• November 4-6, 2005. Harvey Gould attended the Oberlin Conference on Computation and Modeling 2005: The Undergraduate Arena and gave a poster on Using the Open Source Physics Library to Teach About Computer Simulations in Physics (with Jan Tobochnik and Wolfgang Christian
• October 21, 2005. Faculty members Harvey Gould (co-organizer), Arshad Kudrolli, and Ranjan Mukhopadhyay, postdocs Jan Fiala and Ashish V. Orpe, and graduate students Ranjit Chacko, Lou Colonna-Romano, Kristopher Daly, Mina Khanlarzadeh, Hui Wang, Junchao Xia, and Fan Xiao attended the 7th meeting of the Greater Boston Area Statistical meeting. Mukhopadhyay, Fiala, Wang, and Xia gave talks at the meeting on their research.
• August 21, 2005. Natalie Gulbache and Greg Johnson were married in Istanbul, Turkey on Sunday, August 21. Both graduates obtained their Ph.D. in physics from Clark. The wedding was attended by many Clark graduates including Emily Clark, B.A. physics, 2001, her husband Christoph Scheurer, a former post-doc in chemistry at Clark, Harvey Gould and his wife, and Bill Klein of Boston University and his wife. Other graduates of Clark also attended. Bill Klein was on the thesis committee of both Greg and Natali. More details and a photo will be posted later.
• August 6-9, 2005. Harvey Gould and Vincent Ciarametaro attended the summer meeting of the AAPT in Salt Lake City, Utah.
• Ranjan Mukhopadhyay attended a workshop on "Frontiers of Soft Condensed Matter" at ExxonMobil Research and Engineering, Annandale, New Jersey. The workshop brought together researchers at the forefront of soft condensed matter science to discuss the current state of the field and to explore promising future directions. It also celebrated the 60th birthdays of Paul Chaikin and Tom Lubensky, who have had immense influence in charting the evolution of this field.
• May 22, 2005. Natali Gulbahce and Izabela Mihut received their Ph.D. in physics at commencement. Zeynel Bayindir and Catalin Martin also received their Ph.D., but were unable to be present. Brian Landry received a B.A. in chemistry and physics. He graduated summa cum laude with highest honors in Chemistry and high honors in physics. Alex Shapiro received a B.A. in physics, magna cum laude with high honors in Physics. As usual, Chris Landee was Faculty Marshal.
• May 22, 2005. Allex Goh, a 1995 graduate of Clark, visited the campus during Alumni weekend. Goh graduated as a mathematics major, but took several physics courses, and is now studying for his Ph.D. in engineering and is working at W. W. Hansen Experimental Physics Laboratory at Stanford University.
• Arshad Kudrolli was invited to join the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara as a member from April 18 to May 13, 2005. He participated in the Granular Workshop organized by Robin Ball, Thomas Halsey, and V. Kumaran and gave a seminar on "Self-Assembly in Granular Matter and Noise. He will return the week of June 20 to speak at the Granular Conference organized at the end of the workshop.
• Azadeh Samadani, Clark Physics Ph.D. 2002, will join the Department of Physics at Brandeis University as a Assistant Professor, and will establish a laboratory in biological physics.
• April 21, 2005. Graduating seniors Alex Shapiro and Brian Landry presented their senior honors thesis on "Structural and Magnetic Analyses of ([2,3-dmpy]H)₂CuX₄ and (quinolinium)₂CuX₄ Compounds" and "Magnetic Studies of Single Crystal NENB and Powder NPDN," respectively. Brian Landry will also receive honors in chemistry.
• April 14, 2005. Astronomy TA and graduate student Kristopher Daly took a picture of the sunspots.
• April 12. Les Blatt gave a presentation on "Science and the Jewish Tradition of Inquiry" at Temple Sinai, Worcester. Topics included a lesson on "left hand -- right hand" drawn from Biblical texts and examples of chirality in chemistry and physics; a listing of Jewish scientists and related statistics; and a discussion of possible reasons for the substantial numbers of Jews in the sciences, from the points of view of both traditional and cultural factors.
• April 7. Les Blatt gave two interactive presentations on "Mathematical Patterns in Nature" at Oakmont Regional High School, Ashburnham, Massachusetts. Topics included symmetries, fractals, and fibonacci numbers.
• Zeynel Bayindir has joined the group of Kevin Robbie at Queen's University as a post-doc.
• November 21-23. Arshad Kudrolli and Salome Siavoshi participated in the annual Division of Fluid Dynamics meeting of the American Physical Society in Seattle and were associated with the following talks:
  • The maximum angle of stability and angle of repose of wet granular materials, S. A. Nowak, A. Samadani, and A. Kudrolli
  • Erosion channels in a granular bed, A. Lobkovsky, B. Smith, A. Kudrolli, and D. Rothman
  • Dynamics of a dimer on an oscillated plate, A. Kudrolli, S. Dorbolo, D. Volfson, and L. Tsimring
  • Rapid Relaxation of a Granular Step, Saloome Siavoshi and Arshad Kudrolli
• October 16, 2004. Faculty members Harvey Gould and Ranjan Mukhopadhyay and graduate students Kipton Barros, Lou Colonna-Romano, Natali Gulbahce, Hui Wang, Junchao Xia attended the sixth annual Greater Boston Area Statistical Mechanics meeting at Brandeis. Natali Gulbahce gave a contributed talk on "Quench depth and range of interaction effects in homogeneous and heterogeneous nucleation" and Junchao Xia gave a talk on "Effects of long range interactions in the Burridge-Knopoff earthquake mode." Harvey Gould was one of the organizers.
• October 11, 2004. Professor Christopher Landee and Chemistry Professor Mark Turnbull attended the International Conference on Molecular-Based Magnetism (ICMM'04) held Oct 5-8 in Tsukuba, Japan. They reported on recent progress on their joint research on the development and characterization of new low-dimensional antiferromagnets. Landee presented a poster entitled "Molecular-Based Spin Ladders: Cu(2,3-dimethylpyrazine)X2, X = Cl, Br" and Turnbull gave an oral presentation on "Pyrazine-Based Rectangular Antiferromagnets." Landee was also a co-presenter of a poster, "Two-Halide Exchange in Copper(II) Halide Dimers: (Morpholinium)2Cu2Cl6-xBrx," authored by Roger Willett.

  The ICMM is the leading conference for reported on advances in molecular-based magnetism and the development of nanomagnets. ICMM'04 was the ninth conference in a biannual series that has seen attendance grow from about 50 participants in 1990 to 400 at the current meeting.

• October 5, 2004. The Department was pleased to welcome two visitors: Tom Berstresser, who was an visiting Associate Professor, and Milton Cole who gave the colloquium.
• August 15, 2004. Ashish Orpe joined the department as a post-doctoral research associate and will work on granular physics in Arshad Kudrolli's group. Ashish obtained his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from IIT Bombay.
• August 8, 2004. It gives us great sadness to learn that former graduate student, Nick Rosov, passed way due to a brain tumor. The obituary from the Washington Post reads as follows: "Deacon Nicholas Stephen Rosov. On Sunday, August 8, 2004 of Rockville, MD. Beloved husband of Alicia Lee Rosov. Father of Nathaniel Andrew and Stephen Alexander Rosov. Son of Robert and Jeanne Rosov. Brother of Suzy, Matthew and Johanna Rosov. Friends will be received at Pumphrey's Colonial Funeral home, 300 West Montgomery Ave., Rockville, MD on Wednesday from 3 to 5 and 7 to 9 p.m. Trisaghion Prayers at 8 p.m. Service will be held at Holy Transfiguration Melkite Greek Catholic Church, 8501 Lewinsville Road, McLean, VA 22102 on Thursday, August 12, 2004 at 10:30 a.m. Interment Gate of Heaven Cemetery. In lieu of flowers contributions may be made to the Nicholas Rosov Children's Educational Fund c/o Holy Transfiguration Church. Make checks payable to the church. Please view and sign family guestbook at www.pumphreyfuneralhome.com. The funeral was attended by Jeff Williams and his family.
• August 1-4, 2004. Harvey Gould attended the 129th National Meeting of the AAPT in Sacramento. He gave an invited talk on "Recent Developments in Teaching Statistical Physics" with Jan Tobochnik and a contributed talk on "Teaching Computer Simulation."
• July 5-23, 2004. Les Blatt joined Clark Professors David Joyce (Mathematics), Tom Leonard (Biology), Don Nelson (Chemistry), and David Thurlow (Biochemistry) to present a course for rising high-school seniors from around the United States. The course, "Minds, Matter, and Medicine in the 21st Century," explored areas of current interest in the sciences, with both classroom presentations and laboratory exercises. Laboratory Specialist Louis Colonna-Romano joined Professor Blatt in the creation and presentation of the physics laboratory sessions. Twenty-one promising students from as far as Washington state, Minnesota, and North Carolina and as close as Massachusetts and New Hampshire, participated in the three-week marathon, which turned out to be an exciting learning experience for both students and faculty. The program is in its third year and is a small but very promising part of the University's new efforts to reach out specifically to students interested in the sciences.
• June 28-July 2, 2004. Saloome Siavoshi and Arshad Kudrolli participated in the Gordon Research Conference on Granular and Granular-Fluid Flow held at Colby College.
• June 21-30, 2004. Les Blatt led a Summer Institute for teachers in the Worcester Public Schools, entitled "Curriculum and Knowing in the Sciences: Best Practices in Science Education." Other members of the organizing team included Jody Bird (University Park Campus School), Carmen Davila (South High School), and Michele Fulk (Sullivan Middle School). The institute included presentations by several guest lecturers, hands-on experimentation, and field trips to natural sites and science centers around the Central Massachusetts area.
• May 31-June 14. Ranjan Mukhopadhyay participated in the Aspen summer workshop entitled "Geometry and Materials Physics: Making the Connection" held at the Aspen Center for Physics. He presented an informal talk on the physics of red blood cells.
• June 16-17, 2004. Harvey Gould participated in the Gordon Research Conference on Physics Research and Education at Mount Holyoke College. The conference was initiated by Harvey Gould, Jan Tobochnik, and Beth Ann Thacker.
• June 3, 2004. Arshad Kudrolli was invited to speak at the 2nd annual Granular Materials Workshop held at Yale University. Graduate student Saloome Siavoshi also presented a poster on her work on gravity driven granular flows. The workshop is designed to bring together researchers working on granular matter in the New England - New York Area. The first meeting was held at Clark University in 2003.
• May 12, 2004. The Complex Materials Laboratory directed by Arshad Kudrolli has been awarded a DOE-GLUE grant to support the research of a graduate student.
• May 4, 2004. Arshad Kudrolli visited the Levich Institute at City College of New York. He made a presentation based on his group's research. The talk was titled, "Self-organization in anisotropic granular materials."
• April 30, 2004. Arshad Kudrolli visited Emory University in Atlanta and spoke in their physics colloquium series. The title of his presentation was "Anisotropy in granular materials."
