CHAIR’S WEEKLY MESSAGE
Contents
“HITTING THE PEDAL”
People seem to be settling in to this semester. The hybrid classroom still poses many frustrations for faculty and students; these are being expressed routinely in every available forum at SMU. Without dedicated real-time classroom support, this model was not fated to feel right to anyone involved. Virtual classes, in contrast, appear to be well-received and going quite smoothly. In the introductory lab courses, students had their first in-person data-taking activities this week, and it will take time to see how that is faring.
Anecdata is beginning to pile up. Maybe it could even be real data someday, if the stories pile up. We’ve all seen the news about a whole Greek organization house being quarantined. Reports are emerging of students seeking COVID-19 tests off-campus to end-run the on-campus alerting mechanisms, afraid of being isolated, quarantined, or sent home. For now, those are stories … but they are coming from many independent sources.
Faculty and students alike are nonetheless definitely reporting more and more incidents or notifications of isolated or quarantined students. The students are then required to switch to remote-only participation in classes either because of a positive COVID-19 test, or contact with someone who did test positive. I’ve personally encountered a few students just in the first half of this week in that very situation.
The SMU COVID-19 data page backs up these stories. As of the writing of this message (8pm on Thursday night), 38% of campus isolation space is occupied, almost double what it was a day earlier. There have been 54 cases of a person being on campus in September who then tested positive for COVID-19, about a third of the total number of such cases in all of August. Students are really seriously affected by this, and while thankfully the impact on faculty and staff has so far been far smaller, we are clearly still in the growth stage of this process. As we put the pedal to the floor in moving this semester ahead, the virus is similarly putting its pedal to the floor as it spreads.
In spite of all of this, teaching seems to have settled into a new routine. The research faculty in the department seem more and more active, able to return time and attention back to that essential activity now that the inertia of the semester has been overcome. Students are also beginning to get engaged in the research environment, becoming excited about starting or resuming such work. Even Zoom social events seem to bring some extra joy to the world, especially when games are involved. While we all long for things to return to the old normal, there is some fun to be had in the new normal. We’ve put the pedal down, with the speed bumps of the first two weeks in our rear-view mirror. Let’s hope for smooth roads ahead.
Sincerely,
Stephen Jacob Sekula Chair, Department of Physics |
DEPARTMENT VIEWS
No seminar on Monday – Labor Day
While SMU is not honoring Labor Day as a holiday this semester, other institutions are. To provide some relief to people who might have expected to have Monday off, there is no seminar so that everyone can return to their families or activities more easily in the evening.
The Physics Department Speaker Series resumes on September 14 with Dr. Vincent Cheung from UC Davis speaking on “Quarkonium production and polarization in the color evaporation model”. This continues our “Computing the Cosmos” series for September.
https://www.physics.smu.edu/web/seminars/
Astrophysics Lunches to Resume September 14 (12-1pm)
Prof. Joel Meyers announced the resumption of the Astrophysics Lunches. These have been a more casual way of getting together to discuss new papers, discoveries, observations, or ideas centered on astrophysics and astronomy. A recent feedback campaign yielded some new ideas from people in the department. One suggestion was to try to match the subject matter for some astrophysics lunches to upcoming seminar speakers. The goal is to provide some introduction and background material to the content of the seminars, hopefully making both the astrophysics lunches and seminars more valuable.
As always, everyone is encouraged to sign up on the calendar (https://astrohep.org/smu/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=astro_journal_club – restricted to members of the department) to propose topics and then lead that meeting. Presenters can discuss their own research, summarize a recent paper, present a pedagogical introduction to a subject, etc. There is no requirement to prepare slides or to fill an hour.
For the first meeting of the fall term on Monday September 14, the goal is to have everyone give a brief introduction of themselves and their research or interests related to astrophysics. Aim for three minutes of presentation with not more than 5 slides. This will provide a brief, but focused, introduction to everyone interested in the lunches.
If you wish to participate and want to know how to do so, contact Prof. Meyers.
