Profs. Amanuel and Orzel Present at March Meeting

Assistant Professor Samuel Amanuel and Associate Professor Chad Orzel traveled to the 2010 March Meeting of the American Physical Society in Portland, OR. The March Meeting is the largest physics conference in the world, with over 7,500 papers presented over the course of the week.

Prof. Amanuel presented two papers on his research on phase transitions in confined materials: a talk titled “Melting and Freezing of Decanol inside Nanoporous Silica,” and a poster titled “First Order Phase Transition of Primary and Secondary Decanol Inside Nanoporous Silica.” Both papers were on research conducted in his laboratory at Union, with first-year students Amer Khraisat and Jargalsaikhan Dulmaa.

Prof. Orzel gave an invited talk titled “Lasers in the Undergraduate Laboratory: Precision Measurement for the Masses” as part of a special session organized for LaserFest, celebrating the 50th anniversary of the first working laser in 1960. (The idea of the laser had earlier been developed by several scientists, including Union Physics alumnus Gordon Gould ’41.) He discussed a number of laser experiments done in physics classes at Union, and how they illustrate techniques used in ultra-precise measurements.