Faculty

Cindy Blaha
Email: cblaha@carleton.edu
Once again I can hardly believe it is time to write the newsletter note. Years just zip by at faster and faster rate! The end of the year finds us all well. We have the interesting family situation of simultaneous personal/statement/letter writing frenzy. Jenny is applying to a whole array of liberal arts colleges, Katie is applying to grad schools in history and I’m working away at writing letters for our current senior physics majors. Thank goodness for high speed wireless internet! This year we also had a family trip to Florida to watch the launch of Keith’s project on the STEREO spacecraft. It was a great night launch and both STEREO A and B are gathering data like good little spacecraft should. I look forward to seeing some of you at the January AAS meeting in Seattle where we will be presenting results on our M33 survey. As always, I hope all is well with you and yours. Take care, keep in touch and have a wonderful new year!

Nelson Christensen
Email: nchrite@carleton.edu
I have returned from a wonderful sabbatical year in Pisa, Italy, where I did research at the French-Italian gravitational radiation detector, Virgo. My children all speak Italian, and have learned to play soccer Italian style. Now I find myself back at Carleton, and as department chair. It is not so bad since I have such wonderful colleagues, and the department runs along quite smoothly. This year promises to provide much fun time in the lab, since I am again teaching digital electronics and contemporary experimental physics. A number of undergraduates are also working with me analyzing data from the American gravity wave detectors (LIGO).

Melissa Eblen-Zayas
Email: melbenza@carleton.edu
I am finally starting to feel settled at Carleton. While the pace of 10-week terms still feels extremely fast, everything else seems a bit more comfortable in my second year here. This fall I had a wonderful time teaching atomic and nuclear physics, and I will be teaching 113 in the winter and E&M in the spring. There has been quite a bit of activity in my lab, which is focused on growing and characterizing correlated electron materials, particularly colossal magnetoresistive materials. Lots of students have been involved in helping me get my lab up and running, and we have been able to recycle much of Rich's old equipment for various aspects of our work. I have enjoyed bumping into Carleton physics alums at various APS and AAPT meetings, and I look forward to meeting many more of you.

Rich Noer
Email: rnoer@carleton.edu
This past year had two highlights: Raymonde and I took a month's trip to China in May--our first time in this ancient country that's hurtling toward modernity. We were impressed by the friendliness and openness of the people we encountered. Then this fall, a bit of deja vu--teaching a first-year seminar on "The Origins of Modern Science" (a modified reincarnation of a course I used to teach in the now-defunct Integrated General Studies program). An unusually enthusiastic group of students made that a particularly satisfying experience, but after two years "off" I somehow wasn't quite prepared for how all-involving Carleton teaching tends to be!

Steve Parker
Email: sparker@carleton.edu
Greetings! I can’t believe this is already my third year here at Carleton. I have really been enjoying my time here. After my “year of being Nelson” last year, I have started a “year of being Kris” this year. Now that the student presentations of Physics 334 (Optics) are finished, I’ve started preparing for the “joy of clicker questions” for Physics 126 (Physics of Instrumentation) that I am teaching next term. I am the Comps Czar this year, so I’ve had fun scheduling slots for all 25 senior physics majors. We sure have a bumper crop of physicists this year. Over the past summer, I kept busy running computer simulations of the sintering of nanoscale metal particles. In fact, I just had a journal article accepted in Phys. Rev. B. that highlights recent results. Currently, I’m writing a review article on some of work I did with my former PhD advisor on gold catalysis, and I’ll be heading off to give a talk at the March meeting of the American Chemical Society. With all this on my plate, I’ve still managed to find some time to play some volleyball over in the rec center, although my vertical jump doesn’t seem to be what it used to be. Hope this newsletter finds you well, and I wish you a happy Holiday season!

Arjendu Pattanayak
Email: apattana@carleton.edu
Greetings, everyone! What feels like a long and intense year is officially wrapping up. It started with my first opportunity to do Quantum which, for as would be obvious to those of you who know me, was something which I'd been really anticipating with pleasure. And I had a blast with it, starting with Dirac notation almost immediately, in what I found later resembles Mike Casper's way of doing it as well. I seem to have spent most a lot of this year in committee work of various sorts, which is far more exhausting than physics. I did manage to take Parin Sripakdeevong '08 and Leigh Norris '07 with me to the DAMOP Annual meeting in Tennessee. Bruce Thomas also attended, and since Marty Ligare, Pascal Mickelson, and Jessie Petricka and Barb Whitten were also there, it was quite a Carleton reunion. On the home front, some progress in restoring our 'Einstein Year' Victorian. The pip-squeak (Meera) is, as she informed me last night, '3 and 11/12ths' years old, and obsessed with various things to do with princesses, and with books, gymnastics, and her various 'best friends'. So that's the quick summary for the year. Happy New Year!

