Contents
CHAIR’S WEEKLY MESSAGE
“Let the Research Begin”
Nothing gives me greater joy than to see students in our university engaged in research. The research environment is an exhilarating, messy, joyous, and frustrating place where good ideas go to die, discoveries happen when you least expect but are most prepared, and where we forever hone our approaches to interrogating the natural world. This is the best place to learn what it means to become a physicist. While we might mimic aspects of the research environment here and there in academic courses, there is no substitute for the real thing.
The partnership between mentor and research student is essential. Students often mistake conducting research with a mentor, like a faculty member, with one of two things: students pursuing their own ideas, independent of the interests of the mentor but under their tutelage; or, quite the reverse, conducting work only at the behest of the mentor, acting more as a guided worker than a self-initiated problem-solver. In truth, the healthiest research environments are a partnership, where the faculty member guides the student, identifying gaps in their knowledge (basic or advanced physics, mathematics, computation, statistics, instrumental work, etc.) and pushes the student to fill in the gaps, while at the same time the student challenges the mentor, gathers information, tries to present and defend their findings, and folds in critiques and suggestions to refine the research approach. Like science itself, the student research environment is iterative, full of dead ends and failed trials; but the lesson of all of this is that the process is essential to guaranteeing the quality of the finding, whether it be negative or positive.
In this issue, we especially highlight the students who have recently been awarded notable research appointments at SMU: the Hamilton Research Scholar Program. These students, partnered with a faculty mentor, will spend this semester engaged in a wide range of investigations. We look forward to learning more about their struggles and their findings as the semester progresses. In addition, we profile the recipients of the AY2021 Wiley Scholarship; these are students, with an emphasis on women, at the sophomore level or above who have demonstrated excellence in the physics program and are aimed at a career in STEM, especially engineering or physics.
I am looking forward to profiling more of the research activities of faculty, staff, and students in our program as the academic year progresses. Meanwhile, I wish success to the many research projects that are launched at the beginning of this semester. We look forward to knowing what you find, regardless of the nature of the finding.
Sincerely,
Stephen Jacob Sekula Chair, Department of Physics |
DEPARTMENT VIEWS
Next Seminar: Vincent Cheung (UC Davis) on “Quarkonium production and polarization in the color evaporation model”
The Physics Department Speaker Series continues 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. This will be a more in-depth seminar on this month’s theme, with a focus on understanding how one goes from quark- or gluon-level information to bound-state-level information (“hadronization”) via the evolution of particles within Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD), the theory of the strong interaction. Zoom connection information is available to SMU-affiliated participants; the public YouTube stream is available for everyone.
https://www.physics.smu.edu/web/seminars/
Special Note: Astrophysics Lunches to Resume September 21 (12-1pm)
We want to announce a change in the plan for the Astrophysics Lunches. Due to a scheduling conflict on Monday, thet Astrophysics Lunches will actually resume starting Monday, September 21. As already announced last week, the first event will be a sharing event, where each participant is invited to prepare a few slides explaining 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.
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.
If you wish to participate and want to know how to do so, contact Prof. Meyers.
FACULTY NEWS
Nominations for Honorary Doctorates for Spring 2021
There is a call for nominations for candidates for the honorary doctorates awarded at the Spring 2021 Commencement. These are due by October 2, 2020.
It is a special responsibility and privilege of the SMU Faculty, through the Faculty Senate, to nominate candidates for SMU honorary doctorates (in various categories including Arts, Divinity, Humane Letters, Laws, and Science). These names are then submitted to the President of the University for election by the Board of Trustees. Nominations submitted this year will be considered for degrees to be awarded at the May 2022 commencement.
Julie Maynard, email sent to SMU community on September 10, 2020.
Nominations can be submitted electronically (PDF preferred) or as hard copy. Go to https://sites.smu.edu/des/registrar/HonoraryDegrees/ to read about Honorary Degrees. The nomination must be received by October 2, 2020 to be considered. If you are not sure where or how to make the submission, please speak with the Department Chair. If you wish to coordinate nominations, this will bring more strength to the proposal; coordinated nominations of singular individuals is encouraged.
