Bulletin of the American Physical Society
Joint Fall 2021 Meeting of the Texas Sections of APS, AAPT, and SPS
Volume 66, Number 10
Thursday–Saturday, October 21–23, 2021; Houston; Central Time
Session M06: SPS,General Physics & Physics Education I |
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Chair: Evan Richards, Lee College Room: STEM 1200 |
Friday, October 22, 2021 2:00PM - 2:36PM |
M06.00001: Overview of SPS and Sigma Pi Sigma Invited Speaker: Victoria Catlett The Society of Physics Students (SPS) and Sigma Pi Sigma are designed to engage the physics community at the undergraduate level. We will discuss the history of the organizations and what opportunities they offer current students. [Preview Abstract] |
Friday, October 22, 2021 2:36PM - 2:48PM |
M06.00002: STEP UP: Engaging Students in Discussion of the Underrepresentation of Women in Physics Robynne Lock, Conner Kelley, Keely Scott, Zahra Hazari, Geoff Potvin Efforts to increase the representation of women in physics need to include a focus on high school students and thus need to engage high school physics teachers. High school is often the first and last time that a student takes a physics class. Fortunately, nearly half of high school physics students are young women. STEP UP is a national community with the goal of inspiring young women to pursue physics in college. We have created two lessons for high school teachers to implement: Women in Physics and Careers in Physics. This talk focuses on the Women in Physics lesson which explores the underrepresentation of women in physics and the role of implicit bias and cultural stereotypes. Students complete an assignment prior to the class discussion in which they reflect on the experience of women in physics. Classroom discussion is built around an interactive presentation on the underrepresentation of women in physics today and its causes. The presentation is designed to elicit students' personal experiences. Following the class discussion, students write an essay about how they perceive society's influence on women's career decisions and on their own individual career choices. We analyzed student work to examine the impact of the lesson on students’ views. [Preview Abstract] |
Friday, October 22, 2021 2:48PM - 3:00PM |
M06.00003: A Quantitative Analysis of the Feynman Disk Paradox Lennon Crow, James Espinosa In his undergraduate lectures of physics, Richard Feynman created an electrodynamic disk paradox that we solved, using Ritz's action at a distance force law, in closed form. All other authors have solved variants of Feynman's disk since a direct solution using Maxwell's equation appears insoluble without significant approximations. The literature also shows that there is a misconception of the relative contributions of the mechanical and electromagnetic angular momentum to the total amount. We will describe a realistic disk and proceed to compare the exact electromagnetic momentum to the mechanical. [Preview Abstract] |
Friday, October 22, 2021 3:00PM - 3:12PM |
M06.00004: Deep Learning Modeling and Vehicle Tracking for Smart City Traffic Alert System Alexander Pantoja, Elazar Bilewu, Jelena Tesic For the past few years, there has been advances in deep learning for visual recognition where models would be produced to be exactly the product of the trained examples that are provided. Complex Machine learning algorithms like Deep Neural Networks (DNN) have performed well in object detection and recognition. With this, we want to apply these pre existing models to land domain and investigate how successful DNN would be on identifying and labeling diverse objects. [Preview Abstract] |
Friday, October 22, 2021 3:12PM - 3:24PM |
M06.00005: Improving Algorithms for the Automated Tracking of Objects in Videos Robinson Caleb, Calvin Berggren Writing algorithms to track the position of objects in a video opens the door to automate the collection of position data in an experiment. Given a template of an object, the algorithm in the software will run through a video frame by frame and automatically find the position of the object. One important piece of this software is using a comparison method that compares the template image to a certain location in the frame to see how similar they are. This project explored a few possible methods to do the comparison and tested them to see how effective each was in finding the correct position of the object. [Preview Abstract] |
Friday, October 22, 2021 3:24PM - 3:36PM |
M06.00006: Testing Algorithms for the Automated Tracking of Objects in Videos Schaar Maximilian, Calvin Berggren Computer science is a useful tool in computational physics which allows physicists to perform many computations in a short amount of time. The application of computer science allowed a multitude of tests to be created for videos that demonstrate an algorithm's ability to track the position of an object in motion in a variety of conditions. This video library and associated tests are essential in finding out the strengths and weaknesses of each algorithm. Code was also written to enable all the tests to be applied with as little user input as possible. Fast, efficient, and informative testing is important to be able to refine existing algorithms and explore new algorithms. The results for two algorithms are shown to represent how the video library can demonstrate algorithm performance and determine how these algorithms compare to each other. [Preview Abstract] |
Friday, October 22, 2021 3:36PM - 3:48PM |
