Physics Spring 19 Newsletter

Stillwater has commer- cial air ser- vice to and from Dallas. Three times in the last eight months I sat by a window on the right hand side for the late afternoon flight to Stillwater. This is the side where you can see the shadow of the airplane or, if the shadow is too small to see, where the shadow should be. Each time I was able to see the effects of sunlight reflected, refracted or scattered back to- wards the sun. The figure shows the shadow of the air- plane inside a set of colored rings, called “glory.” Spring 2019 │ 3 OSU Physics Newsletter Derek Meyers Condensed Matter University of California-Berkeley Department of Materials Science and Engineering Ahmed Ismail High Energy University of Pittsburgh Department of Physics and Astronomy We are happy to announce that we have hired five new faculty for the upcoming academic year. NEWFACULTY Dorival Gonçalves-Netto High Energy University of Pittsburgh Department of Physics and Astronomy Mayukh Lahiri AMO Austrian Academy of Sciences IQOQI Vienna Andrew Yost Condensed Matter University of Nebraska-Lincoln Department of Physics and Astronomy EMERITI NEWS Backscattering Observations from an Airplane Bruce Ackerson, Emeriti Faculty, July 3, 2019 My position on the plane is just in front of the wing, where the center of the glory is on the shadow. This is not a rainbow due to refraction and reflection of light by raindrops. Rather, it is caused by interference of light traveling opposite directions around the water drop. Bicycle reflectors are retrore- flectors. They reflect light back to the source of the light, re- gardless the reflector orienta- tion to the light. Small glass spheres on paint reflect light back to the source but not as efficiently as bicycle reflectors. Nevertheless the spheres are used for road signs and painted lines. From a plane, these re- flectors light up and darken, as the plane’s shadow passes by them. Cont. on page 4 Again this summer, Yingmei Liu hosted NSF funded the 2019 Physics/Science Workshop for Oklahoma Teachers, we had a total of 8 teachers from various high schools in Oklahoma. Are- as covered were Atomic, Molec- ular & Optics, Biophysics, Nano- physics, High Energy the pre- senters included Joe Haley, Yingmei Liu, Elena Echeverria, Peter Shull, Emrah Turgut and Donghua Zhou. WORKSHOPS AND SUMMER PROGRAMS Another successful Oklahoma Teacher Workshop In 2018 the National Science Foundation awarded the Physics Department a Research Experi- ence for Undergrads (REU) pro- gram. That year, seven students came to OSU to obtain research experience for ten weeks under the mentorship of Physics facul- ty. The participants receive a $5,000 stipend, support for trav- el to a national meeting, travel to and from OSU, housing and meals. Participants also attend multiple workshops including how to apply to grad school, what is required for taking the GRE and finding the best way to present data. The 2019 cohort is eight students and we expect ten for 2020. More important, the OSU Physics REU Program is in the business of making new Cowboys. Calvin Ainsworth and Jacob Crosby – two students who came to Stillwater last year to be apart of the program – will be joining the physics graduate class at OSU in the fall. Mario Borunda and Sasha Khanov host REU Summer 2019