Sergei Voronov and John Madsen with Professor Justin Peatross
Three professors in the College of Physical and Mathematical Sciences at Brigham Young University are including undergraduate students in joint physics projects using the latest laser technology.
Twenty students—five graduates and fifteen undergraduates—are being mentored by professors Dallin Durfee, Justin Peatross and Scott Bergeson on several large-scale science projects including computer-controlled systems, an atomic interferometry lab and more stabilized lasers. These projects will qualify for the undergraduates’ senior thesis research.
The research team meets together weekly to share progress reports and give updates on individual projects. These discussions are helping the students become more involved in laser physics, instead of just reading about what’s being done elsewhere.
Sunlight on a Pinhead
Students mentored by Durfee and Bergeson are working together on cooling atoms with lasers to the degree that they can more easily be observed. This ultra cold plasma—the product of atoms cooled to a fraction of a degree above absolute zero—moves slowly, making it possible to study atomic properties with, what Bergeson calls, “unprecedented accuracy.”
Peatross is helping his students construct a laser 100 times more powerful than their current laser beams. So powerful, in fact, that it will be able to generate an intensity equaling all of the earth’s sunlight onto a pinhead. The purpose of such laser concentrations is to “probe extreme interactions between light and matter,” says Peatross. As electrons are torn from their atoms by intense radiation, part of the laser energy is converted into beams of extreme ultraviolet light and x-rays. This wavelength range is important to the semiconductor industry since shorter wavelengths are necessary to create increasingly smaller features on microchips.
This past year, two of Peatross’s undergraduate students discovered a new way to suspend particles with lasers for long periods of time. Something not achieved before using similar methods.
All of these designs and experiments serve various purposes, from measuring time more precisely to improving navigation and communications technologies.
Research: The Uncommon Denominator
Research for undergraduates is part of a mentored education at BYU. Along with laboratory experience, the department offers students the chance to author publishable materials, present their findings at major conferences and discover new scientific methods and technology that benefit researchers, the university and society.
Several students accompanied their professors to this year’s Four Corners Conference, sponsored by the American Physical Society. At the meeting undergraduate students Rebecca Olson and Rebecca Merrill received honors for their poster presentations of new laser designs. Durfee believes Merrill’s work could have important applications for BYU and other laboratories. “We’re hoping to use this setup to make the ultra stable laser system that’s going to be the heart of our new atomic clock,” he says.
While it’s possible the large projects won’t be completed during the students’ time as undergraduates, they are able to conclude other smaller activities. Nevertheless, the students still take pride and ownership of the larger projects in the labs. “There is sort of a dichotomy,” Peatross says. “In one sense each student has their own little niche, their project, and at the same time they feel like they’re part of a team that’s going to continue after they graduate. But they want to see the overall project succeed and their little piece in it.”
Financial support for these projects and the students comes from sources like the National Science Foundation, the Research Corporation and BYU. The university’s Office of Research and Creative Activities sponsors several of the undergraduate students. If more funding were available, the professors would like to offer research positions to more students. Every year they meet students who are eager to work without pay so they can get experience, and a foot in the door, for the following year’s funding opportunities.
Seeking more funding is a worthwhile pursuit for an undergraduate program that is one of the largest in the country and graduates more physics majors annually than any other university. Faculty members and administrators from other universities tour the department’s facilities to see how they manage so well, especially at a time when other undergraduate physics programs seem to be dwindling. Recently, a visiting faculty member reported to his colleagues that a significant reason BYU has such a strong undergraduate physics program is because it involves them so heavily in research.
What kinds of students make good researchers in the Physics department? Durfee, Peatross and Bergeson look for students who perform well in the classroom and develop good lab skills. Juniors and even sophomores are desirable candidates since they can pass on knowledge and skills to other students before they graduate.
Mentoring is nothing new to the physics department. “It’s not something that just changed two years ago,” says Peatross. This teaching form is one of the traditional ways professors teach their students the discipline.
With the emphasis of research so heavily dependent on undergraduates at BYU, the students are taking on more responsibilities than their counterparts elsewhere. In the physics department, for example, undergraduates make up most of the research team, says Durfee. “We only have a sprinkling of graduate students, and if we want to do some cutting-edge research, they (undergraduates) are the ones who are doing it.”
If there is a downside to undergraduate research the professors agree that it occurs when BYU students with impressive research backgrounds move on to other exceptional graduate programs. Peatross points out that the majority of physics researchers in his lab go on to graduate school. “Students who work in research have a big advantage when they apply to graduate school,” he says. “That’s atypical of most undergraduates nationwide.”
ARCHIVAL REPORT 2001-02:
Laser Physics Mentoring Environment
Dr. Dallin Durfee Faculty 3
Dr. Justin Peatross Undergraduates 6
Dr. Scott Bergeson
College of Physical and Mathematical Sciences
Dr. Dallin Durfee has served as an assistant professor of physics at Brigham Young University during the past year. He came to the university after performing post-doctoral research in atom interferometry for precision measurement at Yale University.
Dr. Durfee received his Ph.D. in physics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1999, and his Bachelors degree from BYU in 1994. As an undergraduate student, he served as project coordinator for the school’s GoldHelox project—an undergraduate research project constructing a robotic soft x-ray telescope.
As a professor at BYU, Dr. Durfee teaches courses in fluids, thermodynamics, waves, optics, relativity, physics and laboratory methods. He also taught classes as a graduate and undergraduate student.
Dr. Justin Peatross has been an assistant professor at Brigham Young University since 1995, seven years after leaving the school with his Bachelors degree (cum laude). In 1990 he earned a Masters degree from the University of Rochester, and in 1993 he received his Ph.D. working at Rochester’s Laboratory for Laser Energetics.
Dr. Peatross traveled across the country and across the globe to work in post-doctoral research positions. In 1993 he studied atomic physics at the Russian Academy of Sciences. From 1994 to 1995 he researched high intensity, femtosecond laser experiments at Washington State University.
Since 2000, Dr. Peatross has received over $400,000 from the National Science Foundation to educate undergraduate students in high harmonic optics. In 2000 he also worked with a team that developed the improved large screen speech prompter used in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints’ Salt Lake City assembly hall.
Dr. Scott Bergeson has been an assistant professor in the physics and astronomy department at Brigham Young University since 1998. Before coming to the university, he served as a post-doctorate research fellow at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, MD. He also performed post-doc work at the University of Connecticut.
Dr. Bergeson earned his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin in 1995. In 1990 he earned his Bachelors degree from Brigham Young University.
The professor has spent his time at BYU teaching and performing research on ultra-cold plasmas, precision spectroscopy and laboratory astrophysics. He currently has two papers submitted for review by scholarly journals, to add to his already long list of published works.