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$: Cornell Society of Physics Studentspages.physics.cornell.edu/sps/pages/leadership/annualReports/Report_16_17.pdfCornell SPS Annual Report, 2016{2017 1 Preamble This year, the Society$
Cornell SPS Annual Report, 2016–2017

Cornell Society of Physics Students2016–2017 Annual Report

Cornell University

117 Clark Hall, Ithaca, New York 14853

Department of Physics – SPS Chapter #1390, Zone 2

http://pages.physics.cornell.edu/sps/

https://orgsync.com/72478/chapter

Advisor: Professor Yuval Grossman

President: Joseph Parisi

Vice President: Roman Marcarelli

Outreach Chair: Julia Kruk

Secretary: Ke Alex Wang

Treasurer, Social Chair, and Diversity Liaison: Saaj Chattopadhyay

Events Chair: Kaiwen Zheng

Programming Director: Eric Shen

Lounge Manager: Ricky Wilde

Advising Director: Jessi Hersh

Alumni Chair: Peter Zeiger

Webmaster: Dang Pham

Demo Officer: Daniel Longenecker

Education Chair: Peter Chen

Service Chair: Yuchen Han

Women in Physics Liason Cher Wang

LGBTQ+ Liason: Vivek Pisharody

Former President: Omar B Alam

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Contents

1 Preamble 3

2 Activities & Events 32.1 SPS Physics and Pizza Lecture Series . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32.2 Colloquium Advertising . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72.3 Bethe Lecture Luncheons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72.4 LN2 Ice Cream Social . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82.5 Bowling Social . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82.6 LATEX Tutorials . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92.7 Peer Advising Program . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92.8 Cornell Days . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92.9 Expanding Your Horizons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

3 Renovations 123.1 Lounge Inventory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123.2 New Lounge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123.3 New Website . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123.4 Alumni Network . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123.5 Physics Department Peer Advising Program . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

4 Acknowledgments 13

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1 Preamble

This year, the Society of Physics students at Cornell has grown larger than ever before.As the club has expanded, we have continued our mission to bring the physics communityat Cornell together in hopes that physics majors, engineering physics majors, and otherphysics enthusiasts have an environment in which they can socialize, seek help, andprosper. In order to facilitate our progress, we elected 10 new officers onto our board.Along with continuing many Cornell SPS traditions such as Physics and Pizza talks andExpanding Your Horizons, we spent much of the Spring semester focusing on how we canpositively impact each and every physics student as we continue to have an ever-growingrole at Cornell. We hope that the changes we’ve made will help the chapter grow as wecontinue to strengthen the Cornell physics community for the years to come.

2 Activities & Events

2.1 SPS Physics and Pizza Lecture Series

Description: Approximately once a month, we sponsor a physics talk aimed toward theundergraduate student body. The physics department and many others (Applied andEngineering Physics, Astronomy, Electrical and Computer Engineering, etc.) sponsorweekly colloquia that are open to the physics community, but unfortunately, most ofthese talks are aimed at the first–year graduate level. Therefore, our talks are designedto be accessible to our undergraduate population, giving them an opportunity to learnabout cutting–edge physics research. Along with having professors talk, we have invitedseveral graduate students as speakers, since graduate students are often more relatablein experience and interest to undergraduate students.

Attendance: Between ten and twenty students usually attend these talks. Most ofthem are Physics and Engineering Physics majors, but some engineering students alsoattend. We schedule the talks on different days of the week each time to accommodateas many schedules as possible.

The Activity: We use the time just before the talk to make announcements aboutupcoming events. The talk itself lasts for an hour, after which many students remain toask questions and converse with the speaker while eating pizza.

Funding: The Physics Department provides financial support for pizza and drinks. Inthe first semester of this year, we had SPS officers volunteer to host one of the speak-ers. Each volunteer was charged with contacting the speaker, advertising via fliers andemails to the listserve, and coordinating the pizza and soda orders with the department’sundergraduate coordinator, Susan C. Sullivan. In the second semester, this duty wasmoved onto Eric Shen, the Programming Director.

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Advertising: For the first talk of the year, the officers attempt to visit all of the intro-ductory physics lectures to make an announcement about our activities for the semester,especially promoting the first talk. We have fliers for each talk, which we put up aroundthe physics buildings about a week before the event. We then send reminders to the SPSlistserve before each talk.

