Seminars
Seminars occur on Tuesday afternoons in ISB 130 and run between 1:30-2:30 PM Pacific with a hybrid option over Zoom unless otherwise posted. To join the mailing list, please contact Prof. Brianne Gutmann at brianne.gutmann@sjsu.edu with the words "Seminars and Events" included in the subject heading.
This Week
Precision Optical Interferometry on a Budget
Christopher Smallwood, San José State University
Tuesday, 11/12/2024, 1:30-2:30pm Pacific
Abstract: Beginning with the work of Ernest O. Lawrence and others developing cyclotrons at
UC Berkeley in the 1930s, experimental achievements resulting from large scientific
collaborations and expensive apparatus have long captivated the public imagination.
However, there is an older and perhaps even more influential tradition in physics
consisting of exploring the boundaries of how cheaply one can conduct an experiment and still produce physically meaningful results. This
second tradition persists to this day as a valuable model today for both university
students and industrial professionals. In this talk I will discuss some of the progress
that undergraduate and master's students in my research group have made in this area
in the realm of optical interferometry. In particular, I will discuss the construction
and testing of a directional optical interferometer incorporating a generic green
laser pointer, home-built photodetectors, 3D-printed optical mounts, a circular polarizer
extracted from a pair of 3D movie glasses, and a python-enabled microcontroller for
analog-to-digital data acquisition. The project highlights both the advantages and
limitations of low-cost research as a practice.
Bio: Dr. Christopher Smallwood is an associate professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at San Jose Staté University. His research focuses on spectroscopy studies of solid-state materials, and on the development and characterization of interferometric optical devices. He received an AB in Physics from Harvard College in 2005 conducting optical measurements of rubidium vapor, and he received a PhD in Physics from UC Berkeley in 2014 developing photoemission spectroscopy techniques to study high-temperature superconductors. From 2014-2018 he worked as a postdoctoral researcher, first at JILA (University of Colorado and the National Institute of Standards and Technology) and then at the University of Michigan, where he developed and used ultrafast spectroscopy techniques to study light-matter interactions in solids. Between college and graduate school, he also taught fifth grade from 2005–2007 with Teach For America at Leo James Leo Elementary School in Mission, TX. He is the recipient of the 2013 Lars Commins Memorial Award in Experimental Physics at UC Berkeley, a National Research Council postdoctoral Research Associateship award at NIST, and numerous NSF-funded grants.
