PHYSICS HIGHLIGHTS 2021 Letter from the Chair Dear Alumni, Parents and Friends of HMC Physics, It is my very great pleasure to be back this year after a wonderfully timed sabbatical and to share with you some of the events that have marked 2021 in the HMC Physics Department. First and foremost, I am delighted to be sitting in my office as I write, listening to snatches of student-faculty conversations once again drifting down the hall and through my open door. This afternoon I chatted with several colleagues passing by in the hallway, stepped out to talk with a tour group, and enjoyed an impromptu sit-down with a student to work through a paper we discussed last week. After a year and a half of “Zoom college,” these in-person and unscheduled interactions seem especially precious whenever they occur. My first day back in the lab with research students this fall left me energized and excited about the year ahead. (It certainly helped that our entangledphoton apparatus functioned better than I had dared to hope after a year and a half!) We are still navigating the global pandemic. Should you visit campus in the near future, here are some of the signs you will see: weekly student testing and occasional quarantine; some classes and office hours under tent canopies outdoors; and masks worn by all, throughout the day. This fall, we welcomed half of the student body to campus for the first time, and only the current seniors have experienced a full academic year at Harvey Mudd; several small traditions usually passed on informally from one class to the next have to be consciously propagated this year if they are to continue. Though, for the most part, we are gradually shedding pandemic practices with sighs of relief, a few innovations triggered by COVID
Professor Sahakian teaches the Physics 151 class in a Jacobs-Keck courtyard outdoor classroom.
are actually positive developments overall and are here to stay. For instance, last year’s Core lab instructors introduced experimental skills in a more deliberately sequenced way that continues to inform the course even as we move from home-based experiments back to the greater range possible in the lab. Hosting colloquium speakers over Zoom creates an opportunity to invite dynamic speakers on a range of research topics without the limitations of travel logistics and expense. Professional collaborations across distance are also easier than ever before; while on sabbatical I organized and attended several workshops on quantum education and forged new collaborative relationships, all quite literally from home. Meanwhile, department members have been busy in the last year. Modern Classical
Mechanics by Professor Vatche Sahakian and Professor Emeritus Tom Helliwell, featured in last fall’s newsletter, was officially available from booksellers starting late in 2020. Several faculty members have new and renewed grant funding for a diverse array of projects, from quantum gravity to drone-based radio surveys. Physics faculty members taught several courses in Harvey Mudd’s new summer session in 2020 and 2021, bringing courses like Special Relativity, Gravitation, Quantum Information, and Climate and Energy not just to HMC and Claremont Colleges students, but also to students from other universities as well as some motivated
DEPARTMENT NEWS
Letter from the Chair
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and well-prepared high-school seniors. In June, we celebrated with Professor Greg Lyzenga as he retired from Harvey Mudd, 50 years after entering as a first-year student in the class of 1975. Greg has been a true “Mudder” throughout his career on the faculty, teaching courses in every part of the physics curriculum and conducting research that has varied from seismology to planetary physics to optics. We already miss his presence in the classroom and on the hallway, but fortunately he has agreed to return in spring 2022 to teach geophysics. In other personnel news, physics administrative assistant Alison Rauchfuss left us over the summer to move out of state with her family. We were sad to lose Alison, but have been very fortunate to find a wonderful new staff member in Vanessa Brillo, who joined us at the end of July. Vanessa has done great work for us already, and has been instrumental in the production of this newsletter. Some of you may already have corresponded with her in the department office. Last but not least, Professor Jason Gallicchio received tenure and promotion to associate professor in May; please join me in congratulating him! Last year’s newsletter announced the establishment of the Physics Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Fund. This fund endows the new Physics Community Award, recognizing the student or students who most notably foster a welcoming environment and a sense of community among physics students. In a year of remote classes, with HMC students living and learning all over the world, the HMC Women in Physics (WiP) club truly rose to the challenge of fostering community via Zoom, and the department was delighted to honor WiP with the inaugural Physics Community Award. The department also formally adopted a statement of community values this year, which can be found on the department web site and which reads as follows: The Harvey Mudd College Physics Department recognizes the value, dignity and humanity of every member of our community. We strive to conduct ourselves with honesty and integrity. We commit to building an environment that is welcoming, supportive and free from racism, bias and
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Harvey Mudd College Physics Department recognizes “ The the value, dignity and humanity of every member of our community. We strive to conduct ourselves with honesty and integrity. We commit to building an environment that is welcoming, supportive and free from racism, bias and all forms of intimidation, harassment and discrimination. And we challenge ourselves to pursue educational and scientific excellence that embodies these values.
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–Department of Physics statement of community values
all forms of intimidation, harassment and discrimination. And we challenge ourselves to pursue educational and scientific excellence that embodies these values. Throughout 2021, a team from the department has participated in the American Institute of Physics TEAM-UP project, focused on removing barriers to the full participation of Black and African American students in physics at the undergraduate level. TEAM-UP workshops and assignments have already helped us reflect on several ways in which we can better support all students as they explore and pursue an interest in physics. Contributions to the Physics DEI Fund are still welcome; in addition to endowing the Physics Community Award, the fund supports efforts to recruit a diverse pool of new faculty candidates and, when possible, enables students to attend conferences that enhance their sense of physics identity by helping them build connections with peers and role models in the field. After a summer of purely remote research in 2020, we were able to resume in-person projects on a small scale in summer 2021. Due to the timing of reopening decisions, some HMC-based student research and most external research experiences remained remote. Still, labs were once again open and active, the Stauffer Lounge again played host to group meetings, and the courtyard was the scene of more than one “fun Friday” as Professor Mark Ilton’s group explored creative play with polymer physics. Given the challenges of student research during the pandemic, we appreciate the flexibility granted us by supporters of the Physics
Summer Research Fund. The fund, originally intended to support student research in summers 2020–2022, has been extended in time frame to include some student fellows in summer 2023 as well. Giving to this fund has been very robust already, and we deeply appreciate your generosity; there are still a few opportunities to fund summer research in 2022–2023. If you are interested, please contact Nicole Ouellette, associate director of development, at nouellette@hmc.edu or 909.607.7924. I invite you to read on for more details about student and faculty research as well as student accomplishments, a milestone achievement for a multi-year Clinic effort, alumni news and more. This year’s alumni updates illustrate the many transitions for HMC physics community members in the last year; thank you for sharing your news and thoughts. Feel free to get in touch at any time through our department administrator Vanessa Brillo (vbrillo@hmc.edu) or any member of the physics faculty. We look forward to hearing from you again soon.
Theresa W. Lynn
Chair, Department of Physics lynn@hmc.edu
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DEPARTMENT NEWS
Out and About with HMC Physics
Professor Mark Ilton joins physics majors at John’s Incredible Pizza as part of a summer 2021 research celebration.
Jeremy Bakken ’23 and Emma Lickey ’23 collect data from their commercial solar PV panel.
Physics of Soft Matter (PoSM) Lab researchers soak up some sun.
Professors Peter Saeta and Brian Shuve join Women in Physics club members for an October hike in the Claremont Hills Wilderness Park. WiP hikes this fall took place in smaller groups to respect COVID gathering protocols.
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DEPARTMENT NEWS
Q-and-A with Professor Ann Esin Ann Esin, a physics faculty member since 2002, specializes in astrophysics, with a focus on observations and theoretical modeling of young stellar clusters.
distant, obey the laws of physics and can be studied and understood by us, telescope and computer wielding astronomers. That is pretty marvelous.
Q. In your opinion, what is the most interesting thing happening in physics today?
Q. What is something most people wouldn’t know about you?
A. I am likely biased, but we are living in the golden age of black hole astrophysics. In the past six years we have detected gravitational radiation from merging black holes and obtained a radio image of the horizon of the supermassive black hole in the center of M87, a nearby galaxy. Both of these are absolutely astounding feats of experimental physics and astronomy.
A. I enjoy all kinds of handcrafts. I can sew, knit, crochet, do basic woodworking and blacksmithing. One day I’d love to learn how to blow glass.
Q. What research are you following (besides your own)? A. It is difficult not to get swept up in the excitement of new discoveries in the field of exoplanets, particularly the latest efforts to characterize exoplanet atmospheres. I also like to keep up with the developments in computational large scale structure and galaxy formation, which essentially involves building a numerical model of a universe-in-a-box.
Q. What would you be if you were not an HMC physics professor? A. As a teenager, I was fascinated by everything to do with the oceans and loved the idea of scuba diving for a living. If things worked out differently, perhaps I could have been an oceanographer. But honestly, now it is difficult for me to imagine not doing astrophysics and not teaching.
