Faculty

Marty Baylor
Email: mbaylor@carleton.edu
This fall I had the opportunity to to attend the Optical Society of America's Controlling Light with Light meeting and present a paper on Holographic Blind Source Separation at Radio Frequencies. While teaching the optics elective course, I have been developing an optics lab that will eventually be taught with the optics course. The new labs will explore topics such as acousto-optics, electro-optics, interference, diffraction, and holography. The new labs will be piloted during the winter term in a separate optics lab course. The department has received generous donations of optics from Edmund Optics and Newport Optics and I am excited about what the department will be able to do with all of this new equipment.

Cindy Blaha
Email: cblaha@carleton.edu
This year marks a new transition for my family since Keith and I have joined the ranks of empty nesters. Jenny has started at Carleton and she loves it and Katie is going to graduate school in history at the University of Minnesota. Aside from feeling like the semester should be over after ten weeks, Katie enjoys her work plus I’m learning all about grad school in a different field and a different era. Things keep plugging around Olin and though we miss former colleagues, we also welcome new ones. My students and I continue our research projects on emission regions in M33 and M31. It sure was wonderful to see so many of you at the AAS meeting last January and to find out what’s new. 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

It has been another busy but productive year. As always, there is much activity around the department. Over the last year my biggest task has been trying to replace Bruce Thomas for electronics and digital electronics; there is no replacing Bruce, but I am working as best as I can to do a good job. Contemporary experimental physics is always a blast since I get to meet all of the juniors. Last year the Bell's Inequality experiment gave all classical results, so either quantum mechanics has failed or there is a problem with the experiment. I am hopeful that by the end of spring 2008 the validity of quantum mechanics can be validated. The gravitational wave research for LIGO is going great guns at present. LIGO finished a two-year run where it operated at its design sensitivity. There are a number of extremely talented Carleton undergrads working with me on the analysis of this data. Carleton's reputation within the LIGO Scientific Collaboration is outstanding due to the results generated by these students. Now back to work; I am teaching Newtonian Mechanics to the frosh for the first time in the Winter of 2008, and tons of preparation is necessary. Happy New Year!

Melissa Eblen-Zayas
Email: meblenza@carleton.edu
It's been another wonderful year at Carleton. I've enjoyed teaching atomic & nuclear and E & M. This winter I'm looking forward to teaching materials science once again. Most of the building of my lab is complete with lots of help from students, and we will begin growing samples this winter. This past summer Tom Brenner '09 and I spent the summer at Ames Laboratory learning metallic flux growth techniques from Paul Canfield and his group. On another front, Roberto got a job with an intellectual property law firm in Minneapolis, making ours a household with two science PhDs who are both gainfully employed in the same metropolitan area. We feel lucky. Happy New Year, and stay in touch!

Rich Noer
Email: rnoer@carleton.edu

Last spring I tried some teaching of a different kind: a course in the local Cannon Valley Elder Collegium on the history of physics and astronomy, loosely based on the Rise of Modern Science course I frequently gave at Carleton. Teaching to a group of retirees with widely differing backgrounds was a challenge, but I think it went well—at least I had a good time with it! Otherwise, the past year included quite a bit of travel, including trips to Arizona and Colorado, and a visit to Raymonde’s relatives in Montreal. The climax was a recent three weeks in southeast Asia, on an Elderhostel trip with Bruce and Alice Thomas to Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. For me, the high point was the temple complex at Angkor—something I’d always dreamed of seeing!

Steve Parker
Email: sparker@carleton.edu
The first snow of the season has just fallen here in Northfield, so that must mean it is time to write a piece for the Alumni newsletter. This last year certainly has been busy. I mentioned that I was working on a review paper on gold catalysis in last year’s newsletter, and it has now been published in Topics in Catalysis. The talk I gave at the ACS meeting last March turned out well, and it was great to see so many of my former colleagues there. Since being Comps Czar was so much fun last year, I decided to do it again this year. We have 16 majors this year and the list of topics promises to be quite interesting. I taught Physics 142 (Matter and Interactions) this fall, which I thought was a novel approach to introductory physics. I still use the “clickers” in my classes, and in fact Eric Egge (from the Math department) and I gave a presentation on the use of clickers at a Learning and Teaching Center event this fall. Matt Blosser has been working with me on the Scanning Probe Microscope this year, and we now have our first images from it running as an Atomic Force Microscope. It was exciting to actually see the “dots” and “dashes” on the surface of a DVD! I’m still playing volleyball and ultimate when I can. In fact, Physbee (the departmental ultimate team) came in first place in the softcore division this year. Happy Holidays!

Arjendu Pattanayak

Email: apattana@carleton.edu

Greetings! This year started with a bang: The official notification of my tenure, which means that we're stuck with each other. Heh. Thanks very much for all the kind words you recent alum students of mine wrote on my behalf to the college. Research has been going well: Long-distance collaborations are paying off, and a handful of nice results and papers emerging. A new direction is work on transport -- chaotic classical and quantum ratchets to be precise, apart from my usual obsessions with chaotic quantum-to-classical transition and decoherence and so on. Weirdly enough, I've recently been teaching in Cross-Cultural Studies, and I have to say that while it's challenging fun to make formal and concrete my thinking in the humanities, it's always a relief to come back to the solidity of physics ideas. This fall was the first run of the re-imagined combined Thermal and Statistical Physics class(es), and it was ... well, interesting, to put it in Bohr-speak. I am glad to do it, though, and am already looking forward to next year! It was great to run into Pascal Mickelson, Ben Luey, and Adam Libson at DAMOP and to (re)-meet the many others of you who came through Carleton this year. Meera is almost 5, and has taken to posting messages on Facebook walls of those of you who have babysat her when she was younger. Happy Solstice Celebration of choice!

