
Tome 115
Pizza provided