Bulletin of the American Physical Society
Fall 2022 Meeting of the APS Eastern Great Lake Section and the Michigan Section of AAPT: Pushing Boundaries in Physics and Education
Volume 67, Number 16
Friday–Saturday, October 21–22, 2022; Lawrence Technological University, Southfield, Michigan
Session E01: Poster Session |
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Chair: Michael Crescimanno, Department of Physics, Youngstown State University Room: Lawrence Technological University Plex Atrium |
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E01.00001: Exploring research design that captures and implements Revolutionary Love to best realize the STEM Transfer student experience. Camila Monsalve, Vashti Sawtelle This exploration focuses on the challenges STEM transfer students experience when transitioning from a two-year institution to a four year institution. Particularly, this research focuses on the social justice theory Revolutionary Love Compass in order to first, analyze student experiences with that lense and second, assist them with their transition. In this poster, we discuss current methodologies that focus on experiences with an appreciative stance (e.g Yosso, Cosby, Gutierrez, and Battychardya), concentrating on their possible applications towards STEM transfer student success. Finally, we explore how Valarie Kaur's Revolutionary Love Compass can shed light on the difficulties STEM student transfers face and how they overcome them when moving from a two-year institution to a four-year institution. |
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E01.00002: A Mixed Methods Approach Towards Defining A Student's Ranges of Self-Efficacy Carissa Myers, Vashti Sawtelle, Rachel J Henderson Traditionally, self-efficacy (SE), or the confidence in one's capability to execute a task, is measured using pre/post-surveys to demonstrate shifts in students' SE. In this work, we present a preliminary analysis of a single student drawing on a mixed methods approach to examine how their SE fluctuates over time. This novel design employs the Experience Sampling Method, a quantitative technique using surveys of domain-specific self-efficacy, and daily reflections, a qualitative technique investigating threats and supports towards students' SE. The preliminary analysis was broken into two strands: (1) using interquartile range (IQR) to define low, normal, and high SE for a student based on their survey scores, and (2) using the student's daily journal reflection responses as proof of concept for defining the student's SE as low, normal, or high from the IQR analysis of survey responses. Findings indicate the boundaries of a student's IQR can define high, normal, and low SE and the student's responses to the daily journal prompts corroborates these definitions. |
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E01.00003: Effects of repeated testing of challenging mathematical problems on students' learning Nenad Stojilovic Frequent testing can enhance memory, but little is known about the effect of repeated testing on learning physics and enhancing undergraduate students’ problem-solving skills. The effects of repeated testing of challenging mathematical problems involving free fall and perfectly elastic collisions are investigated and discussed. The comparison is made with students’ learning less challenging mathematical derivations and definitions. |
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E01.00004: Operationalizing Academic Integration for Post-Transfer Students: Discussing Quantitative Factors Alyssa C Waterson, Rachel J Henderson Research discussing the historic Tinto's Model of Retention has pushed "integration" as a key component to students' will to stay in or leave higher education. Though previous research has attempted to define factors that comprise "integration" for many student populations, it has been difficult to assess or come to an agreement upon what these factors may be for transfer students. Generally, transfer students encounter "integration" through the financial, academic, and social implications of becoming a student at their new four-year institution. This dialogue intends to identify aspects of academic integration that have been analyzed in existing educational retention models to then ask ourselves if they are appropriate for a transfer student population. Through this lens, we will discuss possible variables used to describe academic integration for post-transfer students, in which we consider the factors that may be found in registrar data and used in quantitative modeling to predict student retention. |
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E01.00005: Analyzing the Effect of Agitators on Dusty Plasma Multi-Rings William L Theisen, Jacob T Cowan Dusty plasma multi-rings were created using a grooved electrode to generate a confining potential well. The melamine formaldehyde dust particles moved through the various sections of the multi-rings at differing speeds. In most circumstances there were several highly energetic particles designated as agitators. These agitators are dust particles that reside in a plane that is just above the dusty plasma multi-ring. The agitator repetitively jumps from in plane to out of plane transferring energy to the dusty plasma multi-ring system. Using the data gathered, the angular velocity of dust particles in the multi-rings containing agitators were found within each ring then compared to data found on multi-rings without an agitator inside the system. |