Q. What is on your reading list? A. I have just finished The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai and an audiobook version of A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara. Next on my list is rereading Dune, since my children are clamoring to see it over Thanksgiving. Q. What fascinates you most about astrophysics? A. I always loved that astrophysics is the study of the weird and the extreme. The most massive structures, the hottest plasmas, the densest matter, the emptiest vacuum, the strongest magnetic fields, and the list can go on, can all be found out there in the Universe. And yet, all of these phenomena, no matter how bizarre or how
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DEPARTMENT NEWS
Greg Lyzenga ’75 Retires It’s been 50 years since Greg Lyzenga ’75 (physics) first became part of the HMC community when he was admitted to the Class of 1975. He has taught physics to generations of Harvey Mudd students and worked with them on numerous research projects and extracurricular activities, including astronomy and rocketry clubs and competitions. Upon his retirement in July 2021, the HMC Alumni Association celebrated his many accomplishments with a 2021 Outstanding Alumni Award, which recognizes impact on Harvey Mudd College as well as service to society. As the Burton Bettingen Professor of Physics, Lyzenga conducted both theoretical and observational studies of the physical processes that lead to earthquakes and tectonic deformation. He uses the Global Positioning System to measure the movement of land along fault lines to determine the amount of strain on these faults before earthquakes and the alteration of the earth afterward. He has published extensively in the area of modeling tectonic plate movement. Before becoming a faculty member at Harvey Mudd in 1990, Lyzenga worked at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory on the
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development and interpretation of space-based geodetic techniques. In 2012, he and fellow collaborators received the NASA Software of the Year Award for QuakeSim, a comprehensive software tool for simulating and understanding earthquake fault processes and improving earthquake forecasting. The tool is accessible to a broad range of scientists and end users, including emergency responders, commercial disaster companies, the insurance industry and civil engineers. Recently, he and JPL colleagues have been doing earthquake research, making measurements of the San Andreas fault in the area of the Salton Sea and also in the area of central California near the Ridgecrest earthquake. He’ll continue that work in retirement. Though much of his research is about examining the causes of earthquakes, he’s an inveterate stargazer and science fiction fan. He bought his first telescope at age 8 for $29.95—the insurance money his parents received after his bicycle was stolen. The telescope began Lyzenga’s lifelong activity in amateur astronomy and professional pursuit of understanding planets large and small.
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DEPARTMENT NEWS
Brian Shuve Named Cottrell Scholar The Cottrell Scholar award ($100,000) is given each year to 25 outstanding teacher-scholars in chemistry, physics and astronomy by the Research Corporation for Science Advancement. Professor Brian Shuve was named a 2021 awardee and joined other educators and researchers focused on innovative teaching in the sciences. “I’m of course excited for the financial support, which will be used to support student summer research, conference travel and computing resources,” says Shuve, a faculty member since 2016, “but I’m also excited to join the community of Cottrell scholars and exchange ideas for improving my teaching and integrating my scholarship more into what I teach.” Shuve will use the grant to support two projects: one in his research field of particle physics and the other in physics education.
Particle physics research The research project, titled “Matter-Antimatter Asymmetry from Dark Matter Freeze-In,” seeks to address two seemingly unrelated problems in physics within a common framework. The first problem is the nature of dark matter, which comprises 80% of the matter in the universe but does not give off light and is not made of any of the known particles. The second is matter-antimatter asymmetry: how regular types of matter (protons, neutrons, electrons) have corresponding anti-particles (anti-protons, anti-neutrons, positrons), and yet everything on earth is made exclusively out of matter and not antimatter. Since it is believed that equal quantities of matter and antimatter were created in the Big Bang, physicists do not yet know why we ended up with more matter than antimatter. The project proposal was based on a new idea that Shuve developed with David Tucker-Smith at Williams College, in which the production and scattering of dark matter shortly after the Big Bang has a backreaction effect that can generate an excess of matter over antimatter and hence might explain the existence of the matter-rich world around us. Shuve identified a number of new theoretical and experimental studies that will provide a more complete picture of how scientists can test theories of dark matter and the matter-antimatter asymmetry. “This new idea could solve a number of important, unanswered questions in physics but is only minimally explored from a theoretical perspective,” says Shuve. “The work partially grew out of related projects on which I have been collaborating with Harvey Mudd students, who have shown that undergraduates can contribute substantially to analytic and numerical studies of how these theories play out in a cosmological setting.”
Physics education The physics education project that the grant supports was inspired by Shuve’s four years teaching Physics 111: Theoretical Mechanics, a required class for junior physics majors. The class represents a substantial leap in abstraction and mathematical complexity of physics and uses powerful new methods to examine difficult problems in
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mechanics. Because the level of abstraction of the material makes it difficult for students to integrate what they are learning into their existing knowledge base, Shuve intends to develop new interactive applets. Students will be able to visualize and manipulate the mathematical objects underpinning theoretical mechanics as they are applied to familiar physical problems (like springs and gravity). “These applets will allow students to play around with the new abstract tools and see how they connect with more familiar concepts like forces and accelerations,” says Shuve. “Such applets exist for lower-division physics classes, but not typically for advanced major courses. They will be an important addition to the physics pedagogy toolkit, both at Mudd and other institutions.”
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DEPARTMENT NEWS
NSF Supports Physics Research in Quantum Gravity
Office of Naval Research Clinic Project Combines Physics and Engineering Physics professor Jason Gallicchio is the director of a new Clinic project sponsored by the Office of Naval Research. The project, “Survey, geolocation and precision transmission with airborne software defined radio,” is part engineering, part astrophysics and part experimental physics, and the end goal is a better understanding of dark matter and the formation of the earliest stars and galaxies. “The project has two parts,” Gallicchio says. “One is related to calibrating the antenna pattern of a radio telescope antenna by flying around a very accurate transmitter on a quadcopter or hexacopter. The other is to put a radio receiver on a remote-controlled airplane and map out the location of the Navy’s own radio transmitters. This receiver will have four antennas that will measure the arrival times of signals and can determine their direction of arrival. All transmitters and receivers use a recently popular technique called ‘software defined radio’ where software directly feeds samples into a
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transmitter and directly interprets samples from a receiver.” The engineering-heavy project is a bit of a divergence from Gallicchio’s previous research (which include studies of quantum entanglement and a stint at the South Pole Telescope) in Antarctica, but it draws on similar expertise. “The radio telescope calibration half of the project is relevant for astrophysics,” he says. “It’s engineering that must be done to know exactly which directions in space the radio telescope is sensitive to. Experimental physics and astrophysics require a lot of engineering and then a lot of big data analysis. Once the beam patterns of these radio telescopes are understood, they can be used to map out where all of the neutral hydrogen is in the very early universe.”
Recent research in string theory has spawned a new idea that gravity—which is tightly linked to our perception of space and time—might be an illusion, an approximate framework that is not fundamental. “Instead,” says Professor of Physics Vatche Sahakian, “the way information intertwines in quantum mechanics might underly what we end up experiencing as space and gravity.” The National Science Foundation has awarded Sahakian a grant to further explore this idea in his project “RUI: Weaving space with quantum entanglement, and black holes in stochastic Matrix theory.” The threeyear project will use a mix of analytical and computational methods. “One sometimes needs to perform challenging calculations that necessitate the use of high performance cutting-edge computational techniques, including the use of supercomputers,” Sahakian says. “The project’s goal is to pursue these directions while involving undergraduate students in both the computational and theoretical aspects of the work. This is an exciting direction that is currently a topic of very active research. Matrix theory is relatively unexplored in this direction, and this work is bound to complement this active area of research in an original way and push it in new directions.”
Note: The board of trustees approved Gallicchio’s tenure and promotion to associate professor in May 2021. Join us in congratulating him!
