Physics and Astronomy Seminar Series
The Physics and Astronomy Seminar Series presents:
Projects and research in the MSUM Physics Department
Have you ever wondered what physics and astronomy projects students and faculty here work on? Come to this seminar and find out!
Friday, Sept. 7
3:00 -3:50 p.m.
325 Hagen Hall
D. Jacobs: Designing, Constructing, and Testing an Electric Motor Powered Aircraft. The recreational aircraft industry is extremely carbon intensive. With the introduction of new lithium ion batteries we are on the cusp of moving from heat engine power plants to electric motor power plants. The work here is a demonstration/research project to show the feasibility of that transition.
R. Lahti: Can perception of environmental threats be changed through education? Literature review as well as personal experience revealed a number of persistent misconceptions that people have regarding environmental issues, for example the relationship between global warming and the ozone hole. My work in science education has focused on Piagetian development – concrete vs. abstract thinking. With the politicization of environmental issues, do politics/beliefs influence what can be learned?
J. Cabanela: HR 7308: Going Back In Time for Future Research. When I was an undergraduate, I did a research project examining the complicated Cepheid variable star named HR 7308. This project involved determining the period of its pulsation and then trying to quantify how its pulsation amplitude was changing with time. 20 years later, I want to examine this star again to see if with a longer timeline, we have a better chance of understanding the complicated behavior that it shares with only one other star that we know of … Polaris.
J. Buncher: Does the half-life of a radioactive sample depend on its shape? We report the results of an experiment to determine whether the half-life of 198Au depends on the shape of the source. This study was motivated by recent suggestions that nuclear decay rates may be affected by solar activity, perhaps arising from solar neutrinos. If this were the case, then the beta-decay rates, or half-lives, of a thin foil sample and a spherical sample of gold of the same mass and activity could be different. In this experiment, the half-lives of a gold sphere and a thin gold wire were measured after each had been irradiated in the
NIST Center for Neutron Research. In comparison to an earlier version of this experiment, both the specific activities of the samples and their relative surface/volume ratios have been increased, leading to an improved test for the hypothesized self-induced decay (SID) effect. We find T_1/2,sphere / T_1/2,wire = (0.9993 +/- 0.0002), which is compatible with no SID effect.
M. Craig: Preliminary light curve of the short period variable star EE Lyn. The star EE Lyn was identified by Zwintz et. al. (2005) as a variable star in a study of images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope Guide Star Camera, with variations of 0.02 mag on a timescale of 0.05 days, but no complete curve or period was measured. A complete light curve and preliminary period based on one night’s observations of EE Lyn at the Paul Feder Observatory will be presented.
A. Shastri: How do you make an EKG device? What are the challenges in making a device that detects the electro-chemical voltage pattern created by the contraction of the heart muscles, known as an electrocardiogram (EKG)? First year physics student Andrew Larson undertook the task of learning the electronics needed to build such a device—and he succeeded! Though some challenges still remain to be addressed, the device, its design, and operation will be discussed.