Recent News

Second Ross and Sue Benitez Space Exploration Forum

Sep 5, 2017

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The End of Cassini

Explorer of the Outer Solar System 

Spanos Theatre, Saturday, September 16, 7-8:30 p.m.
Free and open to the public

Doors open at 6:30 p.m.
For more information call 805-756-2448

Jani Radebaugh, a planetary scientist who worked with NASA on the Cassini mission to Saturn and specializes in landscapes of Earth and other planets, will share images captured by the spacecraft. She will focus on her current investigations, which include giant dunes, mountains, volcanoes, rivers and lakes on Saturn's moon Titan and actively erupting volcanoes and mountains on Jupiter's moon Io. Using her hands-on studies of landscapes on Earth in combination with the Cassini results, Radebaugh will discuss the planetary processes on these moons.

 

“To understand these places has required us to be ourselves explorers, ranging from the deserts of Egypt, Arabia and Persia, over the high plateaus of the Argentine Puna, and to the edges of lava lakes in Ethiopia and Vanuatu.” -Jani Radebaugh.

The Cassini spacecraft will end its approximately 13-year exploration of the Saturn system in flames as it enters the atmosphere on Sept. 15, according to NASA. The robotic observation platform provided an unparalleled glimpse into what happens on the distant planet. Operators are deliberately plunging Cassini, which has used up almost all of its fuel, into the planet to ensure Saturn’s moons will remain pristine for future exploration.

About Jani Radebaugh

 

Jani Radebaugh is a planetary scientist and associate professor at Brigham Young University who specializes in landscapes of Earth and other planets. She analyzes images obtained by spacecraft to determine the origins and geologic histories of planetary surfaces. Radebaugh is a regular participant in the U.S. Antarctic Search for Meteorites Program, a science contributor for the Discovery Science Channel's How the Universe Works, and a BBC Horizons special on Cassini.

Inaugural Ross and Sue Benitez Space Exploration Forum

Feb 3, 2017

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Exploration of the Outer Solar System

New Horizons at Pluto & Juno at Jupiter​

Spanos Theatre, Wednesday, April 12, 7:00-8:30 p.m.
Free and open to the public

Doors open at 6:30 p.m.
For more information call 805-756-2859

Fran Bagenal, one of the team leaders on NASA’s New Horizons mission to Pluto and Juno mission to Jupiter, will unpack what scientists have learned from these missions to the largest and smaller worlds in the solar system. Learn how New Horizons came to be, how the spacecraft got to Pluto, and how the findings are challenging our understanding of ice worlds in the outer solar system. Bagenal will also describe ongoing discoveries from the Juno mission, including findings about Jupiter’s core and magnetic field and the presence of water in the atmosphere.

Water ice mountains as big as the Rocky Mountains, glaciers of nitrogen ice, an ice volcano as big as Mauna Kea, and a landscape that resembles the skin of a snake: “Even in our wildest dreams none of us on the New Horizons team really expected the July 2015 flyby of Pluto to produce such riches.” -Fran Bagenal

About Fran Bagenal

Fran Bagenal is a research scientist and professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder and team leader of the plasma investigations on NASA’s New Horizons mission to Pluto and Juno mission to Jupiter. Her main area of expertise is the study of charged particles trapped in planetary magnetic fields and the interaction of plasmas with the atmospheres of planetary objects, particularly in the outer solar system. She has participated in several of NASA's planetary exploration missions, including Voyager 1 and 2, Galileo, Deep Space 1, New Horizons and Juno. Bagenal edited the monograph Jupiter: Planet, Satellites and Magnetosphere (Cambridge University Press, 2004).

Thank You to Our Generous Donors 2016-17

Jan 20, 2017

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Thank you to all the individuals, corporations, foundations and organizations who donated to the Physics Department. Private support enables our department to continue to provide exceptional Learn by Doing opportunities for today’s students.