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DEPARTMENT NEWS
Sandia Clinic Team Publishes Nanocomposite Research A Physics Clinic team’s hands-on work before COVID-19 combined with strategic remote efforts resulted in breakthrough work on barium titanate (BTO) and publication of this research in the December 2020 issue of MRS Communications (Materials Research Society). The Sandia Clinic project, one of 56 Clinic projects sponsored during 2019–2020, addressed the materials science of energy storage technology. The project focused on BTO, a ferroelectric material used in capacitors because of its high dielectric constant, which may be even higher in nanoparticle form. A team of juniors and seniors was tasked with helping Sandia investigate the dielectric constant of BTO nanoparticles as a function of particle diameter by manufacturing composites of BTO embedded in low-density polyethylene. The project built on the work of previous Sandia Clinic teams led by liaison Todd Monson. Professors Peter Saeta and Richard Haskell, who advised earlier teams, provided assistance with materials, measurements and simulations. At the outset of the 2019–2020 project, the team set a goal to publish their research in a peer-reviewed scientific journal. Up until spring break, the goal was in reach: The team was preparing to make presentations at two conferences and, in early March, they’d made a major breakthrough in the lab, which seemed to promise success. Then the COVID-19 pandemic forced campus closure, and with that, the Sandia Clinic project, which depended on the use of an on-campus injection molding machine. That’s when Daniel Brito ’20, Guadalupe Quirarte ’20, Joshua Morgan ’20, Eleanor Rackoff ’20, Michael Fernandez ’20 and Dithi Ganjam ’21 came up with a plan. “The pandemic challenged our team in many ways by removing our ability to work in our lab and communicate with each other in person,” says Quirarte. “However, our team’s problem-solving skills helped us swiftly readjust our schedules.” Before the campus closed in mid-March, the Sandia team had made great strides in its research analyzing the dielectric properties of barium titanate nanocomposites. “With recent modifications to our fabrication method of the nanocomposites, we were able to fabricate samples with significantly higher concentrations of the nanoparticle,” says Quirarte. “Our breakthrough was so exciting,” says Rackoff. “I was telling everybody about it. We were trying to develop a process to produce nanocomposites composed of BTO in order to extract the nanoparticle’s
dielectric constant. But, in order to extract the dielectric constant, we needed to make nanocomposites that were at least 30% volume loading (that is, 30% of the nanocomposite is BTO). Literally a day or two before the entire school left because of COVID, we achieved a 30% volumeloaded sample. Our whole team was so excited.” Quirarte says, “Developing a fabrication method that allows for such flexibility in the concentration levels is a necessary step towards more accurate examination of the nanocomposite’s dielectric properties.” Through virtual collaboration, the team developed an efficient workflow and began building on their previous results. “We used computational methods to perform insightful comparisons between experimental and simulated results,” Quirarte says. “This transition also helped us step back and develop areas of further work that can provide momentum to future iterations of the project.” “Everybody had a great attitude about chipping into work wherever needed,” says Rackoff. “We would all volunteer to take on different parts of the process, we would alternate on sending out emails/submitting purchase requests, doing research, etc. Our collaboration was definitely key to our success, because we all had a hand in the work.” Team advisor and engineering professor Albert Dato says, “The Clinic Program provided the team with the ability to remotely access COMSOL software on the Clinic computers, which enabled them to work as a team and generate results. The team’s publication is a result of the data generated from the hands-on work before COVID-19 and the computational simulations that were done remotely after campus was shut down.” Dato also notes that the Sandia team chose to continue to work on this project even after the seniors had graduated. “Sandia Clinic liaison Todd Monson is very impressed by the team and their hard work, resilience and dedication to their Clinic project,” he says. The team’s physics majors, Rackoff and Quirarte, gained valuable experience working with an interdisciplinary team. Rackoff is now a process development engineer at Qorvo, while Quirarte is pursuing a PhD in mechanical engineering at Carnegie Mellon. “Being part of the Sandia Clinic team with other passionate teammates was a valuable final experience at Harvey Mudd,” says Quirarte. “Everyone brought a unique set of skills from different major backgrounds which really helped propel the research forward.”
Figure 1. (a) Overall sequence of the investigation into the relationship between BTO particle diameter and dielectric constant. (b) The manufacturing process involves two main stages: the mixing stage and the molding stage
HARVEY MUDD COLLEGE | PHYSICS HIGHLIGHTS 2021
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DEPARTMENT NEWS
Physics Paper Named ‘Editors Suggestion’ in Physical Review B Professor Nicholas Breznay ’02 and student researcher Isaac Zinda ’20 have co-authored a paper “Magnon-spinon dichotomy in the Kitaev hyperhoneycomb β−Li₂IrO₃”, which has been named an “Editor’s Suggestion” in Physical Review B (May 2021). “In short, we used cutting-edge X-ray techniques to find evidence for never-observed ‘particles’ called magnons and spinons in an exotic magnetic compound, lithium iridate,” Breznay, who studies emergent phenomena in quantum materials, explains. “Materials of this sort are candidates to realize new states of matter that could ‘democratize’ quantum computation and have other neat applications.” The work comes as a culmination of a collaborative effort across several institutions including UC San Diego, UC Berkeley, MIT, University
a.
b.
of Minnesota and Argonne National Lab. Researchers made strides through several week-long, 24 hour-per-day “beamtime” experiments at Argonne National Lab’s world-class X-ray facility. Zinda participated in one of the beamtime experiments, “driving” the million-dollar experimental setup in regular shifts, and leading realtime analysis and modeling for the project. At HMC, Breznay’s Quantum Materials lab investigates these exotic states of matter—superconductors, spin-liquid magnets, charge-ordered oxides and amorphous Anderson insulators—using hands-on experiments. His group studies complex materials, measuring and modeling their electrical properties in extreme conditions of low temperatures, intense magnetic fields, and high pressures. Breznay has previously published 14 papers with Physical Review B, this being his first with the “Editor’s Suggestion” distinction.
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c.
(a) Three-dimensional projection of β−Li2IrO3 structure with red, green and blue colors representing the orthogonal directions of the Kitaev model. The Ir atoms form zig-zag chains stacked along the cˆ-axis and alternating along the aˆ ± ˆb directions. The red and blue triangles show that the possible tricoordinated boding planes for the magnetic ions are separated by 70o. (b) A picture of the ab plane of a single crystal ofβ−Li2IrO3. (c) Schematic representation of the moment direction along the Ir zig-zag chain for the zerofield, non-coplanar incommensurate (IC) order (green arrows) and the field-induced, collinear zig-zag (FIZZ) order (blue arrows). (d) T-Hb phase diagram constructed using values of H*b, TI and Tη extracted from the magnetization, torque, heat capacity and muon spin relaxation measurements. The data is superimposed on the normalized scattering intensity of a commensurate FIZZ peak.
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STUDENT NEWS
Anna Soper ’22 Receives 2021 Goldwater Scholarship Anna Soper ’22, physics and math major,
is one of four HMC students to receive the most prestigious national award for undergraduate STEM researchers: the Barry Goldwater Scholarship, which covers the cost of tuition, fees, books, and room and board up to $7,500 per year. Soper is a member of Professor of Engineering Lori Bassman’s research team, studying metal alloys and working on computationally simulating their compositions and structures. “My current research is in the field of computational materials science, where I am investigating the chemical and structural mechanisms by which the brittle sigma phase in a novel stainless steel substitute is destabilized by the addition of aluminum, producing a useful, ductile alloy,” Soper says. In collaboration with Bassman, physics professor Nicholas Breznay and Jonas Kaufman ’17, she has developed a model of the complex sigma phase that predicts the lattice sites that different atomic species preferentially occupy, allowing researchers to study local changes in bond lengths and charge distributions that may contribute to the destabilization of the sigma phase. Soper conducted research in nonlinear photonics and optical computing at Caltech this summer, and is planning to pursue a PhD in experimental atomic, molecular and optical physics.
Shion Andrew ’21 Awarded Churchill Scholarship The prestigious Churchill Scholarship offers exceptional American students the chance to pursue graduate studies at Churchill College at the University of Cambridge in England. One of only 16 students nationwide to receive the scholarship this year, Shion Andrew ’21, a physics major, is conducting astrophysical research at Cambridge during the 2021–2022 academic year. “[At Harvey Mudd] I worked on detecting new stellar-mass black holes and non-pulsar neutron stars in long-period binaries through Gaia proper motion measurements,” says Andrew, who will research fundamental questions about the evolution of the universe through mathematical modeling and computer science. She is interested in the versatility of the information extracted from large datasets and plans to explore this research interest further by collaborating with astrophysicists who explore the parameter space of these surveys.
Harvey Mudd Student Co-designs New Salt Lake City Flag A lifetime of enjoying the mountains, skiing and national parks in southern Utah inspired the design Arianna Meinking ’24 developed for her hometown of Salt Lake City, Utah. Meinking and Ella KennedyYoon, high school classmates, are co-designers of the city’s new flag, adopted last month by the Salt Lake City Council. The public rated the finalists and narrowed the field to two top designs: those of Meinking and Kennedy-Yoon, an alumna and senior of Salt Lake’s West High School. It was decided that the blue and white backdrop (from KennedyYoon’s design)—which could symbolize snow, the sky, the Great Salt Lake and salt—would pair best with the sego lily (from Meinking’s design), a flower indigenous to the area, and which symbolizes resilience. “Because so much of my childhood and what I love about Salt Lake City hinges on nature, I knew I’d want to incorporate a natural symbol into my design, and I quickly settled on the sego lily as a symbol,” says
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Meinking, who is planning an individual program of studies in physics and computer science at Harvey Mudd. “My fourth-grade teacher taught us about the importance of the sego lily bulbs to both the pioneers and the Native Americans, so the sego lily also naturally brought together different key groups of Salt Lake’s history, representing all of us.”
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STUDENT NEWS
Department Awards Jon A. Wunderlich ’67 Prize Established in 1994 with gifts from the class of 1967 and Jon’s widow. Awarded to a physics major who has demonstrated remarkable creativity.
The Mindlin Prize Established in 1991 by Katherine and Lee Reinleitner ’76, the prize honors exceptional student papers that demonstrate the best innovative thinking in biology, chemistry, or physics. It memorializes and honors Mrs. Reinleitner’s father and his two brothers, sons of poor Russian immigrants, who had significant careers in engineering, physics and medicine.