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E01.00006: Key Concepts of Quantum Computing: An Overview Jaela H Allen, Imran M Mirza The rules of the quantum world are fundamentally different than the way we see the operation of the classical world. The utilization of the rules of quantum information in computation opens the door for quantum computing, but also information processing. Before we decide to declare quantum computers as the next step, it is important to review the main concepts such as the differences between classical and quantum computers. In this poster discussion, I will be presenting some of the key concepts in quantum computing that I have learned in my freshmen year of college. More specifically, I will be discussing qubits, quantum gates and circuits, which make use of superposition and entanglement. As possible applications of quantum circuits, I will briefly highlight quantum algorithms, quantum cryptography, and quantum teleportation. [1] Equipped with this background knowledge, in the future I am interested in studying questions related to applying quantum information to problems in astrophysics. |
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E01.00007: Modeling the dark sector with multi-field ultra-light scalars John P Dumancic Evidence suggests the existence of a dark sector of dark matter and dark energy that together make up much of the energy density of the Universe. The standard assumptions of modeling dark energy with a cosmological constant Λ and dark matter with weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) work well in many circumstances, but these models have their own difficulties: there is yet no experimental evidence for the existence of WIMPs, and the usual cosmological model under these assumptions (ΛCDM) has some serious discrepancies with observation, such as the Hubble and σ8 tensions. In light of these issues, it is prudent to consider other possibilities. In our analyses, we model the dark sector as a collection of (coupled) ultra-light scalar fields, first considering the mechanism that generates the requisite behavior and then showing how applications of these models can help alleviate the aforementioned tensions. One of these models principally analyzes the dark energy sector with two fields under a specific potential: it mimics a cosmological constant remarkably well on the classical level. The second of these models considers multiple coupled axion fields. Axions act as dark energy early on in cosmic time before transitioning to behavior as dark matter: this model considers situations where some fields have already transitioned while others have not, accounting for the entire dark sector. We argue that the use of these axion fields can be used to simultaneously alleviate both tensions while remaining consistent with observational data. |
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E01.00008: Molecular dynamics study of MEIG1 interactions with PACRG Timothy A Hasse, Yu-ming Mindy Huang, Zhibing Zhang Interactions between the meiosis expressed gene 1 (MEIG1) and Parkin co-regulated gene (PACRG) protein are critical in the formation of mature sperm cells. Targeting either MEIG1 or PACRG protein could be a contraceptive strategy. The W50A and Y68A mutations on MEIG1 are known to interrupt the MEIG1-PACRG interactions resulting in defective sperm cells. However, the details about how the mutants disrupt the protein-protein binding are not clear. In this study, we reveal insights on MEIG1 and PACRG protein dynamics by applying Gaussian accelerated molecular dynamics (GaMD) simulations and post-GaMD analysis. Our results show that the mutations destabilize the protein-protein interfacial interaction. The effect of the Y68A mutation is more significant than W50A as Y68 forms stronger polar interactions with PACRG. Because both human and mouse models demonstrate similar dynamic properties, the findings from mouse proteins can be applied to the human system. Moreover, we report a potential ligand binding pocket on the MEIG1 and PACRG interaction surface that could be a target for future drug design to inhibit the MEIG1-PACRG interaction. Our work provides a fundamental understanding of MEIG1 and PACRG protein dynamics, paving the way for drug discovery in male-based contraception. |
