Bulletin of the American Physical Society
Joint Fall 2013 Meeting of the Texas Sections of the APS, AAPT, and Zone 13 of the SPS
Volume 58, Number 10
Thursday–Saturday, October 10–12, 2013; Brownsville, Texas
Session B1: Physics Education Research, Outreach, Education and Student Research, AAPT, SPS/Undergraduate Research |
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Chair: Harry Swinney, University of Texas at Austin Room: UBCB 2.204 |
Friday, October 11, 2013 10:30AM - 10:42AM |
B1.00001: A Correction to a Well-Known Experiment Procedure in Physics, Electricity and Magnetism Labs Javad R. Gatabi, Hanu Arava, Zahra R. Gatabi The ``Equipotential Surfaces and Electric Fields'' is a well-known experiment in most Physics, electricity and magnetism labs. This experiment provides a clear understanding of equipotential surfaces around charged electrodes in a conducting solution. In many universities, the salt and water solution is used as the conducting solution and a DC power supply is used as the excitation voltage. Our study demonstrates that the application of the DC power source causes problems in final experiment's result due to water electrolysis, double-layer capacitance, Ohmic resistance and electrolytic saturation effects. This results in the potential variation in the water during the time, causing a time dependent measurement. Our study shows that the students plotted equipotential curves bend and deviate from the desired form and it makes them confused. The study proposes a developed setup for the experiment using a proper AC excitation signal with appropriate frequency and amplitude ranges. The result with this AC experiment setup is much closer to theoretically expected curves compared to the experiment with DC supply. [Preview Abstract] |
Friday, October 11, 2013 10:42AM - 10:54AM |
B1.00002: Sound Representation of Physical Phenomena Dwight Russell Using Mathematica as a platform for generating sounds, physical systems can be represented by sound. These sounds are audio equivalents to visual graphs. Examples will include the hydrogen atom, Nyquist theorem, 1-D Brillouin zones and the difference in phenomena requiring discrete frequencies and those requiring broadband representation. [Preview Abstract] |
Friday, October 11, 2013 10:54AM - 11:06AM |
B1.00003: Astronomy Awareness and Personalization Wahltyn Rattray For the amateur astronomer or simple astronomy enthusiast, I aim to establish a solid base of technical knowledge and skills when conducting observational astronomy using telescopes. The spectrum of these knowledge and skills ranges from setting up the telescope to knowing what objects are in the sky and where they are in the sky, ultimately making a personalized photo album of the objects they are looking at. I wish to guide a new astronomer through this and equip that person with a manufactured attachment piece that connects a standard telescope eyepiece with a personal device such as a camera phone, with the prospect of taking images of a few of the first fifty Messier objects, and creating a personal album containing these objects. The end goal is to standardize the astronomy experience and make it an enjoyable learning project carried out from the youngest of astronomers to the more senior, allowing virtually any astronomer to learn and have a desire to keep questioning their environment for the betterment of themselves and science. [Preview Abstract] |
Friday, October 11, 2013 11:06AM - 11:18AM |
B1.00004: Celebrating Einstein Joey Shapiro Key, Nicolas Yunes, Neil Cornish Celebrating Einstein is a series of public art and multimedia events developed by the Gravity Group at Montana State University and now in partnership with the Center for Gravitational Wave Astronomy at UT Brownsville. Celebrating Einstein is a truly interdisciplinary effort including art, film, dance, music, physics, history, and education. Scripts, scores, animations, and films have been commissioned and produced for a Black (W)hole immersive art installation, A Shout Across Time original film and symphony score, a danced lecture on gravitational wave astronomy, and K-12 classroom lessons. The Celebrating Einstein products are available to any party interested in hosting gravitational wave education and outreach events. A full report and analysis of Celebrating Einstein audience learning gains will be presented. [Preview Abstract] |
Friday, October 11, 2013 11:18AM - 11:30AM |
B1.00005: Are Thirty Homework Problems Enough? Lionel Hewett Homework is an essential part of learning physics. But if the homework is not graded, the students will not learn. And no one has the time to grade in detail the necessary homework assignments for a class of some 75 students. Therefore, this author has continually been trying to find an effective homework method that does not require extensive grading time. His latest evolving iteration consists of requiring students to turn in 30 appropriate physics homework problems using a specified writing format for every one-hour lecture class. The type of problems, the required format, the amount of grading time, and a preliminary analysis of the effectiveness of this learning process are all discussed in this presentation. [Preview Abstract] |
Friday, October 11, 2013 11:30AM - 11:42AM |
