Cindy Blaha
Email: cblaha@carleton.edu
Cosmology has been on my mind recently since I just finished my Cosmo seminar as well as a discussion of the early universe in Astro 110. I have a nagging suspicion that all the extra dimensions String Theory requires might be hidden in my office. If I find them, Carleton may be able to start a lucrative business venture in unique storage solutions. I am now the proud parent of a Carleton alum and Katie has recently joined the ranks of the gainfully employed. She is working at River City Books in downtown Northfield and trying to decide on future career options. Jenny is a junior in high school and eager to start visiting colleges. She is taking AP Physics and discovering that having nerds for parents can have some advantages. Keith’s Stereo project is nearing completion so we won’t be seeing much of him until after the spacecraft are launched next year. It was great seeing so many of you at the AAS meeting in May and Reunion. Hope to see you at this year’s Reunion festivities. We all look forward to seeing and hearing from you, so be sure to stop by if you are in the neighborhood. Take care and have a wonderful new year.

Nelson Christensen
Email: nchrise@carleton.edu
I write this from Pisa, Italy, where I am spending the year on sabbatical. As always, it has been a full and exciting year. Finishing off the 2004-05 year I cut me teeth teaching digital electronics for the first time. I sat in on Bruce's electronics class last fall, and learned a ton from the master. During the year I also got buried in committee work, but I guess that happens. Over the summer of 2005 I had three students conducting gravitational radiation research with me for LIGO. Carleton undergrads are awesome. Sarah Vigeland, Hans Bantilan and Mark Knight made enormous progress, and made names for themselves within the LIGO Scientific Collaboration.
This year I am with the French-Italian version of LIGO, namely Virgo. The 3 km interferometer is just outside of Pisa. Our Tuscan life is great. We live right next to the Leaning Tower, which is absolutely beautiful to see every day. Atticus, Conrad and Amalie all attend Italian public schools, and are picking up the language rapidly. The boys are playing with an Italian soccer club too, which is a whole adventure in and of itself. Karla is well. We are all looking forward to exploring more of Italy as time allows. For me the science is great. We are combining the LIGO and Virgo efforts to develop a worldwide network of gravitational radiation detectors. No detection yet, but the antennas are working close to their design sensitivities. We need something to go "BANG" in space.
Hope the finds all of you well. If you are in Italy, stop by. Otherwise stop by in Northfield next year and say hello.

Melissa Eblen-Zayas
Email: meblanza@carleton.edu
Greetings! Joining the faculty at Carleton has been the highlight of my year, but several other exciting events have also filled the past six months. My husband, Roberto, and I both finished our Ph.D’s at the University of Minnesota, and in May, I had the opportunity to travel to Brazil as part of the US delegation to the 2nd International Conference on Women in Physics. Carleton alum, Barbara Whitten, was also a member of the delegation. This fall I had a wonderful time teaching materials science, a topic of particular interest to me and a course that was especially fun because it brought together students from a number of different departments. Additionally, with the help of several students, I have started setting up my lab; I am interested in exploring the role of disorder and phase inhomogeneity in correlated electron materials. I am really enjoying the return to a small liberal arts college environment and a department with a strong sense of community, similar to what I experienced as an undergraduate at Smith College. I look forward to meeting many of you in the future!

Rich Noer
Email: rnoer@carleton.edu
The highlight of my past year was Raymonde's and my two-week trip to Peru, visiting archaeological sites from the pre-Inca ruins in the coastal desert to the Incas' stone structures high in the Andes. Fascinating cultures and civilizations! When I was young I used to fantasize about visiting Machu Picchu and now I've actually done it! Retirement allows so many things that I never had time for before but I still miss the daily interactions with students.

Steve Parker
Email: sparker@carleton.edu
Here I am in my second year at Carleton, and the time just seems to fly by so quickly. With Nelson away to Italy for the year, I took over the teaching of the Atomic and Nuclear Physics class (P128). I will once again be teaching the wonders of special relativity in P115 during the winter term. I wasn't able to play as much ultimate frisbee as I would have liked this term, but a group of faculty have been getting together to play volleyball every week. At least I am staying active with that! I hope your holidays are great.

Arjendu Pattanayak
Email: apattana@carleton.edu
Greetings, everyone! My year started on sabbatical, and I kept up the habit of meeting with Carls while traveling -- Andrew Fink in Berlin while at the Max-Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden, Tom Carroll at the Snowbird Dynamical Systems meeting in Utah, and then Matt Elliott again at a Quantum Information Theory meeting in Los Angeles -- I even ran into an Carleton Econ grad in a bar in Montreal while on a personal trip for the JazzFest there! There have since been some 're-entry' flames coming out of my ears as I merge back into Carleton's teaching pace, particularly since I tackled a couple of new courses this Fall: A new version of intro (113) restricted to first-year students where within 3 weeks of the start of school, we were visualizing Keplerian orbits, binary stars, and thespeed of sound in a solid using a cool new programming language called VPython. It was a blast. This was followed by Advanced Classy, where for the last couple of weeks, with decisions based on student feedback, we pushed into continuum mechanics, that is, classical fields and fluids. I am enjoying it. I hope they are :-). I am looking forward to doing Quantum for the first time shortly. On the home front, Kathleen and I have decided to term our battles with our house 'restoration' -- sounds more like a worthwhile way to spend your time and energy, we hope. Meera continues to fill our lives with challenges and delight -- and who could ask for anything else? It's been great to meet with alums, including all those who visited Carleton, and I look forward to more meetings.