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E01.00009: A z-axis tunneling microscope for undergraduate labs Noah Fuerst, Douglas Knapp, Wesley Kozan, Randy Lindgren, Joshua P Veazey We describe the development of an advanced laboratory apparatus inspired by the scanning tunneling microscope (STM) but simplified to one dimension: the z-axis tunneling microscope (ZTM). This device allows undergraduate experimentation on electron quantum tunneling and electronic density of states. Student data from an advanced lab course show qualitative differences in density of states between metals, semimetals, and semiconductors. Students also observe that the tunneling current is exponentially dependent on the tip-sample separation. The ZTM is a simple device providing access to condensed matter physics in the undergraduate lab curriculum. |
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E01.00010: Avalanche Occurrence on a Conical Bead Pile With Cohesion Eric B Johnson, Susan Y Lehman A conical bead pile subject to slow driving is used as a model critical system to experimentally investigate variations in avalanche size and time between events. The pile is composed of roughly 20 000 steel spheres, 3 mm in diameter, atop a circular base. We add one bead at a time to the apex of the pile; avalanches are measured through changes in pile mass. We investigate the dynamic response of the pile by recording avalanches off the pile over the course of tens of thousands of bead drops. At low cohesion, the statistical properties of the avalanches, including probability of particular avalanche sizes, are well-characterized by universal power laws and scaling functions. As cohesion increases, we observe a deviation from the power law behavior. At both high and low cohesion, the experimental results match well with a mean-field model of slip avalanches [Dahmen et al., Nat Phys 7, 554 (2011)], as we have shown in detail in our recent work in Granular Matter [Lehman et al., Gran Matt 24:35 (2022)]. We report here some improvements for the experimental apparatus and discuss new techniques to analyze the time between avalanche events. |
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E01.00011: An Investigation of the Effects of Gadolinium Doping on the Specific Absorption Rate of Fe3O4 nanoparticles Ronald J Tackett, Abigail Wolf The use of colloidal suspensions of magnetic nanoparticles, or ferrofluids, in the hyperthermia treatment of cancer has gained considerable attention in medical and scientific communities. In this study, Fe3-xGdxO4 (x=0 and x=0.5) nanoparticles were synthesized using a wet-chemical coprecipitation technique. The crystal structure and chemical content of the as-prepared samples were verified using x-ray diffraction (XRD) and energy-dispersive spectroscopy (EDS). Subsequently, the nanoparticles were coated with a surfactant (dextran) and suspended in deionized, unfiltered water to create a ferrofluid. The specific absorption rates (SAR) of the two samples were measured using an induction heating setup, and the gadolinium-doped (x=0.5) sample was found to have the higher SAR. |
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E01.00012: Advancing the Optical Data Storage Systems using Fluorescent Materials Anuj Saini Over past decade the total amount of data produced per year increased from 0.9 zettabytes (ZB) to 20 ZB. It has been predicted that this will rise to a staggering 175 ZB by 2025 because of massive amount of data being generated by internet of things, mobile technology, artificial intelligence, and social media. Currently, there is a huge demand for replacing data storage materials involving magnetic materials to be replaced by optical data storage, which provide lower energy consumption, higher capacity, along with longer lifetimes. It is not possible to store large amounts of data generated onto traditional optical and electronic data storage media (tapes and USB flash drives). Polymeric optical data storage (ODS) medium has been combined with the microscopy technologies to provide advantages in cost, performance, and durability. However, there has been a fundamental limitation imposed by far-field diffraction physics that creates a restriction on the current state-of-the-art in ODS systems. There are also limitations imposed by the amount of laser power required to write in such a media. Here, I present a couple of projects that will change the face of the ODS systems by solving these problems using techniques from single molecule microscopy and nanoparticles. |
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E01.00013: Experimentally Determining the Young's Modulus for Compression of Swellable Organically Modified Silica John P Schmidt, Paul Bonvallet To build on previous work regarding the Young's modulus of expansion of Swellable Organically Modified Silica (SOMS), we generated stress-strain curves for the compression of swollen SOMS within a fixed cross-sectional area. This data was used to calculate the Young's modulus of compression of swollen Cyclasorb, which was found to be (0.964±0.032) MPa, which deviates by 20.5% from previous research's calculation of the Young's modulus of expansion for swollen Cyclasorb, which is 0.8 MPa. Our methods are currently being employed in variable-temperature experiments for insight on the thermodynamics of swelling. These results will improve the application of SOMS in environmental remediation. |
