If you are a prospective physics student visiting UR this spring, we would be happy to let you sit in on a physics class! It’s a great way to get a feel for what a Richmond physics class is really like. To set up a classroom visit, please contact our department admin, Mary Ann Stewart. (During the fall, classroom visits are arranged centrally by the UR admissions office. They don’t do it during the spring, presumably to avoid unmanageably large numbers during that busy time. But as usual, the physics department doesn’t play by the rules; we’re small enough that we can welcome visitors anytime if you contact us directly.)
Archive for March, 2009
A couple of the students in Ted Bunn’s research group published papers recently on their research in cosmology. You can find more details about their work in some posts on Ted’s blog.
Junior Austin Bourdon and Bunn published a paper analyzing some puzzling results from the WMAP satellite. WMAP is a NASA-funded orbiting telescope that has mapped the cosmic microwave background radiation in great detail.
This radiation is the oldest light in the Universe and tells us a lot about conditions shortly after the Big Bang. Some features of these maps appear inconsistent with the best theoretical models. Austin and Bunn tried to search for alternative explanations. The paper was accepted for publication in the journal Physical Review D. Bunn wrote a bit more about it in this blog post, or if you really want the details you can read the paper. (Use the link at the upper right to download the PDF if you want the whole thing.)
Senior Brent Follin worked with Bunn and a former graduate student at the University of Wisconsin 
on another project having to do with the microwave background radiation. The cosmology group at UR is working with researchers at several other universities on a radically new design for a telescope to map the microwave background radiation. This telescope will be an interferometer, which really means a set of many very simple telescopes, combined with a mechanism to “mix” the light from all of them together. It’s a bit tricky to do this mixing in such a way that it’s possible to extract all of the useful information at the end. The three researchers managed to solve an important part of this problem and published the result in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Bunn blogged a bit about this work when we first submitted it. You can read the article if you want to.
Caroline Zegetosky graduated from Richmond in spring of 2007, having completed the Engineering dual degree program. She spent her first three years at UR, then continued as an undergraduate engineering student at the University of Virginia, one of our partner schools, where she is now a graduate student in civil engineering. Carrie uses the same atomic force microscopy techniques she learned here at UR to study the microstructure of different types of concrete, creating images such as the one to the right. (Nice pics, Carrie!)
Jim Stith, recently retired as Vice President, Physics Resources Center for the American Institute of Physics, spoke at the University of Richmond about careers for physics students. The title of his talk was “The Physics Passport - Where does it take you?” Jim points out that of the 5500 yearly graduateswith bachelors degrees in physics, only a small number continue a “traditional path” of academic physics research. Many more continue in industry and government sector work, where their technical backgrounds and problem solving skills allow them to address a variety of challenging problems in different areas. Before coming to AIP, Dr. Stith was a Professor of Physics at The Ohio State University and also spent 21 years on the faculty of the United States Military Academy at West Point.