FACULTY NEWS
The Deiana Firmware Lab and SMU Undergraduate Andrew Reis are Working to Help Bring Machine Learning to the Front Lines of the Large Hadron Collider
Working in the Deiana Firmware Lab, undergraduate Andrew Reis has recently presented his summer research work to the wider ATLAS Global Trigger team. Andrew has been investigating the feasibility of using machine learning inferences in Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) at an early stage of the ATLAS trigger to separate particle jets initiated by the bottom quark from those initiated by other, more copious kinds of quarks. This direction of research has the potential to significantly improve the ability of the ATLAS trigger system to select and record events with b-quark-initiated jets, without being overwhelmed by background processes. As the dominant Higgs decay process is to b-quarks, this would have powerful implications for future programs of study dedicated to the Higgs particle, especially the effort to establish the Higgs’s self-interactions.
Andrew has been using the open-source HLS4ML package, and has developed a convolutional neural network (often used in image recognition or self-driving vehicles) that performs with latency on the order of 10 microseconds. His presentation in the ATLAS meeting was well-received by international colleagues, and he engaged in valuable discussion that will help guide the future direction of his research. Andrew plans to continue this research, with an aim to further reduce the latency and to update the study to the latest simulation of the trigger for the High-Luminosity phase (2030s) of the Large Hadron Collider.
STAFF NEWS
Staff In-Office Schedule for Week of September 7
The in-office staff schedule for the week of September 7 is as follows:
- Monday: Lacey
- Tuesday: Michele
- Wednesday: Michele
- Thursday: Lacey
- Friday: Lacey
Of course, both are always available on Microsoft Teams, by Email, or by phone.
Full staff in-office calendar for September:
STUDENT NEWS
Get those I-9s Completed!
A reminder from the Physics Main Office that students need to complete their I-9 forms as quickly as possible in order to remain in compliance with the University, which would otherwise affect the ability to pay you. Human Resources takes the completeness of your paperwork seriously, and so must you. If you are having problems, don’t struggle silently – reach out to the Administrative Team for assistance.
First Society of Physics Students (SPS) Meeting of the Year: Tuesday, September 8, 6:30pm CST
The Society of Physics Student is hosting its first virtual presentation of the semester. They welcome Research Assistant Professor Katharine Leney, who works on the ATLAS Experiment at the CERN Laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland. Katharine is one of the founders of “Physics Cakes,” an outreach project that uses baked goods to explain complex topics related to particle physics. Join us on Tuesday, September 8 at 6:30 PM CST to hear Katharine’s presentation. Zoom link: https://smu.zoom.us/j/9066747242.
ALUMNI NEWS
If you are an alum of the doctoral, masters, majors or minor programs in Physics at SMU and wish to share news with the community here, please send your story to the Physics Department and we’ll work with you to get it included in a future edition.
Congratulations to Dr. Vladimir Jovanovich, PhD in Neuroscience
On Wednesday, September 2, 2020, SMU’12 graduate and Physics Minor Vladimir Jovanovich successfully defended his PhD, earning his Doctorate in Neuroscience. Congratulations! You can watch the video of his defense on his Facebook stream.
THE BACK PAGE
Fermi Problem: A Drop of Modern Physics
In the Millikan oil drop experiment, an atomizer (a device designed to spray a very fine mist using a narrow nozzle) is used to introduce many tiny droplets of oil between two oppositely charged parallel metal plates. Some of the droplets pick up one or more excess electrons. The charge on the plates is adjusted so that the electric force on the excess electrons exactly balances the weight of the droplet. The idea is to look for a droplet that has the smallest required balancing electric force and assume that it has only one excess fundamental unit of electric charge (e.g. one extra electron). This lets the observer measure the charge on the electron. Suppose we are using an electric field of 3×104 N/C. The charge on one electron is about 1.6×10-19 C. Estimate the radius of an oil drop for which its weight could be balanced by the electric force of this field on one electron. (from the University of Maryland’s Fermi Problems site)
A Fermi Problem is an estimation problem designed to teach dimensional analysis or approximation of extreme scientific calculations, and such a problem is usually a “back-of-the-envelope calculation.”
Paraphrased from the Wikipedia article entitled “Fermi Problem”
