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2015

 

Kenneth Hogstrom

"Permanent-magnet energy spectrometer for electron beams from radiotherapy accelerators, " David J. McLaughlin, Kenneth R. Hogstrom, Robert L. Carver, John P. Gibbons, Polad M. Shikhaliev, Kenneth L. Matthews II, Taylor Clarke, Alexander Henderson and Edison P. Liang, Med. Phys. 42, 5517 (2015);.This paper reports the apparatus, measurement theory, and analysis techniques required for utilization of a lightweight, »0.54-T permanent dipole magnet spectrometer, originally designed for laser plasma research, to measure energy spectra of electron beams used in radiation therapy. Shapes of the energy spectra are important for quality control and for matching beams from different Elekta accelerators, as each shape depends on the phase of the RF power recirculated to its standing wave accelerator.

Jorge Pullin

Chemical compounds may have properties that cannot be obtained by studying the properties of their component parts or their relations. This behavior is known in philosophy of science circles as "emergence". Realistic interpretations based on events as the recently introduced Montevideo interpretation of quantum mechanics by Gambini and Pullin provide a natural framework to explain emergence.
The ADM papers and part of their modern legacy: loop quantum gravity, Jorge Pullin, Classical Quantum Gravity 32 (2015) 124004 (1Opp).

R.F. O'Connell

Position and Spin Operators, Wigner Rotation and the Origin of Hidden Momentum forces, R. F. O™Connell, EPJ Web of Conferences 78, 02002 (2014. General Relativistic Two-Body Problem: Theory and Experiment and the Role of Hidden Momentum, R. F. O™Connell, Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015.

Link: http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-319-18335-0_7

Kristina Launey

"Approximate symmetries in atomic nuclei from a large-scale shell-model perspective", K. D. Launey, J. P. Draayer, T. Dytrych, G.-H. Sun, and S.-H. Dong, review, Int. J. Mod. Phys. E 24, 1530005 (2015), IJMP featured article.

This review article focuses on recent new insights into nuclear structure modeling that are unveiled with the help of group-theoretical methods, together with an overview of the significant studies that have led to these findings throughout the last five decades. In particular, we discuss novel approximate symmetries in nuclei, chaotic behavior of nuclear dynamics based on quantum information theory, as well as unprecedented no-core shell-model descriptions of the challenging Hoyle state and intermediate-mass nuclei.

link: http://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/S0218301315300052

Jonathan Dowling

Jonathan Dowling and Professor Tim Bynes of NYU, have developed a novel way of finding the mass of an atom. "Quantum Hall effect with small numbers of vortices in Bose-Einstein condensates" has been published online, 20 August 2015, in the 1 August 2015 issue of Physical Review A (Vol.92, No.2): http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevA.92.023629
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevA.92.023629

edwards

Graduate Student Zach Edwards' proposal (With Dr. Brad Schaefer and Zhichao Xue) for observing time with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) was accepted. "The Stingray Nebula" provides the unique opportunity to watch the ionization of a Planetary Nebula, a helium shell flash, and the evolution of the central star. This system has been evolving 'startlingly' fast, and has not been imaged for over 15 years. As such, they will be using the Hubble Space Telescope to track the fast evolution of this system."

Hatim Chafi Graduate Student Hatim Chafi, Guang Jia, and coworkers have published a paper in the Journal of Magnetic Resonance Imaging titled "Effect of Parallel RadiofrequencyTransmission on Arterial Input Function Selection in Dynamic Contrast-Enhanced 3 Tesla Pelvic MRI." This paper evaluates whether parallel radiofrequency transmission (mTX) can improve the symmetry of the left and right femoral arteries in dynamic contrast enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (DCE-MRI) of prostate and bladder cancer.
Lydia Jagetic

Lydia Jagetic and Wayne Newhauser published a proof-of-concept study on a novel dose model for radiation cancer therapy. Experimental portions of the work were performed at Mary Bird Perkins Cancer Center in Baton Rouge, LA. The long-term goal of the study is to enable clinicians to improve outcomes for patients with good prospects for long-term survival, especially to reduce treatment-related side effects.

   
Philip Adams

Philip Adams and Tijiang Liu have published a paper in Nature Physics titled "Enhanced electron coherence in atomically thin Nb3SiTe6." The paper explores how the vibrations of atoms in a material change when that material is made very thin. This work suggests that electronic devices could be fabricated from these two-dimensional materials and these devices would have superior electrical properties to those of current technologies.

   
Jonathan Dowling

Jonathan Dowling, Graduate Student Jonathan Olson, Undergraduate Evan Rabeaux, and colleagues have published a paper in the Phys. Rev. Lett. titled "Linear Optical Quantum Metrology with Single Photons: Exploiting Spontaneously Generated Entanglement to Beat the Shot-Noise Limit." Their research shows that a very simple scheme, using just single photons, is able to perform quantum measurement with a degree of precision impossible using classical light, ushering in a new era for quantum measurement.

   
Wayne Newhauser

Wayne Newhauser, Rui Zhang, and Oleg Vassiliev have published a paper titled "Reducing the Cost of Proton Radiation Therapy: The Feasibility of a Streamlined Treatment Technique for Prostate Cancer." The paper explores ways to reduce the cost of proton radiotherapy for cancer patients while increasing convenience for patients, especially those being treated far from home.

   
Jiandi Zhang

cover

Ward Plummer and Jiandi Zhang in collaboration with their colleagues from the Institute of Physics, Beijing, China have published a paper in the Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences (Vol. 112, pg. 2367) titled "Classification of Charge Density Waves based on their Nature." This work is a result of a collaboration funded by the Chinese Academy of Science.

Charge Density Waves (CDWs) are observed in many solids, especially in low-dimensional systems. The existence of CDWs was first predicted in the 1930s by Sir Rudolf Peierls, who prophesied that CDWs would exist in an ideal one-dimensional (1-D) chain of atoms, lowering the energy of the system and driving a reconstruction of the lattice. The 1940 paper by Frisch and Peierls described how one could construct an atomic bomb from a small amount of uranium-235. In 1959, Walter Kohn (1998 Nobel Prize) pointed out that the origin of a CDW in the Peierls picture would result in what is now known as a "Kohn Anomaly", a simultaneous softening of coherent lattice vibrations, i.e., phonon softening. This simple text-book picture of the origin of CDWs does not seem to be correct in most if not all materials, so in this report we propose a new classification of CDWs based upon their nature.

   
Daniel Sheehy

Daniel Sheehy, Stephen Kudla, and Dominique Gautreau have published a paper in Phys. Rev. A titled "Pairing correlations in a trapped one-dimensional Fermi gas." This work analyzes theoretically the properties of a gas of atoms close to absolute zero and confined to a cigar-shaped optical trapping potential. Studying systems like this helps us learn more about the collective behavior of quantum mechanical systems.

   
   

 


Last Updated: October 7, 2015