Bruce Thomas
Email: bthomas@carleton.edu
The loss of Mike Casper in January and then Warren Ringlien in October were heavy blows. I had worked with each of them for more than three decades and both had contributed a lot to the physics program and, significantly, to other Carleton programs as well as engaging in activities in the larger community. But I -- and, I suspect, many of you -- have lots of good memories of them. On a happier note, I can report that I’ve done a lot of traveling this year -- following my wife around the globe. In May I flew to Oman to join her for a few extra days after she finished conducting a workshop. Very interesting place -- rode a camel. In June I accompanied her and two of her nephews to Europe for a two-week adventure. And then in October we went to Cambodia (she had already been there twice) along with Rich and Raymonde Noer on an Elderhostel tour of SE Asia. Very interesting place -- rode an elephant.

Bill Titus
Email: btitus@carleton.edu
Life moves on and sometimes it seems like at relativistic speed, especially as I age. This year has been fairly tranquil, which is not necessarily bad. My daughter, Sarah, had a good first year as a faculty member in the geology department here at Carleton and it's a dream come true having her here at Carleton. Also I have two new additions in the Titus household -- sisters of the feline variety -- Lagrange and Euler (or "Oiler" as the vet has recorded in Euler's data records). Please do visit us if you do get back to campus and may the New Year be productive, peaceful, and prosperous.

Kris Wedding
Email: kwedding@carleton.edu
At the start of 2007, I was still teaching a few classes at Cal State East Bay while on leave from Carleton. That all changed this spring with the birth of our daughter, Haley Jean Wedding Crowell. She showed up almost a month early, but she's been a happy, healthy and wonderfully curious girl ever since. Jeff and I brought Haley to Carleton over the summer to bask in the physics/astronomy hospitality.

I am now taking a year of family leave and thoroughly enjoying the joys and challenges of teaching (and being taught by) my infant. I plan to return to college teaching in the fall, but - alas - not at Carleton. I've often said that working at Carleton has been the best job I've ever had, and I'm not sure that'll change, but the two body problem that Jeff and I were trying to solve has now become a three body problem. We've decided to simplify the problem by limiting our search for solutions to the bay area. I still plan to regularly haunt Carleton, and while this will be my last update as faculty - I'm promise to send periodic updates as an alum.

Thank you, everyone.

Joel Weisberg
Email: jweisber@carleton.edu
Hello alums! We were very sad to lose Mike Casper and Warren Ringlien in the last year.

Our big family event last year was a month-long trip to Vietnam with three other families who also have children adopted from the same Saigon orphanage as Ben. We traveled together from the bottom to the top of the country. Everyone had a fantastic time and the kids are now able to have concrete memories of their country of birth. The adults can replace memories of war with memories of a beautiful country and friendly people. Ben loved it and wants to go back. The only bad thing about the trip was that it had to be during reunion, so I missed many of you I had been looking forward to seeing! Reunion is one of the high points of my year and I try as hard as I can to be in town then, but this was too good to pass up.

Otherwise life continues as usual with family and teaching and research. Last year I mentioned that Arecibo might lose its NSF funding. This year I have helped to organize an organization of scientists working to save it. We'll see if we make any difference, but at least we're trying to preserve the most sensitive radiotelescope in the world by far.

Staff

Tom Baraniak
Email: tbarania@carleton.edu
This year, like last, and for years to come is about raising the boys. Adam started kindergarten this year, and he has daily homework and a backpack. Back when I went to school....we didn't learn to read until the first grade. Adam is starting to read now, and more power to him. Probably won't be the last of the "back when" stories either. Adam's younger brother Alex is anxious to start kindergarten too. Expanding to 12 labs and developing some new labs has kept me busy. For fun I am moving along on the new advanced weather and atmospheric science station that hopefully will include a user controllable webcam on the roof of Olin.

Mary Drew
Email: mdrew@carleton.edu
With this being the third alumni newsletter that I have put together, it is starting to feel like I know all of you. It is fun to hear what all of you are doing – like opening up Christmas cards all day at work. Who could complain about that? This year I became the administrative assistant for the Carleton Interdisciplinary Science and Math Initiative as well as Physics and Astronomy so I have been busy here at work. It has been a year of changes here in the physics department with the passing of Mike Casper and Warren Ringlien and Kris’s decision not to return to Carleton. They will all be missed. On the home front my oldest daughter got her drivers license, a job and is looking at colleges. Miracles do happen! My other daughters have been busy with school and swimming. It seems I spend most of my time driving to and from the pool and watching swim meets. Happy Holidays to all of you. I look forward to hearing from you again next year.

Bruce Duffy
Email: bduffy@carleton.edu
Having bested Josh Allen in trial by combat, I reign supreme as the new Technical Assistant in Physics and Astronomy. Josh has retired to the hinterlands of Boston to lick his wounds and seek his fortune.

A little background: My wife, Nancy Cho, is an Associate Professor of English at Carleton. We've been living in Northfield for 12 years and have a 5-year-old son named Jack who's started kindergarten this year. I have a strong layperson's interest in science and history that makes working here a treat. I've been a software developer for most of my working life. I've really enjoyed my first term as "T.A.". The work is interesting and varied. The people I work with -- students, faculty, and staff, are really wonderful. I feel truly lucky to be working here.