Thomas B. Brown Memorial Award, additional recipients Shion Andrew ’21 received the Brown Award for her work on modeling the stellar rotational period evolution of T Tauri stars (TTSs) during their lifetime, while examining the relationship between the stellar magnetic field and accretion disk.
Thomas B. Brown Memorial Award Tom Brown taught physics at the College from 1958 until his death in 1962. The Brown Award was established after his death by his friends and colleagues in the department. It is awarded for senior research in physics: for research results, originality in conception or in execution of research, diligence and clarity of oral and written reports.
Anna Barth ’21 received the Wunderlich Prize for a broad array of creative contributions, including an amazing performance as Isaac Newton in the play Isaac’s Eye, her exceptional creativity in her research on grain boundaries, and her informative and entertaining series of YouTube videos on a wide range of science topics. Barth was an AE physics tutor and a student leader as well. She received the Mindlin Prize and the Brown Award for her senior thesis, “Modeling Grain Splitting and Shape-Dependent Shrinkage Using Dislocation Theory and Configurational Entropy.” In the engaging and very well-written thesis, Barth described her insightful work on the motion of grain boundaries in two-dimensional crystals. She demonstrated exceptional creativity by developing a new theoretical framework for computing the free energy of hard sphere crystals. This approach is immediately useful in the context of solving the problem related to grain boundaries, but it also is broadly applicable throughout the wider field of colloidal crystal research. Her paper (co-led with Maya Martinez ’20), titled “Grain splitting is a mechanism for grain coarsening in colloidal polycrystals,” has been accepted by Physical Review E. Barth is enjoying a gap year tutoring math and physics before starting a PhD program at Cornell.
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Nicholas Heller ’21 tackled the difficult computational challenge of studying Matrix Theory, a framework for quantum gravity, with its highly non-linear, strongly coupled dynamics. He helped develop the stochastic quantization of Matrix theory and applied a non-perturbative variational technique to it for the first time.
Rojansky Writing Award This award is named for Vladimir (Ro) Rojansky, who came to the College as an emeritus professor after retiring from Union College. Following his death, his wife, Milla, helped create the Rojansky Award to recognize his work in quantum mechanics and his clear and concise writing. The award recognizes the outstanding term paper in the sophomore quantum mechanics course, Physics 52. During 2021, Physics 52 students were asked to write a popular science article on a quantum mechanics concept or application of their choice. The two winning term papers are very different in style as well as topic, but both are excellent and engaging presentations of quantum physics.
Coleman Gliddon ’23 – “Big
Chaehyeong Park POM ’23
Quantum: Overcoming Nature’s Limits Inside Gravitational Wave Detectors.”
– “Demian and Alyosha: A Friendly Conversation about Semiconductors.”
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STUDENT NEWS
Department Awards
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John and Ellen Townsend Award
Graydon and Louise Bell Prize
Given to the outstanding physics major in Physics 116 in honor of John’s service to the department and his dedication to the teaching of quantum mechanics.
Created in 1999, this prize honors the first member of the HMC physics department and his wife. It is awarded at the start of the fall semester to a senior physics major for outstanding scholarship, creativity and service.
Rebecca Chan ’22 earned the Townsend Award through consistently outstanding performance on Physics 116 assignments throughout the spring 2021 semester. Like many students, Chan was quiet during Zoom class sessions, but her written work spoke for itself throughout the course.
Mariesa Teo ’22 has been an excellent physics student and an outstanding student leader at Harvey Mudd. Her leadership in ASHMC and on student and student-staff COVID planning groups has been unflagging in a time of prolonged uncertainty and constant modifications of campus planning and policies.
Physics Community Award During 2021, the physics department was delighted to present the inaugural Physics Community Award, endowed through the Physics Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Fund established in 2020 by members of the physics department, supported by physics staff, faculty and alumni. Each year, the award will honor a physics major who contributes most to the creation of an inclusive and supportive physics community. HMC’s Women in Physics (WiP) club rose spectacularly to the challenge of the
pandemic and remote schooling during the 2020–2021 academic year. WiP provided a range of opportunities for the physics community at HMC, from virtual game nights with professors to grad school and career panels with recent alumni. As students and faculty alike struggled at times with the logistics of building connections on Zoom, WiP’s programming was an important source of support for many. The physics department congratulates and thanks WiP, particularly the 2020-2021 club officers Ruby Foxall ’23, Yilin Li ’22, Anna Soper ’22, and Mavis Stone ’23.
WiP members including Ruby Foxall ’23 pose with professors Jessica Arlett and Theresa Lynn on a WiP hike.
2021 Fellowships National Science Foundation The NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (NSF GRFP) ensures the quality, vitality and diversity of scientific research in the United States. This prestigious program recognizes and funds outstanding graduate students who are pursuing research-based master’s and doctoral degrees in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Guadalupe Quirarte ’20 received this prestigious award for her work on mechanical engineering. Each year, the NSF bestows Honorable Mention to meritorious applicants who do not receive fellowship awards. This is considered a significant national academic achievement and provides access to cyberinfrastructure resources through the XSEDE. Acknowledged for their significant academic achievement were Madeleine Kerr ’20 (geodynamics) and Anna Barth ’21 (condensed matter physics).
HARVEY MUDD COLLEGE | PHYSICS HIGHLIGHTS 2021
Department of Energy Science Graduate Fellowship Madeleine Kerr ’20 received this
fellowship as part of a competitive selection process based on academic merit and alignment of her graduate research to one of the six research program offices with the DOE Office of Science. The fellowship award provides partial tuition support, an annual stipend for living expenses and a research allowance for full-time graduate study and thesis/ dissertation research at a U.S. academic institution for up to three years.
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Summer Research PoSMLab In the summer of 2021, Professor Mark Ilton and the students in the Physics of Soft Matter Lab (PoSMLab) were researching the physical principles of fast elastic movements. April Zhao ’23, Audrey Cole ’24 and Declan O’Neil ’23 performed research on latch-spring systems using a systems-level modeling approach. Avalon Feiler ’22, Carolyn Du ’22, Halie Kim ’22 and Lucien Tsai ’24 synthesized and investigated elastic materials relevant for fast energy release. Tanvi Krishnan ’24 characterized the performance of a spring-driven robotic jumper with tunable components. The students made several important developments and discoveries this summer. The materials team synthesized elastomers with tailored molecular architectures that are suitable for testing hypotheses about the trade-off between energy storage and release. The students discovered that differences in the loading and unloading rate causes additional energy losses when using elastic materials to drive motion. This result has an important connection to the use of biological springs for animal locomotion. Some organisms, such as mantis shrimp and trap-jaw ants, slowly load elastic energy in biological springs and rapidly release them to drive movement. The discovery in PoSMLab this summer suggests that these rapid movements could be more efficient if the spring was loaded more quickly before its release. The modeling team continued work based on last summer’s online-only research.
This year, students made improvements to the open-source model and software that facilitates a comparison between springdriven and muscle-driven motion. Students implemented realistic muscle models to include the effects of muscle activation. They demonstrated that muscle activation has a similar effect on dynamic performance as the muscle’s force-velocity trade-off. Also, using the model, students discovered that viscoelastic damping would require a stiffer spring to achieve the best kinematic performance compared to a purely elastic system without any damping. These findings are included in a manuscript being prepared for publishing in 2022. This summer, students worked in a completely new area: small, spring-driven jumping robots. The robots have a number of components that can be easily swapped out to test their effect on jump performance. For example, the group tested a variety of springs with different stiffness and found that although stiffer springs can enable more energy to be loaded into the robot, this also caused the robot to stall and be unable to jump more frequently. Students are continuing to experiment with different tradeoffs in this robotic system. The group gratefully acknowledges the financial support from the Physics Summer Research Fund, the Donnelly Summer Research Fund, the Sprague Summer Research Fund, the Rose Hills Foundation and the National Science Foundation.
Halie Kim ’22
Carolyn Du’22
Enzymatic Biosensors Rafael Porto ’22 and Vale Glasser ’23
explored the limits of achievable sensor density for enzymatic biosensors with Professor Jessica Arlett. Porto and Glasser made use of simulations that suggested that applying the enzyme catalase to exposed surfaces between sensors could effectively reduce chemical cross talk and thereby reduce false positive results in sensor arrays. They developed strategies to deposit catalase in the appropriate region, including modification of
HARVEY MUDD COLLEGE | PHYSICS HIGHLIGHTS 2021
the hydrophobicity through plasma treatment to minimize spreading. Electrochemical detection of glucose on adjacent high density sensors was used to test the effectiveness of the technique. Along the way Vale and Rafael had the opportunity to gain proficiency with a variety of tools including wire bonding, use of a precision CAD-controlled dispenser for controlled enzyme deposition, and strategies for electrochemical measurement from microarray sensors.