• March 31. Carmen Gagne gave a colloquium to the physics department at UMass Lowell entitled "Phase Transitions in the Early Universe" on Wednesday, March 31, 2004.
• March 26-27. Les Blatt attended the Spring, 2004 Meeting of the New England Sections of the AAPT and APS at Phillips Exeter Academy, New Hampshire. He gave a contributed talk on "A Physicist's Odyssey" and presented a poster on "The Crossroads of Art and Science." He also chaired one of the contributed-talks sessions.
• March 22-26. Many members of the Department participated in the annual March APS meeting held in Montreal, Canada.
  • "Penetration depth study for the FFLO state in CeCoIn₅," C. Martin, C. C. Agosta, S. W. Tozer, H. A. Radovan, E. C. Palm, T. P. Murphy.
  • "Penetration Depth Measurements Using a Tunnel Diode Oscillator in Extreme Conditions," Charles C. Agosta.
  • "Magnetochromism in Transition Metal Oxides," Janice Musfeldt, Jongwoo Choi, Jason Haraldsen, Jonathan Woodward, Xing Wei, Jian He, David Mandrus, Chris Landee, Mark Turnbull, Ramanathanan Suryanarayanan, and Alex Revcolevschi.
  • "A New Rectangular Antiferromagnet, Cu(2,5-dmpz)Br2: Structure and Magnetism," Christopher Landee, Brian Wells, and Mark Turnbull.
  • "Magnetic Order in Quasi-Two Dimensional Molecular Magnet Cu(pz)₂(ClO₄)₂," F. M. Woodward, C. P. Landee, and M. M. Turnbull.
  • "Temperature- and Magnetic Field-Dependent Electronic Structure of NENB and NENP," V. C. Long, E. C. Schundler, P. O. Makumbe, X. Wei, C. P. Landee, and M. M. Turnbull.
  • "Dynamics of the Wang-Landau Algorithm," L. M. Colonna-Romano, H. Gould, Y. Wu, J. Machta, S. Trebst, and M. Troyer.
  • "Pseudospinodal interpretation of the glass transition," William Klein and Harvey Gould.
  • DCOMP/FED: Open Source Software in Physics Education and Research," Harvey Gould, chair.
  • "Simulations of Spinodal Nucleation in Systems with Elastic Interactions," Carmen Gagne, William Klein, Turab Lookman, Avadh Saxena, and Harvey Gould.
  • "Growth of channels driven by seepage erosion," Alexander Lobkovsky, Bill Jensen, Arshad Kudrolli, and Daniel Rothman.
  • "Collective motion of vibrated granular rods," Dmitri Volfson, Lev Tsimring, Daniel Blair, and Arshad Kudrolli.
  • "Java programming using the Open Source Physics Library," Tutorial led by Wolfgang Christian, Jan Tobochnik, and Harvey Gould. Carmen Gagne attended the workshop on "Computational Cell Biology."
• March 11, 2004. Arshad Kudrolli has been awarded a grant by the National Science Foundation to study "Particle Diffusion and Mixing during Silo Drainage." The grant of $300K will support the research of post-docs and students in his lab.
• March 7-12, 2004. Arshad Kudrolli visited the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, Denmark to participate as an external examinar in the Ph.D. defence of graduate student Sune Horlluck. who defended his thesis successfully. Arshad also presented a seminar titled "Granular Materials: Rock, Roll and Shake."
• March 1, 2004. Taimur Ellahi, a 2001 graduate of Clark was recognized by the Kansas City chapter of the IEEE as the "Young Engineer of the Year."
• March 1, 2004. Carmen Gagne gave the condensed matter seminar at UMass, Amherst on "Simulation of Spinodal Nucleation in Martensites. Her host was Buddhapriya Chakrabarti.
• February 1, 2004. Stephane Dorbolo has joined Arshad Kudrolli's group as a Visiting Scholar and will spend the next few months at Clark investigating granular materials. He is a post-doctoral fellow in Liege. Stephane Dorbolo's prior work has received considerable attention.
• January 21, 2004. Carmen Gagne gave a seminar on "Simulations of Spinodal Nucleation in Martensites" at National Institute of Standards and Technology Center for Theoretical and the Computational Material Science.
• December 14-16, 2003. Carmen Gagne gave at short talk at the 90th Statistical Mechanics Conference at Rutgers University.
• December 5, 2003. Arshad Kudrolli visited the Mechanical Engineering Department in WPI and spoke in their seminar series. The title of his presentation was "Self-organization in granular matter." During his visit he met Clark physics alum Tom Roy who is a Masters students in mechanical engineering at WPI.
• October 18, 2003. Chris Landee delivered an invited talk at the Southeast Magnetic Resonance Conference held from October 18-19, 2003 in Tallahassee, Florida. His talk, "EMR Investigations of Quantum Antiferromagnets," described the investigations he and collaborators from the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory have carried out on the new low-dimensional antiferromagnets synthesized by the Landee/Turnbull research group.
• The fifth annual Greater Boston Area Statistical mechanics meeting was held on October 18 at Brandeis University. Among the 77 attendees were Louis Colonna-Romano, Carmen Gagne, Harvey Gould, Arshad Kudrolli, Ranjan Mukhopadhyay, and Junchao Xia. The contributed talks were
  • Junchao Xia, "Simulation of earthquakes using the Burridge-Knopoff model."
  • Carmen Gagne, "Simulations of spinodal nucleation in systems with elastic interactions."
  • Louis Colonna-Romano, "Optimality of Wang-Landau sampling."
  Also Dan Blair, now at Harvard University, gave a talk on "The geometry of crumpled paper," work started while he was a graduate student at Clark with Arshad Kudrolli. Harvey Gould was one of the organizers of the meeting.
• October 3-4, 2003. Carmen Gagne attended the American Physical Society New England Section meeting at Bates College and gave a talk on "Simulations of Spinodal Nucleation in Systems with Elastic Interactions."
• October 2-10, 2003. Arshad Kudrolli visited the Netherlands and participated in the Traffic and Granular Flow Conference in Delft and the Workshop on Cooperative Grains: From Granular Matter to Nano Materials in Leiden. He was invited to speak on "Self-Assembly in Magnetized Granular Materials" at both meetings.
• September 17, 2003. Ranjan Mukhopadhyay visited the Physics Department at Brandeis and spoke in their Condensed Matter Seminar series. His talk was entitled "Physics of Red Blood Cell shapes.". His host was Jane' Kondev. He will give a similar talk at Harvard on October 8.
• August 2, 2003. Arshad Kudrolli was quoted in an article on the Branby effect entitled "Go with the flow" in the August 2 issue of the New Scientist. Over a 100 years ago, Branby observed that the resistance of a bead pack dropped many orders of magnitude when exposed to an electrical spark. Recently, it has been proposed by a group in Belgium that microsoldering at the contacts is the cause.
• The National Science Foundation awarded a grant of $190,000 to Clark University for support of the "Acquisition of a High Performance Parallel Computing Cluster for the Departments of Biology, Chemistry, Physics, and Mathematics and Computer Science at Clark University." The project is under the direction of David S. Hibbett (PI)l Harvey Gould, Li Han, Rafael Bruschweiler, and Shuanghong Huo are co-PIs. The award is effective August 1, 2003 and expires July 31, 2006.
• July 20-22, 2003. Harvey Gould was a workshop leader at the Java programming workshop at Davidson College organized by Wolfgang Christian. This workshop focussed on educational software development using the Java programming language and the Open Source Physics Java code library. Another workshop leader was Joshua Gould, a Clark graduate.
• July 18, 2003. Over 50 people participated in the first annual Granular Materials Workshop, which was held at Clark University. The workshop is designed to bring together researchers in the New England/New York area to discuss their work on granular materials and explore collaborations. The workshop featured four pedagogical talks, 15 minute contributed talks, and a poster session.
• July 9. The work of Charles Agosta and his students was featured on the National Magnet Lab Web site. The measurements of Agosta's group and others demonstrate a fundamentally new state of a superconductor in a strong magnetic field, a long sought goal.
• June 9-11, 2003. Carmen Gagne, Harvey Gould, Natali Gulbahce, and Hui Wang attended a meeting at Los Alamos National Laboratory on the 50th Anniversary of the Metropolis Monte Carlo algorithm. Hui Wang gave a poster on "Comparison of Extermal Optimization and Simulated Annealing for Lennard-Jones Systems'' and Harvey Gould chaired a session. They were met by Greg Johnson, a graduate of Clark who is now a staff scientist at LANL.
• May 9. Members of the Department, including Harvey Gould, were surprised to find a photo of Harvey Gould and Clark graduate Bill Jensen in the May 2003 issue of the APS News. The caption reads "Harvey Gould of Clark University (standing) offers some advice to William Jensen of UMass-Boston, who is preparing to write to his representatives in Congress using special software provided by the APS Office of Public Affairs. More than 2000 letters to Congress were written by attendees at the March meeting. Bill Jensen's photo has appeared in print before, most notably at his graduation.
• Physics majors David Barbee, Eric Fredrick, Brian Landry (double major with chemistry), Ryan O'Donnell, and Gerardo Pena presented posters on their research in Tilton Hall for Academic Spree day.
  • "Epoxy Impregnation of High Field Magnets," Vincent Ciarametaro (sponsor Professor C. Agosta).
  • Frictional Force and Creep-Like Motion in a Granular Spring-Block System," Ryan O'Donnell (sponsor Professor A. Kudrolli).
  • "Effects of Friction in a Vertically Shaken System of Granular Rods," Eric Frederick (in collaboration with Daniel Blair, graduate student; sponsor Professor A. Kudrolli).
  • "Modifications to the Process of Winding Extremely High Field Magnets," David Barbee (sponsor Professor C. Agosta).
  • "Magneto-Structural Relationships in the Copper Bromide Pyridine (C5H5N) Family," Gerardo Pena '03 (sponsor Professor C. Landee).
  • "Toward Magnetic Chains and Ladders: Copper and Nickel Acetyl Acetone Compounds" Brian Landry '05 (sponsor Professor Turnbull).
• April 8. Harvey Gould spoke at the Department of Physics colloquium at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell on "How Computers are Changing Physics."
• April 3. Harvey Gould spoke to members of the junior and senior class of Springfield Cathedral High School on "How computer simulations are thinking the way we do physics." Karen Erickson of the Department of Chemistry also spoke on "Chemicals from the Sea. Harvesting the Treasures of Davy Jones's Locker."
• March 29 and 30, 2003. Graduate students Dan Blair, Natali Gulbahce, Hui Wang, and Junchao Xia, post-doc Carmen Gagne, and faculty members Harvey Gould and Arshad Kudrolli attended the symposium on Non-Equilibrium Statistical Mechanics at Boston University in honor of Bill Klein's 60th birthday. Junchao Xia gave a poster on "Simulations of earthquakes using the Burridge-Knopoff model" and Carmen Gagne gave a poster on "Simulations of Spinodal Nucleation on Systems with Elastic Forces." Harvey Gould was one of the main organizers of the meeting.
