Three senior physics majors describe their capstone projects.

Three senior physics majors describe their capstone projects.

The physicists on the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Clinic team (Emily Lane and Arch Robison) will describe their project, and the physicists on the Sandia National Laboratory Clinic team (Ále Baptista, Andrew Bishop, and Lupe MacIntosh) will describe theirs.

Three senior physics majors describe their capstone projects.

Three senior physics majors describe their capstone projects.

Three senior physics majors describe their capstone projects.

We are excited to welcome back to campus three recent HMC physics graduates to provide their insights into the job market for physics graduates and tips on landing your first job. Wylie Rosenthal (’12) took an optical engineering job with Zygo after graduating and worked there for three years before moving in 2015 to the Giant Magellan Telescope Organization. Chris …

Like a well-written paper, an effective talk should begin with a shared context, state the problem to be addressed and the main points to be made, and use visuals for clarity and redundancy. Unlike a paper a talk proceeds synchronously and demands that the speaker provide more explicit reminders of the underlying structure of the presentation to keep the audience …

HMC Physics faculty will discuss graduate programs in physics and astronomy in the United States and Canada, and how students should think about framing their applications.

Space radiation from high-energy particles is a field that is of increasing importance in this dawning space age. Extreme space weather events are responsible for a variety of problems including satellite failures and radio blackouts, and also have the potential for catastrophic impacts on Earth such as a near-global loss of the power grid. Additionally, radiation protection for astronauts is …

Today’s magnetic device technology is based on complex magnetic alloys or multilayers that are patterned at the nanoscale and operate at gigahertz frequencies. To better understand the behavior of such devices one needs an experimental approach that is capable of detecting magnetization with nanometer and picosecond sensitivity. In addition, since devices contain different magnetic elements, a technique is needed that …

The quantum information revolution has taught us that quantum mechanics is not a paler version of its classical counterpart, hindered by intrinsic uncertainty and random measurement outcomes. Au contraire! A machine whose operation takes full advantage of the laws of quantum mechanics has information processing capabilities well beyond those that are restricted to essentially classical laws. To harness this power …

The 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to David Thouless, Duncan Haldane, and Michael Kosterlitz "for theoretical discoveries of topological phase transitions and topological phases of matter." I will review the discoveries they made and explain how they have changed our understanding of critical phenomena in low dimensions and the phases of quantum matter.

Earth-size exoplanets and their slightly larger ‘super-Earth’ cousins are the most abundant planets orbiting close to Sun-like stars. These planets have diverse physical compositions, unusual atmospheres, and poorly understood origins. My talk will trace the discovery and early characterization of these small worlds through Doppler and transit surveys, and look forward to future discoveries with instruments such as the Keck …

Bell’s theorem states that some predictions of quantum mechanics cannot be reproduced by a local-realist theory. That conflict is expressed by Bell’s inequality, which is usually derived under the assumption that there are no statistical correlations between the choices of measurement settings and anything else that can causally affect the measurement outcomes. In previous experiments, this “freedom of choice” was …