Max Blachman with Michael Martens
Hololens as a Teaching Aid for Concepts in Electricity and Magnetism
HoloLens, a head mounted augmented reality headset promises educational value. We plan to use HoloLens to teach college students learning introductory electricity and magnetism about polarized
light, a topic not ordinarily covered in that class....
Academic Year
Spatially Varying Liquid Crystal Order: Theory and Simulations
Gavin-Rae Barnaby with Rolfe Petschek
Hard Tetrahedra and shapes close to hard tetrahedra pack well when they are oriented in ways different from their neighbors. The Petschek group has hypothesized that long-range periodic orientation or liquid crystal order explains the complicated crystalline structures...
Kelsey Darrah with Pino Strangi
Random Lasing in Liquid Crystals Doped with Dyes and Plasmonic Nanoparticles
Laser light is generated by merging two important physical mechanisms, amplification and optical feedback. Amplification is mainly due to gain materials, whereas the optical feedback is obtained through an optical cavity that allows for mode...
Axel Gross with Kurt Hinterbichler and Pavel Fileviez Perez
Implications of Gauge Unication without Leptoquarks
While the Standard Model has been veried on numerous occasions and has been successful in predicting several new particles, it is incomplete. It fails to explain many of the current problems in physics, such as the origin of...
Yang Han with Xuan Gao
Fabrication and Electrical Characterization of Molybdenum Trioxide Thin Films
Two-dimensional (2D) van der Waals (vdW) materials have been widely studied in recent decades. Among 2D vdW materials, transition metal oxides with 2D vdW structure have drawn the most attention because of their potential in electronic applications....
George Heidbreder with Kenneth Singer
Aggregation Characteristics of Conjugated Sophorolipid-(Zn)porphyrin Polymers
Bio-based, self-organizing molecules are of considerable interest for optoelectronic device applications due to their functionality and ability to construct sophisticated microstructures with similar motifs to those found in nature. Recently, the Singer group has discovered that conjugated sophorolipid-(Zn)porphyrin molecules self-assemble...
Jackson Kishbaugh-Maish with John Ruhl
How Light from the Cosmic Microwave Background Interacts with Filters
SPIDER and the South Pole Telescope (SPT) are two experiments that my advisor, Professor Ruhl, is involved in. Both experiments involve using telescopes to observe the cosmic microwave background (CMB). My goal in this project is...
Benjamin Kuznets-Speck with Michael Hinzcewski Andrew Eckford and Peter Thomas
Cut your losses:
A rate-distortion-thermodynamic approach to molecular communication Benjamin Kuznets-Speck
Molecular communication is a central facet of problems ranging from deciphering the principles governing physiological signaling (occurring constantly in cellular and neuronal transduction networks), to optimization in synthetic biology, and foundational...
Kevin Kwock with Kathleen Kash and Gary Chottiner
Deposition and characterization of ZnSnSb2 for phase transition studies
ZnSnSb2 (zinc tin antimonide) is predicted to have interesting crystal structures, phase transitions, and thermoelectric properties that have not yet been carefully confirmed by experiment. The objective of this study is to produce, characterize...
Sam Llaneta with Andreas Berlind (Vanderbilt)
Dissecting the Angular Momentum of Dark Matter Halos
We want to test the current theory that the dark matter of a halo imparts its angular momentum on infalling gas, dust, and stars that ultimately forms the disks of galaxies. Under this model, the spin of...