Physics has an excellent record of nominating, and having selected, outstanding candidates for these degrees. Here is the record of the three most recent Physics nominations who were selected for honorary doctorates:
- 2018: Barry C. Barrish (Doctor of Science) [Nobel Laureate, 2017]
- 2017: Francis Halzen (Doctor of Science) [European Physical Society Prize for Astroparticle Physics and Cosmology and Balzan Prize, 2015; Breakthrough of the Year Award, 2013]
- 2010: Saul Permutter (Doctor of Science) [Nobel Laureate, 2011]
STAFF NEWS
Staff In-Office Schedule for Week of September 14
The in-office staff schedule for the week of September 14 is as follows:
- Monday: Michele
- Tuesday: Lacey
- Wednesday: Michele
- Thursday: Michele
- 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
Meet the Winners of the Wiley Scholarship in Physics: Stephanie Gilchrist and Abigail Hays
This award, made possible by an endowment established by Katharine Sams Wiley (SMU’65, B.S. in Physics), is presented annually to students majoring in physics who are at the sophomore level or above and who demonstrate excellence in the physics academic environment. The award is aimed at women whose focus is on science and engineering.
The Department’s Undergraduate Committee was very pleased to be able to make two awards for the 2020-2021 academic year. The two winners, Stephanie Gilchrist (SMU’22) and Abigail Hays (SMU’22) are profiled below.
Stephanie Gilchrist
Stephanie Gilchrist is a junior at SMU (class of 2022), originally from Orland Park, Illinois. She is a Dedman College Scholar majoring in Biophysical Sciences on the pre-health track, as well as working towards a minor degree in Spanish. Her goal is to combine her passions for physics, medicine, and language in a single career path. In addition to her academic excellence, she has conducted research in the Physics Department in partnership with Prof. Stephen Sekula, where she worked a statistical analysis Python program to quantify the muons detected using the instrument in Fondren Science Building. She hopes to continue doing research and aspires to explore the different applications of physics complementary to her other interests. In her free time outside of class, she enjoys reading fiction, trying new restaurants, and going for runs on the Katy Trail here in Dallas.
I would like to thank the Physics Department and Mrs. Katharine Sams Wiley for their acknowledgment of my hard work in the selection of this award. As a woman in science, I am grateful for their support as I continue to explore the endless opportunities that physics provides me in my journey to becoming a professional in the scientific community.
Stephanie Gilchrist (’22), Wiley Scholarship Winner
Abigail Hays
Abigail is a Junior (Class of ’22) and a dual major in Physics and Mechanical Engineering. She is originally from Houston, where her family lives, including her parents, two younger sisters, and their “‘small’ pack of animals.” (her emphasis!) Abigail enjoys music, cooking, and reading by the window on a rainy day. Over the past few years, she has been involved with numerous organizations on campus. These include the Society of Physics Students and Mustang Rocketry, where she serves currently as the education and outreach officer and the president, respectively. On top of her involvement with organizations, she also enjoys being involved in her community. She enjoys participating in campus-wide days of service, and she volunteered at the SPCA North Texas animal shelter for several months. Previously, she has served as a tutor in the ALEC, where she tutored for a wide variety of classes in STEM, including physics. Currently, she is a research assistant for the fluid mechanics lab run by Dr. Paul Krueger, head of the mechanical engineering department. In the lab, she helps write code, set up projects, collect data, and assists in the analysis of any data taken.
Meet the Newest Hamilton Research Scholars
The Hamilton Undergraduate Research Scholars Program was established by Jack and Jane Hamilton in 2008. Devoted to the legacy of their parents, Diane Buford (’71) and Dan Hamilton (’79) continue the program to this day. The Hamilton Undergraduate Research Scholars Program enables Dedman College’s most promising students (in the sciences, social sciences, or humanities) to collaborate with top faculty researchers and contribute to the creation of cutting-edge knowledge in significant and meaningful ways. Faculty/student teams carry out primary research for one semester or up to one year. In addition, summer support is available.
We are pleased to have students newly awarded, or on extended, Hamilton Scholar support this fall. Our thanks go out to Diane Buford and Dan Hamilton for their continued support of this program, and for the original vision of Jack and Jane Hamilton in creating this award. We are, of course, extremely grateful to the Dedman College Interdisciplinary Institute for maintaining, operating, and supporting this outstanding program.
Please find information about our scholars below.
