July 13,, 2010

Lots of interesting things have been happening lately.

On Friday the REU students had the oportunity to listen to a practice oral exam for one of Dr. Metcalf's graduate students. Then, on Monday, we got to listen to a practice thesis defence of another of his graduate students. The first talk was not as interesting as the second one because the student was just describing someone else's work and how he wants to do a similar experiment (atosecond pulses = very short pulses!). The second talk described an experiment I've been hearing so much about, but up to this point have not understood what it has been about. Still, I do not understand what the use of making small engravings on gold is. The only thing I can think of is for the making of a very small diffraction grating, but don't know how useful that could be at that scale or if would even work at all. The scale they are woking on is very small.

Today, Dr. Metcalf talked to us about polarized light. He tried to mathematically motivate the mechanism at work. I think it was very effective, but also something I've seen before. Yet, again, it was fascinating to see how quantum mechanics has a strong affect on the field of optics. It's not as simple as drawing diagrams. To understand optics, one must understand the rest of physics in significant detail, as well. This is very appealing to me.

Alsd today, the REU students attended their weekly talk. The speaker today was Dr. Michael Zingale, a professor in the Astrophysics wing of the department. He talked about computation in astrophysics. His talk was very general and basically he just said that in astrophysics you can't run an experiment, you can only observe something or build a model. If you build a model, you need a computer with lots of processing power because you have many billions of calculations to make. As time goes on, computers get better, and you can run bigger and more complex simulations. All of these things I already knew. He also mentioned his own interest, which is modeling how a supernova happens. I thought his simulation looked like popcorn popping in a microwave oven, which I guess is appropriate. After all, all he's doing is expanding fluids really fast.

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