Members of our department have prepared talks oriented to undergraduate physics majors at New England colleges and universities. We generally require 2-4 weeks notice and are willing to drive a maximum of 3-4 hours.

Please contact Sujata Davis at 508-793-7169 or send email to sudavis@clarku.edu to arrange a visit by one of our faculty.

Charles Agosta
"Playgrounds for electrons: Organic conductors in high magnetic fields."
It is surprising that organic materials can act as good metals, but the fact that organic conductors are also superconductors at low temperature is amazing. I will discuss superconductivity and other correlated electron states found in organic conductors as well as methods for generating record breaking magnetic fields that can be used to investigate these materials.

Les Blatt
"The cookbook of the stars: How stellar processes create the periodic table."
Nuclear processes in the stars build up the entire periodic table of elements from a few primordial species produced as a direct result of the "big bang." We will look at these astrophysical processes in pictures and demonstrations to gain a better understanding of the truth of the statement "we are all bits of stardust."

Daeg Brenner
"Weighing radioactive atoms: Why are we interested and how do we do it?"
Some very light stable isotopes of medium mass elements have relatively large abundances in nature. One explanation assumes that these isotopes are produced as a result of very rapid proton capture processes that occur in violent stellar environments. To understand whether this explanation is valid, we must understand all the nuclear processes involved, many of which depend on the atomic masses. How one measures these in a laboratory on Earth will be discussed.

Harvey Gould
"What is a glass?" or "The Open Source Physics Project."
Although glasses are common materials, the nature of the glass transition is not well understood, and little is known about their structure and how this structure differs from a liquid and a crystalline solid. I will discuss the importance of these questions and recent results that give new insight into the nature of the glass transition and aging below the glass transition where the system is not in equilibrium.

Just as the switch from procedural to object-oriented programming has produced dramatic changes in commercial software design, we expect that similar changes will occur in computational physics, both in teaching and research. One of the goals of the Open Source Physics project is to develop a library of Java classes that perform much of the routine programming tasks such as input, output, animation, and user interaction. I will show how using this library makes Java programming much easier and will show examples of applets that simulate various physical systems. Harvey Gould is presently working on the third edition of Introduction to Computer Simulation Methods together with Jan Tobochnik and Wolfgang Christian.

Arshad Kudrolli
"Physics in a sand box"
Why are Brazil nuts found near the top of a can of mixed nuts? What causes an avalanche of rocks or snow? These systems are a collection of grains and examples of granular matter. The behavior of a single grain is easily understood, but the properties of a collection of grains is very complex. I will demonstrate and discuss a surprising range of collective behavior such as convection, size separation, and pattern formation displayed by granular materials.

Chris Landee
"Magnets, Data and Molecules"
The areal density for information storage on magnetic media has increased at an astonishing rate over the past three decades, with the rate approaching 60%/year since 1990. This pace has help drive the explosive development of the computer and telecommunications industries, but such a pace cannot be sustained. Well within the next decade the areal density will reach physical limits beyond which no increases are possible with current technologies. I will describe how chemists and physicists are using organic chemistry to develop molecular-based magnets, a new generation of magnetic materials with the promise to bypass the physical limits for metal-oxide recording media.

Ranjan Mukhopadhyay
"Physics of Red Blood Cells"
A human red blood cell normally assumes the shape of a flattened biconcave disc. However, it has been known for more than 50 years that, under a variety of chemical or physical treatments, the cell undergoes a sequence of dramatic (but reversible) shape transformations. Because a red blood cell has no internal structure, its shape is governed by the physics of its membrane. Using simple physical models, we can compute the full sequence of shapes; the computed shapes are in surprisingly detailed agreement with observations. I will discuss how our results make it possible to use shape transformations as a quantitative tool to probe the physics and biochemistry of cell membranes.

Send suggestions and comments to hgould@clarku.edu.