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E01.00014: Synthesis and characterizations of Zinc Oxide nanoparticles Khagendra P Bhandari, Quenton Stillion Zinc oxide (ZnO) nanoparticles have shown great potentials because of their versatile and promising applications in different fields including solar cells. Various methods of synthesizing ZnO materials have been reported. In this work, controlled synthesis of ZnO nanoparticles were achieved via a simple, cost-effective, and a facile synthetic method. The synthetized ZnO nanoparticles were characterized by UV/Visual Spectrophotometer, X-ray Diffraction (XRD) and Scanning Electron Microscopic (SEM) measurements. Using transmittance spectra and film thickness of ZnO, the optical band gap energies were calculated. For as-synthesized and annealed ZnO films, the band gap energies were found to be 3.26 eV and 3.40 eV respectively. Nature of the optical transition identifies that the material is direct band gap semiconductor. Similarly, XRD and SEM data reveal that the material is pure, and crystalline in nature. |
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E01.00015: Imaging of Calcium chloride drug dissolution by single molecule microscopy Achintya Sunil The most common mode of drug delivery - Oral administration, brings with it an uncertainty in the variation of bioavailability of the drug. This is a common problem faced by the pharmaceutical industry. Current in-vivo models for drug dissolution are based on the phenomenological Whitney-Noyes equation. They generate inconsistent results because they ignore the heterogeneities of dissolution at the molecular level, among other reasons. This research aims to unveil heterogeneities of dissolution at the molecular level. Total internal reflection fluorescence microscopy (TIRF) is used to image the dissolution of CaCl2 (active pharmaceutical ingredient or API) in water at the single molecule level. The change in "turn-on" events as agarose-CaCl2 composite film dissolves in aqueous Rhod-2 solution is observed over time. The size of these events with respect to the entire image frame is also computed. These techniques allow for detecting changes in the concentration of aqueous Ca2+ during the dissolution process, and to quantify the heterogeneities respectively. This proof-of-principle single molecule detection method will be used to develop a pharmacokinetic model for molecular drug dissolution. |
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E01.00016: One and two-photon Fock state master equations for open quantum optical systems Logan K Patrick, Umar Arshad, Imran M Mirza, Dingyu Guo
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E01.00017: Circuit Chirp Asymmetry Joseph Gorkos The Sakharov conditions for leptogenesis (which led to the matter excess) in the early universe are succinctly satisfied in chirped systems in which a discrete symmetry is broken. There the process breaking the discrete symmetry is the analogue of CP violation, and the chirp speed is the analogue of the universe's cooling/expansion rate. In this circuit analog "matter" is represented by the circuit's excitation during an up-chirp and "anti-matter" by the response during a (true time reversed) down-chirp. We demonstrate this in theory and experiment with a two-pole resonant circuit with tunable effective CP-violation. We characterize its electrical response to frequency chirps, and at fixed effective CP violation show that the excitation asymmetry is proportional to the chirps speed (at low chirp speeds). The tuning of the effective CP violation at fixed chirp speed displays a crossover from futures that are "matter" dominated to those dominated by "antimatter". This study helps clarify the causes of asymmetries found in multiphoton rapid adiabatic passage (CAP, STIRAP) and enantomeric ripening. |
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E01.00018: A Two-Photon Investigation of Nonlinear Sample Properties Olivia R Green, Cody C Leary We modeled the Hong-Ou-Mandel effect for a two-photon state modified by a nonlinear sample interaction and studied how the interaction with a sample material affected the output coincidence signal. We found expressions for coincidence detections as a function of time delay between Hong-Ou-Mandel input paths. We find that frequency-independent phase shifts between interferometer arms have no effect on the coincidence signal, while frequency-dependent time delays do. |
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E01.00019: Measuring the phase accumulation of a changing polarization state of light amanuel jissa, Cody C Leary We study a nonlinear geometric phase shift that arises when the po- |
