MISSISSIPPI STATE UNIVERSITY
DEPARTMENT OF PHYSICS AND ASTRONOMY
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June 2005 Newsletter No. 011
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RECENT GRADUATES
Craig Carrigee from Kiln, Mississippi graduated with a BS in physics last August. In January he entered our graduate program.
Four students graduated in May with BS degrees:
Wesley Baker from Cordova, Tennessee graduated with a double major in physics and physics education. He spent this spring practice teaching with Dr. Paul Cuicchi at Starkville High School. Next year Wesley will be teaching at Creekview High School just north of Dallas, Texas.
Joy Barksdale of Pascagoula, Mississippi received a degree in Microbiology and had almost all of the courses required for a physics degree.
Tate McAlpin of Magee, Mississippi, who graduated with degrees in both physics and mathematics, has spent several recent semesters in the CO-OP program working at Waterways Experiment Station in Vicksburg. Tate has accepted a permanent job with that organization; he will work under the supervision of Dr. Robert McAdory, a 1973 B.S. graduate of this department who went on to get a Ph. D. in physics at the University of Texas.
Tate was recently recognized as MSU’s 2005 Outstanding Senior in Physics.
Stephen Phillips of French Camp, Mississippi is the younger brother of Sarah Phillips, a 2000 graduate who will soon receive her Ph. D in nuclear physics at William and Mary. Stephen plans to pursue a graduate degree in Electrical Engineering at Mississippi State.
Later this year we expect to have two additional B.S. graduates: Jeff Durst, of Starkville, Mississippi and Thomas Smith of Jackson, Alabama.
These six students have earned M.S. degrees in physics in the last year: Frances Carter, Rahul Hardikar, Chan Kyu Kim, Mankang Mai, Lina Xu, and Hongbo Zheng.
French graduate student Fabio Mazzotti completed his Ph. D. under the direction of Dr. David Monts in the fall of 2004.
ERMER IS INVENTOR AND ENTREPRENEUR
Dr. David Ermer has invented and is testing and developing a revolutionary time-of-flight mass spectrometer (TOF-MS). The breakthrough in Dr. Ermer’s design has allowed him to make the instrument much smaller than previous such devices. The photograph at right shows Ermer holding his latest spectrometer. Up to now, time- of-flight mass spectrometers were about two meters long. The devices are used to measure the masses of large molecules. Dr. Ermer’s compact design may have applications ranging from Mars exploration to homeland security to clinical testing.
Dr. Ermer has a Small Business Innovation and Research grant from NASA. The space agency’s interest is in detecting large biological molecules on Mars, and probably eventually on Europa. NASA also wants to be able to do molecular biology on the Space Station. You can read an Astrobiology Magazine article about Ermer’s work at:
http://www.astrobio.net/news/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=1477
Recently Dr. Ermer won the Mississippi State University Life Sciences Entrepreneurship Competition and a Faculty Entrepreneurship Award from the College of Arts & Sciences. Both awards included a cash prize and a plaque.
Dr. Ermer joined the MSU physics department in 2000. He has a B.S. from the University of Memphis and M.S. and Ph.D. from Washington State University. Before joining us, he spent three years at Vanderbilt University doing research at the Keck Free-Electron Laser. His current research, at MSU and at the Thomas Jefferson National Laboratory Free-Electron Laser, is concerned with high intensity laser interactions with materials. This includes material modification, surface physics, and laser-based biological mass spectrometry. Besides his research and teaching of introductory courses, Dr. Ermer is working to improve our Electronic Circuits for Scientists course.
WebTOP IS AWARD FINALIST
WebTOP has been named a finalist for the prestigious Pirelli Award. WebTop-The Optics Project on the Web was developed by Dr. John T. Foley, Dr. Taha Mzoughi, and a team of student programmers. Dr. David Banks (formerly of the MSU Computer Science Department and now at Florida State University) has also made contributions to WebTOP. It is a collection of modules that run on the Web with spectacular interactive visualizations of many wave and optical phenomena. Sample some of this work at http://webtop.msstate.edu/ . Drs. Foley and Mzoughi have presented invited workshops on WebTop at several regional and national meetings.
The Pirelli Award was created in 1996 as a move “Toward a Nobel Award for Scientific Communication.” According to Marco Tronchetti Provera, President of the Pirelli Group “The Pirelli International Award is the world’s first Internet multimedia award aimed at the diffusion of scientific and technological culture worldwide.” Canditates for the award may utilize any interactive audio visual format that is electronically transmissible.
MSU RESEARCH IN PHYSICAL REVIEW LETTERS
Published research by MSU Physics professors and students has advanced the forefront of scientific knowledge. Of particular note are two recent articles in the very prestigious Physical Review Letters.
