What's New?

New content and hot topics in the JRM Lab.

Hot Topics

Kansas State University is pleased to announce the formation of a student chapter of the Optical Society of America (OSA).
Professor Brett DePaola has been selected to receive the 2013 Presidential Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching. Brett brings the "trophy" back to Physics after 10 years. Past recipients of this award from Physics are Sorensen (2002), Chakrabarti (2002), and Weaver (2003).
Derrek Wilson, a first year graduate student here in the JRM Lab, has just been awarded a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. He will be working with Carlos Trallero on the optics development of the new HITS laser and will use this laser for ultrafast studies.
The laboratory's office has moved to CW306.
Recent accomplishments of the Kansas State Physics Department are prominently featured in the Fall 2012 issue of K-State Perspectives.
CD Lin has delivered a seminar on Strong-field Physics and Attosecond Science as an ETH-FAST Fellow. ETH, the Swiss Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (Federal Institute of Technology), sponsors the Femtosecond and Attosecond Science and Technology (FAST) iniative to "act as a seed center to expand ultrafast efforts in physics and other departments, and to increase the awareness and excitement of ultrafast science".
A team headed by Carlos Trallero has received a National Science Foundation (NSF) Major Research Infrastructure (MRI) grant. The team proposes the "Acquisition of a High Intensity Tunable Femtosecond Laser". The multi-disciplinary, multi-institution team includes co-principal investigators Carlos Trallero, Itzhak Ben-Itzhak and Matthias Kling of KSU Physics, plus Eric Wells of Augustana College and Erwin Poliakoff of Louisiana State University. Other team members include Vinod Kumarappan and Kevin Carnes of KSU Physics, Christopher Elles from the University of Kansas, and Shuting Lei, from KSU Industrial Engineering. See the KSU press release.
The February 2013 edition of the Division of Laser Science newsletter is available.

Local Research in the News

Distinguished Professor CD Lin is on sabbatical in Japan, where not even earthquakes prevent him from pursuing science! As a JSPS Visiting Fellow, besides doing collaborative research during his sabbatical leave, he has visited and given seminars at a number of top "Imperial" universities.
A collaboration of physicists, including our own Artem Rudenko, has used the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) to find a way to strip most of the electrons from xenon atoms, creating a “supercharged,” strongly positive state at energies previously thought too low. The LCLS is a new facility at the US Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. The work, "Ultra-efficient ionization of heavy atoms by intense X-ray free-electron laser pulses" was recently published by Nature Photonics. It has received a great deal of attention, including a story on the popular technology site, Slashdot.
A paper from Brett Esry's group entitled "New Class of Three-Body States" has been selected as a May 2012 Physical Review Letters Editors' Choice. To promote reading across fields, the editors of Physical Review Letters offer "Suggestions" each week of papers that they hope will lead readers to explore other areas of physics. The paper has also inspired a press release from KSU and a popular news item at Physics World.
Kansas State University physicists and an international team of collaborators have made a breakthrough that improves understanding of matter-light interactions. Their research allows double ionization events to be observed at the time scale of attoseconds, which are one-billionth of a billionth of a second. The physicists have also shown that these ionization events occur earlier than thought -- a key factor to improving knowledge of correlated electron dynamics. The work appears in a recent issue of Nature Communications.
See older press releases concerning ultrafast physics at JRM.

Web Site Updates

The Physics department newsletter for 2013 is now available, featuring, among other news, details of the JRM lab's recent expansion of our ultrafast laser facilities. Read the entire newsletter or just the JRM contribution (pdf).
Our annual list of abstracts submitted to major summer conferences is now available. Read our many invited and contributed talks to DAMOP, CLEO, HILAS, and ICAP.
In April, Itzik Ben-Itzhak was named a Distinguished Professor. A new feature story and a new photo gallery were added in recognition of the honor. Our set of photo galleries documenting our lab remodeling continued to grow. The galleries are frequently updated as progress is now both visible and swift.
Download the Acrobat version of our latest visitor's guide.