• March 18, 2003. Charles Agosta give a talk to the physics department at Rhode island College.
• March 3-7, 2003. Many members of the Department participated in the annual March APS meeting held in Austin, Texas.
  • "New approach to calculate the magnetic breakdown field in the organic conductor k-(ET)₂Cu(NCS)₂," I. Mihut, C. C. Agosta, C. Martin, L. De Viveiros, Z. Bayindir, S. W. Tozer, H. A. Radovan, C. H. Mielke, M. Kurmoo, and P. Day.
  • "Contactless rf measurements of the critical field," Catalin Martin, Charles C. Agosta, Stan W. Tozer, Henri A. Radovan, Eric C. Palm, Timothy P Murphy, J. L. Sarrao, and M. Kurmoo.
  • "Channelization driven by subsurface flow through a sand pile: experimental results," William Jensen, Norbert Schorghofer, Alexander Lobkovsky, Arshad Kudrolli and, Daniel Rothman.
  • "Channelization driven by subsurface flow through a sand pile: theory," Alexander Lobkovsky, Norbert Schorghofer, William Jensen, Arshad Kudrolli, and Daniel Rothman.
  • Particle Dynamics in Granular Drainage," Jaehyuk Choi, Martin Z. Bazant, R. R. Rosales, and Arshad Kudrolli.
  • Experimental study of path and time distributions in a granular gas," Daniel Blair and Arshad Kudrolli.
  • Relaxation of a granular step: An experimental study," Saloome Siavoshi and Arshad Kudrolli.
  • Anisotropy induced vortex formation in vibrated granular material," Arshad Kudrolli and Daniel Blair.
  • "High-field ESR investigation of the spin ladder compound Cu(quinoxaline)Br₂," S. A. Zvyagin, J. Krzystek, J. van Tol, L.-C. Brunel and C. P. Landee.
  • "High-Field Magnetization of Molecular-Based Spin Ladders," C. P. Landee, M. M. Turnbull, Neil Harrison and John Singleton.
  • "Optical Properties of (C₅H₉NH₃)₂CuBr₄, A Ladder-Like Molecular Solid," J. D. Woodward, J. Choi, J. L. Musfeldt, M. M. Turnbull, C. P. Landee, X. Wei, H. J. Koo, and M. H. Whangbo.
  • "Zeros of the Partition Function and Pseudospinodals in a Near-Mean-Field Ising Model," Natali Gulbahce, Harvey Gould, and William Klein.
• February 26, 2003. Harvey Gould was an invited speaker at the 16th Annual Workshop on Recent Developments in Computer Simulation Studies in Condensed Matter Physics at the University of Georgia. Gould gave an invited talk on "Teaching Statistical Physics Using Simulations." (Copy of talk to be available soon.)
• February 20-22, 2003. Chris Landee was an invited speaker at the Second Annual Frontiers in Chemical Physics Workshop at the University of Tennessee, held February 20-22, 2003 at UT-Knoxville. He spoke on the topic "Design and Synthesis of Molecular-Based Magnetic Lattices."

  One of the other speakers was Ken Jordan, Chair of Department of Chemistry, U. Pittsburgh. He spoke on Computer Simulations of Neutral and Charged Water Clusters. Jordan, who received his Ph.D. at MIT still remembers the size of Harvey Gould's jazz record collection.

• January 23, 2003. Arshad Kudrolli visited the physics department at Northeastern University and spoke in thir colloquium series. The title of his presentation was "Granular Matter: Shake, Rattle and Roll." Arshad received his Ph.D. at Northeastern.
• January 27. Les Blatt discussed his work with pre-service and in-service teachers in a talk entitled "Helping Non-Science Teachers Teach Science: A Physicist's Odyssey," at the Department of Physics colloquium at Worcester Polytechnic Institute.
• January 23-24, 2003. Les Blatt presented a talk on stellar nucleosynthesis, "The Cookbook of the Stars," to the AP Physics students at Peabody High School (Peabody, MA) on January 23, and to the students and faculty of the Physics Department at Bates College (Lewiston, ME) on January 24. His talk combined insights he has gained from his own experimental research on the nuclear processes taking place in the stars with his experience in teaching astronomy to provide an introduction to current understanding of the evolution of the universe.
• January 22, 2003. Chris Landee presented a talk on "Molecules, Magnets, and Data" to the local chapter of the IEEE at Maxtor corporation in Shrewsbury MA. Maxtor was formerly the hard drive division of Digital Equipment Company and is currently one of the leading suppliers of hard drives to Dell Computers. He discussed the physical limitations of data storage capacity using the standard technology and discussed advances in molecular-based magnetism that may lead to a new generation of magnetic storage devices.
• January 18-21, 2003. Daniel Blair and Arshad Kudrolli participated in the 2nd GLUE workshop on granular materials at Argonne National Laboratory. They presented invited papers on "Collison statistics in granular gases" and "Clustering, jamming and segregation in cohesive granular materials."
• January 14, 2003. The experimental work of Arshad Kudrolli, Mathew Abraham, and Jerry Gollub on surface waves in the stadium model was the lead story of the TV program ARCHIMEDE, broadcast on the ARTE French and German cultural network. The title was Stadium: Des vaguelettes a la surface d'une mer d'huile. Follow this link.
• January 10, 2003. Arshad Kudrolli visited Merrimack High School in New Hampshire and spoke on "Physics in a Sandbox" as part of a new program to introduce science research at Clark to high school students. Approximately 200 juniors and seniors were in attendance.
• January 6, 2003. Greg Johnson is now a member of the Technical Staff at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Before his new appointment, he was a post-doctoral research fellow.
• December 20. Zeynel Bayindir successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis on "The Magnetic Field-Temperature Phase Diagram of the Organic Superconductor k-ET₂Cu(NCS)₂ in the parallel orientation." He is now a post-doctoral research associate at Boston College.
• December 16 and 17. Harvey Gould, Natali Gulbahce, Hui Wang, and Junchao Xia attended the 88th Statistical Mechanics conference at Rutgers University. Natali gave a contributed talk on "Zeros of the Partition Function and Pseudospinodals in a Near-Mean-Field Ising Model."
• December 16. Les Blatt gave a talk on "The Cookbook of the Stars" for honors physics and chemistry students at the Dover High School in Dover, MA.
• December 13. Thomas Coffey successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis on "Novel Metals, Magnets, and Measurements: The Critical Magnetic Field Phase Diagram of an Organic Conductor."
• December 2-3, 2002. Physics graduate student Dan Blair and senior Ryan O'Donnell participated in the Fall MRS meeting in Boston. They presented the following papers:
  • "Clustering transistions in excited, magnetized granular material." Daniel Blair and Arshad Kudrolli.
  • "Creep relaxation of a spring-block system on a granular layer." Ryan O'Donnell and Arshad Kudrolli.
  • "Vortices and coarsening in vibrated granular rods." T. Neicu, D. Blair, and A. Kudrolli.
• November 29, 2002. Chris Landee and Mark Turnbull perspectives article on "Porous materials with a Difference" appeared in the November 29, 2002 issue of Science.
• November 21-22. Arshad Kudrolli attended the American Society of Mechanical Engineers Meeting in New Orleans, LA and presented an invited paper on "Cohesive Granular Materials." The coauthors were Azadeh Samadani (now at MIT) and Dan Blair.
• October 28, 2002. Arshad Kudrolli visited the Division of Engineering at Brown University and spoke in their seminar series. The title of his presentation was "Clustering, Jamming and Segregation in Cohesive Granular Materials." His host was Tom Powers.
• October 25 and 26. Carmen Gagne and Harvey Gould attended the Fall 2002 NES/APS/AAPT meeting at Bridgewater State. As Immediate Past Chair, Gould attended his last Executive Committee meeting in an official capacity. Jeff Williams, a Ph.D. graduate of Clark, is the chair at Physics at Bridgewater State.
• October 19. Dan Blair, Carmen Gagne, Harvey Gould, Natali Gulbahce, Arshad Kudrolli, Saloome Siavoshi, Hui Wang, and Junchao Xia attended the Fourth Annual Greater Boston Area Statistical Mechanics meeting at Brandeis University. Graduate students Dan Blair and Natali Gulbahce gave contributed talks on "Collision Statistics in Driven Granular Media" and "Partition Function Zeros and Pseudospinodals in Long-Range Ising Models," respectively. Also in attendance was Clark graduate Azadeh Samadani, now a post-doc at MIT.
• September 25, 2002. Arshad Kudrolli visited the Physics Department at U Mass, Lowell and presented his group's research on the physics of granular materials. His host was Albert Altman who had a number of interesting anecdotes to share. (He is the father of Sean Altman, a songwriter and performer.)
• September 5-10. Christopher Landee, Professor of Physics, and Mark Turnbull, Professor of Chemistry, attended the 8th International Conference on Molecule-Based Magnets, held in Valencia (Spain) from the 5th to the 10th of September. Landee presented a poster entitled "Molecular-Based Quantum Magnets: The Isotropic spin Ladder Cu(Quinoxaline)Br₂." This work featured the results by physics majors Anelia Delcheva (class of 2002) and Gerardo Pena (class of 2003. Turnbull's poster, "Through Space Exchange in Tetrahalocuprates: Experiment and Theoretical Models," was based on the work he had done with colleagues during his sabbatical year in Barcelona.
• September 2, 2002. Graduate student Daniel Blair attended the CECAM (European Centre for Atomic and Molecular Computations) workshop on Granular Gases at the Ecole Normale Superior in Lyon. France. The title of his presentation was, "Clustering in magnetic and non-magnetic granular materials" (pdf file).
• August 28. Graduate student Natali Gulbahce received an Outstanding Teaching Assistant award (one of two) at the University Convocation.
• August 26. 2002. Harvey Gould attended the annual meeting of the Division of Computational Physics in San Diego and gave a talk on "Computational Physics and the Open Source Physics Project." viewgraphs.
• August 19-24, 2002. Arshad Kudrolli visited the Lorentz Institute at Leiden University in Netherlands and participated in a workshop on the Formation of Structures in Granular Materials. The title of his presentation was "Vortices, Clustering and Coarsening in Granular Materials."
• August 20, 2002. A symposium in honor of Daeg Brenner was held at the 224th American Chemical Society National Meeting in Boston on August 20. Among the many papers that were given at the symposium was one by former physics graduate student, Charles Barton on "Coulomb excitation experiments with radioactive nuclear beams." Charles Barton is now a post-doctoral research associate at Daresbury Laboratory. The dinner at 29 Newbury St. was sponsored by the University of Notre Dame where Ani Aprahamian, a Clark graduate (B.A. and Ph.D. in chemistry) is a Professor of Experimental Nuclear Physics.
• August 14, 2002. Peter C. Magnante, 63, of 218 Wigwam Road, physics professor, researcher and inventor, died Wednesday, Aug. 14, in Anna Jaques Hospital, Newburyport. Peter was a former Research Associate professor in the Department.
