What does it mean to be an advocate? Advocacy today is bigger than form emails, stuffy suits traipsing down the halls of Congress, and the same tired song and dance with legislative offices. Advocacy is showing up as your authentic self, engaging leaders with energy and passion, and building strong coalitions that can go the distance. How can you be seen, heard, and taken seriously without...
Owning your graduate school experience: Building your success toolkit from application to graduation
Via this workshop participants will gather tools to help them navigate aspects of exploring, applying, and selecting graduate programs. More importantly, it will help participants build their own toolkit for effective communication, self-advocacy, and leadership development. This...
9:45 - 10:15: Jo Dunkley, "The Earliest Image of the Universe"
I will talk about my work analyzing the cosmic microwave background, which is the earliest image we have of the universe. I use telescopes in Chile to study this exciting signal, that tells us about fundamental properties of the universe like its age, composition, and how fast it is growing. We also hope that it will reveal new...
The seminar will focus on professional skills that women need to effectively perform research and thrive in physics, including how to:
- Negotiate a graduate, postdoc, or professional position in academia, industry, or at a national lab
- Interact positively on teams and with a mentor or advisor
- Think tactically
- Enhance personal presence
- Develop alliances
- Achieve professional...
9:45 - 10:15: Alex Leviness, "What's a Stellarator?"
A stellarator is a type of device that magnetically confines a plasma so that nuclear fusion can occur. After the tokamak, it is the second most popular option for a fusion reactor design, and the past several decades have seen major advances in the design and construction of these devices. I will cover some basics of fusion, the...
What does it mean to be an advocate? Advocacy today is bigger than form emails, stuffy suits traipsing down the halls of Congress, and the same tired song and dance with legislative offices. Advocacy is showing up as your authentic self, engaging leaders with energy and passion, and building strong coalitions that can go the distance. How can you be seen, heard, and taken seriously without...
Owning your graduate school experience: Building your success toolkit from application to graduation
Via this workshop participants will gather tools to help them navigate aspects of exploring, applying, and selecting graduate programs. More importantly, it will help participants build their own toolkit for effective communication, self-advocacy, and leadership development. This...
The seminar will focus on professional skills that women need to effectively perform research and thrive in physics, including how to:
- Negotiate a graduate, postdoc, or professional position in academia, industry, or at a national lab
- Interact positively on teams and with a mentor or advisor
- Think tactically
- Enhance personal presence
- Develop alliances
- Achieve professional...
Biophysics, broadly, is interested in taking the rules and laws we know from physics and using them to help quantify and explain behaviors we observe in biological systems. This can be anything from studying social behaviors and postures in animals, to modeling the response of the immune system to disease, to using microscopy and optics to examine tiny details in a cell. In this session, we...
This talk describes my own career trajectory with a message to encourage students to understand how their own journey from undergrad/grad school toward their goals can be made even more intentional. It covers learning styles and approaches, narratives/story telling principles, and understanding their own personal motivators. I hope this talk encourages students to map out their journey and...
We report the discovery of a candidate dual QSO at at z=1.889, a redshift that is in the era known as “cosmic noon” where most of the Universe’s black hole and stellar mass growth occurred. The source was identified in Hubble Space Telescope WFC3/IR images of a dust-reddened quasar that showed two closely-separated point sources at a projected distance of 0. 26, or ∼ 2 kpc. This red quasar was...
We present analytic equations that can infer $\Omega_{\rm m}$ from the positions and velocity modulus fields of dark matter halos and galaxies. We first train a graph neural network with a sparse latent space on halo catalogues from Gadget $N$-body simulations to perform field-level likelihood-free inference of $\Omega_{\rm m}$. The network is trained using the relative positions and velocity...
A longstanding question when studying Brightest Cluster Galaxies (BCGs) and their evolution is whether their luminosities are statistical extremes of the luminosity distribution of other cluster member galaxies, or whether their luminosities follow a different,``special" distribution. To explore this question, we use the two Tremaine-Richstone (1977;TR) statistics that sometimes lead to...
We utilize scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) to probe the nanoscale architecture of catalytic systems consisting of tin (Sn) deposited on inert gold substrates. Upon CO2 exposure, CO2 is captured and dissociated in places where there are two or more adjacent single Sn atoms. This results in O-terminated Sn formations that are observed to move around the gold surface. Notably, our results...
The Bryn Mawr Experiment (BMX) is an experiment designed to measure and study plasma dynamics as turbulence movements. The BMX is a long chamber at high vacuum in which a plasma is created by puffing a small amount of hydrogen gas into the first section of the chamber where an electrode, powered by external capacitor banks, creates a voltage difference and ionizes the hydrogen into a plasma,...