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Armand G. and Michele N. Amoranto
Anonymous Donor
Jay A. Austin and Elizabeth C. Austin-Minor
Raymond C. Austin
Dennis F. Baker
Ross* and Sue Benitez
Richard J. Bietz Jr.
Brian C. Bloomfield
Anita and Richard Blumenthal
Jeanne C. and Roger L. Brunel
Cathleen M. and Geoffrey R. Clarion
Keith A. and Meg Evans
Kevin R. Flournoy
Michal W. and Rebecca A. Fouquette
Alan F. and Patricia Francis-Lyon
Richard B. and Julie R. Frankel
Jay D. and Mary E. Freeman
Richard V. Genazzi
Maureen L. Godbout
Hans K. and April A. Hess
John P. Holler
Riva Johnston
Endel Kallas Jr.
Randall D. and Sally Knight
Ronald S. Longacre and Lois H. Mitchell
Ignatius S. and Marsela Mangkuorahardjo
Robert B. Mathews
Minus K Technology Inc
Nam T. Nguyen and Ngoc N. Tran
James M. Patt
Alan H. and Jane M. Patterson
Raytheon Company
Lee and Shirley Rosen
Rebecca R. Rosen
Bernard Smit
Daniel A. Spaizman
Stellar Solutions Foundation
Elijah G. Stiny
The Charles Schwab Corporation
Verizon Communications Inc.
Robert C. Webb
Wells Fargo Philanthropy Fund
James T. Woolaway

 

Every effort has been made to ensure the completeness and accuracy of the listing of contributors from July 2015 through June 2016. If you have been omitted from the list, please let us know at physics@calpoly.edu.

New Faculty 2016-17

Jan 20, 2017

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The Physics Department welcomed three new faculty members this fall. They bring expertise in solid state energy conversion, brightest cluster galaxies, and physics education.

Faculty Updates 2016-17

Jan 20, 2017

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Scott Fraser

Fractal Black Holes on Strings

Schematic of the evolution of an unstable black string in the efficient and physically elegant model that Fraser and Fleischman developed. The model fits the radii shown to the high-cost numerical data found by Lehner and Pretorius in Phys. Rev. Lett. 105, 101102 (2010).

Working with Scott Fraser in summer research and her senior project, physics senior Laura Fleischman investigated the non-uniform shapes of black strings (cylindrical black holes). Black strings have attracted intense theoretical interest for decades because they are known to be unstable to long wavelength perturbations. This phenomenon is analogous to a thin water stream rippling from a faucet, but it is much more interesting: the instability is known to evolve a black string into a fractal-like beads-on-string structure of black holes connected by ever-thinner black strings. This structural phenomenon also occurs in fluids, with fractal-like generations of droplets connected by thin fluid filaments.

Fleischman developed a simple and powerful conservation model for the evolved shapes of unstable black strings, motivated by the correspondence between black strings and fluids and using results from general relativity. Using her conservation model, Fleischman predicted the sizes of multiple generations of black holes and connecting string segments to within 2.7 percent of the values known from difficult numerical techniques in general relativity.

The calculations in the conservation model are fast and elegant, in contrast to the enormous computing resources required in numerical general relativity to evolve one black string of one initial size (the equivalent of two months of continuous running time on 100 processors). Fleischman’s conservation model is also very general: it can be applied to black strings with any initial size, so it can be used to predict undiscovered shapes. This elegant model complements, and can potentially supersede, a decade of difficult numerical work.

Fleischman is also developing an intriguing connection to the long-held Cosmic Censorship hypothesis in general relativity, which postulates that the singularities inside black holes and black strings always remain inside and are never exposed. If this is true, then unstable black strings will not break by pinching off. It is tantalizing that the known fractal-like evolution of an unstable black string extrapolates to a breakup, but this breakup cannot be confirmed because finite computing resources cannot track the evolution indefinitely. This extrapolated breakup can be interpreted as strong evidence that Cosmic Censorship is violated. However, Fleischman is developing a new way of understanding black strings, including strong evidence that a black string might not break, which suggests that the Cosmic Censorship hypothesis can be saved. This research was partially funded by the College-Based Fees and Frost summer research program and is being developed to submit for publication.

Tom Gutierrez

Aaron Wong cleans specialized equipment inside
of the Laboratori Nazionali de Gran Sasso in Italy.
Contributed Photo: Laura Marini

Physics students Kevin Armenta, Kevin Phung, Ryan Werth and Aaron Wong provided onsite support at Italy’s Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso while the CUORE — short for Cryogenic Underground Observatory for Rare Events — installation team finished putting the world’s largest scientific refrigerator in place.

Read more about this milestone

Themis Mastoridis

This past academic year, among other things, I continued my work on the upgrade of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), specifically the High-Luminosity LHC. The upgrade includes the implementation of resonant structures called crab cavities. These structures turn the clouds of particles traveling at the speed of light “sideways” so that they are moving like crabs. The result is an increased geometric overlap of the colliding particle clouds and thus a higher collision and data collection rate.