Below is a list of the talks that we had, with the title of the talk and a short abstract:

Figure 1: Cyclically : Itai Cohen, Peter Lepage, Guillaume Lambert, Farhan Rana, andPaul Ginsparg.

September 13th, 2016 : Professor Itai Cohen (Department of Physics)

Title: Flight of the Fruit Fly

Abstract: There comes a time in each of our lives where we grab a thick section ofthe morning paper, roll it up and set off to do battle with one of nature’s most accom-plished aviators – the fly. If however, instead of swatting we could magnify our viewand experience the world in slow motion we would be privy to a world-class ballet full ofgraceful figure-eight wing strokes, effortless pirouettes, and astonishing acrobatics. Afterwatching such a magnificent display, who among us could destroy this virtuoso? Howdo flies produce acrobatic maneuvers with such precision? What control mechanisms do

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they need to maneuver? More abstractly, what problem are they solving as they fly?Despite pioneering studies of flight control in tethered insects, robotic wing experiments,and fluid dynamics simulations that have revealed basic mechanisms for unsteady forcegeneration during steady flight, the answers to these questions remain elusive. In thistalk I will discuss our strategy for investigating these unanswered questions. I will beginby describing our automated apparatus for recording the free flight of fruit flies and ourtechnique called Hull Reconstruction Motion Tracking (HRMT) for backing out the wingand body kinematics. I will then show that these techniques can be used to reveal theunderlying mechanisms for flight maneuvers, wing actuation, and neural circuits govern-ing flight stability. Finally, I will comment on the implications of these discoveries forinvestigations aimed at elucidating the evolution of flight.

September 21st, 2016 : Professor Peter Lepage (Department of Physics)

Title: 40 Years of Lattice QCD

Abstract: QCD is the fundamental theory that describes the internal structure andinteractions of protons, neutrons and other strongly interacting particles. The theorywas created 40 years ago but it is only in the last decade or so that we have been ableto solve QCD for such low-energy properties as the mass and structure of the proton— leading to the most accurate calculations in the history of strong-interaction physics.This talk is about those calculations.

September 29th, 2016 : Professor Guillaume Lambert (Department of Applied andEngineering Physics)

Title: Quantitative Single-Cell Biophysics: Unravelling Bacterial Adaptation Dynam-ics under Fluctuating Environments

Abstract: Our research is motivated by the notion that complex behaviors in bacteriaoften arise from cell-to-cell variability within members of a population. Consequently, togain sufficient insight into active biological processes, information about microorganismsmust be gathered at the single-cell level. To this end, we combine tools from Physicsand Synthetic Biology to track individual bacteria under environmental fluctuations.Ongoing research projects include 1) the study of antibiotic resistance in single-cells, 2)a quantitative description of a biological clock and its robustness to perturbations, and3) the development of a rapid, low-cost diagnostic platform for infectious diseases.

November 4th, 2016 : Professor Farhan Rana (Department of Electrical and Com-puter Engineering)

Title: Ultrafast Dynamics of Electrons, Excitons, Phonons, Spins, and Plasmons: Study-ing New Physics on Femtosecond Time Scales

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Abstract: 2D layered materials are like color papers: they can be glued, stacked, cutand folded to form integrated devices with atomic thickness. In this talk, I will discusshow different 2D materials can be grown with distinct electrical and optical properties(coloring), how they can be connected laterally to form pattered circuits (stitching) andhow their interaction with light can be designed by controlling the interlayer rotationand the valley degree of freedom (twisting).

December 2nd, 2016 : Wee Hao Ng (Graduate Student, Department of Physics)

Title: Low-Energy Tests of High Energy Physics

Abstract: Most of you should be familiar with the role of high-energy colliders in probingthe fundamental laws of physics, e.g. the Higgs boson discovery at the LHC. However,there is also a lot that can be discovered using relatively low-energy experiments. Inthis talk, I will first introduce the basic concepts of particle physics, and then highlighta selection of interesting experiments. Emphasis will be placed on the underlying theo-retical ideas rather than the experimental details.

March 29th, 2017 : Shawn Henderson (Graduate Student, Department of Physics)

Title: The Development of Superconducting Cameras to Measure Polarization Anisotropiesin the Cosmic Microwave Background

Abstract: Global efforts are underway to precisely map the polarization of the cos-mic microwave background (CMB), which will improve and transform our knowledge ofthe standard model and probe for signs of new physics in the early and late Universe.The Advanced Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) Polarimeter is a new polarization-sensitive microwave receiver on the ACT that we are using to tackle these excitingproblems by more precisely mapping the polarization anisotropies of the CMB down toarcminute scales. I will describe and explain how the Advanced ACT cameras work,focusing on novel electronics and devices that make our measurements possible.