Bruce Thomas
Email: bthomas@carleton.edu
I finished teaching my last course last March but am still sifting through an accumulation of 40 years of notebooks and files and have not yet managed to "move out". It turns out (not totally surprisingly) that every file folder holds something interesting that I ponder a bit and then, somewhat reluctantly, surrender to the shredder. Outside of Olin, the major change for wife Alice and me is that our daughter Valerie and her husband Craig decided to flee Los Angeles and they moved back to Northfield a few months ago. Instead of our two grandchildren living a thousand miles away, now they live a block away so we're enjoying lots and lots of contact with them.

Bill Titus
Email: btitus@carleton.edu
Well, with Bruce's retirement, I now have the dubious distinction of being the oldest member of the department, although I would rather think of it as the "most experienced" member. As far as this year, it's been a real treat having my daughter Sarah as a colleague over in the geology department. We are already plotting about how we can co-teach a course on geophysics within the next several years. I sincerely wish all of you the best for this coming year and I look forward to seeing some of you at reunion in June.

Kris Wedding
Email: kwedding@carleton.edu
While my Carleton colleagues are enjoying winter break, I'm still preparing my last week of lectures and busily grading labs. Officially on leave, working to solve my own personal two-body problem (and physics theory claims two body problems are easy - shesh!), I'm keeping my teaching skills honed at California State University - East Bay. Next quarter I hope to also conduct some research at Stanford's Radiological Sciences Lab where I did my post-doc. Personally, a big highlight of the past year was the two week trip Jeff and I took to Alaska in July. We were in the region around Juneau and Haines. We went river rafting, ice climbing, kayaking and hiking and saw eagles, salmon, bear, whales and even some glaciers. I miss all my Carleton colleagues - present and former students included. Stay in touch! My Carleton email remains the best way to reach me.

Joel Weisberg
Email: jweisber@carleton.edu
At our Departmental Retreat last September, we were fortunate to have alums Tom Moore and Mark Schneider providing insight and perspective. We have some interesting curriculum changes planned for the next few years. As one example, i will be teaching a five-week course on Environmental Physics that will deal with energy, thermo, and the environment. Pulsar research continues here. My students and I just started using the Green Bank (WV) telescope which is a good thing because NSF has just announced they will be defunding Arecibo. That is a very big hole to fill (literally), which will have major consequences for our pulsar research here. Meanwhile, I am also continuing to work with Australian colleagues and we will be spending a few weeks there this month. Ben just hit 10 years old and is looking forward to seeing his old friends there and to surfing.

Staff

Josh Allen
Email: jallen@carleton.edu
Happy holidays to the whole Carleton physics family. I hope you find yourselves in a warm comfortable environment for the Christmas season. Minnesota is a bit chilly right now and without snow again for the holidays. Let's hope that changes before Christmas roles around. We once again had a wonderful fall term here on the Carleton campus. The Physics 115 videos went off wonderfully again. The seniors are gearing up for comps and I'm happy to say that we will now be providing them each with a high quality DVD copy of their comps talk. Winter term is going to be busy for both the professors and myself with the number of majors we have but it should be fun to see all the exciting and interesting talks that our majors are preparing. Merry Christmas to everyone and happy holidays.

Tom Baraniak
Email: tbarania@carleton.edu
This year has been mostly consumed by taking care of Adam (4+ years old) and Alex (3+ years old). At the same time, it is fascinating - and insightful - to watch them grow up. They warm dad's heart when they beg to go to the "shoppo" or when they say "I want to go to the moon someday". Amazingly, it is starting to look like that might actually be a possibility. Fun projects involve learning about and designing weather and atmospheric science instrumentation.

Mary Drew
Email: mdrew@carleton.edu
Well, I’m in my second year here in the physics and astronomy department and still enjoying the job very much. As I am sure all of you know, this is a terrific group of people who are a lot of fun to work with. I spent much of the summer teaching my 15-year-old daughter how to drive and as a result I now have many more grey hairs and a nervous twitch. It was actually a relief to come back to work. Seriously though, I feel very blessed to have all three of my girls, a great husband, and a job I enjoy. Life is good.

Warren Ringlien
Email wringlie@carleton.edu
The phasing out of Bruce's lab and the gearing up of Melissa's lab has been stirring the dust in the shop. These experimentalists never throw anything out without a critical eye toward potential applications. But then I have similar tendencies since I'll often make do with what is on hand. A turnover in facilities management and ENTS personnel will have some impact on shop activities since Physics is proposing to add an energy course with a laboratory in 2007-2008. The college wind turbine output is being posted on 3rd Olin and the output since going on line September 17, 2004 until November 27, 2006 was 10,082,656 Kilowatt-hours, approximately 30% of the electricity consumed by the college. The Contemporary Physics shop lab, the Robotics group, and equipment recycling keep things going here in the instrument shop.