Due to technical limitations, however, these crab cavities introduce noise to the particle clouds. Physics major Philippe Nguyen and physics and mathematics double-major Aron Daw investigated the effectiveness of a fast feedback system to mitigate these noise effects using multi-particle simulations. Their results were well received at CERN and suggested that such a system has a potential to improve the Hi-Luminosity LHC’s performance.

Devin Wieker studied the possibility of using the crab cavities to clean the edges of the particle clouds by deliberately injecting carefully selected “noise” into the system. Wieker, Daw and Nguyen visited CERN for two weeks at the end of the summer.

In addition, Jake Hargrove and Dylan Tucker worked on the upgrade of another accelerator at CERN, the Super-Proton Synchrotron (SPS). They worked on modeling the proposed upgrade of the SPS accelerating system.

Pete Schwartz

This summer, Professor Pete Schwartz and a research community of 19 students, five faculty members, and six collaborating companies (AidAfrica, Sanga Energy, JLM Energy, SLO Guild Hall, Rincon-Vitova Insectaries, and Social Ice Cream Company) investigated multiple projects relating to the direct use and management of solar electricity. The community is interested in the potential of solar panels to bring electricity to the world’s poor as the cost of the panels decreases. They also see a possible transformation in how the industrialized world uses electricity due to the development of free but variable solar electricity.

Their projects include:

• Insulated solar electric cooking developed at Cal Poly and implemented by four students in Uganda in collaboration with AidAfrica. The group published an article on the project in Development Engineering.
• Solar ice. The group is improving technologies used to make ice with solar electricity and built a prototype at the student experimental farm. Student researchers also installed solar ice production in a local ice cream truck.
• A bug vacuum for pest control in organic farms to replace those powered with gasoline engines. The plan is to charge the batteries in the field with solar panels.
• Design and provisional patent of a method to electrically heat water in a natural gas water tank. Heating thermal loads represents a way to stabilize oscillations in grid power. Stabilization is becoming increasingly important with the increase in the portion of electricity generated by wind and solar. Schwartz is heating water with solar electricity at his house using a prototype the group constructed.
• Investigations into the best way to convert DC voltages, allocate available solar electricity, and directly charge electric cars while working to develop a provisional patent to control allocation of electrical power in off-grid applications.

The research takes place in a variety of locations: on campus, at cooperating companies’ facilities, in African villages, at the Student Experimental Farm, and at researchers’ homes. Physics instructor Nathan Heston provided some of the research groups with significant lab and field guidance, as well as motivation and assistance with implementation.

Stephanie Wissel

Students Build Neutrino Telescope and Monitor Data for Antarctic Flight

Professor Stephanie Wissel and physics majors Donald Hersam and Caroline Paciaroni assembled and tested the Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna (ANITA) in Palestine, Texas, at NASA’s Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility last summer. ANITA searches for cosmic rays and neutrinos with energies produced in the most violent explosions in the universe. By pointing radio antennas at the icy Antarctic surface, ANITA looks for the radio frequency radiation produced from the millions of particles moving close to the speed of light produced when a neutrino interacts in the ice or a cosmic ray interacts in the atmosphere.

Hersam, Paciaroni and Wissel were part of the team that assembled and tested new analog electronics and antennas for the fourth flight of ANITA. After passing a NASA inspection in August, they packed up the experiment and sent it off to Antarctica where Wissel met it again for the launch in early December.

Wissel led a team of researchers on an expedition deep into the heart of West Antarctica where they manned transmitters as ANITA flew overhead. Hersam, Paciaroni, physics major Alex Crawford, and other members of the NuRad Group at Cal Poly monitored the data transmitted over satellites and provided feedback to the entire ANITA collaboration. The NuRad Group is an interdisciplinary research group headed by Wissel and Professor Dean Arakaki of the Electrical Engineering Department with student members from both physics and electrical engineering.

The ANITA collaboration is led by Professor Peter Gorham with collaborators from around the world and funded through NASA. The students’ work is funded by the university, student fees and a donation from Randy Knight, physics professor emeritus.

Read about Cal Poly’s leading role in the calibration of the ANITA antennas

Greetings from Department Chair Bob Echols 2016-17

Jan 20, 2017

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Hello friends of the Physics Department and welcome again to our annual newsletter. I hope everyone is doing well.