• August 5, 2002. Harvey Gould attended the summer 2002 AAPT meeting in Boise and gave an invited talk on "An invited talk on "Using Open-Source Java Applets for Teaching Statistical Physics." Wolfgang Christian also gave a talk in the session and Jan Tobochnik chaired the session.
• July 15-18, 2002. Harvey Gould participated in a NSF panel to review proposals for the NSF Course, Curriculum, and Laboratory Improvement Program (CCLI).
• July 9, 2002. Arshad Kudrolli was invited to speak in the Granular Materials session at the 50th Annual meeting of SIAM held in Philadelphia, PA. The title of his presentation was "Vortices in Vibrated Granular Materials" (in collaboration with Clark students T. Neicu, E. Fredrick and D. Blair). The session organizer was Mark Shattuck.
• July 1-24, 2002. Graduate student, Saloome Siavoshi, is attending the Summer School on Soft-Condensed Matter Physics held at Boulder, CO. She is also presenting a poster on relaxation of a granular step.
• June 29-July 3, 2002. Prof. Chris Landee participated in a recent Gordon Research Conference dedicated to Strongly Correlated Electrons. The focus of the conference was recent developments in superconductors and magnetism. Landee presented a poster on "Isotropic Spin Ladders: Synthesis, Structures, and Magnetic Properties" on the recent developments from the joint research he carries out with Chemistry Professor Mark Turnbull. The Conference was held at Colby College, Waterville, Maine.
• June 30-July 4, 2002. Arshad Kudrolli and Dan Blair participated in the Gordon Research Conference on Granular and Granular-Fluid Flow held in Plymouth, NH. Kudrolli presented his group's research on novel granular materials in his invited presentation. Dan Blair presented a poster on the effect of inelasticity on the properties of granular gases.
• June 9-13, 2002. Harvey Gould attended the Gordon Research Conference on Physics Research and Education at Mt. Holyoke College. The theme of the conference was teaching quantum mechanics. The next conference in 2004 will emphasize the teaching of classical mechanics and non-linear dynamics. Gould and Jan Tobochnik started the series in 2000.
• May 19, 2002. Physics major Anelia Delcheva graduated summa cum laude with highest honors in physics. She also is a member of Phi Beta Kappa.
• The University announced the availability of the Stanley Geschwind Memorial Summer Research Internship for Physics Undergraduates. A permanent endowment fund was established by the Geschwind family, including his sons Daniel, Benjamin, and Michael, his daughters-in-law Ethelyn and Sandy, and his sisters Shirley Frant and Lenora Gebeloff and their husbands Martin S. Frant and Seymour Gebeloff; former students Jonathan Goldstein (Class of 1997) and Jenny Sun (Class of 1998); and Clark Parent Melvin Goldstein. Awards may be made to students after the completion of ther first year.
• Christopher Landee recently concluded a three month stay (Feb - April 2002) as Visiting Scientist at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Tallahassee, Florida. While there, he collaborated with NHMFL scientists in characterizing the high-field behavior of a new family of magnetic "spin-ladders" synthesized by Landee and Chemistry Professor Mark Turnbull.
• May 5-10, 2002. Harvey Gould attended the third ACES meeting on Earthquake Physics and Dynamics in Maui. He presented a poster on Simulations of the Burridge-Knopoff Model by graduate student Junchao Xia and W. Klein.
• April 29, 2002. Physics junior Ryan O'Donnell has been named one of only ten Anton Fellow by Clark University. The Fellowship carries with it a stipend of $1700 to do summer research. Ryan is working in the Kudrolli Lab investigating friction in granular materials and its implications to earthquakes.
• April 24, 2002. Arshad Kudrolli has received a $5000 award from the Granular Center for Excellence, ANL-DOE. The purpose of this grant is to promote collaborations between national labs and universities.
• April 26. Physics majors Ryan O'Donnell and Eric Fredrick presented posters on their research in Tilton Hall for Academic Spree day.
  • "Vortices in vibrated granular needles," Eric Frederick '03 (in collaboration with Toni Neicu and Daniel Blair, graduate students; sponsor Professor A. Kudrolli.
  • "Stick slip friction and earthquake dynamics," Ryan O' Donnell '03 (in collaboration with Azadeh Samadani, graduate student; sponsor Professor A. Kudrolli.
• April 22, 2002. Arshad Kudrolli spoke in the physics colloquium series at WPI on his group's research on granular materials. The title of his presentation was, "Vortices and clustering in anistropic granular matter." He was hosted by Nancy Burnham.
• April 19 and 20. About 100 people attended the Chris Hohenemser symposium to celebrate Hohenemser's career at Clark.
• April 19, 2002. A REU-supplement has been awarded to Arshad Kudrolli to support the research of an undergraduate student over the summer of 2002. Physics major Eric Fredrick will be investigating the properties of rods vibrated in a container that exhibit novel ordering transitions.
• April 15, 2002. The National Science Foundation awarded a grant of $25,386 to Harvey Gould for support of the project, "Development of Software and Curricular Materials for the Incorporation of Computer Simulations into the Undergraduate Physics Curriculum."
• April 13. About 50 people attended the 10th Complex Fluids Workshop at Clark University. The Workshop was organized by Arshad kudrolli and his students. graduate student Dan Blair was one of the four invited speakers.
• March 18 - 22. Many members of the Department participated in the annual March APS meeting held in Indianapolis.
  • Angular Study of the Magnetic Breakdown Effect in the Organic Conductor k-(BEDT-TTF)₂Cu (NCS)₂ at High Magnetic Field, Izabela Mihut, Charles Agosta, Charles Mielke, M. Tokomoto, and Tsukuba Ibaraki.
  • Anisotropic Critical Field Study of \alpha-(ET)₂NH₄Hg(SCN)₄, T. Coffey, C. Martin, H. Gao, C. C. Agosta, H. Anzai, and M. Tokumoto.
  • The critical magnetic field of the organic conductor \kappa-(BEDT-TTF)₂Cu(NCS)₂ with the applied field parallel to the conducting layers, C. C. Agosta, Z. Bayindir, C. Martin, L. De Viveiros Souza, and M. Tokumoto.
  • Lattice-independent approach to thermal phase mixing, Carmen Gagne and Marcelo Gleiser.
  • Overview of curriculum developments in the teaching of statistical physics, Harvey Gould (invited).
  • Effect of the viscosity of the liquid on the angle of inclination of a wet sandpile, Azadeh Samadani and Arshad Kudrolli.
  • Clustering transitions in excited magnetized granular beads, Daniel Blair and Arshad Kudrolli.
  • Angle of repose and segregation in cohesive granular matter, Arshad Kudrolli (invited talk).
  • Vortices in vibrated granular rods, Toni Neicu and Arshad Kudrolli.
  • Spectrum of the Magnetized State of the S = 1/2 Linear Chain Antiferromagnet Copper Pyrazine Dinitrate, M. B. Stone, D. H. Reich, C. Broholm, K. Lefmann, C. Rischel, C. P. Landee, M. M. Turnbull.
  • Magnetic Properties of Isotropic Molecular-Based Spin Ladders: Copper Quinoxaline Dihalides, C. P. Landee, C. Galeriu, A. Delcheva, G. Pena, M. M. Turnbull.
  • Polarized Optical Transmittance of the NENB Haldane Compound, Virginia Long, Pedzisayi Makumbe, Xing Wei, and Chris Landee.
• March 1, 2002. Azadeh Samadani visited the Department of Physics at Emory University, Atlanta and also spoke in the physics colloquium series. The title of her presentation was "Physics of dry and wet granular matter". She was happy to meet two Clark-Physics Alums - Fereydoon Family (1974) and Raymond C. DuVarney (1968). Her host was Eric Weeks.
• February 20, 2002. Dan Blair visited the Weitz group at Harvard University and spoke on "Clustering in Dipolar Hard Spheres" in the squishy physics talks series.
• February 14, 2002. Arshad Kudrolli visited the Department of Physics at the University of Maryland, College Park and spoke in the applied dynamics seminar series. The title of his presentation was, "Vortices in vibrated granular rods," and his host was Wolfgang Losert.
• January 21. Harvey Gould attended the AAPT meeting in Philadelphia and the Editorial Board meeting of the American Journal of Physics.
• January 11. Arshad Kudrolli visited the Departments of Physics and Engineering at Northwestern University in Evanston, IL, and spoke in the Nonlinear Science Seminar Series. The title of his presentation was "Vortices and clustering in granular matter" and his host was Paul Umbanhowar.
• January 4-7. Daniel Blair participated in the Annual Dynamics Days Conference held in Baltimore, MD. He presentation was titled "Self Assembing Chains, Rings and Droplets in magnetized granular matter."
• January 1, 2002. Harvey Gould has been appointed as a member of the Editorial Board of Physical Review E for a three year term.
• January 1, 2002. Harvey Gould has completed his one year term as Chair of the New England Section of the American Physical Society. Bill hersman of the University of New Hampshire moves from Vice Chair to Chair. He now becomes Past Chair and will remain a member of the Executive Committee.
• December, 2001. Reinhardt Schulmann, who received his Ph.D. from Clark in 1988 has been appointed Managing Editor of Physical Review Letters, succeeding Gene Wells. From the APS Web site: "Reiny brings to this new assignment twenty years of experience as a physicist and with APS publications. His passionate commitment to physics and to the excellence of our journals, and his keen understanding of the editorial process, will serve him and the scientific community well in this important position. We look forward to his leadership of the PRL editorial staff in dealing with the many challenges of the present and future."
• December 16-18. Carmen Gagne, Harvey Gould, and graduate students Natali Gulbahce and Junchao Xia attended the 86th Statistical mechanics Conference at Rutgers University. Carmen Gagne gave a talk on "Lattice-Independent Approach to Thermal Phase Mixing." Also in attendance was Greg Johnson, a recent Ph.D. from Clark, who is now a post-doctoral research associate at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
• December 5. Carmen Gagne visited the University of New Hampshire as a guest of John Dawson and gave a seminar on "Lattice-Independent Approach to Thermal Phase Mixing." She received her B.A. degree in physics from UNH.
• November 19-21. Azadeh Samadani and Arshad Kudrolli participated in the Division of Fluid Dynamics meeting of the APS held this year in San Diego, CA. and made the following presentations: "Clustering in excited magnetized granular beads," Daniel Blair and Arshad Kudrolli; "The viscosity dependence of the angle of stability of wet granular matter," Azadeh Samadani and Arshad Kudrolli; and "(Gallery of Fluid Motion) Vortices in vibrated granular rods," Toni Neicu and Arshad Kudrolli.
• November 5. Charles Agosta gave the physics colloquium on "Measurements of Organic Superconductors in High Magnetic Fields using a Tunnel Diode Oscillator" at WPI.
• November 5. Carmen Gagne visited the Department of Physics at Bridgewater State College as a guest of Martina Arndt and spoke on "Phase Transitions in the Early Universe."