Prof. Jim Dunne, as part of the Jefferson Lab E93-026 Collaboration, published a determination of the electric form factor of the neutron (Phys. Rev. Lett., vol. 92, article 042301, 2004). The measurement involved polarized electrons scattered off a polarized deuterated ammonia 15ND3 target.
Prof. Mark Novotny, and his three collaborators from the Naval Research Laboratory, Florida State University, and the Univesidad Simon Bolivar in Venezuela, published computational and analytic results for low temperature kinetic Ising models with different dynamics (Phys. Rev. Lett., vol. 92, article 015701, 2004). They showed that, contrary to conventional wisdom, changing the dynamic in simulations can change both the prefactor and the exponential part of the measured lifetime of a metastable state. This study has ramifications in areas as diverse as chemical reaction rates and analysis of protein folding simulations.
MZOUGHI IS MOVING TO KINNESAW STATE
Dr. Taha Mzoughi who has been at MSU since the fall of 1996 will be leaving us after this summer to become an Associate Professor of Physical and Biological Sciences at Kinnesaw State University in Georgia. This move will bring him closer to his wife who works is in Atlanta.
Dr. Mzoughi, who is originally from Tunisia, earned his Ph. D. at the University of South Carolina and came to Mississippi State after several years on the faculty at the South Carolina Governor’s School for Sciences and Mathematics. While at MSU he has published 15 peer reviewed papers and made approximately thirty invited presentations, two of which were keynote addresses. His research is in the area of physics education with emphasis on the effectiveness of using multimedia in teaching. He has worked with three graduate students; two have finished master’s degrees and the third is expected to graduate this summer. Dr. Mzoughi has had collaborations with Dr. Sandra Harpole and with members of the science education faculty at MSU. He has worked closely with Dr. John Foley on WebTOP, an online resource that provides interactive simulations of wave and optical phenomena. He has been PI or CO-PI on grants that have brought more than $3 million to MSU.
Besides his teaching and research, Dr. Mzoughi has made many service contributions. Of particular value to other physics faculty members has been Dr. Mzoughi’s development of PERC, a physics education resource that has made it easy for our faculty to create course web pages and to use them in administering computer assisted learning and testing. He has been a willing and always highly expert computer problem solver for many of his colleagues. He has served on a number of departmental committees and has been very active in the Mississippi Association of Physicists (MAP) and the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT). He has served several times as an officer in MAP. He has worked diligently on important college and university committees and headed the Mississippi State University Instructional Improvement Committee for two years.
Taha Mzoughi will be missed by many as a tireless worker, dedicated teacher, and cordial and helpful colleague. We wish him well in his new position.
FERGUSON IS RETIRING
After 37 years as a physics faculty member, Professor Joe Ferguson is retiring from Mississippi State on July 1. He joined the MSU faculty in the fall of 1968 after obtaining his Ph. D. from Vanderbilt University. He is a graduate of MSU, having earned his B.S. in physics in 1963.
Although he has done some work in plasma physics, solar energy, and optics, Ferguson’s primary contributions at MSU have been in teaching and service. For the ‘90-‘91 school year he was Acting Department Head. In 1980 he was recognized with the Mississippi State University Alumni Association Faculty Achievement Award for Teaching. He also received the 1995 Pegram Award for Teaching of Southeastern Section of American Physical Society (SESAPS). Since 1996 he has served as the Undergraduate Coordinator of the MSU Department of Physics and Astronomy and he is a long-time advisor of physics majors. He was the first person at MSU to implement computer-interfaced experiments in physics teaching laboratories. For most of his time at MSU he has supervised the physics lecture demonstration apparatus and has introduced a number of new demonstrations several of which have led to publications in the American Journal of Physics and The Physics Teacher. On several occasions he was the organizer of and one of the presenters at the lecture demonstration program at the annual meeting of SESAPS.
He has served on numerous departmental, college, and university committees and has for many years chaired the Undergraduate Program Committee for Physics. He was a charter member of the
Mississippi Association of Physicists, a section of the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT.) For several years he served as the Mississippi Section’s representative to the national AAPT. For years he served as a referee for AAPT’s American Journal of Physics. Dr. Ferguson is a long time member of the Southeastern Section of the American Physical Society and has served on and chaired both the Pegram Award and Slack Award committees of that organization.
On April 19, Dr. Ferguson was honored with a retirement reception. He is shown at right examining the piece of luggage presented to him by the College of Arts and Sciences. He was also presented with a certificate for a clock that is being built for him by Dr. Paul Cuicchi and was also honored by the unveiling of a plaque that will hang outside the MSU physics demonstration apparatus room officially naming it the “Joe L. Ferguson Physics Demonstration Room.”
