Ted Bunn – Page 2 – Physics News

New $160,000 supercomputer coming!

Two physics faculty members, Ted Bunn and Jerry Gilfoyle, have just been awarded a $160,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to buy a new supercomputing cluster for their research. Ted and his students will use it to simulate new telescopes that are being designed for observations of the cosmic microwave background radiation. Jerry and his students will use it for simulation and analysis of nuclear physics data from Jefferson Lab.

Both faculty members are excited about the new research directions that this will allow them to explore, and especially about the opportunity for students to be involved with research using cutting-edge supercomputing equipment.

Physics courses for new first-year students

It’s time for incoming first-year students to register for classes for the fall semester. We in the physics department are looking forward to meeting you all in the fall.

Here’s some information about the physics courses available for new students. If anything here isn’t clear, or if you have any questions about which course is for you, ask us!

Physics majors typically start with Physics 131 in the fall and either 132 or 134 in the spring. There are four sections of physics 131 available this fall. Physics 131 is mostly about mechanics but has some other topics as well. It requires either that you’ve had some calculus or that you take Calc. 1 at the same time.

Pre-med students and students in other science majors also take this same sequence of courses, and the course fulfills the science requirement for non-science majors, so even if you’re not sure what you’re majoring in, keep this course in mind.

Students with strong high school physics backgrounds can skip Physics 131 and start right away with Physics 132. There is one section of this course offered in the fall. University policy says that you need a 4 or 5 on the Physics C Mechanics, or departmental permission, to skip Physics 131. If you have a strong physics background but didn’t take the right AP exam, email us or talk to one of the physics faculty when you arrive in town to see if you should be in 132. (This applies especially to international students, who aren’t part of the US AP system.)

If you think you might want to major in physics (even if you’re not sure), and you’re eligible to skip 131, we strongly urge you to sign up for Physics 132 in the fall. Finishing the introductory physics sequence early will give you a lot more scheduling flexibility in future semesters (and remember that even if you end up majoring in another science, you’ll still need to take this course).

Students with very strong physics backgrounds (a 4 or a 5 on the Physics C: Electricity & Magnetism AP exam) are eligible to skip both semesters of the introductory sequence. If you’re in that category, and you think you might want to study physics, the best courses for you are Physics 205 (Modern Physics) and/or Physics 301 (Mathematical Methods). Once again, if you didn’t take the appropriate AP exam but think you might have the right background for this option, ask us.

For students who aren’t planning to major in a science, we offer Physics 125, a survey of conceptual physics. This course fulfills the general-education science requirement, but it does not fulfill prerequisites for more advanced science courses.

New telescope

Our department just took delivery of a new 14€³ telescope, to be used for classes, student projects, and public observing nights:

As you can see, it's not in the best possible observing location at the moment. Plans are in motion to give it a permanent home on the roof of our building.

Thanks a lot to Dean Newcomb for buying us this!

Andrew Hearin, '03

UR Physics alumnus Andrew Hearin, ’03, went off to graduate school in mathematics, but before too long he saw the light and returned to physics. He’s now a Ph.D. student at the University of Pittsburgh, and he just recently published a paper on a possible novel test of general relativity. (That link is to a publicly-available preprint version of the paper. Here’s the actual published version, but the link may not work unless you’re connecting from a university with a subscription to the journal.)

Evolution and entropy

Researchers tend to get very specialized, working mostly in just one area. But every once in a while, it’s fun for a researcher to work on something completely different. UR Professor Ted Bunn, who normally does astrophysics, just had an article accepted for publication that talks about biological evolution and its relationship to the laws of thermodynamics.

Believers in creationism and intelligent design sometimes say that Darwinian evolution is impossible, because it conflicts with the second law of thermodynamics. The second law says, very roughly, that the total amount of disorder (or entropy) in the universe always increases, so, the creationists say, it’s impossible for the orderliness of life to arise spontaneously. This argument is wrong — there’s no conflict between evolution and thermodynamics. The point of this article is to explain exactly why it’s wrong.

Cosmology research at Richmond

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.

Jeff Zheng ’11: Research Update

Haoxuan (Jeff) Zheng started research in Ted Bunn’s research group during his freshman year and continued during the summer afterwards. He examined theoretical models of dark energy, the mysterious phenomenon that is causing the expansion of the Universe to accelerate. He used observations of supernovae, the microwave background radiation, and other observations to see what limits we can place on the physical properties of dark energy.

Ben Rybolt ’09: Research Update

Ben Rybolt worked in Ted Bunn’s research group during the summer of ’08 and during the school year before then. His work has focused mostly on testing methods for diagnosing and removing contaminants from maps of the cosmic microwave background radiation. He presented his work in a poster at the summer 2008 meeting of the American Astronomical Society in St. Louis.

Brent Follin ’09: Research Update

Brent Follin has worked in Ted Bunn’s research group for the summers of 2007 and 2008, focusing on issues related to the construction of MBI, a new telescope being constructed for observations of the cosmic microwave background radiation. Along with Peter Hyland (U. Wisconsin and McGill U.), Brent and Ted solved an important problem related to finding the best possible design for this sort of telescope. Brent presented preliminary results in a poster at an American Astronomical Society meeting in St. Louis this summer, and we just submitted a paper for publication. Ted wrote a bit more about this in his blog.

Austin Bourdon ’10: Research Update

Austin Bourdon has worked in Ted Bunn’s research group for the past two summers, examining a bunch of possible explanations for some unexplained features in maps of the cosmic microwave background radiation. He presented his work in a poster at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Denver this summer, and he is coauthor on a paper recently submitted to the journal Physical Review D. Bunn wrote more about this on his blog, and you can see the paper here.