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.
Claudio Mazzoleni (Physics/EPSSI) is the principal investigator on a research and development project that has received $400,321 from the National Science Foundation.
Jacek Borysow (Physics), Raymond Shaw (Physics), Will Cantrell (Physics) and David Ciochetto (Physics) are co-PIs of the project, “MRI: Development of a Water Vapor and Temperature Mapping System to Study Cloud-Turbulence Interactions in the MTU PI-Chamber.”
This is the first year of a three-year project.
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.
On Wednesday, May 11, faculty and staff members, along with their guests, gathered at the Memorial Union Ballroom for an awards dinner recognizing 25, 30, 35 and 40 years of service to Michigan Tech. From the physics department, Bryan Suits (30 years), Donald Beck (35 years) and Robert Weidman (35 years) were recognized.
From Tech Today, by Human Resources
The Vice President for Research Office announces the 2016 REF awards and thanks the review committees, the deans and department chairs for their time spent on this important internal research award process. Among the recipients are:
Infrastructure Enhancement (IE) Grants
Will Cantrell, Physics/EPSSI – Refrigerated Water Re-Circulating System
Research Seed (RS) Grants
Jae Yong Suh, Physics