Bulletin of the American Physical Society
16th Annual Meeting of the Northwest Section of the APS
Volume 60, Number 6
Thursday–Saturday, May 14–16, 2015; Pullman, Washington
Session D1: Plenary Session II |
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Chair: James Imamura, University of Oregon Room: Webster Physical Science 16 |
Saturday, May 16, 2015 8:20AM - 9:00AM |
D1.00001: Careers in Data Science Invited Speaker: Kathy Copic |
Saturday, May 16, 2015 9:00AM - 9:40AM |
D1.00002: Choose Your Own Adventure: Blueprints for Other Solar Systems Invited Speaker: Sarah Ballard Our own Solar System furnishes the most familiar planetary architecture: many planets, orbiting nearly coplanar to one another. However, the most common planetary systems in the Milky Way Galaxy orbit much smaller stars, and these may present a very different blueprint. NASA's Kepler mission has furnished more than 100 exoplanets orbiting stars half the mass of the sun and smaller. Half of these planets reside in systems with at least one additional planet. I investigate the proposition of self-similarity in this sample: whether a single architecture explains the planet yield of Kepler, and whether it bears any similarity to our own Solar System. I discuss whether stellar properties are predictive of one final architecture versus another, and describe implications in the search for life. [Preview Abstract] |
Saturday, May 16, 2015 9:40AM - 10:20AM |
D1.00003: Global Climate Change IS Increasing Weather Volatility Invited Speaker: Greg Bothun For many people, climate change is perceived to manifest as a \textbf{systematic } shift away from average weather to some kind of new average weather. A priori, there was never any physical reason to expect this kind of behavior; only glacial-interglacial dynamics produces such shifts. Consequently, denial of climate change is rising because there is no perception of an average weather change. However, climate is a complex and non-linear interplay between surface ocean heat distribution and the atmospheric heat re-distribution and the natural timescales in those systems is different by three orders of magnitude. By adding energy (now measureable) to the atmospheric-ocean interface, humans have changed pathways and exchange rates, leading to a non-linear response of the system that is manifest as \textbf{climate volatility}. This climate volatility easily now appears in the data. Three most recent examples are a) two extreme polar vortex intrusions to very southerly latitudes in Winter 13-14, b) Summer 13 incredibly weak jet stream that lead to prolonged retrograde storms (storms that move from east to west) and c) the conditions that spawned SuperStorm Sandy. This talk will make the case that climate volatility is quite real, that some non-linear thresholds are being reached, that increases in deep tropical convection may be the principle driver of the currently observed volatility, and that the connections between the oceans and the atmosphere are deeper and more complicated that previously appreciated. Most all of this has occurred within just the last 3-4 years due to significant advances in observational instrumentation and computational modeling and has re-written climate literacy 101. [Preview Abstract] |
Saturday, May 16, 2015 10:20AM - 10:40AM |
D1.00004: Break
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Saturday, May 16, 2015 10:40AM - 11:20AM |
D1.00005: Developing, validating, and measuring \textit{Content Knowledge for Teaching:} An example from energy in mechanics Invited Speaker: Stamatis Vokos In carrying out tasks of teaching, teachers enact specialized knowledge that content experts who are not teachers do not use (and most likely do not have). The concept of content knowledge for teaching (CKT) originated with the work of Shulman (1986) and was more fully developed by Ball and colleagues (Ball, Thames, {\&} Phelps, 2008). CKT is premised on the idea that teachers need to understand subject matter content in ways that are specific to teaching, such as understanding challenges that specific content might present to students and how students may represent their understanding in non-standard forms, knowing how to ask questions or provide explanations that can move understanding forward, etc. (Ball {\&} Bass, 2003). How do we operationalize such a construct, validate it, and measure it in distinct ways (in teacher assessments, classroom observations, and teaching artifact analysis)? What is the relationship between these measures and student learning? In this talk, a multi-year, multi-institutional, ongoing effort to pursue these research questions will be described, the project framework will be shared, sample assessments items will be illustrated, and preliminary results from a pilot study and the full field test involving about 560 high school physics teachers will be discussed. Implications for teacher education programs and physics faculty and TA development efforts will be highlighted. [Preview Abstract] |
Saturday, May 16, 2015 11:20AM - 12:00PM |
D1.00006: Ultrafast Dynamics of Quasiparticle Formation in Structurally Tunable Materials Invited Speaker: Susan Dexheimer Localization of electronic states as a result of electron-phonon coupling plays a critical role in determining the properties of a wide range of materials: polaron formation has a profound impact on charge transport properties of electronic materials, and formation of self-trapped excitons, or exciton-polarons, dramatically changes optical properties and energy transport mechanisms. I will present time-resolved studies of the dynamics of the localization process, focusing on the formation and evolution of self-trapped excitons and polarons. The experiments are carried out in quasi-one-dimensional materials in which the strength of the electron-phonon coupling that drives the dynamics can be systematically tuned by varying the material composition. Our studies use a combination of ultrafast time-resolved techniques that are sensitive to the electronic, vibrational, and structural dynamics that accompany self-trapping, including femtosecond optical spectroscopy in the vibrationally impulsive limit, time-resolved terahertz spectroscopy, and time-resolved x-ray spectroscopy. [Preview Abstract] |
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