Dr. Ferguson plans to remain in Starkville and hopes to continue his association with MSU as an emeritus professor doing part time teaching. On July 23 his life will undergo another major change when he is married to Jean Walrath, who has a counseling practice in Starkville.
LESTRADE IN FRANCE THIS SUMMER
Dr. Patrick Lestrade is spending part of the summer in France at the Observatoire Midi-Pyrenees. The photograph at right was taken on May 16, shortly after he arrived in France.
Professor Lestrade began working on gamma-ray bursts in 1987 with the BATSE team at NASA's Marshall center in Huntsville, Al. This work has led to a collaboration with a French gamma-ray burst team headquartered in the south of France. Dr. Lestrade, who is fluent in the French language, has had 5 extended stays in France working on data from two principal experiments: PHEBUS which flew on the Soviet GRANAT satellite from 1990 until 1994, and FREGATE which is currently in orbit on the HETE-II satellite. These experiments, part of a large international effort, are helping to explain the physical phenomena that are responsible for these bursts of radiation which have been nick-named the "largest explosions since the Big Bang". They are most likely the result of the collapse of super-massive stars.
An important side benefit of Dr. Lestrade’s collaborations is that our graduate and undergraduate students are able to get involved with a new and exciting area of space research. They have the advantage of having access to data which are state of the art. Over the years, several of our students have presented papers on research using these burst data. One student, Brad Barlow, is the undergraduate student featured in this newsletter.
Dr. Lestrade’s work is supported by an NSF grant as well as by the College of Arts and Sciences.
AFANASJEV TO JOIN FACULTY
Dr. Anatoli Afanasjev will join the MSU physics faculty this fall. Dr. Afanasjev’s education includes a Doctor of Physics from the Nuclear Research Center of the Latvian Academy of Sciences and the Habilitated Doctor of Physics from Latvian State University. His work at both institutions was in theoretical nuclear physics. He has held several appointments in Latvia and has been a visiting scientist in Sweden, Germany and Denmark and also at both Argonne National Laboratory and SUNY Stony Brook in the US. Most recently Dr. Afanasjev has been a Visiting Research Assistant Professor at the University of Notre Dame. While at Notre Dame he has had extensive teaching experience.
Dr. Afanasjev has more than one hundred publications and a very extensive list of presentations. At MSU there is the likelyhood that his work will overlap with that of our Nuclear Physics group of Drs. Jim Dunne, Wenchao Ma, and Jeff Winger and there is also the possibility of some collaboration with our Computational Physics group of Drs. Torsten Clay, Seong-Gon Kim, and Mark Novotny. His work in nuclear astrophysics may also lead to mutually beneficial interactions with Dr. Patrick Lestrade.
Dr. Afanasjev is married and has two children.
TOM MALLOY PAYS VISIT
After a 26 year absence, Dr. Thomas Malloy paid a visit to MSU in late May. Professor Malloy was on our physics faculty from 1971 to 1979. In addition to his teaching, he was very active in research at what has become known as the Diagnostic Instrumentation and Analysis Laboratory (DIAL). He left MSU to join Shell Development (later Shell Chemical Co.) in Houston Texas. After an illustrious career that included his serving as administrator of all Annalytical Research for Shell in the US, he retired from that company in 2000. He currently serves as Cullen/Welder-Mitchell Professor of Chemistry at the University of Saint Thomas, his alma mater, in Houston. Dr. Malloy and his wife Deanne have two grown children. Sean is a Computer Science graduate of Texas A&M. Jeanne is a Biology graduate of UT Austin and is currently in graduate school at Vanderbilt.
Former students and colleagues may reach Dr. Malloy at malloyt@stthom.edu
FEATURED GRADUATE STUDENT
Poonam Verma is known for her bright smile and her mischevious sense of humor. This hardworking student from Gandhidham, Gujarat, in India, has for the last two years represented her fellow physics graduate students in MSU’s Graduate Student Association.
Before coming to the US, Poonam attended St. Xavier’s High School where she was involved in various sports including volleyball, basketball, and marathon. She did her undergraduate work in physics at Tolani Arts and Science College and then earned her M.Sc in Electronics and Radio Physics from Maharaja Sayajirao University. She points out that this was her first MSU.
Since coming to Mississippi State in the fall of 2002 she has completed a second master’s degree and is working on her Ph. D. Her research is in computational physics studies of surfaces and interface dynamics. She works under the direction of our department head, Dr. Mark Novotny. Much of this work is done at MSU’s ERC Center for Computational Sciences. Poonam, who hopes to have a research career, is co-author of a paper on this research published in 2004 in Physical Review E
http://link.aps.org/abstract/PRE/v70/e051602 .