• November 2, 3. Harvey Gould attended the Fall 2002 meeting of the New England Section (NES) of the American Physical Society at Keene State. At the meeting he met Jeff Williams, a Ph.D. graduate of Clark, who is now chair of physics at Bridgewater State College. He also met former Clark undergrads, Brad Robinson and James Vesenka (1982), who are now at Exeter Academy and the University of New England, respectively. Harvey Gould is chair of NES/APS during 2001 and will remain a member of the Executive Committee as Past Chair during 2002. The spring 2002 meeting of NES/APS/AAPT will be at Brandeis on April 5,6 and the Fall 2002 meeting of NES/APS/AAPT will be at Bridgewater State.
• November 1. Christopher Landee visited Amherst College on November 1,2001 as a guest of Jonathan Friedman. Landee presented a talk on "Magnets, Data, and Molecules" in which he described how magnetic storage for data is approaching real physical limits, but that high-spin molecules may offer a way out.
• October 31. Les Blatt discussed Energy fields, Exploring the Matrix, with artists Sarah Walker and Robin Reynolds at the University Gallery exhibit, Matrix. The conversation took place from 4 to 5:30 pm at the Clark University Gallery.
• October 30. Physics majors, Ryan O'Donnell and Eric Fredrick, were featured in an article in the Clark News discussing their summer research experience in the nonlinear physics lab directed by Arshad Kudrolli.
• October 26. Harvey Gould visited Carnegie Mellon University and gave a talk to the condensed matter seminar on "Approaching the Glass Transition: The Importance of Near-Mean Field." He also visited Clark graduates Joseph DeCarolis, a graduate student in the Engineering and Public Policy Program and Robert Suter, a physics faculty member at CMU.
• October 24th. Charles Agosta gave a talk on, "Resistivity and penetration depth measurements of organic superconductors in high magnetic fields using a tunnel diode oscillator, " at the Physical Phenomena at High Magnetic Fields- IV conference in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
• October 22. Greg Johnson successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis on October 15 and started a new postdoctoral research position at Los Alamos National Laboratory on October 22.
• October 20. Approximately 80 people attended the third annual Greater Boston Area Statistical Mechanics Meeting at Brandeis University. Arshad Kudrolli gave one of the four invited talks and featured the research of graduate students Daniel Blair and Azadeh Samadani, who also gave contributed talks. Harvey Gould was one of the organizers of the meeting, which was also attended by graduate students Natali Gulbahce and Junchao Xia.
• October 16, 2001. Sixty-two people from the Clark and Worcester communities gathered at O'Connors restaurant to celebrate the 80th birthday of Roy Andersen, Professor of Physics, emeritus. Roy Andersen returned to Clark in 1960 to reestablish the Ph.D. program in physics, and has been associated with Clark for 45 years.
• October 3, 2001. The work of Anna M. Delprato, Azadeh Samadani, and Arshad Kudrolli on the growth of bacterial colonies subjected to UV radiation was featured on Physics News Update published by the AiP. Anna Delprato did her work while she was a Ph.D. student in biology at Clark. Azadeh Samadani is a graduate student in Kudrolli's group. The work was done in collaboration with L. S. Tsimring of UCSD. October 23 update: This research on the bacteria rings was also mentioned in the news briefs of the Boston Globe Science section.
• October 2, 2001. The SiP Web site maintained by Gould and Tobochnik has been listed at The Society for Modeling and Simulation Europe Web site as "Online Course of the Month."
• October 2, 2001. Arshad Kudrolli spoke to the Physical Mathematics Seminar in the Department of Mathematics at MIT. The talk was titled, "Granular matter with attraction." Kudrolli holds a visiting position at MIT and collaborates with members of the Mathematics and Geophysics Departments.
• August 20-September 2 2001. Graduate student, Natali Gulbahce, attended the summer school on Fundamental Problems in Statistical Physics X in Altenberg, Germany. A scholarship from the summer school enabled her to attend.
• August 8, 2001. Azadeh Samdani spoke in the Squishy Physics Pizza Seminar Series hosted by the Weitz group at Harvard University on "Properties of cohesive granular matter."
• July 22-28, 2001. Arshad Kudrolli participated in the Continuum Mechanics Workshop hosted by the University of Chicago and presented his group's research on the properties of dry and wet granular matter.
• July 2, 2001. Matt Woodward, a recent Clark physics Ph.D., became a post-doctoral research fellow for Jeff Lynn, Professor of Physics at the University of Maryland and NIST. He will scatter neutrons from condensed matter materials, and will be the post-doc liaison for visitors who come to NIST for experiments. Matt now holds the same position that Nick Rosov held with Lynn back in the late 1980's.
• June 24 - 27, 2001. The 30th Northeast Regional Meeting of the American Chemical Society took place at the University of New Hampshire. Mark Turnbull (Clark chemistry) and Chris Landee organized a symposium on Molecular Magnetic Systems, during which Landee gave an invited talk on "Constructing a Family of Pyrazine-Bridged One-Dimensional Antiferromagnets." Charles Agosta also gave an invited talk on "A Tunnel Diode Oscillator Measurement System for Making Magnetic Measurements in Ultra High Pulsed Magnetic Fields."
• June 25 - 28, 2001. Harvey Gould, Natali Gulbahce, and Junchao Xia attended the annual meeting of the Division of Computational Physics, DCOMP01, held at MIT. Gould chaired the session on "Computational Physics and the Computer Industry," and was a member of the Program Committee.
• June 20, 2001. The following undergraduate students are spending their summer at Clark working on various research projects.
  1. Eric Fredrick '03. Eric is investigating the effect of inelastic collisions and dissipation on the diffusion of particles in a granular system using high speed imaging and computer simulations. He is working in the granular and nonlinear physics laboratory of Professor Kudrolli.
  2. Ryan O'Donnell '03. Ryan is studying the effects of friction on the dynamics of a spring-block system on a granular layer. He is also learning laboratory automation techniques using capacitance sensors and data acquision boards. He is working in the granular and nonlinear physics laboratory of Professor Kudrolli.
  3. Gerardo Pena is working with Chris Landee on preparing new insulating magnets, particularly those in which the magnetic copper ions are connected in a ladder configuration. Only a few of these are known, but they are of great interest due to their connection to theories of superconductivity.
• June 15, 2001. Members of the Kudrolli group attended the 7th Workshop on Complex Fluids held at Brown University. The conference organizers were Tom Powers and Sean Ling. Blair, Kudrolli, Neicu, and Samadani spoke briefly on their research on aspects of granular matter.
• May 30, 2001. Harvey Gould gave an invited talk on "Integrating Computational Science into the Physics Curriculum," at Computational Science - ICCS 2001, San Francisco, May 30, 2001 (viewgraphs).
• May 21-25. Graduate students Azadeh Samadani and Daniel Blair attended the 21st CNLS sponsored Annual Conference on Principles of Soft Matter held at Santa Fe. They presented posters on their thesis-related work on properties of cohesive granular matter and on excited dipolar hard spheres.
• May 21-25. Arshad Kudrolli traveled to Sendai, Japan to attend Powders and Grains 2001. He presented papers on "Angle of repose and segregaton in wet granular matter" (with A. Samadani) and "Velocity correlations in dense granular gases" (with D. Blair).
• May 1, 2001. Arshad Kudrolli visited the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT and spoke in the Hatsopoulos spring seminar series. His presentation was titled "Physics of Granular and Dipolar Materials."
• April 18, 2001. Arshad Kudrolli visited the Mechanical Engineering department at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and spoke in their seminar series. The title of his presentation was "Clustering and segregation in granular matter."
• April 9, 2001. Chris Landee spoke at the physics department colloquium at Temple University on "Molecular-Based Quantum Antiferromagnets."
• April 7, 2001. The department was saddened to hear of the death of Kurt Hohenemser, father of Chris Hohenemser.
• March 26, 2001. Les Blatt was one of the participants in the March 2001 panel discussion on "Science Education: How Can We Measure Success?" The panel discussion and talk by Bruce Alberts was the first event in the a week-Long Celebration of the Inauguration of President John E. Bassett.
• March 12 - 16, 2001. Many members of the Department participated in the annual March APS meeting held in Seattle.
  • Anisotropic Critical Field Study of alpha-(ET)₂NH₄Hg(SCN)₄ Using rf Penetration, T. Coffey, H. Gao, C. C Agosta, H. Anzai, and M. Tokumoto.
  • The study of the superconducting phase diagram of organic superconductor (BEDT-TTF)₂Cu(NCS)₂ in short pulsed magnetic fields, Z. Bayindir, C. Martin, I. Mihut, T. Coffey, C. C. Agosta, M. Tokumoto, and H. Anzai.
  • Near-Mean-Field Effects in a Fragile Glass Former, Gregory Johnson, Harvey Gould, and W. Klein.
  • New Perspectives and Methods for Complex Simulations and Optimization Problems, Harvey Gould chair.
  • Signatures of the periodic orbits of a Clover shaped acoustic resonator, Toni Neicu and Arshad Kudrolli.
  • Segregation and angle of repose of wet granular matter, Arshad Kudrolli and Azadeh Samadani.
  • Surface instabilities and velocity field of granular flow inside a silo, Azadeh Samadani and Arshad Kudrolli.
  • Velocity correlations in dense granular gases, Daniel Blair and Arshad Kudrolli.
  • Dimensional Crossover from Two to Three Dimensions in S = 1/2 Copper Heisenberg Antiferromagets, F. M. Woodward, C. P. Landee, and M. M. Turnbull.
  • Quasi-One-Dimensional Spin-1/2 Antiferromagnetism in Molecular-Based Magnets, Christopher Landee (invited talk).
  • Magnetic and structural properties of a new molecular-based spin-ladder system: (5NAP)₂CuBr₄ \bullet H₂O, Calin Galeriu, Frank Woodward, John Giantsidis, Christopher Landee, and Mark Turnbull.
• February 14. Charles Agosta recently spoke at the condensed matter seminar at Brandeis University on "Organic conductors and high magnetic fields: a playground for correlated electrons." He gave a similar talk at Trinity College on Feb 9.
• February 2-4. Arshad Kudrolli was invited to speak at a conference on "Soft matter as a nonlinear system" organized by CCCNLS at Laguna Beach, California. Michael Dennin, Bob Ecke and David Egolf were the conference organizers. Arshad's presentation was titled, "Instabilities in the flow of dry and wet granular matter."
• January 22, 2001. Harvey Gould spoke at the WPI physics colloquium on "Approaching the Glass Transition." His host was Nancy Burnham. Chris Landee spoke at WPI about his research in November, 2000.
• January 8, 2001. Jan Tobochnik of Kalamazoo College has been appointed Editor of the American Journal of Physics. His long-time collaborator, Harvey Gould, was appointed as Associate Editor.
• January 3-6, 2001. Graduate students Azadeh Samadani and Daniel Blair attended Dynamics Days 2001 held at Chapel Hill, NC. They presented their study on migration patterns in bacterial colonies, and velocity correlations in dense granular gases. Their travel was partially supported by the conference.
• December 12. Les Blatt has posted some information about the upcoming eclipse of the sun on December 25.