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Summer Research
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Colloidal Crystals
Solar Photovoltaics
In Summer 2021, the students in Professor Sharon Gerbode’s lab co-authored a paper, now accepted at Physical Review E, reporting their discovery of a new form of crystal growth in colloidal crystals. Most crystalline materials are actually made up of many smaller crystal regions called grains, and the size and shape of these grains determine various properties of the material, like how strong it is, and how much it conducts electricity. The group has discovered a surprising new method for how neighboring grains grow and merge. Until now, this grainmerging type of crystal growth has been understood in terms of two possibilities: either the smaller grain shrinks, while the other grows; or both neighbors can rotate to align their crystal rows and merge into a single crystal. But what happens when a grain has two neighbors that don’t agree on which way to align their rows? They have discovered that in this situation, there is a third option: the grain can split apart and rotate in opposing directions to line up with both neighbors. This “grain splitting” is more likely to occur in smaller grains, making this new mechanism particularly relevant in nanomaterials. Their experimental observation and model for grain splitting will enable better predictions of how everyday crystalline materials change over time.
Solar photovoltaics are among the best options we have for generating needed electricity without releasing greenhouse gases. Under optimal conditions, conventional photovoltaics convert roughly 20% of the power of sunlight into usable electrical power. In principle, the process is straightforward: photons in, electrons out. In practice, the voltage gain from a conventional silicon cell is only about 0.6 V, which means that 20 or more cells must be wired in series to yield a reasonable voltage. However, series-connected cells must pass the same current, which means that a cell that happens to be shaded ends up dissipating the electrical power generated by its neighbors. Professors Peter Saeta and Richard Haskell, and juniors Emma Lickey and Jeremy Bakken confirmed that shaded cells develop significant hotspots when operated by a maximum-power-point-tracking controller—routinely achieving temperatures exceeding 150°C. By contrast, panels operated with a recently patented approach that monitors the dynamic conductance of panels comprising a single string of 230 quartersized cells never generated a hot spot and provided performance superior to conventional panels when a single cell was shaded up to 48%. A paper detailing the results with Lickey and Bakken as coauthors has been submitted to IEEE Journal of Photovoltaics.
Quantum Gravity Victoria Lloyd ’22 worked with Professor Vatche Sahakian to complete the preliminary work on the application of a new computational technique to quantum gravity and is now engaged in turning this research into her senior thesis. The approach allows studying a regime of quantum gravity which was not previously accessible and, hence, the research holds great promise for new discoveries and a better understanding of quantum mechanics and the nature of space and time. Stay tuned for a paper to be published with the results of the research.
HARVEY MUDD COLLEGE | PHYSICS HIGHLIGHTS 2021
Fig. 6. Top panel: Output power as a function of percent shading of a single cell in a COMM panel under MPPT control (filled red circles) and in an HSP panel (filled green squares). In both cases, the power output with a shaded cell is normalized by the full power with the shade removed. The red curve shows a simulation of the expected behavior of the COMM panel with a lossless controller. The green curve is a simulation of expected behavior of the HSP panel as described in detail in Section IV. Bottom panel: The temperatures of the shaded cells in the COMM panel (open red circles) and in the HSP panel (open green squares) vs. shading of a single cell. The shaded COMM cell remains roughly 25°C above ambient as shading increases and current decreases until the shading exceeds 48%. At this point, the MPPT controller raises the current, which activates the bypass diode of the string with the shaded cell. The temperature of the shaded cell then rises as high as 160° C for 70% shading. The shaded HSP cell (open green squares) shows no temperature rise for this high level of shading, but shows output power that decreases linearly with shading, albeit with an offset we attribute to light
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Summer Research
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Quantum Materials This summer in Professor Nicholas Breznay’s research group, Catherine Phillips ’23 and Natalia Hernandez ’22 valiantly pursued two remote research projects studying the electrical properties of quantum materials. Phillips continued work she began in the spring semester, developing and testing a general model for electrical transport properties of 2D materials subject to disorder and electromagnetic fields. By extending the approach of a highly cited Nature paper, Phillips was able to microscopically model how electrical currents flow in a material with different length scales and strengths of disorder and has submitted an abstract to present this work at the 2022 APS March Meeting in Chicago. Hernandez has led the next steps in understanding the electronic properties of sodium iridate (Na2IrO3), a candidate spinliquid material whose strange magnetism is tied to its local honeycomblike structure. Building on work by recent graduate Kewei Zhou ’21 and group alum Anna Soper ’22, Hernandez developed her own Python-
based analysis code to understand quantitative surprises in the X-ray absorption properties of these iridate compounds and is now pursuing this research as part of her senior thesis.
Donors Support Physics Research The Physics Summer Research Fund was established to support students over three summers (2020, 2021 and 2022) who are engaged in the department’s exciting summer undergraduate research opportunities. Due to more limited summer research opportunities offered during recent pandemic summers, the department will award fellowships in summer 2022 and in summer 2023. In summer 2021, the Physics Summer Research Fund covered stipends for three students doing research with their faculty advisors.
Drones, Radios and Entangled Photons Professor Jason Gallicchio worked on three projects this summer. One project was a continuation of his work with entangled photons. Kate Lord ’22 optimized a portable source of quantum mechanically entangled photons. She investigated ways of measuring the spectrum of the entangled photons and their beam shape. The other two were new projects and involved drones and radios. Students who worked on these projects include Domenico Ottolia ’22, Henry Pick ’23, Lillian Vernooy ’24, Gabriel Zwillinger ’24 and Allison Marten ’24. One project was to fly a remote controlled aircraft with a weak radio transmitter to calibrate the beam pattern of a radio telescope. Another project is with MIT Lincoln Laboratory, which is currently sponsoring a Clinic focused on geolocating ground transmitters (e.g., cell phones, WiFi, Bluetooth, or artificial beacons). Both projects use software-defined radios (SDRs) mounted on a drone. Airplanes carry more weight and fly longer and farther than quadcopters, but they are more difficult to fly or execute motion planning maneuvers.
HARVEY MUDD COLLEGE | PHYSICS HIGHLIGHTS 2021
The Xinyi Guo POM’12 Summer Research Fellow Xinyi Guo POM’12, donor “Ultrafast snapping recoil of elastic materials” Lucien Tsai ’24; Mark Ilton, advisor Anonymous donor “Modeling grain rotation” Anna Barth ’21; Sharon Gerbode, advisor Anonymous donor “FeRh Measurements” Ellen Ferranto ’24; Jim Eckert, advisor We welcome gifts as we seek to reach our fundraising goal of $120,000, which will unlock a generous challenge match from HMC alumni Peter Paterno ’72 and George Innis ’74 for this summer research initiative. To contribute to the Physics Summer Research Fund and to learn about fellowship naming opportunities, contact Nicole Ouellette at nouellette@hmc.edu in the Office of College Advancement.
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2020–2021 Physics Senior Research and Clinic Projects Theses Winnie Chu: Optimizing Observational Arrays for Carbon Dioxide in the Tropical Pacific Ocean Advisors: Tom Donnelly, Lelia Hawkins, Matt Mazloff (Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego) William D. Warfield: Emergent Geometry Through Quantum Entanglement in Matrix Theory Advisor: Vatche Sahakian Kewei Zhou: Evidence for Strong Spin-Orbit Coupled Mott Insulating Ground State in Li2IrO3 from X-ray Absorption Spectroscopy Advisor: Nicholas Breznay Shion E. Andrew: Modeling the Rotational Evolution of T Tauri Stars Advisor: Ann Esin Anna R. Barth: Modeling Grain Splitting and ShapeDependent Shrinkage Using Dislocation Theory and Configurational Entropy Advisor: Sharon Gerbode
Clinic Projects Andres L. Cook: Determining Nonlinear Properties of Viscoelastic Materials Advisor: Mark Ilton Martin Gonzalez: Power and Resilience Optimization in Linear Elastic Recoil Advisor: Mark Ilton Nick D. Heller: The Stochastic Quantization of Matrix Theory Advisor: Vatche Sahakian Ngan H. Nguyen: Dark Matter Through the Axion Portal: Axion-Like Particles as Mediators to the Hidden Sector Advisor: Brian Shuve Jane F. Schlesinger: Baryogenesis via Sterile Neutrino Oscillations in the Presence of a Dark Higgs Boson Advisor: Brian Shuve
Computer Science/Physics Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Automatic Generation of Physiologically Relevant Lipid Bilayers Liaisons: Tim Carpenter, Helgi Ingólfsson, Drew Bennett Advisor: Peter Saeta Students: Eric Weiner, Rakia Segev, Emma Cuddy, Rachel Cohen, Rebecca Qin Math/Physics Harvey Mudd College HMC Achieving Net-Zero Emissions Through Infrastructure Decision-Making Liaisons: Annika Eberle ’09 and Colleen Coxe (HMC) Advisor: Peter Saeta Students: Mary Anderson, Hannah Davalos (PM-S), Chai Karamchedu, Sam Ness (PM-F), Eric Thompson-Martin Jr.
