Weekly Calendar

October 2, Physics Table

Thursday, 12:00-1:00 p.m., LDC 113 (Fireplace Room)

All physics students are invited to join the Department faculty and staff for lunch. We can meet on 3rd Olin at 11:55 for the short walk to the dinning hall or you can join us there.

October 3, Colloquium

Friday, 3:30-4:30 p.m., Olin 02

Our colloquium series this fall will be primarily students reporting on their summer research experiences. Come to hear about the interesting work. Come to hear about opportunities for summer research in your future. Come for the refreshments!

Clark Ritz - “Proton Conducting Membranes for Hydrogen Separation.” Hydrogen for use as a "clean fuel" is produced mainly through steam reforming of methane, which makes a mixed gas stream of things like CO, CO2, H2O, and H2. The H2 needs to be separated and purified before it can be used. One way of doing this is with a ceramic membrane, which is what I worked on developing last summer.

Dan Brooks and Lawrence Urrichio – “Enhancing Phase-Space Coherence using Non-linear Hamiltonians.” Recent work has shown that the natural dynamics of non-linear Hamiltonian systems can be used to increase the coherence of probability ensembles. This is connected to informational cooling of atomic ensembles. We generalize previously found results, showing that our technique is broadly applicable to non-linear Hamiltonians. The probability distribution in such a system oscillates between higher and lower coherence due to the natural dynamics and under certain conditions can be made to systematically increase. This is equivalent to a decrease in the entropy of the ensemble.

October 3, Goodsell Open House,

Friday, 8-10pm, Goodsell Observatory,

Goodsell Observatory will hold an Open House Friday, October 3, 8-10 PM. View stars, galaxies, and nebulas through the Observatory telescopes if clear. The observatory holds open houses the first Friday of every month. The events are cancelled if it is cloudy.

FYI

Iowa State Engineering Programs. Any students interested in hearing about graduate engineering programs at Iowa State should come and talk to their representative. She will be here at Carleton from 10:30 to noon on Wednesday October 22. See Nelson for an appointment.

Students: Consider doing "Special Project" research with a Physics Prof. this term. If you lost the list of possible projects, look at

http://webapps.acs.carleton.edu/curricular/physics_astronomy/for_students/projects/

Personal copies of Mathematica are available for students through the Student Computing Information Center (the SCIC) located on the first floor of the CMC. If you would like a copy of Mathematica on your personal computer, go to the SCIC to pick up your copy. Windows, Mac OS and Linux copies are available.

The deadline for materials to be included in Radiations is noon Thursday prior to the week you would like the information to appear.