Our research has received support over the years from the National Science Foundation, the Research Corporation, and the Beatrice Aitchson '28 funds at Goucher College.
 Daniel Pines Class of 2006 Physics Major Currently in Ph. D. program in Materials Science at University of Maryland, College Park |
 During the summer of 2005 Daniel Pines worked hard to calculate the specific heat of Nb3Sn superconductor in the mixed state. His work consisting of first learning a lot about superconductors at high magnetic fields and then writing programs in C++ on our new LINUX platform that replaced old "django" UNIX machine. We kept the name since Dr. Dukan is so fond of Django Reinhardt. After two months of computer work we obtained theoretical curves that we compared with available experimental data.A good qualitative agreement between theoretical curves and recent experimental data at very low temperatures is found, but there exists a significant quantitative difference at higher temperatures where our theory is less reliable due to number of approximations made in the calculation. Daniel presented his research at the National Conference On Undergraduate Research (NCUR) 2006 The |
Joel Tenenbaum |
During
the summer of
2004, I worked with Dr. Dukan studying the STM tunneling current in
extreme type II superconductors in high magnetic fields. This was
particularly challenging since I had never done
any programming other than some very basic BASIC on my TI-83 and some
VERY minor html (think the html equivalent of “hi, how are you” with a
broken accent). Fortunately, our good John
Trafton a few years previous had written his programs in C++ and had
left comments in all the right places in the code. All of the
programming and debugging took a few
weeks, but we started to get results. It
was quite something to see an elaborate 3D picture created in IDL as a
result of programming I myself wrote when a
few weeks previous all I could do in programming was make my calculator
display “YOU SMELL” ** I authored a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Conference On Undergraduate Research 2005 and you can check it out by clicking on a figure above. |
Paul Powell
Mathematics Major |
During the summer of 2001, I studied the thermal transport of type-II superconductors at high magnetic fields. Others in the science division poked fun at my work with "imaginary superconductors", because I worked only with computers using the language of C++ but little did they know we were on to something. I programmed on our Unix workstations named ella and django, ella after Ella Fitzgerald and django after Django Reinhardt. After many weeks of analyzing and optimizing code, I calculated the thermal conductivities of a borocarbide and an A-15 superconductor. The calculated or theoretical curves are in excellent agreement with the available experimental data. This nice agreement lead to the publishing of a paper in Physical Review B**. Presently I am heading to Grahamstown, South Africa to study how superconductors operate in a post-apartheid southern hemisphere environment. I presented my work at the 16th National Conference of Undergraduate Research at University of Wisconsin view my NCUR presentation or view NCUR photo **I co-authored a Physical Review B article on this research. You can check it out by clicking on the figure above. |
 John Trafton Class of 2003 Computer
Science
Major |
During the summer of 2002, I assisted Dr. Sasha Dukan in research on
the
specific heat of type II superconductors at extremely low temperature
and
high magnetic field. I started off the summer working with Amanda Carr,
continuing her work from the previous summer. First, we wrote C++
programs
to reproduce the previous results she obtained for ‘imaginary’
materials,
and then we tackled the daunting and seemingly impossible task of
performing
the same calculations for a real material. Our initial assessment of
the
situation looked bleak—it seemed as though, due to the complexity of
the
equations involved, that performing the calculations for a single data
point would take as long as 2 months! However, after applying just
about
every optimization technique I could think of, we were looking at 2
days
instead of 2 months. After that, it took a number of tries to properly adjust the input values and the level of precision desired, but in the end, we had calculated specific heat for the type II superconductor YNi2B2C that correlated with observed lab data, and our findings were published in the Physical Review B. I wrote about this research experience in my admissions essay for the Masters degree program in Applied Mathematics at the University of Maryland, which I’m sure helped win them over. They accepted me and I’ll be studying there in Fall of 2003. **I co-authored a Physical Review B article on this research. You can check it out by clicking on the figure above. |
 Amanda Carr Class of 2002 Mathematics
Major |
 I
spent the summer of 2001 doing research on the specific heat behavior
of
type-II superconductors at high magnetic fields. These programs
calculate
the ratio Cs/Cn, the specific heat of the material in the
superconduting
state versus the normal state for a "clean" superconductor as well as
for
a "dirty" superconductor. At this point, all the materials were
"imaginary"
(who ever said you can't play pretend as an adult?) since values
for a real superconducting material would have made my programs run for
weeks at a time and would have made debugging impossible.
During the summer, Paul Powell and I together presented our findings thus far to various science professors and students here at Goucher. Even the Math and Computer Science faculty came to support their renegade major. You can see the power point presentation that WOWED them all by clicking here. I also presented my work at the second annual "Beyond the Classroom ExPO". The audience here included staff, faculty, current students and prospective students, all from various disciplines. What's Next? Now that we have computer programs to run specific heat data, and we have results from some “imaginary” superconducting materials using hypothetical numbers, we are ready to move on to the "real thing." During the summer of 2002, I will be examining data from superconducting material which has already been tested in a lab, to compare our theory with real life results. **I co-authored a Physical Review B article on this research. You can check it out by clicking on the picture above. |
|
Richard Howard Class of 2002
|
 I
learned IDL (Interactive Data Language) in order to generate and
analyze
surfaces representing quasiparticle energies in a superconductor
at high magnetic fields. IDL is one of the most powerful data
analysis
and visualization language packages available. It is a fourth
generation
language which makes it more compact than other data analysis
languages.
During the fall of 2000 I wrote programs in IDL and searched for
patterns
in the appearance of gapless points in the energy spectrum.
I presented a poster about my research at the 1st annual "Beyond the Classroom ExPO" at Goucher College. You can view my poster by clicking on the picture above. I co-authored a presentation at the 2001 March meeting of the American Physical Society in Seattle. Click here for the abstract. |
|
Oskar Vafek Class of 1998 |
 Oskar
and Sasha developed a theoretical model to explain an
experimentally
observed anomalous divergence of the upper critical field at low
temperatures
at high magnetic fields. Oskar utilized his background in
physics,
mathematics and computer science to develop computer codes in FORTRAN
and
C languages on django and numerically computed a critical field
as
the function of temperature. Oskar was awarded Goucher’s Presidential Scholarship for this research, which he used to travel to Los Angeles for the 1998 American Physical Society March meeting where he presented his research. You can read his abstract by clicking on the picture above. Oskar and Sasha published their results in the leading journal on superconductivity Physica C (Holland). Oskar is currently a post-doctoral fellow at Stanford in the group of Prof. Robert Laughlin, a winner of the Nobel Prize. Oskar has become one of the leading young scholars in the field of superconductivity and has published many more articles in prestigious journals like Physical Review, Physica, etc. You can check them out here |