• December 8. Les Blatt presented an interdepartmental colloquium on stellar nucleosynthesis, "The Cookbook of the Stars," at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut.
• December 4. Arshad Kudrolli spoke at Bridgewater State College to the Physics Student Association. The title of his presentation was "The Physics of the Sandbox."
• November 19-21. Dan Blair, Azadeh Samadani, and Arshad Kudrolli attended the annual Fluid Dynamics Division meeting of the American Physical Society held at Washington DC. They made the following presentations at the meeting.
  • "Segregation and layering in the flow of wet granular matter," Azadeh Samadani, Arshad Kudrolli
  • "Velocity fields of patterns in vibrated granular matter," Daniel Blair, Arshad Kudrolli
• November 20. Chris Landee gave the physics department colloquium at WPI on "Quantum Effects in Antiferromagnetic Molecular-Based Magnets." His host was Nancy Burnham.
• November 17. John Morrill, BA 1982, is now the Energy Manager for Arlington County, VA. In this new governmental position, he is working to cut costs and the environmental burden from about 80 county facilities, as well as outreach and education to residents. He has been there since late July 2000, and is "having a blast." We also hear that Brett Alten, BA 1985 is enjoying his new job with a start-up company that is making an instrument that compensates for a distortion effect in optical fibers called polarization mode dispersion (PMD). Although not all fiber is PMD-limited at this time, within a few years, when carriers start transmitting at 40 Gb/s, most if not all carriers will need an instrument like ours.
• November 13. Les Blatt presented a talk on nuclear astrophysics, "The Cookbook of the Stars," to the Society of Physics Students chapter at the University of Massachusetts (Amherst) on November 13, 2000.
• November 11. Harvey Gould visited the Department of Physics at Purdue University and gave a talk on "Approaching the Glass Transition" at the Condensed Matter Seminar. Gould discussed some of the characteristics of the glass transition in fragile glass formers and the long-standing question of whether the transition is predominantly kinetic or thermodynamic in nature. A pdf file of the viewgraphs is available.
• November 8. Arshad Kudrolli visited the Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences department at MIT and spoke on "The physics of granular matter" in their department lecture series.
• November 3. Members of the Department welcomed Joe Budnick, Janice Musfeldt, and Roger Willett to Clark. The three visitors gave talks at the Harry Allen symposium sponsored by the Department of Chemistry. Among other links, Chris Landee did postdoctoral work with Roger Willett and collaborates with Budnick and Musfelt. Joe Budnick was a Goddard Research Professor at Clark in the late 1980's at which time he actively collaborated with Chris Hohenemser among other people in the Department.
• October 25. Harvey Gould gave a talk on "Approaching the Glass Transition" to the Materials Science and Engineering Seminar at Johns Hopkins University. His host was Mo Li.
• October 18. Charlie Saylor, a Ph.D. graduate of Clark, will become a permanent staff member at the Florida National High Magnetic Fields Laboratory. He will work with the high-frequency EPR group of Louis-Claude Brunel.
• October 14. Approximately 85 people attended the second annual Greater Boston Area Statistical Mechanics meeting at Brandeis University. This year's meeting was organized by Bulbul Chakraborty and Harvey Gould.
• September 22. Graduate students Azadeh Samadani and Daniel Blair presented their work on the properties of granular matter at the 4th New England Complex Fluids meeting which was held at MIT.
• September 16-21. Chris Landee gave an invited talk and was a member of the organizing committee of the 7th International Conference on Molecular-Based Magnetism. Landee's talk was on "Copper Pyrazine Nitrate: The Exploratoreum for One-Dimensional Quantum Chains" and was based on work by Stephanie Amaral, William Jensen, Christopher P. Landee, Mark M. Turnbull, and F. Matthew Woodward. His long-time collaborator in the Department of Chemistry, Mark Turnbull, gave an invited talk on "Through-Space Superexchange in Copper Salts: Factors Affecting Intra- and Interlayer Exchange" based on work by Nathan S. Agrin, John Giantsidis, Christopher P. Landee, Mark M. Turnbull, and F. Matthew Woodward. Physics graduate students Calin Galeriu and Matt Woodward gave posters on their research.
• September 12. Arshad Kudrolli visited the Department of Physics at Cornell University and gave a seminar on "Clustering and segregation in the flow of granular matter."
• September 7, 2000. Arshad Kudrolli is enjoying his pre-tenure sabbatical and is spending most Tuesdays and Wednesdays at MIT with the research group of Michael Brenner.
• July 31 - August 11, 2000. Harvey Gould visited the Institute for Theoretical Physics at UC Santa Barbara as an Institute Scholar.
• June 29, 2000. The following undergraduate students are spending their summer at Clark working on various research projects.
  • Anelia Delcheva was awarded an IBM summer research fellowship for women and is working with Stuart Parkin at IBM-Almaden, who is the person most responsible for the rapid growth in hard disk density over the past decade. Two awards were made to the 300 applicants.
  • Taimur Ellahi is spending the summer in Kudrolli's lab doing research on granular matter before he enters Washington University School of Engineering this fall as a 3/2 student.
  • Bill Jensen, a recent graduate, has been working in Landee's group and preparing his data on one-dimensional antiferromagnets for publication.
  • Jeremy Newburg-Rinn is working with Les Blatt on a physics major's guide to important and useful techniques that are not usually systematically taught in formal courses.
  • Luiz De Viveiros Souza is working on the pulsed field apparatus in Agosta's laboratory (see below).
• Luiz De Viveiros Souza has been appointed as the Erickson Summer Scholar and will be the Erickson Fellow during AY 2000/01. Luiz is majoring in physics and philosophy and is working on a new micro-machined magnetometer for pulsed magnetic fields in Agosta's group.
• June 11-16, 2000. The first Gordon Research Conference on Physics, Research and Education organized by Harvey Gould and Jan Tobochnik, was held June 11-16, 2000 at Plymouth State College. The meeting was the first Gordon conference on both education and research and was attended by approximately 95 people from a variety of institutions and with diverse interests in physics research and teaching. It was decided that the meeting should be continued and the next meeting will emphasize the teaching of quantum mechanics and be held in June 2002. Beth Ann Thacker is the Chair of this meeting and Harvey Leff was elected Vice-Chair.
• June 12, 2000. Harvey Gould was elected Secretary/Treasurer of the Division of Computational Physics of the APS.
• May 21, 2000. Emily Clark, Joe DeCarolis, Bill Jensen, and Apurba Pradhan received their bachelor of arts degree in physics, and Charles Barton received his doctoral degree during commencement 2000. Bill Jensen was featured on the front page of the Worcester Telegram & Gazette.
• May 13, 2000. Chuck Agosta and his wife Lucy McQuilken were featured in the Sunday Boston Globe: Consider the plight of Lucy McQuilken and Chuck Agosta of Harvard, Mass. Married for eight years, McQuilken and Agosta love going on bike rides together. Five years ago, they had a baby. Unfazed, they put her in a baby trailer hitched up to Agosta's bike. Three years ago, they had another daughter, who would ride in the trailer, too, beside her sister. Two months ago, baby number three came along. With no more room in the trailer, what's a bicycling couple to do?

  Get a tandem, of course. Mom and Dad ride the tandem, the older kids go on a tandem tagalong bike attachment called Trail-a-Bike, and baby gets towed behind everyone else in the trailer.

  "We thought it would be an efficient way to ride together," says McQuilken, 35, who spent last Sunday afternoon with her husband at a Tandem Demo Day sponsored by Belmont Wheelworks.

• May 7, 2000. Harvey Gould gave an invited talk on "The Structure of Fluctuations at Mean-Field Critical Points and the Implications for Supercooled Fluids: Simulations and Experiments" at the 83rd Statistical Mechanics meeting at Rutgers University. The meeting celebrated the 70th birthday of Joel Lebowitz.
• April 29, 2000. Harvey Gould is one of two candidates for Secretary/Treasurer of the Division of Computational Physics of the APS.
• April 20, 2000. Anelia Delcheva, a sophomore physics major, was received an IBM Research Internship Award and will work with Stuart Parkin this summer at IBM Almaden near San Jose, CA. Over 100 students applied for the two awards.
• April 19, 2000. Arshad Kudrolli visited the Mathematics Department at WPI and presented his group's work on granular flow in their Colloquium series.
• April 15, 2000. Harvey Gould spoke on "Computational Physics in the Undergraduate Curriculum" at the Physics Department Chair Conference at the American Center for Physics, College Park, MD. Among the participants at the meeting was Jeff Williams, Chair of Physics at Bridgewater State, and a Clark Ph.D.
• April 10, 2000. Harvey Gould was member of a National Science Foundation Information Technology Research (ITR) Proposal Panel in Arlington, Virginia.
• March 29, 2000. Charles Agosta gave the condensed matter seminar at Northeastern University.
• March 20 - 21, 2000. Harvey Gould was a member of the external review committee that evaluated the Department of Physics at Rutgers University/Camden.
• March 20 - March 24, 2000. Three faculty members and six graduate students attended the annual March meeting of the APS. Three physics majors participated in the research. Talks by members of the department:
  • "Anisotropic Critical Field Study of a(ET)₂NH₄Hg(SCN)₄ Using rf Penetration," T. Coffey, Z. Bayindir, L. De Viveiros, H. Gao, C. C. Agosta, M. Tokumoto, and H. Anzai.
  • "Measurements of the Superconducting Phase Diagram of l-(BETS)₂GaCl₄ in Short Pulsed Magnetic Fields," Z. Bayindir, T. Coffey, J. DeCarolis, I. Mihut, C. C. Agosta and M. Montgomery.
  • "Infrared Properties of the Chemically Tunable Molecular Magnet Copper Pyrazine Dinitrate," B. R. Jones, I. Olejniczak, P. A. Varughese, J. M. Pigos, J. L. Musfeldt, G. L. Carr, C.P. Landee, and M. M. Turnbull.
  • "3D Ordering in 2D Quantum Heisenberg Antiferromagnets," C. P. Landee, F. M. Woodward, J. Giantsidis, and M. M. Turnbull.
  • "Magnetism in Pyrazine-Based Two Dimensional Copper Heisenberg Antiferromagnets," F. M. Woodward, C. P. Landee, M. M. Turnbull, and N. Rosov.
  • "Magnetic and structural properties of new molecular-based spin-ladder systems," Calin Galeriu, Frank M. Woodward, John Giantsidis, Christopher P. Landee, and Mark M. Turnbull.
  • "Flow and segregation in dry and wet granular matter," Arshad Kudrolli (invited talk).
  • "Quantum chaos in mixed systems: Level dynamics using vibrating plates," Toni Neicu, O. Brodier, T. Ellahi, and A. Kudrolli.
  • "Non-Gaussian velocity distributions in vibrated granular matter at low densities," Arshad Kudrolli and J. Henry.
• March 11, 2000. Graduate student Azadeh Samadani spoke at the Second Boston Area Complex Fluids Workshop at Brandeis University on "Segregation-mixing transitions in wet granular matter."