A new population of quasars–titled cold quasars–has been discovered that are associated with host galaxies that have a high star formation rate. We aimed to study the host galaxies of 65 of these cold quasars in order to further evaluate their peculiar characteristics. Data was collected from the XMM-XXL survey and cross-matched with the VHS, WISE, and HerMES surveys to obtain multiwavelength...
Principal component analysis (PCA) can be used to generate an orthogonal set of principal components, or an orthogonal basis, which can be used to reconstruct elements within and outside of the test set. In this project, a set of images was used to create a set of principal component images (or “eigenimages”), each of which accounts for a certain percent variation (first eigenimage accounting...
An atomic dark matter model, consisting of self-interacting “dark protons,” “dark electrons,” and “dark photons,” as explored by Cyr-Racine and Sigurdson (2013), is observationally viable, provides new observational signatures beyond non-interacting cold dark matter, and might provide a solution to the Hubble tension and the σ_8 tension. We present updates to constraints on the model from...
The Hubble and S8 tensions exist between direct and indirect measurements of the universe’s expansion rate today and the clustering of matter in the universe. We examine two models constructed to alleviate both tensions. Both models inject a strongly self-interacting dark radiation (DR) fluid that also interacts strongly or weakly with some or all of the dark matter (DM). The DR energy density...
Multilayered thin films with interfacial Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interactions (iDMI) can enable the formation of stable magnetic skyrmions at room temperature, which have potential for storage, logic, and neuromorphic computing applications [1-5]. Understanding of iDMI is key to designing optimized multilayer structure for device applications. Here we report deposition of Pt/Co/Ir multilayer...
Dust Cleaning The Cosmic Microwave Background
Simon Foundations, National Physics Society, Steve Choi and Zachary Huber (Cornell University)
Cosmology big question is how the universe began, this research will contribute to finding out the answer to this. A theory that this is based on is the Big Bang theory which explains the expansion of the universe. The CMB is the cosmic microwave...
Liposomal drug delivery is a promising, effective therapeutic approach; it has been used for COVID-19 vaccines as well as cancer therapies. However, most liposomal formulations lack the needed stability for long enough circulation prior to reaching the target or getting cleared out of the blood stream. To mitigate this shortcoming, current liposomal formulations use cholesterol as a...
Lipids exhibit distinct transitions between the gel and fluid phase depending on various factors, such as the length of their fatty acid chains, the number of double bonds in the chains, and temperature. Our cell membranes contain different forms of lipids, with ratios that depend on cell membrane type. Therefore, how lipid molecules pack at different temperatures and within mixtures with...
“Effects of X-ray Exposure on Physical Characteristics of Metallic Thin Films”
Dorothy Doughty & Dr. Jeffery Hettinger
This experiment is designed to understand the impacts of broad spectrum radiation on metallic films with emphasis on corrosion resistance. There was an analysis of depositions of films on a silicon substrate: Copper, Titanium, Titanium Nitride, Silver, and Aluminum. These...
Organic semiconductors (OSC) are exciting materials for incorporation of novel technologies. OSCs can be solution processed in a scalable manner, have high mechanical flexibility, tunable optoelectrical and chemical properties, and excellent biocompatibility. They enable devices like ultra-thin solar cells, flexible and bendable displays and printable communication devices. Here, we focus on...
In preparation for the upcoming Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) mission, the LISA Data Challenges pose a series of open questions on how to extract gravitational wave (GW) signals from simulated LISA data. Solving these challenges is essential to demonstrating effective analysis methods for the mission in the mid-2030s. As the LISA mission will detect GW signals in a new frequency...
Liquid crystals are a state of matter between liquid and solid that is observed in various substances. They are characterized by a clear directional order of the molecule called the nematic phase. We are analyzing the behavior of 4-Cyano-4'-pentylbiphenyl (5CB) molecules in response to various external fields, which are conditions often used in liquid crystal displays (LCDs). While 5CB...
Smartphones contain many sensors that can be used in a multitude of different contexts. Following a past experiment we conducted that confirmed an anomaly in the measurements, that we have not found in literature, a new question came to the forefront. An iPhone12 and a PASCO Scientific Accelerometer were placed onto a cart and sent down an incline to compare their measurements of acceleration....
