Pizza Lunch Meeting

Attended by: LTC students and mentors, Jenny Magnes and her three undergraduate students, Maurice Kernan, and undergraduate and graduate students in the Metcalf AMO group

Brian Deer, Vassar College '15
Ramy Abbady, Vassar College '16
Diffraction Intensity Studies

Brian and Ramy talked about measuring changes in the electric field of a regenerating planaria by detecting changes in the intensity of its diffraction pattern, and their initial work in understanding the relationship between laser power and intensity in the diffraction pattern.

Tewa Kpulun, Vassar College '15
Locomotion of C. elegans using Shadow Imaging and Laser Diffraction

Tewa discussed her work in using shadow imaging to study the 3D movements of C. elegans and laser diffraction (with various wavelengths) to measure their thrashing frequency.

Jenny Magnes, Professor of Physics at Vassar College

Jenny then spoke about how their group was creating a reference library to help researchers match the shape of the worm to its resulting diffraction pattern. She also gave an overview of how oversampling can be used to recover the phase of these diffraction patterns. A video of her work in Quantitative Locomotion Study of Freely Swimming Micro-organisms using Laser Diffraction can be found in the Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE).

Rachel Sampson, Stony Brook University ‘16
Optical Diffraction and Biology

Rachel explained her initial interest in identifying bacteria by their light scattering patterns, reconstructing an image from its diffraction pattern, and creating aperture functions through apodization with a circular aperture.

Kathy Camenzind, California High School (San Ramon, CA) ‘14
An Introduction to Optical Tweezers

Kathy discussed how optical tweezers work, their history, and described her current setup and results; she then mentioned the possibility of using optical vortex tweezers and some of the biological applications.