• February 23, 2000. Chris Landee spoke at the Condensed Matter Seminar at Northeastern University on "Advances in Quantum Magnetism using Molecular-Based Magnets."
• February 15, 2000. Arshad Kudrolli spoke at the Martin Weiner Lecture Series in the Physics department at Brandeis University. The title of his talk was "Instabilities in the Flow of Dry and Wet Granular Matter."
• Members of the department were sadden to hear about the passing of Theodore Von Laue, Frances and Jacob Hiatt Professor of European History, emeritus at Clark University. Besides being well known for his own work and accomplishments, he was the son of the Max Von Laue, a Nobel prize winner in physics. Theodore Von Laue's obituary.
• January 4, 2000. Arshad Kudrolli has received a four-year National Science Foundation CAREER grant. The grant totaling $360,000 will support his group's research on "Instabilities in the flow of dry and wet granular matter."
• December 17, 1999. Arshad Kudrolli spoke at the first Complex Fluids Workshop at Harvard University about "Instabilities in dry and wet granular matter." The purpose of the workshop is to bring together physicists in the greater Boston area working in the area of soft condensed matter and was organized by David Weitz and Seth Fraden. Quarterly meetings are planned.
• December 11, 1999. Harvey Gould spoke about "A New Gordon Conference on Research and Teaching of Statistical and Thermal Physics" at the 82nd Statistical Mechanics Meeting at Rutgers University organized by Joel Lebowitz.
• November 30, 1999. Arshad Kudrolli spoke at the Physical Mathematics Seminar at MIT on "Clustering and Segregation in Granular flows."
• October 19, 1999. Harvey Gould spoke to students at the Wachusetts Science Seminar at Wachusetts High School.
• September 28, 1999. Harvey Gould is a candidate for Vice-Chair of the APS New England Section. His very worthy alternative is Robert Hallock of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. November 4, 1999 Update: "I am happy to inform you that you have been elected Vice-chair of the New England Section for 2000."
• September 3, 1999. Chris Landee gave the chemistry colloquium on "Quantum Magnetism: New Materials, New Physics from Molecular-Based Magnets" at SUNY-Binghamton, now known as Binghamton University.
• August 16-20, 1999. Chris Landee and Harvey Gould attended the Institute for Theoretical Physics Conference on Quantum Magnetism, August 16-20, 1999 at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Landee's lecture is online
• July 21, 1999. Harvey Gould and Jan Tobochnik's proposal to organize a Gordon Research Conference on Physics, Research and Education has been approved. It will be held on June 11-16, 2000 at Plymouth State College.
• June 28-29, 1999. Harvey Gould judged the entries for the annual physics software contest for Computing in Science and Engineering in New York City.
• May 6 - 10, 1999. Arshad Kudrolli spoke on "Size segregation in silo discharges" at the IUTAM Conference on Segregation in Granular Flow in Cape May, NJ.
• Dr. Joel Lebowitz, George William Hill Professor of Mathematics and Physics and Director of the Center for Mathematical Sciences Research at Rutgers University, received a honorary degree from Clark University on May 23, 1999. Among his many awards and honors, Lebowitz is the recipient of the Boltzmann medal (1992) and the New York Academy of Sciences Heinz R. Pagels Human Rights of Scientists Award (1996) for his work in advancing the human rights of scientists worldwide. We are particularly pleased to be able to honor Joel Lebowitz on the 100th anniversary of Clark awarding a honorary degree to Ludwig Boltzmann. The citation was read by Harvey Gould.
• Rongfeng Sun received his B.A. degree in physics (highest honors) and mathematics on May 23, 1999.
• May 13, 1999. Harvey Gould, spoke to the physics colloquium at Northeastern University on "Computational Physics and the Physics Curriculum." His host was Alain Karma.
• Arshad Kudrolli continued the Clark invasion of Wesleyan and spoke on "Physics of granular flow on April 15.
• Chris Landee spoke on "Quantum Magnetism: New Magnets, New Physics" to the physics colloquium at Wesleyan University on April 8.
• March 21 - March 26, 1999. Five faculty members, ten graduate students, and three undergraduate majors went to Atlanta to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the founding of the American Physical Society of which Clark physics Professor Arthur Gordon Webster was one of the three founding members.

  Talks by members of the department:

  • Arthur Gordon Webster, Founder of the American Physical Society, Roy S. Andersen and S. Leslie Blatt.
  • Using a tunnel diode oscillator in pulsed magnetic fields to study an organic superconductor, T. Coffey, J. F. Decarolis, G. Esper, Z. Bayindir, and C. C. Agosta.
  • The Anomalous Superconducting Phase Diagrams of the Organic Superconductors: l-(BETS)₂GaCl₄ and (BEDO-TTF)₄H₂O," Z. Bayindir, T. Coffey, G. Esper, J. F. DeCarolis, C. C. Agosta, T. Burgin, L. K. Montgomery, E. Yagubskii, and N. Kushch.
  • Velocity Distribution and Size Segregation of Granular Material in an Emptying Silo, Azadeh Samadani, A. Pradhan, and A. Kudrolli.
  • Density distributions in vibrated granular materials, J. Sasha Henry and A. Kudrolli.
  • Experimental investigation of parametric correlators and localization using vibrating plates, K. Schaadt, O. Brodier, and A. Kudrolli.
  • Experiments on Pattern Formation in Bacterial Colonies under Convection, T. Neicu, A. Pradhan, D. Larochelle, and A. Kudrolli.
  • Computational Physics and the Undergraduate Curriculum, Harvey Gould.
  • Molecular Dynamics Study of Long-Lived Structures in a Fragile Glass Forming Liquid, Gregory Johnson, Harvey Gould, and W. Klein.
  • High Field Magnetization Studies of Pyrazine Based S = 1/2 Two-Dimensional Magnets, F. M. Woodward, C. P. Landee, and M. M. Turnbull.
  • A Molecular Based Family of Linear Chain S = 1/2 Heisenberg Antiferromagnets, C. P. Landee, F. M. Woodward, and M. M. Turnbull.
• March 5, 1999. Les Blatt presented his nuclear astrophysics lecture/demonstration, entitled "The Cookbook of the Stars," at Connecticut College on March 5, 1999. He was hosted by the Society of Physics Students, and enjoyed meeting with the students and faculty. He was especially pleased to be able to talk about times old and new with Professor Arlan Mantz, who was a frequent visitor at Ohio State University when Blatt was chair.
• Dr. Stanley Geschwind of Needham and Berkeley Heights, NJ passed away on Monday, February 8, 1999. Stan Geschwind was the Goddard Research Professor in the Department of Physics since Fall, 1991 and internationally known for his work at Bell Labs. He had a large impact on both the undergraduate and graduate programs in the physics department during his tenure at Clark.

  He is survived by his companion Susan Powers; sons Daniel, Benjamin and Michael and their mother Dena, his grandchildren Eli and Maya and his sisters Shirley Frant of Newton and Lenora Gebeloff of New York. Services at The Levine Chapel, 470 Harvard Street, Brookline, on Tuesday, February 9, 1999 at 2:30 p.m. Shiva at the home of Shirley and Martin Frant. In lieu of flowers, remembrances may be made to Appalachian Mountain Club (Three Mile Island Camp), 5 Joy Street, Boston, MA 02108. The flag at Clark University was flown at half-mast on Tuesday and Wednesday, February 9 and 10 in his honor.

• February 4, 1999. Arshad Kudrolli spoke to the condensed matter seminar at Brown University on "The Physics of Granular Flow."
• January 27, 1999. Undergraduate physics majors, Emily Clark, Joseph DeCarolis, and Apurba Pradham, received APS student travel grants to attend the APS Centennial Meeting in Atlanta, Georgia, March 20-26, 1999. They were joined by most of the physics faculty and graduate students.
• December 10, 1998. Chuck Agosta spent the day at Smith College visiting Nat Fortune and gave a talk to their journal club on the physics of organic superconductors. The students were particularly impressed with his demonstration of a 15 tesla pulsed magnetic field apparatus which fits on a 2' x 2' piece of plywood.
• December 7, 1998. Harvey Gould gave the physics departmental colloquium at Brown University. He spoke on his research on glasses and give a partial answer to the question, "What is a glass?" (It is not a frozen liquid.)
• December 2, 1998. Arshad Kudrolli has received a Research Innovation Award by the Research Corporation in support of his research on quantum chaos. The project titled "Experimental study of parametric correlators in acoustic resonator" uses vibrations of quartz plates to study experimentally the properties of eigenmodes of non-integrable systems under perturbation.
• November 20, 1998. Les Blatt presented his talk, "Ovens in the Sky: How the Stars Cook Up the Periodic Table," to students at Boston College on November 20, 1998. Nearly 100 persons attended the talk, which described the evolutionary cycle of stars and the nuclear reactions which build heavier elements from the electrons and protons condensed out of the "big bang." Professor Blatt's nuclear physics research background includes several years devoted to measuring reactions relevant to the silicon burning phase of stellar nucleosynthesis. The talk was accompanied by illustrations and demonstrations of the interplay among astronomical observations, laboratory experiments, and theoretical modelling.
• November 13, 1998. Harvey Gould visited Bates College where he give a talk to physics faculty and students on his curriculum development work involving computers.
• November 6,7, 1998. About 70 people attended the festschrift on "Frontiers of Nonequilibrium Statistical Physics" at Clark University in honor of Harvey Gould's 60 birthday. Speakers included Gene Mazenko, Ray Mountain, Jon Machta, Fereydoon Family, Jan Tobochnik, Ivan Kramer, Fred Wu, Bruce Boghosian, and Richard Brower. The symposium was organized by Bill Klein, Fereydoon Family, Chris Landee, and Sujata Davis. The complete schedule is available.
• October 24 - 27, 1998. Charles Agosta and Chris Landee attended the Physical Phenomena at High Magnetic Fields Conference (PPHMF-III) at the National Magnetic Field Laboratory in Tallahassee, Florida. This conference meets every three years to discuss recent developments in condensed matter physics which make use of high magnetic fields. Major topics covered were novel superconductors (organic, heavy fermion, high T_c) and collective electron effects in high fields, such as the "composite fermions" which appear in the Fractional Quantum Hall Effect. Two of this years winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics attended, Horst Stormer (Columbia University) and Bob Laughlin (Stanford), joining Robert Schrieffer who won the Prize for his work in explaining one type of superconductivity.
• Chris Landee presented a poster on "Low-Dimensional Quantum Antiferromagnets in Large Magnetic Fields" with Mark Turnbull as coauthor. Charles Agosta presented a poster on "Hydrostatic Pressure Studies of the New Organic Conductor a-(BETS)₂KHg(SCN)₄" with coauthors S. A. Ivanov, T. Coffey, B. W. Fravel, and L. K. Montgomery.
• October 19-23, 1998. Harvey Gould attended the conference on "Electrostatic Effects in Complex Fluids and Biophysics" at the Institute for Theoretical Physics at UC, Santa Barbara. Gould's attendance was supported by the ITP Scholar's Program.
