Bulletin of the American Physical Society
9th Annual Meeting of the Northwest Section of the APS
Volume 52, Number 6
Thursday–Saturday, May 17–19, 2007; Pocatello, Idaho
Session D1: Plenary Session II |
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Chair: E.M Henley, University of Washington Room: PSUB Salmon River Room |
Saturday, May 19, 2007 9:00AM - 9:36AM |
D1.00001: The Sudbury Neutrino Observatory: Past, Present and Future Invited Speaker: The Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO) is a 1000-tonne heavy-water Cherenkov detector situated 2 km underground in INCO's Creighton mine near Sudbury, Ontario, Canada. The third phase of operation finished in November 2006, completing the physics program for the experiment. Results from the first two phases will be summarized and details of the third phase which employs an array of low-radioactivity proportional counters will be discussed in addition to topics relating to detector decommissioning. \\ The laboratory that currently houses the SNO experiment is undergoing an expansion to become SNOLAB, an international facility that is in an advanced stage of construction and will soon provide twice the space available for deep underground experiments over the existing SNO installation. SNOLAB will host the next generation particle-astrophysics experiments in pursuit of low-energy solar neutrinos, neutrinoless double beta decay, cosmological dark matter and supernova neutrinos. \\ One such experiment is the successor to SNO called SNO+, which is proposing to use liquid scintillator in place of heavy water to study low-energy {\it pep} and CNO solar neutrinos and potentially geo-neutrinos originating from radioactivity in the Earth. A second phase of the experiment would allow sensitivity to neutrinoless double beta decay by adding $^{150}$Nd to the liquid scintillator target volume. Aspects of SNOLAB and SNO+ will also be presented. [Preview Abstract] |
Saturday, May 19, 2007 9:36AM - 10:12AM |
D1.00002: Controlling Light at the Nanoscale Invited Speaker: The ability to confine and process optical radiation at deep subwavelength scale will fundamentally improve a number of applications including high-resolution sensing, imaging, lithography, and signal processing. We explore the perspectives offered by nanoplasmonic metamaterials for manipulation of optical signals at the nanoscale. We first show that in contrast to conventional dielectric waveguides, plasmonic and anisotropy-based systems support confined optical modes even when the waveguide size is much smaller than the operating wavelength. The effective modal index in these nano-thick structures is inversely proportional to the waveguide size, and can be either positive or negative, providing a versatile mechanism for manipulating the phase velocity at the nanoscale. We next demonstrate that in contrast to diffraction-limited systems, in nano-scale systems the combined effect of waveguide- and material-induced dispersions provides new versatile controls for pulse manipulation. In particular we demonstrate that the group velocity in such waveguides can be changed from negative to large or small (in comparison with $c)$ positive values by a relatively weak modulation of either material properties or waveguide dimensions or both. We finally explore the prospects of active plasmonic metamaterial in provide a unique platform for \textit{independent manipulation of group and phase} velocities of electromagnetic radiation in sub-wavelength domain. [Preview Abstract] |
Saturday, May 19, 2007 10:12AM - 10:34AM |
D1.00003: Coffee Break
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Saturday, May 19, 2007 10:34AM - 11:10AM |
D1.00004: Good defect, bad defect: electronic properties of CuGaSe$_{2}$ solar cells Invited Speaker: The Cu(In,Ga)Se$_{2}$ (CIGS) alloys are promising materials for the absorber layer in solar cell devices. Single junction devices using CIGS absorbers have achieved 19.5{\%} efficiencies. This is remarkable for a device with a thin film, non-crystalline absorber, and for this reason the CIGS electronic properties and especially the nature of defects and grain boundaries are of interest. In this talk, I will discuss several types of electronic defects in CIGS films: those that are beneficial---including defects that allow the material to be intrinsically doped; those that are neutral---apparently grain boundaries fall in this category; and those that may act negatively as traps and recombination centers, limiting device efficiencies. The higher Ga alloys have larger bandgaps, necessary for a multilayer tandem solar cell device. However, solar cells made from higher bandgap CIGS tend to perform more poorly than expected from studies of their low bandgap counterparts. We have studied a series of CuGaSe$_{2}$ solar cell devices, using techniques based on the measurement of capacitance including admittance spectroscopy and drive-level capacitance profiling, as well as current-voltage measurements as a function of temperature and illumination intensity. These studies allow us to better understand the limitations to device performance, and the population of sub-bandgap traps that are present in the CGS film. Our studies suggest that the p-n interface is particularly problematic in these devices. [Preview Abstract] |
Saturday, May 19, 2007 11:10AM - 11:46AM |
D1.00005: Deep Science: The Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory Invited Speaker: |
Saturday, May 19, 2007 11:46AM - 12:22PM |
D1.00006: Quantum Entanglement of Matter and Light Invited Speaker: A peculiar phenomenon called the entanglement is responsible for those features of quantum mechanics which Albert Einstein called ``the spooky action at a distance.'' Indeed, quantum systems in an entangled state seem to violate either the locality, or physical reality, or even both. Local measurements performed on one part of an entangled system \textit{instantly} influence the outcome of local measurements on the other part. I will describe experiments in which quantum states of matter (in the form of trapped atomic ions) and light (in the form of single photons) are entangled. The matter-light system offers many advantages for fundamental studies of quantum mechanics, as well as applications in quantum computation and quantum information. [Preview Abstract] |
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