Fall 2011 - Physics Department

Seminars in Fall 2011

All seminars are held at 4:10 PM in Bio 19, unless otherwise noted.
Refreshments will be served at 4:00 PM.

Aug 31	Thesis Start-Up Meeting
Sept 7	"The frequency of offset bars using the Spitzer Survey of Stellar Structure in Galaxies" (Alexa Ross ′12, Reed College); "Quantifying Magnetic Energy Release in Active Regions of the Sun with Emerging Flux" (Meg Millhouse ′12, Reed College)
Sept 14	Alex Small, California State Polytechnic University, Pomona Imaging live cells with nanometer resolution: Theoretical, computational, and statistical limits
Sept 21	"Investigating cellular biophysics using total internal reflection’ fluorescence microscopy" (Ben Larson ′12, Reed College); "Stimulated Rayleigh Scattering" (Chrissy Porter ′13, Reed College)
Sept 28	Erik Sanchez, Portland State University Super-Resolution Imaging with Fluorescence/Raman Spectroscopy
Oct 5	Rob Berger, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Tuning the Electronic Structure of Strontium Titanate for Solar Water Splitting
Oct 12	"Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording" (Neal Reynolds ′12, Reed College); "Paul Trap" (Wes Erickson ′12, Reed College) In addition to the seminar, Albyn Jones from CAT will give a brief presentation about faculty evaluation procedures.
Oct 19	FALL BREAK
Oct 26	Richard Crandall, Center for Advanced Computation, Reed College Of mice and galaxies: The promise of teraflop computing
Nov 2	Lucas Illing, Reed College Chaos, Synchronization, and Network Dynamics
Nov 9	Nicholas Wheeler ′55, Reed College Some Miscellaneous Adventures in EXPERIMENTAL MATHEMATICAL PHYSICS: Properties and Physical Applications of Random Matrices and Random Walks Mathematica, MATLAB, Maple and similar software provide beginning/advanced students of physics with means to pose and to explore questions and ideas which in many cases would be very difficult to approach analytically. They are resources that have created the possibility of an "experimental mathematical physics," which in some cases serves to motivate and to guide fruitfully refined analytic work. The speaker will use off-the-shelf Mathematica commands to provide several illustrations of the ease and power of this new way of doing physics.
Nov 16	Eric Corwin, University of Oregon A granocentric model for the random packing of spheres
Nov 23	"The Amazing Properties of MnSi" (Sina Zeytinoglu ′12, Reed College); "The Black Hole Mass Function for Spiral Galaxies" (Lucas Johns ′13, Reed College)
Nov 30	Tyler Nordgren ′91, University of Redlands Stars Above, Earth Below: astronomy, education, and the liberal arts in the national parks
Dec 7	"Techniques in Computational Nanoscience: A Density Functional Theory Investigation of Fo:rster Resonance Energy Transfer" (Neil Anderson, '13, Reed College); TBA (Gray Davidson, '11, Reed College)