These are ideas I'm toying around with. While I almost certainly will start work on them at some point, they still are rather nebulous in terms of where they will end up.
For students, the advantage of getting involved with one of these projects is that you get to see how research work gets off the ground, and you get to shape where you were going instead of performing an already-defined task in the context of an ongoing project. The risk is that we might not be able to produce something concrete, suitable for a student presentation, in a relatively short amount of time.
I did my Ph.D. work on Jospehson junction arrays, which are interesting as macroscopic quantum systems, as well as being worth exploring for potential device applications. I have not been active in the field for the last few years, but I want to get reacquainted, and I can think of a few small problems which an undergraduate with a computer might be able to explore.
A Josephson junction is what you get when you take two superconductors and separate them by an insulating gap; the superconducting charge carriers then quantum-tunnel across this barrier. In mesoscopic arrays, that is, with a small number of junctions, some interesting chaotic behavior results, plus I-V characteristics which might lead to applications.
We would study these systems by simulating them on the computer. For the experimentally inclined, it would be interesting to build a couple of these small arrays and play with them in the lab. We'd need to interest some of the experimentalist faculty in collaborating with us, however.
This is something I want to do for the hell of it, because I can combine certain abstract dynamics questions with computer simulation in a straightforward manner.
The basic question is finding out what happens when you put particles on a discrete spacetime of randomly distributed points, and have them move by hopping. Getting reasonably coherent behavior should be an interesting problem.
If all goes well, this could produce some results useful for simulating quantum systems. If nothing goes well, we will find nothing interesting happens -- unfortunately, real-world research projects often do fail. If we get the usual mix of success and failure, we'll have a way to play with some simulated dynamic systems at an undergraduate level, and produce some reasonable presentation or something.
Being a computational physicist, I am occasionally drawn to questions which have as much to do with machine learning and the philosophy of science as with physics.
I want to look at the history of physics and see how small effects such as certain symmetry violations were accepted, and how some claimed small effects such as the 5th force were rejected. I want to distinguish between small and marginal effects, and clarify this in terms of statistical inference and the role of statistical resoning in physics.
One particular application would be in criticizing the marginal effect claims of fringe sciences such as parapsychology -- this would tie into the "Weird Science" JINS course I hope to teach one of these years.
Student involvement in this project would include helping with library research and learning how to criticize experimental claims. So it would be suitable for a physics major interested in the history of the discipline and who has no particular desire to work with computers.
Anti-evolution public sentiment primarily attracts attention because it is such a nuisance for biology education. However, especially with the more sophisticated "Intelligent Design" movement, creationists have been making more claims relevant to the physics of complexity, and they have also started to appeal to a college-level audience.
I therefore want to explore how creationism might be affecting physics education. We might, for example, look at some Missouri area schools, both public and sectarian, to examine their physics curricula. There is interesting work to do here for students interested in physics education or questions of public science literacy.
| Taner Edis | Home |
| Last modified: 25-Apr-2003 |