Student Research: Recent Experiences
Almost all Haverford physics and astronomy majors perform scientific research either during the summer or academic year (or both).
These experiences can be part of Haverford's extensive summer research program, or at other locations, such as other colleges or universities, national laboratories or industrial labs. We regard student research as an integral part of the major experience, rather than as an option for a select few, so we provide extensive support and funding to help our students find opportunities that suit their interests and backgrounds. Our majors have multiple opportunities to present their research experiences in public settings, including national scientific meetings, our physics senior seminar capstone course (which includes a required senior talk) and local student research poster sessions.
Analyzing Data Taken with the VLA
"I spent summer 2008 assisting Prof. Bruce Partridge with astronomy research. We focused on analyzing data taken with the VLA (the Very Large Array radio telescope) in 2001 with the intention of creating a catalog of gigahertz peaked radio sources. These sources are expected to cause problems with the next phase of Cosmic Microwave Background measurements to be performed by the Planck satellite, which we expect will launch in 2009, so we worked to obtain the spectra of roughly two hundred such sources. On a day to day basis, my work consisted of using the AIPS software package to first clean the diffraction pattern from an image, then to determine the flux of the source."
Shea Garrison-Kimmel - Physics & Astronomy '09
Distributions of Dust and Star Formation
"My summer 2008 research project working with Anna Sajina focused on studying a the distributions of dust and star formation in a galaxy that had recently undergone a collision with another galaxy, an event suspected to result in higher rates of star birth. I learned how to use the programming language IDL to analyze images of the galaxy taken by the Spitzer and GALEX space telescopes, which collect emission in the infrared and ultraviolet bands respectively. I learned about galaxy collisions and the connections between star formation and dust in galaxies by reading journal articles and talking to my research advisor."
Anna Pancoast - Physics & Astronomy '09
Quantum Lattice Gases
"My research in the summers of 2007 and 2008 with Prof. Peter Love involved studying simple models of quantum mechanics called quantum lattice gases. These systems can be used to simulate the relativistic Dirac equation in one spatial dimension, or the nonrelativistic Schroedinger equation in any spatial dimension. We hope to be able to use our simulations as a pathway for future quantum computing experiments to model physical systems such as chemical reactions. Our immediate goal in studying them is to find out their behavior in various parameter limits. For me, I have found that summer research is as much about the actual research project as it is about learning and developing new skills outside of the classroom. Through this project, I have learned about programming and the Linux operating system environment, mathematics, technical writing, and reading journal articles."
Andrew O'Hara - Physics & Math '09
Dynamics of Inertial Particles In A Driven Incompressible Fluid Flow
"This summer I worked in Professor Jerry Gollub's lab studying the dynamics of inertial particles in a driven incompressible fluid flow. As a follow-up to Peter O'Malley's (Physics & Astro '08) experiment that examined the properties of spherical particles, my experiment used rod-like axi-symmetric anisotropic particles. The dynamics of these particles are interesting since many particles in fluid flows in nature are not spherically symmetric, and rigid rods can be used as an example of particles with both rotational and translational motion in fluids. In our experiment, we float the particles between a layer of water and inorganic salt solution, and use Lorentz forcing to drive our flow. After imaging the rod-like particles and the tracer particles, we examine many different aspects of both the rod-like particles as well as the underlying flow such as displacement, velocity, orientation, etc. "
Monica Kishore - Physics '09
Investigating the Photoconductive Properties of Porphyrin Nanorods
"I'm Kent Riley and I just graduated from Haverford with a B.S. in Physics in 2008. I did my senior research with Walter Smith on investigating the photoconductive properties of self-assembling porphyrin nanorods over the past year. Porphyrin is the light harvesting molecule found in chlorophyll, a necessary structure for photosynthesis in plants. Consequently, porphryins in the chlorophyll effectively absorb light from the sun and allow electronic communication along molecules in the plant. Using synthetic porphyrin that self-assemble, we create our own nanorod aggregates to mimic the effects displayed by the porphyrin in cholorophyll. These synthetic structures show promise as optically active molecular wires, optical sensors, or even optically-based computers. Most of what I did in the lab was using the AFM (atomic force microscope) to image nanorods deposited on gold electrodes, then conduct electrical measurements under laser light to explore their optical and electronic properties."