Our educational mission would not be possible without our dedicated staff and faculty. We are grateful to have three new tenure-track faculty members joining us this year: Matt Beekman, Louise Edwards and Stamatis Vokos. In addition, we are pleased to have seven new full-time lecturers: Marwa Abdalmoneam, Andrew Clough, Christopher Culbreath, Nikolaus Glazar, Lei Lu, Alfredo Sanchez and Daniel White. You may recognize two of these names — Christopher and Nik are Cal Poly physics graduates — welcome back! These new additions bring our total full-time faculty count to 47.

As I have said before, many aspects of the Cal Poly Physics Department make us special, but undergraduate research certainly stands out. I hope you will enjoy reading about some of our student research experiences in this newsletter. During the past summer we had 32 students working with 13 faculty members funded by the Frost/CBF undergraduate research program. Many other students conducted research with faculty thanks to funding from research grants.

If you haven’t been by to see our beautiful new building, please visit soon. I had the pleasure of giving Scot Shields (Physics and Mathematics, ‘03) and his family a tour recently. Scot was blown away by h-bar’s private balcony on the sixth floor.

Another building by the same architects is in the planning phase, thanks to a generous donation from Bill Frost (Biochemistry, ’72) and his wife Linda. It will fill the need for dedicated undergraduate research space and is scheduled to open in 2020.

A big thank you to all of our department donors as well. Your contributions help us continue to provide a truly Learn by Doing education to today’s physics students.

Please keep in touch,

Dr. Bob (Echols)
rechols@calpoly.edu

Newsletter 2016-17

Jan 20, 2017

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Featured Articles

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Remote Control of a Giant Telescope? Yeah, That’s Cool

Students learn by viewing a black hole using a telescope at the Lick Observatory outside of San Jose. The twist? They're settled comfortably 200 miles away on the Cal Poly campus, controlling instruments on the telescope remotely.

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More News

Letter from the Chair

Bob Echols reviews the year and looks ahead to what’s next for the Physics Department in 2016-17.

Read the letter ›

NSF Grant Will Aid Search for Blazars, Dark Matter

Professor Jodi Christiansen and a team of students will work on improving gamma ray detection at the Very Energetic Radiation Imaging Telescope Array System (VERITAS) in southern Arizona thanks to almost $160,000 from the National Science Foundation. The improvements will help scientists observe blazars and dark matter.

Read more about Christiansen's search ›

Cal Poly Connected to Gravitational Waves Announcement

LIGO and the National Science Foundation displayed one of Professor Steve Drasco’s computer simulations at the press conference for the discovery of gravitational waves.

Read more about Cal Poly and gravitational waves ›

Faculty Updates

Student-faculty research projects spanned the globe and the world of physics. From fractal black holes on strings to insulated solar electric cooking, Cal Poly  contributed to what we know about the universe.

Read the faculty updates ›

New Faculty

The Physics Department welcomed three new faculty members this fall, including Louise Edwards, pictured at left. They bring expertise in solid state energy conversion, brightest cluster galaxies, and physics education.

Read more about the new faculty ›

Thank You to Our Generous Donors

Thank you to all the individuals, corporations, foundations and organizations who donated to the Physics Department. Private support enables our department to continue to provide exceptional Learn by Doing opportunities for today’s students.

View the list of donors ›

Cal Poly Physics Department No. 2 in Nation for Graduates

Dec 31, 2015

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Cal Poly’s Physics Department was ranked No. 2 in the nation for granting physics degrees in solely undergraduate programs, according to a recent report.

The ranking, compiled by not-for-profit organization the American Institute of Physics, looked at data from 2012 to 2014.

Robert Echols, professor and Physics Department chair, says physics majors develop problem-solving and critical-thinking skills.

“Studying physics provides a foundation for all the sciences and technical disciplines, opening up many doors for a physics major,” Echols said.

The ranking places Cal Poly ahead of 72 other universities. The No. 1 spot was given to State University of New York at Geneseo. Only one other university in California appeared on the list. 

Download or view the full report. 

Physics Department Receives $225K Grant to Fund Student Research

Dec 13, 2015

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Physics Professor Themis Mastoridis has received a three-year, $225,000 grant from the National Science Foundation that will send student researchers to the European Organization for Nuclear Research.

During the academic year, students at Cal Poly will investigate how to optimize the performance and reliability of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Organization for Nuclear Research — better known by its acronym CERN. They will then travel to Geneva, Switzerland, in the summer to present their work to leading scientists in the field of particle physics.

“I’m very excited that the students will get the opportunity to go to CERN,” said Mastoridis. “This will be a great and unique experience for our physics majors.”

