The Spectrometer

We just heard that Corinne Manogue is the APS Woman of the Month

August 2016 Woman of the Month: Corinne Manogue, Oregon State University

Corinne Manogue obtained her Ph.D. in physics from the University of Texas at Austin in 1984. She studied black holes with Denis Sciama and field theory in curved spacetime with Bryce DeWitt, and joined the physics faculty at Oregon State University (OSU) in 1988 after postdoctoral positions at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, the University of Durham in England, and as an Indo-American Fellow of the Comparative and International Education Society. Professor Manogue played a key role in the early work relating division algebras and supersymmetry. In her infinite free time, she continues explore how to use the octonions to describe the symmetries of high-energy particle physics.

Since its inception in 1996, Professor Manogue has been the driving force behind the Paradigms in Physics project at OSU, a complete redesign of the physics major. This redesign involved both a rearrangement of the content to better reflect the way professional physicists think about the field and also the use of a number of interactive pedagogies that place responsibility for learning more firmly in the hands of students.

Her curriculum development/research interests are in helping students make the difficult transition from lower-division to upper-division physics. Professor Manogue is the recipient of a number of teaching awards, among them the 2008 David Halliday and Robert Resnick Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching from the American Association of Physics Teachers. She was voted a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2005 and named a Fellow of the American Association of Physics Teachers in 2014. After more than three decades in her career, she continues to be amazed to find herself a physicist.

Mateus Carneiro in the neutrino lab worrying about meson exchange currents.

Please welcome Mateus Fernandes Carneiro who has joined the Schellman neutrino group as a postdoctoral scholar. Mateus just completed his dissertation “Measurement of Muon Neutrino Quasi-Elastic Scattering on a Hydrocarbon Target at Enu of 6 GeV” at the Centro Brasileiro de Pesquisas Fisicas using the MINERvA neutrino detector at Fermilab. He will be working with Heidi Schellman and Amit Bashyal on studies of neutrino cross sections. Mateus will be working from Fermilab most of the time but will visit us frequently.

Janet Tate setting up her superconducting demonstration.

The Spectrometer has been operating from the Oort cloud for the past few months, hence some delays in the signal reaching you.

A big event Spring quarter was Janet Tate’s masterful Gilfillan Lecture, “It’s a Materials World” on May 9th.

If you ever wanted to know what goes on in her lab, this is the lecture to watch.

You can find photos at:

Scenes from 2016 Gilfillan Memorial Lecture

and a video, featuring some great superconducting material at:

Graduate student Atul Chhotray sets up telescopes for visitors on the roof of Weniger Hall.

On the moderately cold, crisp night of June 28th the Department of Physics hosted OSU’s First Astronomy Open House. The event, set up by graduate students Tyler Parsotan and Atul Chhotray, gave over a hundred children and adults alike an opportunity to experience physics and astronomy.

Attendees were able to experience what happens to a star when it spins up, how astronomers identify what a star is made of, how telescopes work, and how the solar system is scaled. Additionally, people were able to see, through the Department’s telescopes, into the dark night sky, planets and their companions such as Jupiter and its moons, Saturn and its rings, and Mars. Tom Carrico, a renowned astrophotographer, showed attendees deep sky objects such as the great American Nebula using long exposures with his tracking telescope camera. Along with the wonder and awe that one gets from seeing these beautiful celestial objects, attendees also got a free NASA Tourism Poster for them to remember the event.

There were beautiful 3D posters of the surface of Mars that encompassed a near real experience of being on the surface of mars, and the other “2D” posters decorated the walls of Weniger Hall in a mosaic of celestial beauty.

With the success of this first event of its kind at OSU, harboring at least 120 attendees, Tyler and Atul will be having another event, so stay tuned to when the next Astronomy Open House is!

Check in with graduate student Kelby Petersen

A crown gathers on the roof. — Astrophotographer Tom Carrico creates a stacked image of the Milky Way in real time for an appreciative audience.

Dean Pantula came prepared for astronomy! — Dean Sastry Pantula came prepared for astronomy!

Prof. Yun-Shik Lee’s group has their most recent paper featured as an editor’s pick in Applied Physics Letters. Link to Paper Link to the Editors Picks

Congratulations to a physics major Alexander Quinn who received an Undergraduate Research, Innovation, Scholarship and Creativity (URISC) Award for Fall/Winter 2016-2017 sponsored by the OSU Research Office. Alex (pictured while performing experiments) will work with Prof. Oksana Ostroverkhova on a project titled “Investigating Xylindein, a Fungus-Derived Pigment, as a Candidate for use in Sustainable Optoelectronic Devices”. Alex is planning to graduate in the Spring of 2017 and continue his education as a graduate student in physics. His longer-term plan is to work in the area of sustainable materials and renewable energy.

Scott Clark, B.S. 2008, was named one of Forbes’ 30 under 30 in 2016:

http://www.forbes.com/30-under-30-2016/enterprise-tech/#559be7755023

https://www.linkedin.com/in/sc932

After graduating from OSU (where he earned 3 BS degrees in Physics, Math, and Computational Physics), Scott went on to a Ph.D. in Mathematics at Cornell, worked for Yelp, and then started his own company called SigOpt.

Thanks to Janet Tate for the news!

Scientists from the Physics Department visited the first grade classes (about 100 students) at Clover Ridge Elementary School. Atul Chhotray and Davide Lazzati used solar telescopes to give students an introduction to astronomy. Nicole Quist, Jacob Bigelow and Ethan Minot used an assortment of interactive demos to explain the amazing things we can do with air. From pushing a sail boat with giant air molecules, to floating on a hover craft. Nicole: “Raise your hands if you want to say something.” Student: “That was awesome!”

Hiral Patel and Kyle Vogt are Physics Ph.D. students in the Graham Lab. Both contributed to a major conference called CLEO in San Jose (4,600 attendees) that is sponsored by APS, OSA and IEEE. Kyle presented his paper as a talk. Hiral’s poster received the highest traffic and the most votes, and the Optical Society of America awarded her the “Outstanding Student Poster Presentation Award” from the OSA Optical Material Studies Technical Group.

Congratulations to a physics major Graham Founds who received an Undergraduate Research, Innovation, Scholarship and Creativity (URISC) Award for Summer 2016 for his project titled “Optical Tweezers-Based Probing of Charge Transfer in Organic Semiconductors at Microscopic Scales” ! The URISC program is a university-wide competition of undergraduate proposals sponsored by the OSU Research Office. Graham’s proposal was among 8 compelling undergraduate proposals that were selected for funding. Graham (pictured below) has been a member of Organic Photonics and Optoelectronics Group led by Prof. Oksana Ostroverkhova at OSU Physics department since September 2015. With the URISC funding, he will continue working with Prof. Ostroverkhova over the summer towards demonstrating a new experimental technique for measuring charge transfer between molecules with elementary charge resolution. Graham is planning to graduate in the Spring of 2017 and to continue his education as a graduate student in physics. His longer-term plan is to join the US Air Force laboratories as a research scientist.

The Spectrometer

Physics at Oregon State University

Corinne Manogue names APS Woman of the Month

New Postdoc – Mateus Carneiro

Photos and Video from Prof. Janet Tate’s Gilfillan Lecture

Astronomy Open House draws hundreds to Weniger

Front page news! Lee lab featured in Applied Physics Letters

Another URISC Award for OSU Physics !

Physics Alum Scott Clark is one of Forbes’ 30 under 30 for 2016

Physics visits Clover Ridge Elementary

Graduate student Hiral Patel wins Best Poster Prize at CLEO 2016 from the Optical Materials OSA Group

Physics major wins URISC Award !

Contact Info