Winter 2009 News
Senior physics and mathematics major and SPS President, Daniel Velazquez, and Professor Thomas E. Wilson presented a poster entitled "Anisotropic Propagation of Capillary Waves in a Ripple Tank" at the Physics Diversity Summit 2009 (http://www.nsbp.org/conference/) held in Nashville, TN, February 11-14, 2009. Daniel met with 1997 Nobel Prize winner (methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light) William Phillips and had this to say about his experience:
"Attending this conference gave me the invaluable opportunity to interact with worldwide renown professionals in fields of physics such as atomic, molecular, optical, cosmology and astrophysics, and my personal favorite, condensed matter physics. For instance, I had the chance to have a discussion about quantum mechanics for over an hour with Nobel Laureate William Phillips. The exchange of ideas with students from some of the best universities such as MIT, Cornell, Columbia, etc., not only gave me the confidence to stand up in front of any audience and show what I know, but also showed me how rich our faculty members are, who have prepared me, are. We may be a small program but we are a good one too and one I am proud to represent."
Professor William Phillips (1997 Nobel Laureate in Physics) and Daniel Velazquez
Daniel Velazquez and Thomas Wilson with their poster.
Other 2008 News
Publications/Presentations:
"Fabrication and Characterization of a Granular Aluminum/Palladium Bilayer Superconducting Microbolometer", by Thomas E Wilson at Acoustics'08 International Conference held from June 29-July 4, 2008 in Paris, France.
"Evaluating the Barten SQRI for Predicting Small Visual Dipslay Character Recognition" to be presented at the The Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology (ARVO) 2009 Annual Meeting to be held May 3-7 in Fort Lauderdale, FL. The work represents first results from a clinical trial involving visually-impaired persons that was recently conducted at the VA Rehab R&D CoE in Decator, GA. This work has evolved through a collaboration between Professor Thomas E. Wilson, Dr. Ron A. Schuchard, Director of the Rehabilitation Research and Development at the Atlanta Vision Loss Center and Mr. Mark Uslan, Executive Director of the the American Foundation for the Blind TECH in Huntington. Dr. Wilson provided the physical optics experimental design (based upon testing for a correlation between the Barten SQRI integral and the corresponding recognition of sigle digit characters) for the study. The paper concludes that "Combined measures of individual contrast sensitivity with image display characteristics (Barten SQRI integral) may be better outcome measures of the effect of vision loss on performance with small displays than standard visual function measures"."
“Atmospheric Smog Modeling, Using EOS Satellite ASTER Image Sensor, with Feature Extraction for Pattern Recognition Techniques and Its Analysis of Variance with In-situ Ground Sensor Data” by Parthasarathi Roy, Pollard, J., Kennedy, P., Beaty, P., Dooley, J., Oberly, R., and Brumfield, J.O. at the International Conference of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing in Beijing, China, July 4, 2008. To be published in the International Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, in press.
“Comparative Analysis of ECW, MrSid, and JPEG2000 Compression Techniques of Mosaiced DOQQ Image Data”, Chuyen Nguyen, Randall L. Jones, Parthasarathi Roy, Michael Orr, Juan de Dios Barrios, Ralph Oberly, and J.O. Brumfield, at the International Symposium of High Mountain Remote Sensing Cartography, Kathmandu, Nepal, September 8-19, 2008.
2007 News
Professor Wilson had two papers published in peer-reviewed journals: (1) "The fabrication and characterization of granular aluminium/palladium bilayer superconducting microbolometers" in Measurement Science and Technology (formerly Journal of Physics E: Instruments) and, (2) "Accessibility of Home Blood Pressure Monitors for Blind and Visually Impaired People" in Journal of Diabetes Science and Technology (DST) Issue 2, March 2007. His DST contributions included measurements of the modulation transfer function and the low spatial-frequency contrast, of small visual displays, as part of an ongoing collaboration with the American Foundation for the Blind TECH. Co-authors were Mark M. Uslan, Darren M. Burton, Steven Taylor, and Bruce S. Chertow.
Professor Wilson has also had a paper describing his microbolometer work accepted for a 20-minute oral presentation at PHONONS2007 - The 12th International Conference on Phonon Scattering in Condensed Matter, to be held July 15-20, 2007 in Paris, France. http://www.isen.fr/phonons2007/.
Fall 2005 News
Distinguished physicist Dr. Carlos Stroud visits Marshall University (made possible by a grant from the Division of Laser Science of the American Physical Society). See: (1) Poster advertising Dr. Stroud's public lecture on quantum weirdness and teleportation of quantum information (2) Dr. Stroud's slideshow. (3) Dr. Stroud's and Open House itineraries.
Concurrent with Dr. Stroud's visit, the Physics Department and SPS students also hosted the 2005 Year of Physics MU Open House as was described in this Huntington Herald-Dispatch article. This video clip shows Dr. Nico Orsini describing that Open House along with a brief portion of Dr. Stroud's public lecture, including a humorous introduction in which Dr. Stroud arrived, via a "contaminated teleportation device", with Spock ears!