Lorenzo J. Calvano: Magnetic and Structural Properties of MnRh Thin Films Advisors: James Eckert and Patricia Sparks
HARVEY MUDD COLLEGE | PHYSICS HIGHLIGHTS 2021
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ALUMNI NEWS
How to Cultivate a Career It was spring of Betty Johnson’s junior year at Harvey Mudd. Interviews with several oil companies hadn’t led to an internship, so the physics major with a geophysics emphasis resigned herself to the idea of once again working retail over the summer. Then, at the last minute, Unocal offered her an internship in the geophysics department working on a statistical project. She accepted despite one major challenge. “At that time, I hadn’t taken any statistics classes,” says Johnson ’78, laughing. “It was a steep learning curve, but I had a fantastic boss who mentored me. I learned about everything the geophysicists were doing. I knew at that moment it was definitely what I wanted to do.’” Johnson’s subsequent 43-year career in the petroleum industry as a geophysicist with Unocal (acquired by Chevron in 2005) has been a testament to the rewards of seizing and creating opportunities that stretch one’s skill set in new and unexpected directions. At every turn, Johnson has leveraged her technical and managerial skills and Harvey Mudd education into innovative and prominent positions in a maledominated field while staying at the forefront of dramatic changes in how terrain and talent are cultivated. “In my career, I’ve seen an evolution of companies, technology, geophysics and women in the workplace,” she says. Her first position at Unocal, geophysical technician, wasn’t exactly what she had in mind, but it got her foot in the door at corporate headquarters in the Los Angeles area. The workplace “was still a lot like Mad Men,” she says. “Women had to wear dresses and skirts and pantyhose. Most of the women were secretaries. I definitely felt out of place as a female scientist.” While at Harvey Mudd, Johnson had valued the support and collegiality of the Society of Women Engineers (SWE). She recreated that nurturing environment by serving as one of the “founding mothers” of the Association for Women Geoscientists (AWG). “It was instrumental for me because at the time there were few leadership opportunities for women within work,” she says. “I found amazing colleagues through AWG and learned a lot about leadership.” Johnson’s career advanced in tandem with computing technology and the development of geographic information systems. She distinguished herself by mastering new software as platforms evolved from mainframe to workstations to PCs. “I quickly became an expert, which is a testament to the strength of the Harvey Mudd education,” she says. “I had only a bachelor’s degree, which was unusual in my field. But Harvey Mudd taught me how to learn and solve challenging problems.” Early in her career, Johnson also was tapped for a task force that defined a technical career path within the company. “It was an incredible project, a peek behind the curtain of how people were managed,” she says. That one assignment served as a springboard for several subsequent higher-level management positions. She took on leadership of the Gravity, Electrical and Magnetic Services team, an area that was not her strength in college but provided an exciting learning opportunity in offshore exploration. She oversaw talent management, from recruitment through leadership development, for the 475-member Earth Science Department.
Betty Johnson ’78
Until recently, she managed the dozen or so technically diverse members of the newly created basin framework analysis team, which analyzed potential exploration sites around the world. “I felt like I was in The Big Bang Theory every day,” she says. “It was a joy to learn about each team member’s deep expertise and find ways for these very different disciplines to work together.” These are very different times for the petroleum industry from when Johnson first started. As science and public sentiment have shifted away from fossil fuels, Chevron has stated its dedication to a lower-carbon future. “As earth scientists, we have a role to play at all points along that spectrum,” Johnson says, “from producing oil and gas in a clean and safe way to looking for alternative sources of energy.” As she contemplates retiring in the next couple years, Johnson has been focusing her attention on the next generation of scientists. While serving on Harvey Mudd’s Alumni Association Board of Governors, she helped lead fundraising efforts for the curricular innovation fund, which has exceeded its $100,000 goal. In her new role at Chevron as subsurface talent manager, she’s engaging employees at all levels in championing new ways of working together in a digitally connected world—lessons learned during the pandemic. “In the span of 40 years, we’ve learned a lot about leading people, how teams work together and how innovation actually happens,” she says. “One of the things we’ve learned this past year is that we have to empathize with what’s going on in people’s lives and how that affects their thinking, their availability and other factors. There’s a shift to a more caring style of leadership. That’s what I saw in SWE and AWG, and it’s exciting to now see this actually be the core of how companies like Chevron foster our own workforce.”
Reprinted from spring 2021 Mudd Magazine.
HARVEY MUDD COLLEGE | PHYSICS HIGHLIGHTS 2021
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ALUMNI NEWS
Alumna Encourages Impactful Voting with Voteology Holly Frank ’20 is working with colleagues at Voteology to help college students understand the impact of their vote. Voteology is an online platform that helps educate college-age voters about the impact of their vote and ways to combat gerrymandering. The site contains resources to help voters make informed decisions and helpful features like email reminders. The organization was founded by Julia Bain (Cornell) ’20 after the 2016 presidential election. “The controversial 2016 election of Donald Trump when I was a freshman in college revealed a great need and opportunity; my peers, irrespective of their political orientation, didn’t feel like their votes mattered, and they did not vote,” Bain says. Frank got involved with the organization after Bain, a friend from high school, asked her to join the board of advisors. “I thought it was such an amazing idea,” says Frank, a physics alumna. “I’m eligible to vote at home in Virginia and in Los Angeles, and I never knew where my vote would be more impactful. With the electoral college system and the way voting districts are drawn, some votes empirically count more than others, and I believe people should be able to maximize their vote.”
HARVEY MUDD COLLEGE | PHYSICS HIGHLIGHTS 2021
Frank discovered that her vote is more impactful in Virginia and will be voting there while she is still eligible to do so. The site features a tool designed to help college students determine if they are eligible to vote in two or more districts and in which district their vote will matter more. It also describes rules for registering to vote as a college student and other information to help demystify the voting process and encourage students to be active voters. Frank’s role on the board of advisors is to create initiatives that increase Voteology usage and, ultimately, voter registration. She collects data on the organization’s target audience—primarily college students and those displaced during the COVID-19 pandemic—and then works to publicize Voteology and reach potential users. Frank says the Mudd community can get involved by checking out Voteology and sharing the website with prospective voters, who can learn more about where their vote matters most and share the Voteology website with others. “Our short-term mission is welcoming the next generation into political empowerment,” Bain says. “Long term, the big-picture vision is to draw attention to the disparity in the empirical values of votes across districts and states, which today is due to gerrymandering and electoral college-driven inequality.”
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2021 Outstanding Alumni Physics alumni were among those recognized for their impact on Harvey Mudd College and for service to society. Bob Charrow ’66 is recognized for advancing health care and for science advocacy. In January 2018, he became the general counsel of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)—one of the most consequential positions in health care law—where he leads an office of more than 600 lawyers. HHS oversees the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and 24 other agencies. Previously, Charrow was deputy general counsel and principal deputy general counsel under President Reagan (second term) and President H.W. Bush, and an associate professor of law at University of Cincinnati. He helped write an influential brief relied upon by the U.S. Supreme Court in the landmark 1993 decision, Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, which set standards for the admissibility of scientific evidence at federal trial. He is author of the text Law in the Laboratory. Bob Hettel ’71 is considered one of the world’s experts of synchrotron radiation X-ray source technology. At Argonne National Laboratory since 2017, Hettel oversees the planning, construction and implementation of the Advanced Photon Source Upgrade, an $815 million project that will create a world-leading three-dimensional hard X-ray microscope that will enable researchers to view and manipulate matter at the atomic level to solve complex science problems across multiple disciplines. He is a veteran accelerator designer and expert on storage-ring light sources, arriving at Argonne after nearly 40 years at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science Laboratory that includes the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource (SSRL) for which he was technical director of the SPEAR3 storage ring upgrade. After many years with SSRL, he became deputy associate lab director for SLAC accelerators and the acting head of the lab’s Accelerator Research Division, where he helped launch SLAC’s ultra-fast electron diffraction and microscopy program. In addition to the honor of receiving the Brown Award in 1971 for his senior thesis on the physical properties of tachyons (with Professor Tom Helliwell), Hettel says he is forever grateful to HMC “for being taught not what to think but how to think.” Greg Lyzenga ’75 has taught physics to
generations of Harvey Mudd students and worked with them on numerous research projects. He conducts both theoretical and observational studies of the physical processes that lead to earthquakes and tectonic deformation. He uses the Global Positioning
HARVEY MUDD COLLEGE | PHYSICS HIGHLIGHTS 2021
System (GPS) to measure the movement of land along fault lines to determine the amount of strain on these faults before earthquakes and the alteration of the earth afterwards. He has published extensively in the area of modeling tectonic plate movement. Before becoming a faculty member at Harvey Mudd in 1990, Lyzenga worked at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory on the development and interpretation of spacebased geodetic techniques. In 2012, he and fellow collaborators received the NASA Software of the Year Award for QuakeSim, a comprehensive software tool for simulating and understanding earthquake fault processes and improving earthquake forecasting. Catherine “Caty” Anderson Pilachowski ’71
has made distinguished contributions to stellar astrophysics and to the astronomical community. She spent 22 years as an astronomer with the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO) before joining Indiana University in 2001 as professor and the inaugural Daniel Kirkwood Chair in the Department of Astronomy. Pilachowski was the first to recognize the importance of comparing the chemical compositions among large numbers of clusters and large numbers of stars within individual clusters. She also was instrumental to the realization of the Wisconsin-Indiana-Yale-NOAO 3.5-m telescope and contributed to the international Gemini Observatory project. Active in the areas of astronomical instrumentation, large telescope design and construction, electronic publications, women in science, and astronomy education, Pilachowski has published over 330 papers and her research has received over $1.7 million in funding. She was president of the American Astronomical Society (2002–2004), and she is a Fellow of that organization as well as of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In September 2020, Pilachowski received the IU Bicentennial Medal in recognition of her distinguished contributions to Indiana University. Warren Rogers ’81, professor and Blanchard
Endowed Chair of Physics at Indiana Wesleyan University, was the 2018 recipient of the American Physical Society’s Prize for a Faculty Member for Research in an Undergraduate Institution, an award he also received in 2009. Rogers has contributed substantially to the professional development of undergraduate students, and his research in an undergraduate setting has achieved wide recognition and contributed significantly to physics. Rogers is an expert in the exploration of atomic nuclei beyond the neutron drip line and is highly praised for his conception and continued leadership of the Conference Experience for Undergraduate program. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society.