M06.00007: Designing and Building a Set of Smart Blinds Simon Carandang, Calvin Berggren The project conducted this summer was to design and build a device that can be attached to a set of standard blinds to open and close them autonomously. The main inputs are the amount of sunlight entering the room, measured by a phototransistor; whether someone is in the room, measured by an IR sensor; and the tilt position of the blinds, measured by an accelerometer. A stepper motor was used to turn the blinds. Various custom parts used to mount the device were designed in CAD software and 3D printed. The device was controlled using an Arduino development board, which was programmed to turn the blinds based on sensor input. [Preview Abstract] |
Friday, October 22, 2021 3:48PM - 4:00PM |
M06.00008: Fabrication of Porous Silicon Thin Films and Characterization by Photoluminescence Addison Hild, Toni Sauncy Several porous silicon (p-Si) samples were fabricated using anodic etching techniques to investigate the role of crystal growth direction and the impact of including a strong oxidizer in the etching solution. A set of n-type and p-type samples with two different crystal growth axes (\textless 100\textgreater and \textless 111\textgreater ) were etched in a solution of either 40{\%} aqueous hydrofluoric acid (HF) or a solution of HF with Cobalt Nitrate (Co(NO3)2). All samples exhibited the optical discoloration associated with the formation of the thin film structure on the surface of the crystalline silicon substrates. Samples were characterized using standard optical microscopy and a low-resolution photoluminescence system. Evidence of the porous silicon structure was found in the photoluminescence emission in the red (600-700nm) range of the visible spectrum. [Preview Abstract] |
Friday, October 22, 2021 4:00PM - 4:12PM |
M06.00009: Fabrication and Characterization of Simple Dye Sensitized Solar Cell Devices Kaine Buchanan, Toni Sauncy This work explores an alternative materials system than that used for commercialized solar cells. Current solar cell technology is dominated by the ubiquitous silicon-based microelectronics industry, which utilizes toxic and sometimes hard to obtain materials. In the past decade, researchers have discovered an organic-based materials system that can rival the photovoltaic properties of the silicon-based devices. For this project, these dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSC) were investigated, with the dye extracted from beets, raspberries, and blackberries. Layered solar cells that utilize other nontoxic materials (titanium dioxide, graphite, and iodide) were fabricated and characterized by comparing measured voltage in dark (built in bias) and under constant illumination conditions. Most fabricated devices produced measurable voltage above the built-in bias, in the range of 10mV - 120mV, which is similar to reported results from other groups. Further characterization to determine overall efficiency of energy conversion is planned. [Preview Abstract] |
Friday, October 22, 2021 4:12PM - 4:24PM |
M06.00010: Testing the Bottle Trap Method for Sediment Deposition Sophia Sauceda, O'Donnell Frances, Shepherd Stephanie Land use change from forest to agriculture or urban development results in soil degradation and erosion. One way to quantitatively assess sediment accumulation is the bottle trap method. This method is proven to work in a lake environment, however, not much is known about its efficacy in the wetland environments. To test the performance of bottle traps, we installed 6 traps in a controlled sediment basin at the National Center for Asphalt Testing (NCAT). We measured total sediment mass and grain size distribution in sediment traps. Total suspended solids and core samples of the bottom of the basin were taken for comparison with the sediment collected in the bottle traps. Grain size distribution is consistent across the core and bottle samples showing silt and sand size particle are deposited in the basin and captured in the sediment traps. Clays and to lesser extent silts are in suspension in the water samples over the period of the experiment. We have calculated the mass per area of sediment deposition measured in the bottles, but it was much smaller than the sediment per area loaded into the sediment basin and more analysis of the particle size distributions is needed. Initial results indicate the traps are working efficiently however, in the future we need to analyze the particle size distribution information to determine if we are getting the fraction in the bottle so we can credit reliably what is going to settle out and where. [Preview Abstract] |
Friday, October 22, 2021 4:24PM - 4:36PM |
M06.00011: Vacuum energy density and pressure inside a soft wall Agam Shayit In the study of quantum vacuum energy and the Casimir effect, it is desirable to model the conductor by a potential of the form V(z) = z^α. Unlike the standard Dirichlet wall, this model does not violate the principle of virtual work under regularization. Previously, this ``soft wall" model was formalized for a massless scalar field, and the expectation value of the stress tensor was expressed in terms of the reduced Green function of the equation of motion. In the limit of interest α >> 1, which corresponds to the Dirichlet wall, a closed-form expression for the reduced Green function cannot be found. Here we develop a piecewise approximation scheme incorporating the perturbative and WKB expansions of the Green function, as well as an interpolating spline in the region where neither expansion is valid. We then apply the scheme to the sextic soft wall and use it to compute the renormalized energy density and pressure inside the cavity for various conformal parameters. The consistency of the results is verified by comparison to their numerical counterparts and verification of the trace anomaly and the conservation law. Finally, we use the approximation scheme to reproduce the energy density inside the quadratic wall, which was previously calculated exactly. [Preview Abstract] |
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