For the fall semester, the department enjoyed the company of Prof. Eugen Merzbacher of the University of North Carolina who joined us as a Bernhard Visiting Professor of Physics. He taught a special limited enrollment seminar for advanced placement first-year-students called Discovering Symmetries which explored symmetry as a unifying theme in a broad range of physical theories. Students played an active role in the seminar format course giving talks ranging from "Why Up and Down is (or isn't) Different From Left and Right", "Symmetry in Bach's Music", "Symmetry in Sports", and "Symmetry in Chaos". In addition, Prof. Merzbacher taught the lecture portion of the junior quantum mechanics course, an area in which he is the author of a noted text.
Student-faculty research continues to be an important part of our program; several projects are mentioned below. For the summer of '94, the department is running a program sponsored by the National Science Foundation's Research Experiences for Undergraduates initiative (NSF-REU), involving students from Williams and elsewhere.
During the summer of 1993, Professor Stuart Crampton advised a group of five undergraduate researchers sponsored by the SMALL program in mathematics and physics. Jamie Kerman, '93, who had just finished a mathematical modeling project for his senior research thesis, was group leader of a group including Kira Maginnis, '95, Craig Epifanio, '94, Jason Eglit, '94, and Fronefield Crawford, '94. They used Monte Carlo techniques to investigate motional narrowing of the Doppler effect in a gas of radiating hydrogen atoms. SMALL was supported by the New England Consortium for Undergraduate Science Education and by NSF-REU grants to the Mathematics and Physics departments. In addition to the students in the SMALL group, Kate Lanford, '95, and Arthur Cole, '94, worked with Crampton on projects in the Atomic Hydrogen Maser lab.
With Kerman, Cole, John Krupczak, '80, and Postdoctoral Research Associate Donald McAllaster, Crampton reported at the 1994 IEEE International Frequency Control Symposium in Boston in June on recent results obtained with the 10 Kelvin atomic hydrogen maser. This work has been supported by a National Science Foundation Research in Undergraduate Institutions grant. In addition to Arthur Cole's senior thesis on a Frequency Sampling Spectrometer for the new maser, Craig Epifanio and Peter Bronk also did senior research theses this year in the Hydrogen Maser Laboratory.
Crampton continues to serve on the Board of Directors of Research Corporation and as a consultant to the Sherman Fairchild Foundation Scientific Equipment Program. In addition, he has begun a four year term on the Advisory Board to the Education Division of the American Institute of Physics (AIP) and a three year term on the National Academy of Science's Board of Assessment of the National Institute of Standards and Technology. He also participated in a one-time review of all the AIP physics programs. In June he gave an after dinner talk at the national meeting of the Council on Undergraduate Research reviewing the progress made by that society since it became a membership organization during his tenure as president. At Williams, Crampton served on the college's interviewing committee and as a first year student advisor.
Associate Professor Kevin Jones continued to serve as Department Chair. A major task for the year was hiring a new experimentalist to replace the retiring Ballard Pierce. Jones also served on the executive committee of the New England Section of the American Physical Society. With the assistance of Jim Partan '94, he continued his research on laser cooling of atoms.
Professor C. Ballard Pierce has continued his work with the Educational Testing Service as Chair of their Test Development and Oversight Committee for the Advanced Placement Examinations in Physics. He also spent a week at Clemson University as a Table Leader working with a group of approximately 40 high school physics teachers and college professors who read the AP examinations. With his retirement at the end of the year, Ballard's attention has turned southwestern as he plans to move back to that area. We wish him well and already miss his steady hand at the departmental tiller.
Assistant Professor Andrew C. Redfield taught a new version of the "Physics for Poets" course which emphasized the exciting ideas of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics.
Associate Professor Jefferson Strait is moving into a new area of research, light propagation in optical fibers. When very short pulses of light travel in a fiber, they tend to spread, due to an effect called dispersion. Strait is studying how to use the nonlinear properties of the fiber to compensate for dispersion and to produce pulses called solitons that can maintain their shape for very long distances. With the help of summer student, Todd Stievater '95 and honors student Nell Winston '94, Strait has built an apparatus that he and his students will use to inject soliton pulses into a dual-core fiber. Also, during the summer of 1994, he will begin building an optical fiber laser that will produce 1 picosecond pulses for these experiments.
In September, the Optical Society of America published the Optics and Spectroscopy Undergraduate Laboratory Resource Book, a compilation of experiments edited by Strait and Kevin Jones. In October, Strait attended the Optical Society of America Annual Meeting in Toronto. There he demonstrated an optical fiber time domain reflectometry experiment that has been used in freshman and sophomore physics courses at Williams. Throughout the year, he reviewed papers for Physical Review and for IEEE Journal of Quantum Electronics. He also served as the pre-engineering advisor. In that capacity, he organized an engineering career panel during Winter Study Period.
Professor William Wootters worked this year with his thesis student Jason Eglit '94 on the problem of estimating how much information one can extract from a single particle of light. This work continued even during the spring semester when Professor Wootters was on leave and was splitting his time between Williams and the University of Montreal. At Montreal, Professor Wootters collaborated with a group of computer scientists to analyze certain new cryptographic schemes that depend crucially on the special properties of quantum particles. This summer he will continue this and related work with the help of four students as part of the department's summer research program, sponsored by the NSF-REU initiative.
Staff Physicist and BSC Coordinator Bryce Babcock spent the fall semester in Timisoara, Romania at the University of Timisoara. While there, he taught a course on data acquisition techniques in the physics department using National Instruments data acquisition boards and the LabView programming language. Arrangements for this visit were made with Professor Ioan Muscutariu, who visited Williams in April 1993. During a visit to Bucharest with Professor Muscutariu he met with Ioan Coplanus, the Director General of University Research at the National Ministry of Education, to discuss the state of research instrumentation in Romanian universities. Upon his return, Dr. Babcock has continued work developing applications for Biology and Neuroscience which make use of data acquisition in undergraduate instructional labs. He has also been making preparations with Professor Pasachoff for experiments at the next solar eclipse in Putre, Chile on November 3, 1994. During the recent annular eclipse on May 5, he spoke to 5th graders at the Greylock Elementary School and setup up a small reflecting telescope from the Astronomy department for viewing the eclipse.