Themis Mastoridis

There will also be plenty of opportunities for hands-on learning during the students’ two-week stint at CERN. They will work on and run simulations, measure various components of the collider, validate assumptions they’ve made during their year of on-campus research, and collaborate with top physicists from around the world.

CERN’s collider is the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator. The collider aided in the discovery of the Higgs boson, an elementary particle whose existence physicists had hypothesized but couldn’t prove for decades. Students selected for this program will get to work on the development of essential upgrades to the collider.

“This really epitomizes Learn by Doing,” said Mastoridis, who spent two years working at CERN before arriving at Cal Poly. “Our students will develop skills that will be very helpful for a job in the industry or for a graduate career.” 

 

Student-Faculty Research Flourishes in Physics Department

Dec 13, 2015

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Undergraduate research is thriving in the Physics Department. Current students Learn by Doing research with faculty mentors on projects as massive as black holes and as tiny as nanometer-thick liquid crystal films. Read what they've been up to below.

Vardha Bennert's Team

Students Work to Classify Galaxies

Maren Cosens at the Lick Observatory.

In April 2015, physics major Sean Lewis and mechanical engineering major Maren Cosens joined Professor Vardha Bennert for an observing run at the three-meter Shane telescope at the Lick Observatory, located on Mt. Hamilton east of San Jose.

They observed emission-line clouds outside of galaxies discovered by Galaxy Zoo, an online astronomy project that invites members of the public to assist in the structural classification of large numbers of galaxies. The origin of these emission-line clouds is unknown, and the team used spectroscopy to shed light on their nature.

Alumni Co-Author Paper on Fading Active Galactic Nucleus Candidates

Together with their senior thesis advisor, Professor Vardha Bennert, physics alumni Bryan Scott, Charlie Showley and Kelsi Flatland co-authored a peer-reviewed paper on so-called fading active galactic nuclei observed with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). The paper was published in the The Astrophysical Journal, the leading journal for astronomy and astrophysics in the U.S.

While still at Cal Poly, these alumni helped with observations at the Shane telescope that led to the sample selection of these galaxies. For all eight galaxies, HST observations reveal evidence of ongoing or past galaxy interactions and mergers including tidal tails, shells and warped or chaotic dust structures. The very extended ionized gas is composed of tidal debris rather than galactic winds. The host systems are bulge-dominated and show no strong evidence of triggered star formation in luminous clusters.

The article is titled "HST Imaging of Fading AGN Candidates: Host-Galaxy Properties and Origin of the Extended Gas."

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Jonathan Fernsler's Team

Research Experience for Undergraduates Offered at University of Colorado

Vincent Nguyen gives his final presentation on liquid crystal
films at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Physics students Vincent Nguyen and James Amarel spent the summer doing a Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) funded by Professor Jonathan Fernsler’s National Science Foundation grant. They traveled to the University of Colorado at Boulder and worked at the Soft Materials Research Center running experiments on freely suspended liquid crystal films. These films are the thinnest fluid films known and can be regularly created with a thickness of only one molecule, i.e., one nanometer thick.

Nguyen studied 2D hydrodynamics of interacting islands, which are thicker regions of film, and Amarel studied active matter of oil drops propelled by surfactant that can model simple living systems. These results are now being analyzed back at Cal Poly, and Amarel is building an active matter experiment in Fernsler’s Baker Center lab.

New Liquid Crystal Behavior Discovered

Electrical engineering student Xem Muscarella and double-major in mechanical engineering and physics Taylor Best studied electro-optics of liquid crystals and discovered a new behavior. They sandwiched liquid crystal cells between glass with a transparent conducting layer that makes it possible to apply a voltage across the liquid crystal.

Applying a voltage to the cell switched the optic axis of the liquid crystal, as expected, but after removing the voltage, the optic axis remained in place for approximately a minute. This electrostatic response is analog, where the optic axis can be frozen wherever desired, and is a previously unrealized behavior in the scientific literature. Fernsler, Muscarella and Best are now examining how this behavior occurs and expect to publish a journal article in the coming year.

Students Build a Microscope out of Legos

The Lego Brewster Angle Microscope in the Physical
Chemistry Lab. It will be used to study synthetic lung
surfactant that could serve as improved surfactant
therapy for prematurely born babies.

Physics student Vincent Nguyen and chemistry student Nick Benz built a Brewster Angle Microscope (BAM), which can image a one-nanometer thick monolayer on the surface of water. The microscope uses a laser reflected off the surface at a precise angle.