April 19th, 2017 : Professor Paul Ginsparg (Departments of Physics and InformationScience)

Title: Deep Learning for Shallow Physicists

Abstract: In the past five years, there have been significant advances in applicationsof machine learning, specifically deep learning, to a variety of familiar tasks. From im-age and speech recognition and machine translation to beating the Go champion, barelya week goes by without some new breathless report of superhuman machine performance.

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There have also been many recent proposed applications of machine learning ideas toboth theoretical and experimental physics research. We will overview of the underlyingideas and their evolution over the past few decades, including the past historical involve-ment of the statistical physics community, and describe some recent applications.

2.2 Colloquium Advertising

While the physics department’s weekly colloquia are geared towards first–year graduatestudents, we have found that many advanced undergraduates choose to attend. As aresult, we have begun advertising the talks each week to our list–serve.

2.3 Bethe Lecture Luncheons

Figure 2: From left to right: Hans Bethe, Anton Zeilinger, and Josh Frieman.

Hans Bethe was a Nobel Prize–winning physicist at Cornell. From the Physics Depart-ment website, the Bethe “lectureship will bring to Cornell distinguished persons workingin physics to enrich and stimulate the intellectual atmosphere of the University in themanner that Hans Bethe did throughout his career.”

In the fall, we were lucky to have Professor Anton Zeilinger from University of Vienna asour Bethe lecturer. In 2008, Zeilinger was awarded the Inaugural Isaac Newton Medal .We were delighted to engage in conversation about the capabilities of quantum comput-ing . About 20 undergraduates attended this lunch, which was on November 30th, 2016.

This spring, we were delighted to have Professor Josh Frieman of Fermilab and theUniversity of Chicago. At the luncheon, we discussed his extensive research on darkenergy and cosmic acceleration. About 25 undergraduates attended this lunch, whichwas on April 26th, 2017.

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2.4 LN2 Ice Cream Social

At this year’s first SPS meeting, we made ice cream by freezing the ingredients withliquid nitrogen. This event provided a chance for the freshmen physics students tosocialize outside of the classroom. It also provided an opportunity for them to ask theupperclassmen about living and studying physics at Cornell. About 30 incoming physicsmajors attended. Funding for the ice cream ingredients and the liquid nitrogen wasprovided by the Physics Department.

2.5 Bowling Social

In the fall, SPS had its first annual Bowling Social at the Helen Newman Bowling Center.At the event, students were given the chance to get acquainted not only with each other,but with department faculty who chose to attend. Drinks, pizza, and snacks were alsoprovided. The event was the most well-attended in recent SPS history, with over 50students, faculty, and their family coming out to bowl.

Figure 3: S tudents and faculty alike socialize and bowl together.

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Figure 4: Students and faculty enjoy some delicious slices of pizza.

2.6 LATEX Tutorials

SPS member and former president Omar B. Alam continued his LATEX tutorial in thefall semester. The public link to our LATEX tutorial PDF is available here.

2.7 Peer Advising Program

This year, Advising Director Jessi Hersh successfully implemented the Peer AdvisingProgram in both the fall and spring semesters. The Peer Advising Program matchedundergraduates in SPS with upperclassmen who volunteered to be advisors. This servicewas provided not only to Arts and Sciences physics majors, but to all members of theSPS community, reflecting the effort to bring the physics community at Cornell together.Advisors were in charge of emailing and meeting up with their respective advisees toanswer any questions and provide helpful advice. All in all, there were 19 pairs in thefall and 14 pairs in the spring.

2.8 Cornell Days

Advising Director Jessi Hersh organized two separate events this spring for admittedhigh school seniors. Members of SPS were invited to form a student panel, in which theytalked about their experiences as physics majors at Cornell: classes, social life, research,

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https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/109369859/LaTeX_tutorial_SP16.pdf


etc. The panel also answered student and parent questions. Following the discussion wasa liquid nitrogen ice cream social. Both events were well–received, and the parents andstudents stopped us afterward to comment that they were swayed towards consideringCornell as a result of these panels.