She presented these results at the March Meeting of the American Physical Society in Montreal, Canada; her abstract is available at:
http://www.aps.org/meet/MAR04/baps/abs/S1580007.html
The always cheerful Poonam says of MSU: “I am glad that I have such a wonderful atmosphere here for my studies. Every professor over here is readily willing to help anybody at anytime.” As a teaching assistant, she took a real interest in her own students and attempted to help them get over their fear of physics.
In December of 2004 Poonam was married (in a traditional Indian ceremony) to Rahul Hardikar who is also a physics graduate student at MSU. Rahul, who recently completed his masters degree, is working toward his Ph. D. under the direction of Dr. Torsten Clay. Poonam is shown at right, in traditional Indian dress, with Rahul. Around the physics department she is more likely to be seen in blue jeans and an SPS t-shirt.
Poonam’s interests include cooking and experiencing the cuisines of different countries. She loves travel. Her enthusiasm for sports, especially basketball, continues. She still likes volleyball and clings to the faint hope that she may be part of the student team that overcomes the long-standing jinx and finally defeats the faculty at one of our departmental picnics.
FEATURED UNDERGRADUATE STUDENT
Brad Barlow is the renaissance man of our current students. This personable junior from Biloxi has broad interests including astrophysics, language, and music.
Brad is majoring in both Physics and German. He combined the two interests by spending the summer of 2004 working at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, Germany (near Munich) under the title, "Guest/Visiting Scientist." (At right he is shown at work in Germany.) Working under Dr. Jochen Greiner in the gamma-ray section, his activities focused on the writing of an addition to XSPEC, an X-ray spectral fitting program developed by NASA. This addition to XSPEC contained new photoelectric absorption models that would be used to analyze data taken from ROSAT (The ROentgen SATellite). For this reason, he was given direct access to data taken from ROSAT and from other observatories. He also found time for hiking in the Bavarian Alps and rafting down the nearby Isar River.
Since coming to MSU Brad has been involved with Dr. Patrick Lestrade’s gamma ray burst research. At the 2003 Mississippi Academy of Sciences (MAS) meeting he made a presentation titled "THE GAMMA-RAY BACKGROUND FOR FREGATE, A NEW SPACE-BORNE DETECTOR." In 2004, his MAS presentation was "MAPPING ANOMALIES IN THE EARTH'S MAGNETIC FIELD WITH THE GAMMA-RAY BURST DETECTOR, FREGATE." Read his abstracts at:
http://www.msstate.edu/org/MAS/jan03journal/mas03.pdf (Page 74)
http://www.msstate.edu/org/MAS/jan04journal/mas04.pdf (Page 102)
Brad’s outstanding work earned him the "2005 College of Arts and Sciences Undergraduate Student Research Award."
This enterprising student may also have a future in politics. He was recently elected the 2005-2006 Physics Representative to the Arts & Sciences Dean's Student Advisory Council, a self-governing organization serving as a consultant to the Dean of Arts & Sciences and also as a liaison between the College and students, prospective students, alumni, and benefactors. Brad’s other activities include: Society of Physics Students Vice President (2004-2005), Treasurer (2003-2004); MSU German Club President (2003-2005); Phi Kappa Phi; and Golden Key International Honor Society. For the past three years he has been assistant to Dr. Lestrade at the Howell Observatory during the 'Lights Out; See the Stars' evenings.
Brad is also an accomplished musician. He has been playing the piano for the past 8 years and loves to compose and play his own music. Lately, he has become a performer at weddings, having been hired to play for several and having four already lined up for the summer. In 2002, with the help of a friend on the coast who owns a music studio, Brad put out a CD containing some of his compositions.
CROFT IS HONORED BY SCHOLARSHIP
Friends and family of Dr. Walter Lawrence Croft have established a scholarship in his honor. Dr. Croft was on the MSU Faculty from 1962 to 1997 and served as Department Head from 1993 to 1996. In future years, the scholarship will be awarded to a deserving physics major. Dr. Croft is a Professor Emeritus and occasionally still teaches physics at MSU. He is active in several conservation organizations and maintains a tree farm at Longview west of Starkville. Those wishing to honor Dr. Croft by adding to this scholarship should send contributions to the Mississippi State University Foundation, One Hunter Henry Drive, P.O. Box 6149, Mississippi State, Mississippi 39762 and should very clearly indicate that the contribution is for the W. Lawrence Croft Scholarship in Physics.
UPDATES WELCOMED
Alumni, please send us news of change of address, job changes, accomplishments, and other information of interest to other former MSU physics majors. Send information to Mrs. Amy Massey, Box 5167, Mississippi State, MS, 39762 or email the news to her at amym@ra.msstate.edu or to Joe Ferguson at jlf1@ra.msstate.edu.