The COVID-19 pandemic necessitated the quick production of PCR tests and rapid antigen tests to diagnose a quick uptake in cases. However, the current diagnostic tests have less than desired sensitivity or too long a wait time until complete diagnosis. The Daniels lab previously constructed a biosensor to detect COVID-19 by immobilizing COVID-19 spike protein polyclonal antibody onto...
The origin of magnetic fields in the universe and the role of individual galaxies in it is still an open question in modern cosmology. Observational data such as the polarization and intensity of total radio synchrotron emission have historically allowed for a better study of the strength and the shape of the magnetic fields in galaxies. More recently, cosmological simulations of magnetic...
BACKGROUND – Pacemakers and Implantable Cardiac Defibrillators are extremely sensitive to radiation. To minimize the exposure of radiation to these devices, doctors and physicists may choose to use APBI via brachytherapy, using the SAVI device to best cover the PTV. For physicists to best plan for these patients, there needs to be an understanding regarding the dose delivered at differing...
Mid-Infrared laser-based sensing using molecular spectroscopy is commonly used for trace-gas detection and density measurements. An obvious advantage in detection in the mid-IR region is the fundamental absorption bands of several molecular species of interest for environmental, biomedical, and industrial processing applications. Several challenges in mid-IR sensing are due to significant...
We present initial Faraday rotation measurements of extragalactic radio sources with lines of sight passing through or near to the HII region of IC 1396. We measured the linear polarization of the sources with the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) at frequencies of ~5 GHz (6 cm) . We estimate the background rotation measure (RM) in this region of the galaxy to be ~ -140 m^-2. We find the...
The Hunter Lab searches for long-range spin-spin interactions as a potential fifth fundamental force of nature. Using a Cs-Hg comagnetometer, we measure the long-range effect of unpaired geo-electrons in Earth’s mantle on the spin precession frequencies of Hg-199 nuclei in the lab. We seek to optimize our apparatus to increase the sensitivity of our measurements by an order of magnitude from...
We cannot measure things in space directly. Instead, we rely on mathematical relations to manipulate the limited data we can collect. The Baryonic Tully-Fisher Relation is one such relation. This equation says that the baryonic mass of a spiral galaxy is related to its rotational velocity. Unfortunately, the current data supporting the Baryonic Tully Fisher Relation has a lot of scatter. As a...
Superthin galaxies are spiral galaxies that exhibit large axial ratios (>10) with no distinguishable bulge component. The sixth data release of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey showed approximately 15% of the observed edge-on disk galaxies to be bulgeless. Simulations have struggled to replicate this result in the context of the hierarchical and Lambda-CDM models since the superthin galaxies would...
Interactions between biomolecules in DNA replication, transcription, and translation possess inherent stochasticity, which leads to intrinsic noise in gene expression (Elowitz et al., 2002). Organisms deploy various methods for regulating this noise to maintain precise RNA and protein levels. In Vibrio quorum-sensing networks, small, regulatory RNAs (sRNAs) called Qrr (Quorum regulatory RNA)...
From the Great Pyramids of Giza to snowflakes, symmetries are everywhere. But symmetries lie deeper than snowflakes, even deeper than molecules! For something to be symmetrical, it remains unchanged under some transformation. Symmetries can also be broken. This occurs when an object's symmetry changes after it goes through some transition. This concept extends into the fundamental particles...
We determine the total stellar mass fraction (stellar mass/total mass) in
clusters of galaxies using data from the Dark Energy Survey for ∼ 300 clusters
in the redshift range 0.2-0.3 (Zhang et al. 2019). We use the total observed
luminosity of the clusters, including their Brightest Cluster Galaxy (BCG),
satellite galaxies, and Intracluster Light (ICL). Previous studies claimed...
What does it mean to be an advocate? Advocacy today is bigger than form emails, stuffy suits traipsing down the halls of Congress, and the same tired song and dance with legislative offices. Advocacy is showing up as your authentic self, engaging leaders with energy and passion, and building strong coalitions that can go the distance. How can you be seen, heard, and taken seriously without...
Owning your graduate school experience: Building your success toolkit from application to graduation
Via this workshop participants will gather tools to help them navigate aspects of exploring, applying, and selecting graduate programs. More importantly, it will help participants build their own toolkit for effective communication, self-advocacy, and leadership development. This...
1 - 1:30: Claire Gmachl, "Quantum Cascade Ring Lasers and Related Systems"
Monolithic integrated photonics is a large field of active research interests, both foundational and for applications as varied as sensing or computing. Our interests in this area are especially directed towards active integrated photonics, where the light-guiding waveguides are at the same time functioning as light...