Ryan Guess (Faculty Mentor: Jingbo Ye)
The collaborations on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN have seen huge progress in ASICs (application-specific integrated circuits) in participle physics experiments. SMU is one of the key players in these developments, with successful deliveries of several ASICs that are being installed in the ATLAS particle detector. Electronics in ATLAS must withstand the harsh operation environment that includes both extreme magnetic fields and radiation. It is also very difficult to repair electronics inside ATLAS. This puts stringent reliability requirements on the components, ASICs included, that compose the electronics system. Each ASIC chip we build at SMU must go through a thorough quality control (QC) test, with all the information stored and traceable should a chip fail in operation. Because of this, each chip must have its own unique identifier. This is different from chips in commercial applications where one usually only finds the name of the chip printed on the case. Ryan will research effective ways to add a serial code to the chips that we produce at SMU. That chip marking will also need to be scratch resistant, survive the high temperature when it’s assembled on the PCB (printed circuit board) and then also survive the operation environment. On top of all these challenges, the marking will have to contain the name of the chip and the three letters SMU, together with a serial coding that can identify at least 10,000 chips, on chips that may be as small as 4 mm x 4 mm. Ryan’s work will define the solution to this problem.
Noah Pearson (Faculty Mentor: Joel Meyers)
The aim of the research program is to investigate innovative means of detecting low frequency gravitational waves. Noah and Dr. Meyers will consider two separate techniques: (1) using strongly lensed repeating Fast Radio Bursts and (2) using the gravitational waves from Galactic White Dwarf Binaries expected to be observed by the LISA mission. We show how careful monitoring of signal arrival times can make these observations sensitive to the effects of long wavelength gravitational waves such as those produced by supermassive black hole binary systems.
Andrew Reis (Faculty Mentor: Allison Deiana)
Working in the Deiana Firmware Lab, undergraduate Andrew Reis will continue to investigate the use of machine learning inferences in Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) for the hardware “trigger system” in the ATLAS Experiment. 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 aim is 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.
Taylor Wallace (Faculty Mentor: Jodi Cooley)
Radon background, airborne radon created by the decay of naturally-occurring uranium and thorium isotopes, is particularly problematic to rare event searches. As radon decays, its progeny can plate-out (“stick”) onto important components of the experiment such as the surface of the detectors. The subsequent decay of the progeny emits radiation that can mimic the expected signal of Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs), a candidate class of particles which could explain Dark Matter. The best way to limit this background source is to limit exposure of the experiment’s materials to radon gas. Plastics are particularly difficult to characterize because of their insulating properties and the triboelectric effect. Taylor will use a custom made donut-shaped chamber and a purge cabinet to study the effectiveness of radon plate-out mitigation techniques on plastics.
Society of Physics Students Kicks Things Off With Cakes … @PhysicsCakes
Did you miss the Society of Physics Students’ (SPS) first meeting this week? No worries! Below you will find a recording of the event, featuring a presentation by SMU Research Assistant Professor Katharine Leney on the creative communication of physics using cake! (and other baked goods)
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.
THE BACK PAGE
Around SMU: Events of Potential Interest
Virtual Colloquium, Department of Mathematics
Wednesday, September 16, 3:30-4:30PM
Title: “Where can a place cell put its fields? Let us count the ways”
Speaker: Manyi Yim, Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Mathematics at SMU
How to connect: Contact Liz Berry for the Zoom meeting information
Abstract:
A hippocampal place cell exhibits multiple place fields within and across environments. What factors determine the configuration of these fields? We conceptualize place cells as performing evidence combination across many inputs, including multiscale periodic grid-cell drive, non-grid spatial input and noisy input.
First, at the single-cell level, we consider place cells as perceptrons acting on geometrically organized grid-cell drive. We characterize and count which field arrangements a place cell can realize with such structured input. We show that the “separating capacity” or spatial range over which all field arrangements are realizable is given by the rank of the grid-cell input matrix, and this rank scales as the sum of distinct grid periods, a small fraction of the unique coding range of the input that scales as the product of periods. Therefore, with grid-cell input, firing fields cannot be set down in arbitrary locations. Compared to random inputs over the same range, grid-cell input generates larger margins, conferring stability to place fields.
Second, at the population level, we explore the place field statistics in a place cell population through computational modeling. We show that the observed population statistics of place fields can be robustly replicated with different variants of our model. Further, our model predicts that the discrete spatial frequencies associated with grid periods are over-represented in the power spectral density of field distribution in place cells, even in the presence of non-grid spatial input and noise. We confirm our prediction in the place cell activity from rodents traversing a long linear virtual track. This observation could serve as a robust signature of information flow from grid to place cells.
