Bulletin of the American Physical Society
APS March Meeting 2016
Volume 61, Number 2
Monday–Friday, March 14–18, 2016; Baltimore, Maryland
Session L4: Physics for EveryoneInvited Undergraduate
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Sponsoring Units: DMP Chair: Daniel Dessau, University of Colorado, Boulder Room: Ballroom IV |
Wednesday, March 16, 2016 11:15AM - 11:51AM |
L4.00001: Is the Choice Bad Science or No Science? Invited Speaker: Rush Holt In our efforts to teach good scientists we leave everyone else with the impression that they cannot do science or appreciate it and should not even try. Should we be surprised when many in the public adopt unscientific beliefs? [Preview Abstract] |
Wednesday, March 16, 2016 11:51AM - 12:27PM |
L4.00002: Physics Behind Optical Fiber Communications: Technologies that Drive the Internet Capacity Growth Invited Speaker: Alan Willner Optical fiber communications forms the backbone for global communications, especially as it relates to the Internet. Indeed, the Internet as we know it today would not exist without optical communications. The data transmission capacity through an optical fiber has undergone an exponential growth increase for decades, progressing from Megabits/sec to now Petabits/sec in just the past 40 years. This growth came about due to many physics advances in the field of optical fiber communications, dating back to 1966 when Sir Charles Kao proposed the idea of a communication system based on low-loss optical glass fiber. This presentation will explore the past and present physics-based crucial innovations needed for this continuing story. Specific topics to be highlighted include: (a) ultra-pure fiber that decreased the attenuation losses through glass by many orders of magnitude, (b) single-frequency lasers that defined a specific data channel that could propagate with low signal distortion, (c) Erbium-doped fiber amplifiers that had high gain and low additive noise allowing for amplifier cascades and conquering enormous distances, (d) the simultaneous transmission of multiple wavelength-division-multiplexing data channels down the optical fiber, and (e) the tackling of various dispersive and nonlinear effects that are introduced by the optical fiber itself, cause the data to degrade, and necessitate some form of compensation or management. [Preview Abstract] |
Wednesday, March 16, 2016 12:27PM - 1:03PM |
L4.00003: Computational Social Science: Exciting Progress and Future Challenges Invited Speaker: Duncan Watts The past 15 years have witnessed a remarkable increase in both the scale and scope of social and behavioral data available to researchers, leading some to herald the emergence of a new field: “computational social science.” Against these exciting developments stands a stubborn fact: that in spite of many thousands of published papers, there has been surprisingly little progress on the “big” questions that motivated the field in the first place—questions concerning systemic risk in financial systems, problem solving in complex organizations, and the dynamics of epidemics or social movements, among others. In this talk I highlight some examples of research that would not have been possible just a handful of years ago and that illustrate the promise of CSS. At the same time, they illustrate its limitations. I then conclude with some thoughts on how CSS can bridge the gap between its current state and its potential. [Preview Abstract] |
Wednesday, March 16, 2016 1:03PM - 1:39PM |
L4.00004: Are There Two Forms of Liquid Water? Invited Speaker: H. E. Stanley We will introduce some of the 73 documented anomalies of the most complex of liquids, water—focusing on recent progress in understanding these anomalies by combining information provided by recent experiments and simulations on water in bulk, nanoconfined and biological environments designed to test the hypothesis that liquid water has behavior consistent with the novel phenomenon of “liquid polymorphism” in that water can exist in two distinct phases [1]. We will also discuss very recent work on nanoconfined water anomalies as well as the apparently related, and highly unusual, behavior of water in biological environments. Finally, we will discuss how the general concept of liquid polymorphism is proving useful in understanding anomalies in other liquids, such as silicon, silica, and carbon, as well as metallic glasses, which have in common that they are characterized by two characteristic length scales in their interactions.\\ \\This work has been supported by the NSF Chemistry Division grant CHE-1213217 and was performed in collaboration with, among others, C. A. Angell, S. V. Buldyrev, S.-H. Chen, D. Corradini, P. G. Debenedetti, G. Franzese, P. Kumar, E. Lascaris, F. Mallamace, O. Mishima, P. H. Poole, S. Sastry, F. Sciortino, and L. Xu.\\ \\ ~[1] H. E. Stanley, Editor, Liquid Polymorphism, Vol. 152 in Advances in Chemical Physics, S. A. Rice, Series Editor (Wiley, New York, 2013). [Preview Abstract] |
Wednesday, March 16, 2016 1:39PM - 2:15PM |
L4.00005: Nanoscience and Reminiscences of a Woman in Physics Invited Speaker: Mildred Dresselhaus My entry into carbon science and nanoscience at an early stage in my career occurred in part because I was a woman in physics. In these reminiscences I will relate why working on carbon science started because I was a woman interested in working on a topic that interested me greatly, but was unpopular at the time; carbon science and thermoelectricity are two examples. I will elaborate on how our research system allows safe study of unpopular topics so that both the researcher and research sponsor are satisfied with outcomes. I also learned a lot from my family and acknowledge their contributions as well as those of sponsors who supported high-risk projects. [Preview Abstract] |
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