Figure 5: S tudents Sumner Hearth, Julia Kruk, Joseph Parisi, and Dang Pham sit onthe panel as Kaiwen Zheng presents.

Figure 6: A large crowd of accepted students and their parents listen as the panelistsexplain life at Cornell as a physics student.

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2.9 Expanding Your Horizons

This Spring, SPS continued their involvement in the Expanding Your Horizons confer-ence at Cornell University under the supervision of Outreach Chair Julia Kruk. Thepurpose of this conference is to inspire 500+ middle school girls to pursue STEM ca-reers. Demo Officer Daniel Longenecker put together five excellent science demonstra-tions which explained the curvature of spacetime, gyroscopic motion, the free fall of aslinky, the dynamics of a pendulum, and the optics of a ”disappearing” bottle submergedin water.

Figure 7: SPS members demonstrate the gyroscopic motion of a bicycle wheel.

Figure 8: SPS members explain the concept of spacetime with this spacetime demo.

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3 Renovations

3.1 Lounge Inventory

Prior to spring semester, there were many items in the Cornell physics lounge whichbelonged to SPS, but were not accounted for. In the spring semester, Lounge ManagerRicky Wilde put in the effort to create a lounge inventory to keep track of SPS-owneditems. Such a system will prevent items from being lost or stolen in the future. Further-more, there were many books on a bookshelf in the lounge which Ricky catalogued tocreate an SPS library. Now, SPS members may check out books which may be requiredfor their physics classes or may otherwise be very useful supplementary material.

3.2 New Lounge

Along with creating an inventory for the items in the current lounge, Ricky communi-cated with Director of Administration Craig Wiggers and DUS Kyle Shen to get a newphysics lounge, which had been requested by many physics majors who found the currentlounge cramped and inconveniently located. In response, they worked hard to find SPSa room for a new lounge twice as large as the current room, and graciously granted SPSwith a five-figure renovation. Once complete, the new lounge will be equipped with arefrigerator, library, and study area for students who need to be tutored or want to worktogether. It will be available to students at the beginning of the Fall 2017 semester.

3.3 New Website

In the Spring Semester, webmaster Dang Pham recruited a few CS students to help himrenovate the Cornell SPS website. In the coming semesters, it will contain informationabout upcoming events, learning resources, and how to get involved.

3.4 Alumni Network

In the second semester, Alumni Chair Peter Zeiger worked with Director of Administra-tion Craig Wiggers to make contact with past alumni in hopes of strengthening the SPSAlumni network. Peter also sent out a survey to graduating SPS seniors asking themfor their plans post-graduation and for contact information. Many seniors responded,providing valuable career information and contact information. We plan to use thisinformation not only as an accessible resource for our members, but also as a startingpoint for organizing career fairs and similar events in the future.

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3.5 Physics Department Peer Advising Program

After the success of the SPS Peer Advising program for the past two years, SPS proposedthe creation of an official Peer Advising Program for the Physics Department to Directorof Administration Craig Wiggers and DUS Kyle Shen. They agreed that such a programcould be a very valuable asset to all incoming physics majors, and are putting it intoaction at the start of the Fall semester! The new program will assign each physicsfreshman to an upperclassman advisor who can provide advice about which classes totake, how to get involved with research, where to go for tutoring help, and more! PeerAdvisors were trained at the end of the Spring semester, and will be sending emails outto their advisees in the summer.

4 Acknowledgments

• Professor Yuval Grossman for his continued support and enthusiasm for makingSPS the best it can be.

• The entire SPS Executive Board for their hard work: Joe Parisi, Roman Mar-carelli, Julia Kruk, Alex Wang, Saaj Chattopadhyay, Kaiwen Zheng,Eric Shen, Ricky Wilde, Jessi Hersh, Peter Zeiger, Dang Pham, DanielLongenecker, Peter Chen, Yuchen Han, Cher Wang, and Vivek Pishar-ody

• Our graduating seniors on the executive board for their commitment to SPS: OmarAlam, Ariel Donlin, and Cecilia Chen.

• Physics department building managers Mark Lory–Moran, Jenny Wurster,and Vince Kotmel for their help in providing parts for our many outreach eventsand planning for the new lounge.

• Sue Sullivan for her assistance in organizing talks and social events.

• Professor Kyle Shen (Director of Undergraduate Studies), Craig Wiggers (Di-rector of Administration) and the rest of the Physics department for their continuedsupport – we wouldn’t run without you!

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