Heather Lewandowski has been inducted into the Presidential Council of Alumnae. She received a B.S. Physics degree from Michigan Tech in 1997 and is currently an associate professor at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Lewandowski’s lab, The Lewandowski Group, focuses on studying the collisions and reactions of simple cold molecules and ions.
Raymond Shaw (Physics/EPSSI) is the principal investigator on a research and development project that has received a $150,931 grant from the U.S. Department of Defense, Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL).
Will Cantrell (Physics) and Claudio Mazzoleni (Physics) are Co-PIs on the project, “An Investigation of the Suitability of a Laboratory Cloud Chamber for Optical Radiative Transfer Measurements.”
This is the first year of a two-year project potentially totaling $316,374.
Teresa Wilson’s monthly series “This month in Historical Astronomy” is published on aas.org. This month’s topic is “Miss Mitchell’s Comet”. Read the complete article here.
John Jaszczak (Physics and adjunct curator of the A. E. Seaman Mineral Museum) presented an invited lecture at the Denver Mineral and Gem Show (Sept. 16-18).
Jaszczak presented “Mineralogical Miracles From Merelani, Tanzania,” and brought an exhibit of faceted fluorite gemstones from the museum’s collection that were donated to the museum by the late Harold Dibble.
Images from “Interfacial Mode Interactions of Surface Plasmon Polaritons on Gold Nanodome Films” co-authored by Jae Yong Suh (Physics) appeared on the August cover of Applied Materials and Interfaces.
The article describes a method to create centimeter-scale lattices of gold nanodomes in order to study their optical properties.
Congratulations to Bishnu Tiwari , Hugo Ayala, and Gaoxue Wang, who received Doctoral Finishing Fellowships for Fall 2016.
Petra Huentemeyer (Physics/EPPSI) received a $170,000 research and development grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF).
Huentemeyer is the principal investigator for “Investigating Large Scale Structures and Galactic Plane Morphologies at TeV Energies with the HAWC Observatory.”
This is the first year of a three-year project potentially totalling $510,000.
From Tech Today
Andrea Baccarini is an Italian master student who graduated in Physics at the University of Trento in 2016. Andrea performed field research at the Pico Mountain Observatory in the Azores in collaboration with MTU faculty members. Recently, he described his field experience in the MTU “Unscripted: Science and Research” blog as a guest writer with an entry titled “On Top of the World“.
Nearly a thousand times thinner than a human hair, nanowires can only be understood with quantum mechanics. Using quantum models, physicists from Michigan Tech have figured out what drives the efficiency of a silicon-germanium (Si-Ge) core-shell nanowire transistor.
The study, published last week in Nano Letters, focuses on the quantum tunneling in a core-shell nanowire structure. Ranjit Pati (Physics) led the work along with his graduate students Kamal Dhungana and Meghnath Jaishi.