B1.00006: Instrumentation and Implementation of High Temperature Electrical Contact Resistivity Jose Puente High Temperature Electrical Contact resistivity is a method by which current is applied to a thermocouple sample, and a tungsten probe is dragged across the sample to measure resistance variations across it. This method is very destructive, and often results on damaging the sample. Dragging a probe across a thermocouple sample under high temperature, and pressure creates micro cracks in the material that compromises the structure integrity of the sample. Using this method it is difficult to accurately estimate the material distribution over the sample due to the low resolution of the system. A more accurate, and nondestructive method needs to be develop to improve the efficiency of the testing method. We will achieve a higher resolution by adding a servo motor that can accurately probe the sample using an up, and down motion. The probe will be lifted, and move horizontally every ten microns to avoid dragging, and to increase the resolution of the testing. We will develop and automate the new testing using mechanical fixtures, high resolution servo motors, and LabVIEW software. [Preview Abstract] |
Friday, October 11, 2013 11:42AM - 11:54AM |
B1.00007: Constructing a Magneto-Optical Trap for an Atomic Interferometer Dallas Akins, Dennis Ugolini Recent observations have revealed that the Universe is expanding at an accelerating rate! The source of this acceleration has been dubbed ``dark energy.'' If there are different densities of dark energy within the universe we can detect them using an atomic interferometer. The first stage of developing an atomic interferometer is constructing a magneto-optical trap (MOT) to capture atoms. The MOT consists of four key components: a source of cesium atoms, two coil magnets that position the atoms, two lasers that suppress atomic motions, and a vacuum system to house it all. In this talk I will describe the construction of the coil magnets and tunable lasers for our cesium atom MOT. The magnetic field is generated by two 150-turn coils with opposite currents. The laser diode emits a range of frequencies, but the atoms require a specific frequency for trapping. A diffraction grating is used to pick off a single frequency based on the grating's angle from and distance to the laser diode. This distance is adjusted with a piezoelectric transducer (PZT) on which the grating is mounted. With these elements and the vacuum system complete, all that remains is to find a practical cesium source and finish the optical layout. [Preview Abstract] |
Friday, October 11, 2013 11:54AM - 12:06PM |
B1.00008: Development of Room Temperature Detectors for Neutron Tagging Caitlin Campbell, William Baker The Cryogenic Dark Matter Search (CDMS) uses silicon and germanium detectors in the search for Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMP), a candidate for dark matter. Although these detectors are heavily protected with lead and polyethylene, high energy neutrons may penetrate through the shielding and cause nuclear recoils on the detector that may be mistaken for a WIMP. The purpose of this project was to create a detector that shields as well as tags incoming neutrons to measure the background neutron noise. In the design a polyethylene cylinder slows fast neutrons to thermal that are captured by either a gadolinium or boron source, both of which have high thermal neutron cross sections. Boron neutron capture has decay products of gammas and alphas while gadolinium releases only gammas. A plastic scintillator converts the resulting gammas into visible light to be readout by an avalanche photodiode. Each signal read out by the electronic circuit corresponds to gammas released from a neutron capture. Because outside gammas and gammas decay products are indistinguishable in this project, detection of neutrons will not be absolute until the system is tested inside a lead casing in which outside gammas will be shielded. [Preview Abstract] |
Friday, October 11, 2013 12:06PM - 12:18PM |
B1.00009: Long Baseline Neutrino Experiment simulation studies on Offset of Detector and Proton Beam Amit Bashyal, Jaehoon Yu, Seongtae Park, Timothy Watson, Yvonne Ying Wung Ng The Long Baseline Neutrino Experiment(LBNE), hosted by Fermilab is a world class physics program aiming to probe our understanding on neutrino physics and look for physics beyond Standard Model. While LBNE is still under development, the LBNE beam simulation group performs the simulation using the G4LBNE simulation software and packaged geometry. The simulation studies are done by shifting and offsetting several parameters (which represent the physical components of the real experiment). The results obtained were analyzed graphically and statistically. In this talk, I will explain the effect of beam offset and detector shifting on parameters like pion production in the decay pipe, intensity of neutrino flux, variation on the number of neutrinos in specific energy ranges. Simulation experiment results will help to simplify the complex nature of neutrinos itself to a small extent and the collective work from the beam simulation group can provide a raw guideline for the experiment itself in the long run. [Preview Abstract] |
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