Bulletin of the American Physical Society
Annual Meeting of the APS Four Corners Section
Volume 60, Number 11
Friday–Saturday, October 16–17, 2015; Tempe, Arizona
Session H1: Plenary II |
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Chair: Richard Sonnenfeld, New Mexico Tech Room: Murdock Hall 101 |
Saturday, October 17, 2015 9:00AM - 9:48AM |
H1.00001: Illuminating My Career -- From Flash Gordon to Laser Surgery Invited Speaker: James Wynne As a child, I was fascinated by television programs about Flash Gordon. His partner in conquering the universe was Dr. Alexis Zarkov, a physicist, who had invented, among other things, a death ray gun. My personal ``death ray''was a magnifying glass, focusing sunlight on unsuspecting insects, like crawling ants. So I understood something about the power of sunlight. In my senior year of high school, I had a fabulous physics teacher, Lewis E. Love, and I knew after one week that I wanted to be a physicist. It turns out that the first laser functioned on May 16, 1960, just one month before I graduated from high school, and it was inevitable that I would pursue a career working with lasers. My first job as a physicist, during the summer of 1963, was working with lasers at TRG, Inc. a small company whose guru was Gordon Gould, now recognized as the inventor of the laser. After three summers at TRG, I spent three years working on nonlinear optics for my PhD thesis, under the guidance of Prof. Nicolaas Bloembergen, who later won the Nobel Prize in Physics for codifying nonlinear optics. Following completion of my PhD research in 1969, I joined IBM Research, where I have worked ever since. Upon joining the Quantum Electronics group in the Physical Sciences Dept. of the T.J. Watson Research Center, my management told me to ``do something great'' with lasers. After working on atomic spectroscopy with dye lasers through the 1970s, I had the inspiration to acquire an excimer laser for the Laser Physics and Chemistry group. Using this laser, my colleagues and I discovered excimer laser surgery, capable of removing human and animal tissue with great precision, while leaving the underlying and adjacent tissue free of collateral damage. This discovery laid the foundation for the laser refractive surgical procedures of PRK and LASIK, which have been used to improve the visual acuity of nearly 30 million people. Today, I am working on validating my concept that the argon fluoride excimer laser can serve as a ``smart scalpel,'' capable of debriding necrotic lesions of the skin without damaging the underlying and adjacent viable tissue, leading to faster healing, reduced pain, reduced probability of infection, and minimal scarring. To quote Louis Pasteur, ``Chance favors the prepared mind!'' [Preview Abstract] |
Saturday, October 17, 2015 9:48AM - 10:36AM |
H1.00002: Dawn at Vesta and Ceres Invited Speaker: Mark Sykes The NASA Dawn Discovery mission was designed to study two of the largest objects in the asteroid belt that formed on opposite sides of the snow line, Vesta and Ceres. Vesta formed dry and is covered with bright basaltic material, some of which has made it to the Earth in the form of HED meteorites. From these meteorites we knew in advance that Vesta was differentiated early in its history, forming a metallic core. Before Dawn arrived we were expecting to find evidence of volcanism on its surface. After a year in orbit, nothing conclusive was found. We did find an extensively battered surface with much mass wasting, and evidence for two large basin impacts covering the South pole, Rheasilvia and Venenia. The Venenia impactor appears to have been a large carbonaceous object which contaminated an entire hemisphere of Vesta and buried over time by ejecta from other collisions. This may be the source of the dark material excavated by impacts and seen in crater walls. There are also mysterious depressions on the floors of some large craters that suggest devolatilization in a surface that is not supposed to have any volatiles. In December 2014, Dawn arrived at the dwarf planet Ceres. Ceres formed "wet," with much ice and much dark carbonaceous material (which covers its surface). Thermal models suggest that Ceres also differentiated, but with a rocky core surrounded by an ice-rich mantle. A liquid water ocean is also expected to have formed, with the question of whether it could have persisted over the age of the solar system. Herschel Space Telescope made exciting observations of water vapor emission at two longitudes as Ceres approached its perihelion. One of these longitudes has been found to correlate with that of a "great white spot" complex, which may be cryovolcanic in origin, possibly connected to a deep interior reservoir of water or arisen from impact-driven hydrothermal activity. In some ways a negative of Vesta, Ceres has numerous other small white spots over areas of its surface, primarily associated with craters, but qualitatively different than the "great white spot." Ceres also sports a mountain, the "pyramid," which bears striking resemblance to the newly discovered mountains on Pluto. Could similar processes be in operation on these greatly separated planetary bodies? [Preview Abstract] |
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