Bruce Thomas
Email: bthomas@carleton.edu
This is my final year of Carleton's painless "phased retirement" program. When we were planning courses for this year, Bill awarded me first choice. I chose three of my favorites -- Statistical Mechanics, Waves, and Electronics. I've just finished the first two and am looking forward to launching into Electronics for the very last time. When my wife retired last June she reminded me that a long time ago we had promised each other that at this point we would do some sort of international volunteer work -- Peace Corps or something like that. So far she is already involved in projects in Uganda and Cambodia. I'll be hard pressed to catch up.

Bill Titus
Email: btitus@carleton.edu
Ah, another year of being chair of the department. Luckily next year will be Nelson's opportunity, bless him. With Bruce's retirement this year, I'll be the "Old One" in the department, something I never even contemplated when I came to Carleton in 1970. Next year, my daughter, Sarah, starts as an assistant professor in the geology department -- something that I also never expected. It will be an interesting experience to have her as a colleague and something I am really looking forward to.

Kris Wedding
Email: kwedding@carleton.edu
It's been an exciting year. I just finished teaching a first-year seminar called Visiting the Subatomic Zoo, which combined a study of particle physics with a philosophical discussion of the role of science in society. On the policy side, we studied the debates about the Super-conducting Supercollider and then examined the current push to put people on Mars. Another excitement is that my research lab is starting to be filled with equipment: a Doppler ultrasound scanner, a computer-controlled flow pump (that can mimic physiologic flow), an electro-magnetic flow meter, and dual axis computer-controlled motion stage. The last was bought off E-bay, and I worked with a student for two terms to adapt if for our use. Bruce was instrumental in decoding the command structure of the controller. We're sure going to miss Bruce and his talents when he's gone next year! My next task is to fabricate models of the aorta and to begin taking data on flow profiles and how they change as the elastic properties of the vessel wall changes. Best wishes to everyone!

Joel Weisberg
Email: jweisber@carleton.edu
We finished our one year sabbatical in Sydney in July. The work was very stimulating and a total of five Carls came and did research with me there. Australia is one of the places where radio astronomy was born, and it maintains a tradition of excellence. Sydney was an absolutely beautiful city, but there's no place like home. Janet and I were glad to get back here; but Ben was very sad to return. Luckily, after a few months he's happy as usual. I'm delighted to be back with students and colleagues. Even though full-time research was fun, this is where I belong. As always, I greatly look forward to hearing from and seeing you.

Staff

Josh Allen
Email: jallen@carleton.edu
Well this is my second year in the department and I am finding it more enjoyable than ever. Fall term has gone by very quickly with everything going on. We, of course, made our Physics home movies with the 115 students. They were very funny. As usual, the technology aspect of my job was very fulfilling. Everyday, I am able to work with the latest and greatest in computer technology and I get paid to do it. However, it is the people I work with and for that make my job that much more amazing. The professors in this department are some of the coolest people I have ever met. I am beginning to regret that I was not a physics major at Carleton.

Tom Baraniak
Email: tbarania@carleton.edu
This year has been dominated by taking care of my two toddler boys, whose picture can be seen on my website http://people.carleton.edu/%7Etbarania/physicsshop.html. I've worked on several projects for the department and have started on my big lander project, also shown on my website. Next year will likely be much of the same.

Mary Drew
Email: mdrew@carleton.edu
I would like to introduce myself to all of you, although I feel like I know so many of you already after putting together this newsletter. I am the new administrative assistant in the department. My husband Steve and I moved to Northfield fifteen years ago when he started teaching in the chemistry department here at Carleton. The fifteen years have flown by filled with raising three daughters, now 14, 10, and 8, and all that entails. As much as I loved being home with my girls, the time finally came for me to cut back on the volunteer opportunities and get a paying job. So here I am in the Physics and Astronomy Department working with some of the nicest people in town. So far so good…

Warren Ringlien
Email: wringlie@carleton.edu
Operations at the Instrument Shop this year included the now traditional "Shop Lab" where the students get a day of hands on "How to use hand and power tools" to make their very own "C" clamp. I assisted the ENTS folks to a considerable extent the past year fabricating structures to measure insulation values and solar energy absorption. The robotics club is making use of the facility to fabricate their latest wizardry. Along with the new faculty come new ideas for devices for class demos and research apparatus that make the work here never routine.