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E01.00020: A Low-Cost Spectrometer Design for Enhancing Atomic Spectra Analysis in the Modern Physics Laboratory Brendon M Kaniecki, Jonathan R Skuza Spectroscopy has become an important tool of modern-day sciences due to its wide-reaching applications. This importance has made higher precision more desired with spectrometers; this high precision often comes with a high price as well. Within the modern physics laboratory, analyzing atomic spectra from emission tubes is one of the best ways to calibrate a spectrometer as the known spectral lines allow for correct scaling. I designed a budget friendly spectrometer and implemented a respective procedure to enhance the accuracy of the "Atomic Spectra" experiment for the modern physics laboratory (PHY 372) at EMU. In calibrating the new spectrometer, we noticed that the mercury emission tube had some anomalies that we plan to investigate. We used the new spectrometer to compare a new mercury emission tube to our current one in addition to analyzing the emission spectra of hydrogen, helium, neon, argon, and krypton. The spectrometer images were digitized using the free program ImageJ and analyzed using the RGB color channels as a filter. Overall, the current spectrometer has resolving power of around 0.50 nm/pixel with a 5-megapixel webcam. Possible improvements to image quality as well as data processing and characteristic fitting are considered as well. |
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E01.00021: Black Hole As A Diverging Lens Reinali Calisin, Dr. Scott Schneider The goal of this research is to determine if one is able to see the back of their head when looking through a telescope facing sideways to a Schwarzschild black hole. Compared to the amount of knowledge that has been accumulated over hundreds of thousands of years regarding celestial bodies, there is still little-known information about black holes. The scientific community will greatly benefit from the study of the behaviour of light around black holes. Specific concepts and equations are utilized to complete photon trajectory simulations in Python using the fourth-order Runge Kutta (RK4) method. Using the concept of tracing rays back to the image points in the case of a plane mirror, we are able to find where each light ray converges back to a point. Our results lead us to conclude that the black hole acts on the light rays as a diverging lens. This research serves multiple purposes, including developing a greater understanding of how light behaves in the vicinity of a black hole, gaining more coding experience in Python, as well as satisfying pure curiosity. |
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E01.00022: Lagrange Points: Asteroids and SOHO Alec Ferensic Lagrange points are gravitational locations in a two body orbital system (like Sun and Earth, Earth and Moon, etc.) where small objects can semi-stably orbit. There are five Lagrange points in any one of these systems. L1, L2, and L3 are located in the line containing the two major bodies. L4 and L5 are located 60 degrees ahead and 60 degrees behind (respectively) in the smaller major body's orbit. Trojan asteroids such as Earth's own 2020-XL5 was analyzed in an attempt to investigate it’s long-term orbital behavior. We wanted to answer two questions. Why did it switch from L4 to L5? And, why do trojan asteroids prefer a particular Lagrange point over the other? In the interest of time, we altered the scope of the project to focus on SOHO, a solar observatory orbiting L1 (a Lagrange point requiring orbit adjustments). We then investigated its motion and the station keeping maneuvers required to keep it in orbit. |
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E01.00023: Countertops and Citizen Science for Macroscopic Dark Matter Daniel Kessler, Glenn d Starkman, Jagjit S Sidhu, Ralph Harvey, Emily Safron It is possible that dark matter interacts strongly with baryons, so long as the dark matter's constituents are sufficiently dense and massive that these interactions occur too rarely to produce a prominent signal. We propose a scheme to detect such 'macroscopic dark matter' (macros) using the largest medium directly available to us: the Earth. Were a macro to collide with granite in the Earth's crust, it would vaporize the rock—which would then quickly cool—leaving behind a tube of solidified obsidian, such that any slab excavated along the macro's trajectory would have a distinguishable ellipse on one surface, with a matching one on the opposite. Using the tools of citizen science, we and volunteers from the scientifically inclined public will visually inspect granite countertops for these ellipses, hoping to find definitive proof of dark matter, all while broadening physics research education and constraining the macro parameter space. |
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E01.00024: Accurate Calculation of the Volume and Density of the Big Bang Gh. Saleh Considering that the smallest, fastest, and lightest object in the universe is photon and the universe mass is about1053 kg, if we consider the photon as the basis of the Big Bang, the volume and density are far different from the information that obtained for the Big Bang before. In other words, the photon is not the desired particle that could have formed the Big Bang sphere. |
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