An unusual twist on this BAM is that it is built almost entirely out of Legos. Using two computer-controlled motors from a Lego Mindstorm kit, the BAM adjusts the angle of reflection with one motor and adjusts the focus of the image with the other. Because the BAM views the monolayer at an oblique angle, only a section of the image is in focus, but Nguyen wrote software that combines the images taken at different focal points to create a composite image that is in focus. This feature is usually only seen in BAM’s costing approximately $100,000.

Physics student Jessica Pilgram and chemistry students Hunter Vanderpoel and Alison Wallum continued work on the BAM, which was used in Chemistry 354, the upper division physical chemistry lab, to image several monolayers and teach students about 2D thermodynamics.

During the 2015-16 academic year, the BAM will be used to study synthetic and native lung surfactant, a coating on the surface of the lungs necessary for breathing. Lung surfactant therapy is used primarily on prematurely born babies, who lack a functioning surfactant. The team will also submit a paper — including a Lego manual on how to build a BAM — to the American Journal of Physics.

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Scott Fraser's Team

Maximally Charged Black Holes Minimize Total Energy

A simulated black hole of 10 solar masses as seen from a
distance of 600 kilometers with the Milky Way in the background.
Image compliments of Ute Kraus, Physics education group
Kraus, Universität Hildesheim, CC BY-SA 2.5

Working with Professor Scott Fraser, graduating senior Shaker Von Price Funkhouser proved an energy principle for charged black holes, research for which he won first prize at the CSU Student Research Competition in May. Funkhouser also recently published this work in Physical Review D 92 104016 (2015).

Funkhouser showed how a set of maximally charged black holes minimizes its total energy. If all charges have the same sign, this work provides the first energy interpretation of these black holes’ known static equilibrium condition, thereby replacing nearly fifty years of intuition based on forces. This intuition — that the static equilibrium is a balance between the black holes’ mutual electric repulsion and gravitational attraction — is not precise because gravity is not regarded as a force in general relativity.

Black Holes Behave Like Fluids

In their senior projects, Anthony Bardessono and Conrad Pearson are developing a correspondence between black holes and ordinary fluids. Because fluids are directly accessible in the lab, a potential future application of this correspondence is to use well-measured fluid phenomena to predict new features to explore about black holes — and perhaps about gravity itself because in general relativity, black holes represent objects that are purely gravitational and in particular exhibit very strong gravity.

Bardessono has shown how a black hole attached to a membrane interacts with the membrane like an ordinary liquid droplet that is attached to a flat surface. Depending on the type of membrane, the black hole behaves like a liquid droplet whose interaction with the flat surface is either repulsive (it beads up on the surface) or attractive (it wets the surface). Also, depending on the type of membrane, the black hole behaves like a liquid droplet that either sits on a flat horizontal surface, or hangs from it. The two cases are distinguished by the direction of the constant gravitational field that the droplet experiences.

Pearson is refining a known correspondence between a black cylinder (a cylindrical black hole) and an ordinary liquid cylinder. Just like tap water that breaks up into droplets as it falls from a faucet, a long and thin black cylinder is known to be unstable to long-wavelength perturbations. The critical wavelength (of order the cylinder circumference) corresponds well but not exactly to the critical wavelength in the Rayleigh-Plateau instability of a liquid cylinder that breaks up into droplets due to surface tension. Pearson is refining this known correspondence by incorporating the black cylinder’s self-interaction, which has been neglected in previous work, and matching the black cylinder’s instability to the instability of a fluid with elasticity (an elastic soft solid).

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Themis Mastoridis's Team

Simulations Investigate Workings of High Luminosity LHC

Professor Themis Mastoridis visited the European Organization for Nuclear Research, more commonly known as CERN, in June and September for research projects on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), High Luminosity LHC (HiLumi LHC) and the Super Proton Synchrotron. 

During the summer, Mastoridis brought his CERN experience back to Cal Poly and worked with students Stan Steeper, Dylan Tucker and Devin Wieker. They investigated the performance of the HiLumi LHC’s crab cavities, devices that will lead to a significant increase of the particle collision rate and thus expedite discoveries. The students performed simulations to determine whether the crab cavities will cause any adverse effects on the accelerated particles.

Pete Schwartz's Team

Students Develop and Use Solar Cooker

Professor Pete Schwartz and three students invented and continue to develop an insulated cooking unit connected directly to a photovoltaic panel. They presented their invention at the Solar Cookers International Conference in Sacramento in July, and the food cooked using it has been “spectacular.”