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2021 Outstanding Alumni
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Spotlight Recognition Award Physics alumni were among those receiving this new award from the HMC Alumni Association. Board leadership selects inspirational alumni whose impact “embodies the HMC visionary themes of innovation, leadership and impact through global influence and contributions to society.” Steve Quilici ’67
Small towns often do not have the financial capability to pay for the outside expertise critical for the infrastructure and important decisions they have to make to thrive. Quilici helps citizens intelligently evaluate planning, zoning and other community matters. Quilici became active in leadership positions in several professional organizations related to his work in aerospace and then joined other community organizations (Los Angeles County Business Technology Center, City of Ojai Planning Commission and board positions). He believes Mudders should get involved in local professional societies, charities and local government (volunteer) agencies to help the communities, stay informed and meet interesting people.
Peter Schwartzman ’91
Schwartzman is contributing to his community through volunteer work and by serving as mayor of Galesburg, Illinois. He moved there in 1998 to launch the Environmental Studies Department at Knox College, having recently completed a PhD in atmospheric sciences at the University of Virginia. Nine years later, after a sabbatical spent volunteering for a non profit environmental justice organization in Chicago and with two children, he felt compelled to improve the city where his family would reside. This mindset led first to the founding of a small community center, which clarified to Schwartzman the important role of local government and moved him to run for city council. After serving as a council member for 10 years, he saw an opportunity to inject optimism and a collective mindset into his community. He was elected mayor of Galesburg in April 2021.
In Memoriam Katherine Robin Wong Evans ’89, P24
Kevin Byram ’08
Katherine Robin Wong Evans ’89 (physics) died unexpectedly of a stroke on June 19, 2021 at the age of 53. Evans was born in Los Angeles and graduated from Immaculate Heart High School in 1985 before attending Harvey Mudd College. After college, she worked as a white water rafting guide in California, a ski lift operator in Utah, an environmental technician on Alaska’s North Slope and as a product designer at REI in Seattle. It was there that she began dating her future husband, Robert, and, within a few years, they quit their jobs to backpack across Europe and Asia for over a year. They moved to San Francisco in 1997 and made many friends as they explored that city’s vibrant nightlife. In 1998, Robert and Robin became husband and wife. In 2001, they started their family, purchasing a house in San Francisco’s Mission District and raising their children there. Robin became a devoted mother and a prominent parent at the international high school her children attended. Her home was a center of that community, with many dinners and parties thrown over the years. Robin was fortunate to be able to spend her summers in Hawaii and winters in Tahoe where she shared her love of the oceans and the mountains with her family. And throughout, she always made things, exploring her love of craft and art. Robin and Robert were planning their next adventure as COVID waned and their children went off to college. She is survived by her husband Robert ’90, her daughter, Clements ’24, her son, Liberty, and by many friends and family.
Kevin Byram ’08 of Herndon, Virginia, passed away after complications from treatment for leukemia on July 8, 2020. He leaves behind his wife, Caitlin Furjanic ’08, and his three children, Gavin, Catherine and Lillian Byram. At Harvey Mudd, Kevin majored in physics, but maintained an interest in mechanical and electrical engineering. Fellow students, professors and department members remember him as easygoing and an excellent teammate whose work was always thoughtful. He was known as smart, collaborative and a clear communicator, who offered valuable insight to every project he touched. Byram balanced his academic accomplishments with active ones. He played football for the CMS Stags for four years, coordinated the intramural sports program and served as the student council athletics chair. He lived in North Dorm, and one of his favorite events was the annual Hallowiener party, a tradition he hosted with fellow classmates for years after his time at Harvey Mudd. After Kevin graduated, he started his career as a systems engineer in Northern Virginia. He progressed as a leader in engineering, ultimately becoming a deputy program manager at General Dynamics Information Technology. Those interested in making a donation in memory of Byram, may contribute to the intramural program he helped to run. Please visit hmc.edu/give and denote Byram’s name in the honoree field. Under designations, mark “Other” and indicate the Linde Activity Program fund.
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ALUMNI NEWS
1961 Walter Naumann: We live at the Valle Verde
retirement community after selling our view home on the Santa Barbara Riviera and we have no regrets. People say it is like living on a stationary cruise ship. It gives us time for many activities including president of the CC Camera Club, the Radio Control Airplane Club and the 900 Cottage Hospital volunteers. I have moved on from those to volunteering at our community as chair of the Building and Grounds committee, member of the Resident Council, and zone representative for Memory Care and Assisted Living residents. Also, secretary of the Foundation that collects funds to assist residents that run out of money, treasurer of the Resident Wood Shop, member of the Health Care Committee, chair of a Great Decisions discussion group, member of the Science Discussion Group and the Non-Fiction book club, being a frequent presenter. I recommend a good retirement community.
1967 Steve Quilci: Retired from working in
aerospace and communications in 2015. Appointed to city of Ojai Building Appeals Board in 2015, then to city of Ojai Planning Commission in 2016. Elected to Ojai Valley Sanitary District Board of Directors in 2018. Since 2004, I have been on the board of the Los Angeles Chapter of AFCEA, served as VP programs, VP membership and president (twice). Joined the board of the [U.S. Space Force] Space & Missile Systems Heritage Foundation as VP in 2018. Summary: staying busy in “retirement.”
William Casey when he was director of the CIA and to James Clapper, the former director of National Intelligence. I was instrumental in a major new satellite program and spent a decade frequently briefing HPSCI and SSCI members and staffers. I felt the breadth of my interests and abilities encouraged by my Mudd experience paid off here. Fifty-three years ago, my fellow West dormers threw me into Scripps’ Seal Court Pond to celebrate my engagement to Cathy Wallace. We now have two daughters and four grandsons.
people to fly airplanes. I’m also enjoying music: mostly old-time and Celtic fiddle and guitar music with a group of friends. In the winter, my husband and I will be heading south in our trailer to avoid the Frozen North. Our husky and three cats will travel with us as they’ve done since we began the mobile snowbird routine. Our instruments come with us, and I find jam sessions in other parts of the country to keep my music mojo. Oh, and I love to bake bread! Who knew chemistry could be so interesting?
1969
1977
Henry E. Brady: After 12 years as dean of the
Goldman School of Public Policy (GSPP) at UC Berkeley, I stepped down June 30. GSPP is the top-ranked public policy school in America according to U.S. News and World Report’s rankings, and a recent article in The American Prospect identified it as the center of a new movement in economics to study inequality in America. After being dean through the Great Recession, many years of state funding cuts, and the last year and half of COVID, I am very happy to return to being a faculty member, especially since GSPP has managed to remain financially strong with no layoffs. I will be leading the research component of California 100, a project looking at the future of California across a broad range of policy areas. Patty and I will also have more time to spend with our children: Julia who is a high school teacher in the Bay Area and Daniel who is a pediatrician in Westchester County, New York.
1976
Mike Osborne: I retired from Chevron’s upstream research in late 1999. Past 20 years, I have been helping small oil fields in California get more automated and collect better quality data. This allows them to be better stewards of the 100+ year old oil fields. These old fields are amazing places since they are basically untouched (except for a few scattered wells) for over 100 years. I was able to set up the computing and communications environments, so working from afar is not much of a problem. I also keep a good eye on the beehive that has developed at the base of my 50-year-old olive tree.
