In this issue...

General News Awards and Honors Student and Alumni News Colloquia
Seminars Presentations and Talks Publications Proposals
Travel and Conferences Visitors Upcoming Events




April 2001

"From our home on the Earth, we look out into the distances and strive to imagine the sort of world into which we are born. Today we have reached far out into space. Our immediate neighborhood we know rather intimately. But with increasing distance our knowledge fades, and fades rapidly, until at the last dim horizon we search among ghostly errors of observations for landmarks that are scarcely more substantial.

The search will continue. The urge is older than history. It is not satisfied and it will not be suppressed."

Edwin P. Hubble


GENERAL NEWS

Physics End of Year Awards were given this year went to:

Outstanding Faculty: George Tuthill
Outstanding Staff: Margaret Jarrett
Outstanding GTA: Louis Rubbo and Chija Skala
Outstanding Senior: Angela Colman (pictured below)

More pictures from the awards and celebration can be found on the Physics Web Site
SPS held it's annual Spring picnic on April 28th in Beall Park.

Welcome to Dr. C.V. Ramana and his wife Haritha. They arrived in Bozeman on Apr. 19, in the middle of our cold, windy weekend, from the tropics of southern India. Fortunately, they did not get back on the plane and return home! Dr. Ramana was working in a postdoctoral position at the Indian Institute of Technology in Bangalore. He will work as a postdoctoral scholar in the Ion Beam Lab with Dick Smith for the next few years.

AWARDS AND HONORS

Sara Maccagnano had a paper accepted at the Northwest Regional Meeting of American Physical Society. She will receive $585 as a travel support award to attend the meeting May 25-26.

Steve Kelly and Norm Williams were nominated for MSU Employee Recognition Awards 2001.

Greg Francis received the 2001 President's Excellence in Teaching Award, a relatively new award which is reserved for the best of the best.

John Carlsten was selected as this year's winner of the James and Mary Ross Provost's Award for Excellence. This recognition of outstanding undergraduate teaching by a distinguished scholar caps a long string of victories for John.

Monty Mola was chosen to receive the Graduate Achievement Award for outstanding perform- ance in a doctoral program. This honor is richly deserved, as anyone knows who attended Monty's thesis defense. The award, sponsored by the MSU Foundation, consists of a plaque and a substantial cash prize.

Loren Acton was honored to be chosen as the James T. Bunyan lecturer by Stanford University. In early May he'll give one public lecture and one astrophysics seminar at Stanford.

Sachiko Tsuruta was awarded the `Yamada Foundation Visiting Professorship' for April and May 2001, to work in ISAS (Institute for Space and Astronautical Science) in Japan.

Dave Klumpar and Dana Longcope have been invited by NASA Headquarters to serve on the Sun Earth Connections Advisory Committee (SECAS). The 13 members of SECAS provide advice from the Sun-Earth Connections (SEC) scientific community to Dr George Withbroe, Director of the SEC program in the Office of Space Science at NASA.

STUDENT and ALUMNI NEWS

PhD Thesis Defense
"Optical Coherent Transient Correlator and Enabling Erbium Doped Materials for the 1.5 Micron Communication Bands", Todd Harris, Apr. 11.

"Phase Transition Behavior of the Three Dimensional KDP-Type Sixten-Vertex Model", Adam Stern, Apr. 18.

"Superconducting Mixed State Phase Diagram of ?-(BEDT-TTF)2Cu(NCS)2", Monty Mola, Apr. 19.

PhD Comprehensive Oral Successes
"The de Laval Nozzle and the Solar Wind", Damon Resnick, Apr. 11.

"Imaging High Energy Photons", Elizabeth Noonan, Apr. 26.

COLLOQUIA

"Control and Measurement of Electric Fields on the Femtosecond Time Scale: Terahertz Time- Domain Spectroscopy and Its Applications", Jie Shan, Dept. of Physics, Columbia Univ. New York, Candidate for Condensed Matter Physics Faculty Position, Apr. 2.

"Superfluid Effects on Thermal Evolution and Rotational Dynamics of Neutron Stars", Michelle Larson, Montana State Univ., Physics Dep., Apr. 6.

"How the Variable Sun Affects the Earth's Atmosphere: Solar Soft X-rays and Their Role in the Chemistry of the Upper Atmosphere", Dr. Scott M. Bailey, Center for Atmospheric Sciences, Hampton Univ., Hampton, VA, Candidate for Experimental Space Physics Faculty Position, Apr. 9.

"Physics of Dusty Plasma Liquids and Crystals", Prof. Amitava Bhattacharjee, Dept. of Physics and Astronomy, Univ. of Iowa, Apr. 13.

"Fast Imaging Spectroscopy of the Solar Atmosphere", Dr. Charles Kankelborg, Physics Dept., Montana State Univ., Candidate for Experimental Space Physics Faculty Position, Apr. 16.

"From the sun to the ionosphere-the interaction of the solar wind with the earth's magnetic field", Dr. Marc Lessard, Dartmouth College, Thayer School of Eng., Hanover, NH, Candidate for Experimental Space Physics Faculty Position, Apr. 19.

"A new Vogel-like Law: Toward an understanding of the Glass transition", Dr. Michael F. Shlesinger, Chief Scientist for Nonlinear Science Office of Naval Research, Apr. 27.

SEMINARS

Relativity, Astrophysics, Solar and Space Seminars
"Cooper Pair Emissivity from Isolated Neutron Stars", Marcus Teter, Mar. 29.

"Putting the SI into HESSI", Elizabeth Noonan, Apr. 5.