• October 2, 1998. Two Clark undergraduates, Emily Clark and Joseph DeCarolis, and physics graduate student Greg Johnson, have built a four node Beowulf cluster to do large scale molecular simulations. The cluster is named Arthur in honor of Arthur Gordon Webster, one of the three co-founders of the American Physical Society. Support for the Beowulf project at Clark was provided by Rafael Bruschweiler and the Department of Chemistry, Harvey Gould and the Department of Physics, and the Office of the Provost. Arthur joins the many other computers in the Department used for simulation, data analysis, instrument control, and word processing.
• September 22, 1998. Chris Landee gave a 15 minute contributed talk on "Pyrazine-bridged copper linear chains: Molecular-based 1D Quantum Antiferromagnets" at the Sixth International Conference on Molecular-Based Magnets, September 12-17 in Seignosse, France. He also contributed two posters, "EPR Studies of Molecular-Based 2D Heisenberg Antiferromagnets" with Chemistry Professor Mark Turnbull and physics graduate student Matt Woodward, and "High-Field Magnetization Studies of 2D copper antiferromagnets" with Turnbull and Clark graduate Andrew Albrecht. The first and third presentations will be published in a special issue of Molecular Crystals/Liquid Crystals in 1999.
• Mark Turnbull and Chris Landee were appointed to the Organizing Committee for the Seventh International Conference on Molecular-Based Magnets to be held in the U.S. during 2000.
• September 18, 1998. Arshad Kudrolli spoke on "Physics of granular flow" at the Physics Colloquium at University of Rhode Island.
• August 27, 1998. Rong-feng Sun was awarded the Erickson Scholarship for AY 1998/99 during the University Convocation. During the summer of 1998, Emily Clark and Rong-feng Sun were Erickson summer scholars. Luiz De Viveiros was awarded the Roy Andersen Prize for the best first-year student in Introductory Physics.
• August 7, 1998. Harvey Gould and Jan Tobochnik of Kalamazoo College have received a three-year grant from the Physics Division of the NSF for $283,885 to develop "New Curriculum Materials for Upper Level Undergraduate Courses on Thermal and Statistical Physics." Information on the project can be accessed at http://stp.clarku.edu.
• July 19-24, 1998. Harvey Gould and graduate student, Greg Johnson, attended the International Conference on Statistical Physics, StatPhys 20, in Paris, France. Johnson gave a poster on "Molecular Dynamics Study of Long-Lived Structures in a Fragile Glass Forming Liquid" and Gould gave a poster on "Reforming the Undergraduate Curriculum in Statistical and Thermal Physics."
• July 2, 1998. Charles Saylor successfully defended his thesis on "EPR Investigations of Fractional S = 1/2 Spins in Antiferromagnetically Coupled S = 1 Spin Heisenberg Chains." His thesis committee consists of Stan Geschwind (chair), Charles Agosta, and Chris Landee. Charles Saylor leaves this week for a postdoctoral position at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory at Florida State University.
• June 24, 1998. Charles Agosta has received a three-year grant from the NSF Division of Materials Research for $270,000 to study "Correlated electron effects in anisotropic metals and superconductors."
• June 19, 1998. Christopher Landee (Physics) and Mark Turnbull (Chemistry) have received a grant from the NSF Division of Materials Research for their project, "Molecular Based Quantum Antiferromagnets: Design, Synthesis and Experimental Investigations." This grant, totalling $360,000 over three years, was awarded for their innovative approach of using solution chemistry techniques to create new materials with which to test fundamental questions of quantum mechanical behavior in magnetic systems.
• June 19, 1998. Zoran Slanic (BA, physics, Clark University, 1992) received his Ph.D. degree at graduation ceremonies at the University of California at Santa Cruz. His parents came from Slovenia for the ceremony, and he has scheduled a two-day party following the commencement.
• June 1, 1998. Undergraduates Emily Clark and Joe DeCarolis attended the 1998 Linux Conference at the University of North Carolina on May 28-30, 1998. Read their comments.
• May 17, 1998. Jenny Sun and Chris Kaklamanis received highest honors in physics. Leon Lederman received a honorary degree from Clark. The citation was read by Stan Geschwind.
• Four undergraduates participated in Academic Spree Day on April 24, 1998. The titles of their posters were
  • "Computer Simulation of the Secondary Immune Response," Jenny Sun '98, in collaboration with Philip Seiden and Harvey Gould.
  • "Computer Simulation of Spin Diffusion in the Three Dimensional Heisenberg Model," Chris Kaklamanis '98, in collaboration with Greg Johnson and Harvey Gould.
  • "Waves of Grains," Younes Horma '00, in collaboration with Sasha Henry and Arshad Kudrolli.
  • "Avalanching and Instabilities in Sand Piles," Apurba Pradhan, '00, in collaboration with Arshad Kudrolli.
• Jeff Williams, j7williams@bridgew.edu, who received his Ph.D. in Physics from Clark in 1992, will be Associate Professor and Chair of the Physics Department at Bridgewater State College beginning August 1998.
• The Department hosted the Spring 1998 Meeting of the New England Sections of the American Physical Society, the American Association of Physics Teachers, and Zone 1 of the Society of Physics Students on April 3 and 4, 1998.
• March 29, 1998. Harvey Gould spoke on "How computers are Affecting Our Lives" to the Men's Brotherhood at Beth Israel Synagogue at 9:30 am on Sunday, March 29.
• Rafael Bruschweiler will join the Department of Chemistry in August 1998 as the Carlson Chair. He will become an adjunct member of the Department of Physics. His research interests include biomolecular dynamics.
• March 16-20, 1998. Charles Agosta, Arshad Kudrolli, Chris Landee, and Matt Woodward attended the 1998 APS March meeting in Los Angeles. Their abstracts included "Multiple Superconducting Phases in a Layered Organic Supercondutor," C. H. Mielke, R. Movshovich, N. Harrison, C. C. Agosta, B. W. Fravel, and L. K. Montgomery; "Anomalous Superconducting Phase Diagram of (BEDO-TTF)ReO₄H₂O," C. C. Agosta, T. Coffey, Z. Bayindir, G. Esper, T. Roy, E. Yagubskii, and N. Kushch; "Linear-Chain Antiferromagnetism in Copper Pyrazine Nitrate," P. R. Hammar, M. B. Stone, D. H. Reich, C. Broholm, C. P. Landee, and M. M. Turnbull; "High Field Magnetization Studies of Low Dimensional Heisenberg S = 1/2 Antiferromagnets," C. P. Landee and M. M. Turnbull; "EPR Studies of Two Families of Two-Dimensional S = 1/2 Heisenberg Antiferromagnets," F. M. Woodward and C. P. Landee; "Velocity distributions in vertically shaken granular media: effects of inelasticity," Jean Delour, Arshad Kudrolli, and Jerry P. Gollub.
• March 13, 1998. The Goddard School of Science and Technology awarded Les Blatt its Robert Goddard Service Award for his contributions to the "life and knowledege of the students at Goddard School."
• February 28, 1998. As part of the City of Worcester's 150th Anniversary Celebration, Les Blatt organized an re-enactment of the first rocket launched by Robert Goddard. The lauch took place on the Worcester Common at 2:30 pm on Saturday, February 28. Blatt gave a brief introduction, including the famous New York Times editorial in 1920 questioning Goddard's understanding of "the law of action and reaction" which, according to them, would not let a rocket operate in the vacuum of space. They "regretted the error" only in 1969, when Apollo 11 was half-way to the moon. Students from the Goddard School of Science and Technology did a play re-enacting the 1926 launch, including launching a couple of model rockets (with parachutes, to protect the crowd). They also sang several songs. It was great fun!
• Howard Geller, a 1977 B.A. physics/STS graduate of Clark, shared the 1998 APS Leo Szilard Award for physics in the public interest. Both Howard and 1982 graduate John Morrill work at the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy.
• March, 1998. Arshad Kudrolli has been awarded an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship by the prestigious Sloan Foundation. Each year, 100 Sloan Research Fellowship awards are made to young scientists who demonstrate outstanding potential for research in physics, chemistry, pure and applied mathematics, neuroscience, economics or computer science. The awards carry high prestige because of their selectivity, the careful nature of the selection process and the outstanding quality of past recipients. Twenty-one past fellows have become Nobel laureates.
• February, 1998. Harvey Gould was selected as an ITP scholar for 1998-2000 and will be able to visit the Institute for Theoretical Physics three times during the next three years.
• June, 1997. Les Blatt was presented with the 1997 John W. Lund Community Achievement Award, an annual award designed to recognize Clark University's commitment to the community beyond its own walls. The award is presented to Clark students, staff, and faculty who are helping to further this goal. Les Blatt was recognized for his work with teachers in the Worcester Public Schools, where he has been offering workshops and summer institutes on the process and content of the sciences, and on hands-on, cooperative learning approaches that have proven valuable in working with diverse school populations. Also cited was his co-founding and continuing participation in the HEART program (Help Educate And Renew Trust), an after-school homework and academic enrichment program for children in the Worcester African-American community with volunteers from a broad spectrum of ethnic and religious backgrounds. His work on local boards and committees, including the New England Science Center and Dynamy, Inc., a non-profit organization providing alternative educational opportunities between high school and college, were also noted.

  In prior years, two Clark staff members and two students received this award. Les Blatt is the first faculty member to be recognized in this way.

• June 3, 1997. The Agosta family announces the birth of their daughter, Eliza Jane Agosta. She was born on June 3rd at 2:45 pm just 15 minutes after we arrived at the hospital. She weighed 8 lbs., 13 ozs. at birth. Her older sister Nellie (almost 3) is thrilled to be able to take care of a real baby.
• May 18, 1997. Muslim Baig, Geoffrey Esper, Jonathan Goldstein, James Looney, Brett Pasinella, and William Smith received their B.A. with a major in physics at Clark's graduation ceremonies on May 18.
• May 13, 1997. Harvey Gould was appointed a member of the State Board of Education Advisory Council on Technology, 5/13/97.
• Charles Agosta has been promoted to Associate Professor of Physics and awarded tenure.
• Arshad Kudrolli joined the Department in August, 1997. Arshad received his Ph.D. at Northeastern University working with S. Sridar on quantum chaos using microwaves and was a postdoctoral research associate with Jerry Golub at Haverford College. He is expected to work on granular matter and quantum chaos at Clark.
• Stanley Geschwind has been elected to membership in Phi Beta Kappa, Clark chapter.
• Charles Agosta has created a 50 tesla magnetic field in the Clark Pulsed Magnetic Field Laboratory, which is used to study organic superconducting materials. Agosta's field is comparable to those achieved at the Los Alamos National Magnetic Field Laboratory.
• Harvey Gould was honored at Clark's first annual faculty award ceremony on February 28, 1996. Gould was recognized for his coauthorship of his text on computer simulations and for his recent election as a Fellow of the American Physical Society.

Send updates to Sujata Davis.