Monday, October 23, 2000

UR Senior Wang Wins 2nd Place in Poster Competition at the NYS APS Meeting

Department of Physics and Astronomy senior, Torr-Jong (Albert) Wang, was awarded 2nd place in the poster competition at the Annual Meeting of the New York State Section of the American Physical Society, held last week in Buffalo, NY, October 20 -- 21.

Wang's poster, Transport Simulations of Vortex Lattices, was based on original research carried out under the guidance of Prof. S. Teitel, as part of the Department's NSF funded Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program.

The REU program, co-directed by Department Chair Arie Bodek and Dean Priscilla Auchincloss, provides apporximately 30 undergraduates each summer with the opportunity to undertake supervised research projects, working with department faculty members in a variety of areas of physics and astronomy. The program also provides support for the students to publish and present their work at professional conferences.

A second UR physics senior and REU student, Andrew E. Blechman, also presented a poster at the meeting, Top Quark Spin Correlations in e⁺e^- Collisions, based on research carried out under the guidance of Prof. L. H. Orr.

This year's NYS APS meeting, with over 200 participants, focussed on the topics of Cosmology, Strings, and Particle Physics, and featured invited talks by Department Professors S.L. Manly, J.L. Pipher, and F.L.H. Wolfs. Prof. Bodek served as chair of the Paticle Physics Session.

The abstracts of Wang's and Belchman's posters are given below:

Transport Simulations of Vortex Lattices by Albert Wang (with Prof. S. Teitel)

We study the Monte Carlo simulations of the two dimensional classical lattice Coulomb gas, which serves as a model for vortex motion in a Josephson Junction Network. The cases with charge density f=1/51 and f=1/60 in the Coulomb gas are studied. The charge density f corresponds to the transverse magnetic flux quantum per unit cell on the superconducting network.

Top Quark Spin Correlations in e⁺e^- Collisions by Andrew E. Blechman (with Prof. L. H. Orr)}

The top quark (t), recently discovered at the Tevatron Accelerator at Fermilab, provides a wonderful opportunity to test the Standard Model of Particle Physics (SM) and explore new physics. Because of its brief lifetime of 10^-24 sec, top decays before it can hadronize via the strong interaction (QCD). Therefore its spin information is passed directly onto its daughter particles. Thus, we have a chance to measure any spin correlations in the top system and compare these measurements to the SM predictions. This project specifically considers these spin correlations in the interaction: e⁺e^- --> (T)(Tbar) --> (W⁺)(W^-)B(Bbar) were the W⁺ and W^- decay to leptons and neutrinos.

Article submitted by:
Arie Bodek
10/23/00; 1:11:33 PM

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