"Chromospheric evaporation in the gradual phase of flares", David Alexander (former member of MSU Solar Group), Lockheed Martin Solar and Astrophysics Lab, Palo Alto, CA, Apr. 11.

"Collisionless Magnetic Reconnection", Prof. Amitava Bhattacharjee, Dept. of Physics and Astronomy, Univ. of Iowa, Apr. 19.

"Anisotropy of Ultra High Energy Cosmic Rays", Malina Schindel and John Belz, Apr. 26.

Condensed Matter Physics
"Research Activities in the Surface Science Group at the Technical University - Ilmenau, Prof. J.A. Schaefer, Apr. 11.

"Growth of Palladium / Yttrium films and their characterization with Rutherford Backscattering and X-Ray Photoemission Spectroscopy", Gregor Neuert; Ilmenau, Technical University, Apr. 18.

PRESENTATIONS AND TALKS

Invited Talks
"Testing Neutron Star Thermal Evolution Theory with Observation", Sachiko Tsuruta, Symposium on New Century of X-Ray Astronomy, Yokohama, Japan, Mar. 5 - 9.

"MEROPE: Montana's First Satellite" Mike Obland, Montana Academy of Sciences meeting, MSU, Apr. 21.

"MEROPE: Montana's First Satellite" Mike Obland, Bozeman Lion's Club, Apr. 24.

Contributed Talks
"Unequal arm gravitational wave interferometers", Shane L. Larson, April APS meeting, Washington DC, April 28-May 1, 2001.

"Semiclassical perturbations of extreme black holes", William A. Hiscock, April APS meeting, Washington DC, April 28-May 1, 2001.

"LISA, binary stars, and the mass of the graviton", William A. Hiscock, Pacific Coast Gravity Meeting, Santa Barbara, CA, Mar. 11.

Abstracts
"Unequal arm gravitational wave interferometers", Shane L. Larson, William A. Hiscock, and Ronald W. Hellings, Bull. Am. Phys. Soc. Vol. 46, p. 86 (2001).

"Semiclassical perturbations of extreme black holes", William A. Hiscock, Paul R. Anderson, Brett E. Taylor, Bull. Am. Phys. Soc. Vol. 46, p. 159 (2001).

"A Reflight of the Explorer-1 Science Mission: The Montana Earth Orbiting Pico Explorer (MEROPE)" by, D. M. Klumpar, M. Obland, G. Hunyadi, S. Jepsen, B. Larsen, C. Kankelborg. and W. Hiscock, submitted to the spring meeting of the American Geophysical Union, May 29-June 1, 2001, Boston, MA.

PUBLICATIONS

Publications Submitted
"Chromospheric Damping of Alfven Waves", by B. De Pontieu, P.C.H. Martens, and H.S. Hudson 2001, Astrophys. J.

Publications Accepted

Publications
"Evidence for a Quasi-Two-Dimensional Proton Glass State in Cs5H3(SO4)4 ? xH2O Crystals, S.G. Lushnikov, S.N. Gvasaliya, A.I. Fedoseev, V.H. Schmidt, G.F. Tuthill,, L.A. Shuvalov, Phys. Rev. Lett. 86, No. 13, pp 2838-2841 (Mar. 2001)

PROPOSALS

Proposals Submitted
Chandra X-Ray Observatory Cycle 3 proposal on Spectral Studies of PSR 1823, Sachiko Tsuruta.

"Long Term Ralph Steckler Legacy", NASA, $ 1,000,000, PI: Richard Henry (Johns Hopkins); co-I's: Mitchell Colgan (College of Charleston), William Hiscock (MSU), G. Jeffrey Taylor (University of Hawaii), John Wefel (Louisiana State University), and Mike Wiskerschen (UCSD).

Proposals Funded

TRAVEL AND CONFERENCES

Bill Hiscock and Mike Murray traveled to Seattle to develop a six-state proposal to the NASA OSS Broker-Facilitator Program, Mar. 3-5.

Bill Hiscock and Laurie Howell went to the Space Grant Director's Council Meeting in Washington, DC, Mar. 21-24.

Bill Hiscock attended the Pacific Coast Gravity Meeting in Santa Barbara, CA, Mar. 8-12.

Bill Hiscock traveled to Utah State University, Logan, April 12-13, to act as external reviewer for the Physics Department there.

Bill Hiscock and Shane and Michelle Larson attended the April APS meeting in Washington, DC, April 28-May 1. Hiscock chaired the meeting's session on Quantum Gravity.

Bill Hiscock traveled to NASA Headquarters, April 23-25, to attend the final meeting of the LISA Mission Definition Team, and to meet with Space Grant and NASA EPSCoR program managers.

Dana Longcope attended a Beyond Solar-B workshop in Huntsville, AL, Apr. 3-5.

Larry Kirkpatrick was in Ankara, Turkey, to work on the examination questions for the International Physics Olympiad, Apr. 9-14.

Stephen Hill traveled to Gainesville, FL, for a meeting, Apr. 12-17.

Mike Murray, David Klumpar, Steve Kelly, Sean Kirn and Ryan Belohlavek traveled to a balloon launch in Rome, OR, Apr. 27 and 28.

Bill Hiscock attended the LISA definition team meeting, Apr. 23-25, in Washington, DC.

Robert Leamon, traveled to Boulder, CO, for SEC Space Weather Week, Apr. 28-May 4.

VISITORS NEWS

Dr. Jun Sato, currently an NRC postdoc at NASA GSFC, visited the solar group and presented a seminar on his work on solar hard x-ray flares. Sato will be joining the MSU solar group in June as a Research Scientist.

UPCOMING EVENTS