1979
1968
Diana Dunham-Scott: I’ve been working
Ken White: My
senior physics thesis project led to employment in solar physics research at The Aerospace Corporation while I earned an M.A. in astronomy at UCLA. Later, I led the Image Exploitation Department and then transitioned to Hughes Aircraft and Raytheon in new business, retiring from the Boeing Company in 2013. Throughout my career, I worked on National Reconnaissance Office programs and made extensive briefings to
HARVEY MUDD COLLEGE | PHYSICS HIGHLIGHTS 2021
Nancy Smith: I’m formally retired. That means I have time to work as part-time faculty in the Lake Superior College Center for Advanced Aviation! I work there (Duluth, Minnesota) and at outlying airports teaching
for the United States Navy as an electrical engineer/operations research analyst at the Naval Air Warfare Center, Weapons Division at Point Mugu NAS, California. I can walk to the beach from my office! I can wear jeans! My job is a mish-mash of engineering, physics and design of experiment for electronic warfare experimentation. I help design field experiments, collect data from military systems, lead post-event data analysis with stakeholders and provide recommendations for senior DOD leaders. In my spare time, I enjoy my horse, Boomie. I’m in between dogs.
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ALUMNI NEWS Greg Hassold: I retired as a professor of
physics at Kettering University in July, after 32 years. I’m still serving as organist at my Episcopal parish. My wife and I are hosting our 20th exchange student this year. Hosting with AFS has been a wonderful, life-changing experience. My wife and I plan to relocate from Michigan to Albuquerque in a few years.
1980 Scott Pace: Returned to George Washington University in January 2021 as director, Space Policy Institute and professor of practice of international affairs in the Elliott School of International Affairs. On leave the prior three and a half years to serve as deputy assistant to the president and executive secretary of the National Space Council (August 2017– December 2020). Jeff Silverman: To my astonishment, I’ve
been married to the same woman for 39 years. We have five grandsons and a granddaughter. The 3-year-old wants to be a civil engineer and work on transportation infrastructure. Okay, he likes to play with trains. I tried training to be a life insurance salesman. A couple of weeks into training, I showed up a mock sales meeting with actual actuarial data, and I was told that I am not going to sell life insurance.
1984 Dean Smith: Just in case folks managed to
track me to Boulder, Colorado, I’m soon to relocate to Newport, Rhode Island. Gotta keep my friends guessing!
1985 David Piehler:
David recently co-wrote (with Brad Booth of Microsoft) a chapter on optical fiber transmission technology for datacenters in the Springer Handbook of Optical Networks (2020). He is a Distinguished Engineer at Dell Technologies’ Infrastructure Systems Group in Santa Clara, California, where he focuses on high-speed inter- and intra-datacenter optical fiber transmission. Previous positions include chief scientist at NeoPhotonics (NPTN); vice president, Broadband Access Networks R+D at
HARVEY MUDD COLLEGE | PHYSICS HIGHLIGHTS 2021
Harmonic, Inc. and entrepreneur-in-residence at the Mayfield Fund, a venture capital firm. He earned a PhD in physics from the University of California, Berkeley for experimental work in nonlinear optics.
1988 Steve Roth: Retired from 30 years at HP
in 2018. Currently doing volunteer work as emergency response volunteer coordinator for the city of Sunnyvale, California. That means I run our four disaster preparedness and disaster response volunteer programs (CERT, Listos, SNAP, ARES), comprising about 150 volunteers. Also doing a bunch of traveling in the camper van that I bought for retirement.
1990 Marty Berliner: I’m an informatics lead
at Pfizer (for the past five years or so; no longer in the lab), working on improving the scientist/technology interface and making our enterprise computer systems easier to use. Spreadsheets don’t cut it anymore, and bootstrapping an organization that collects a massive amount of data to use that data effectively and efficiently is a huge challenge, since it requires both culture changes (essentially unlearning bad habits from grad school) and technology improvements. In personal news, we have been very fortunate. Lucky that we’re healthy and that our two kids are in school and thriving. Lucky that I’ve been able to work mostly remote for the last year and half, which has allowed me to start playing piano again (it’s six steps from my desk, so an excellent distraction between Zoom/Webex/Teams calls). Lucky that we’ve discovered many new excellent dessert recipes!
1991 Scott Burke: I joined Verily as chief
technology officer shortly before the pandemic. Verily is a great place to apply the breadth of a Mudd education to novel challenges in healthcare and life sciences. We operate clinical trials for pharmaceutical companies, develop software platforms to help health systems, employers, and patients, and invent medical devices for patient monitoring and surgical applications. The family is settled in the Bay Area, with a high school senior looking into colleges, a middle schooler, and a puppy!
1993 Doug Cowell: I mocked my psychology
professors whenever they claimed it was a hard science... But seriously, my next college’s physics department couldn’t hold a candle to Mudd’s so I changed majors to “Scientific and Technical Communication.” It made for a fun senior year when all the writers were trying to get enough science credits, while I had them to burn and needed every communication class I could schedule. Since then, I’ve worked on reference manuals, user guides and all manner of boring documentation. At least so far, most companies want their documents written in American style English, so that has kept me employed. It even had me working with some European companies for a while, traveling there, and almost moving to Belgium. I’m now in a marketing department doing release notes and trying to keep all the advertising guys (somewhat) honest.
1994 Jason Goldberg: I don’t think I’ve ever given an update, so here goes. Despite getting an M.S. and PhD in electrical engineering, my heart was never really far from physics, working in magnetic recording. More recently, I have been leading quality teams for implantable cardiac medical devices. Currently, my family resides in St. Paul, Minnesota, and I still bike, although racing had had to stop due to an accident three years ago.
2004 Zoe Boekelheide: I recently achieved tenure
and promotion to associate professor of physics at Lafayette College. This makes me the first tenured woman professor in the Physics Department in the nearly 200year history of Lafayette College. Jason DeCamp ’02 (engineering) and I live in Easton, Pennsylvania, with our two children. In our spare time, we do a lot of outdoor activities and sports.
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ALUMNI NEWS
2006
2010 Alex Himmel: Alex
was recently elected as spokesperson of NOvA, Fermilab’s flagship neutrino experiment. In that role, he leads a collaboration of >250 scientists from 49 institutions in eight countries studying neutrino oscillations, neutrino scattering, astroparticle physics and more. (novaexperiment.fnal.gov)
Alex Hagen & Lea (Zernow) Hagen: After a
decade-long sojourn on the East Coast, we’ve moved back to California and settled in the San Diego area! Alex joined SiteZeus and now leads the data science team. Lea finished an astronomy postdoc at the Space Telescope Science Insitute and moved to Qualcomm, where she is a senior software engineer. Our son, Isaac (age 4), just started transitional kindergarten at the local elementary school.
2012 Julien Devin: I’ve been working as a staff
Stephen Rosenthal: I started a new job as a software engineer at Datadog a year ago, which now employs five Mudders. My wife (Courtney SCR ’09) and I spend most of our time trying to keep up with our children, Phoebe (age 2) and Gabriel (age 0).
member in the Stanford Physics Department since 2018, overseeing the introductory lab courses. We had a hectic year teaching remotely, which involved mailing kits to hundreds of students so they could do physics labs from home. I’m looking forward to starting a new school year teaching in person again, with appropriate safety measures.
Tahir Yusufaly: In March 2021, I started a
2016
2009
tenure track position as an assistant professor of radiological physics at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. I am writing a grant proposal focused on the development of quantitative biophysical models of radiation toxicity in cancer patients undergoing radiopharmaceutical therapy, with the long-term goal of applying these models towards real-time, patient-specific treatment planning. Johns Hopkins has also recently started an M.S. program in medical physics, with the first incoming class starting this fall. We are always on the lookout for potential future applicants, particularly from traditionally underrepresented groups, so if you see someone whom you think would be interested, feel free to send them our way. Outside of work, my wife, Anaan, and I have a daughter, Azhari, who will be turning 4 in September 2021 (and was born in the same hospital as Theresa Lynn’s twins, one day after their birthday).
HARVEY MUDD COLLEGE | PHYSICS HIGHLIGHTS 2021
Victor Shang: I have been doing research
with the CMS experimental group at UW Madison as a fourth-year physics graduate student. My current analysis is a search for dark matter in association with top quarks using data collected during 2016–2018 from the CMS experiment at the LHC. As part of the UW Madison CMS group, I had the opportunity to travel to Geneva in 2019 to work at CERN for the summer. Due to the COVID situation, I have been working
remotely back home in Victoria, BC, Canada, but I am planning to travel back to CERN when the situation allows in order to continue my research.
2017 Kathleen Kohl and Tessa Kohl ’14: Tessa
and Kathleen got married on June 5 in a private ceremony and and celebrated safely with a few local friends. They are so happy to share that they are wives! Tessa works as a product manager at Laserfiche, and Kathleen is heavily involved in local community organizing and mutual aid. They live in Long Beach, California, with their cat, Curtis, and retired racing greyhound, Korra.
2021 Ziyang Zhang: Working on my master’s program at Brown and will continue my academic career afterward.
We Love Hearing From You Thank you for your enthusiastic response to the Physics Department’s request for alumni news. We’ll be in touch each spring by email, or you can send updates at any time to vbrillo@hmc.edu.
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