What's New?

New content and hot topics in the JRM Lab.

Web Site Updates

James R. Macdonald Laboratory theoretical physicist Uwe Thumm has been named a University Distinguished Professor. We have featured Uwe and his work as a feature story on the lab's home page. Uwe joins a long line of Physics professors who have been so honored. Current Distinguished Professors in the Physics department include Itzik Ben-Itzhak, Brett Esry, CD Lin, Bharat Ratra and Chris Sorenson. Retired or otherwise past professors include Lew Cocke, Pat Richard, Dean Zollman, Talat Rahman and Bill Reay. Clearly, we're doing something right!
See all the latest news from the KSU Physics Department, including the latest edition of the departmental newsletter.

Hot Topics

Thursday, 16 May 2019 is the International Day of Light. The UNESCO sponsored event provides an annual focal point for the continued appreciation of light and the role it plays in science, culture, art, and education. It will be celebrated by physicists attending CLEO, as well as in other OSA organized activities.
Adam Summers has been named a winner of a PROBIST Postdoctoral Fellowship. This award is sponsored by the Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology and co-funded through the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions and the European Union's Framework Program for Research and Innovation Horizon 2020 program. The award provides three years of funding to include salary and relocation expenses. Summers will be hosted by the Attosecond and Ultrafast Optics group of Jens Biegert at the Institute for Photonic Sciences in Barcelona.
APS News has republished an opinion piece by Kristan Corwin originally in the Topeka Capital-Journal. Kristan argues that "Scientific Research Stimulates Kansas Economy". Kristan and Brian Washburn will be leaving us for NIST soon, and we wish them well!
Adam Summers has been awarded the 2018 Laser Technology, Engineering and Applications Scholarship by SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics, for his potential contributions to the field of optics, photonics or related field. See our news release for more.
We have been granted funding from the Department of Defense under the Office of Naval Research. The grant, awarded to former K-State Physics assistant professor Carlos Trallero and current graduate research assistant Derrek Wilson, will fund research to study the interaction of intense, long-wavelength, short pulses with solids and molecules. In addition, the proposal will allow the development of new techniques for the characterization of short pulses in this spectral region. Learn more from the KSU press release.
The latest edition of the Division of Laser Science newsletter is available.

Local Research in the News

The Department of Energy's Office of Science featured the work of Artem Rudenko and Daniel Rolles this December in "Science Up-Close: Blasting Molecules with Extreme X-Rays".
JRM Professor Daniel Rolles and his group have published a video article in JoVE, the Journal of Visualized Experiments. They describe the key steps for performing and analyzing pump-probe experiments combining a femtosecond optical laser with a free-electron laser in order to study ultrafast photochemical reactions in gas-phase molecules. This work utilizes the CAMP instrument at FLASH, a soft x-ray free electron laser that is part of the German DESY laboratory. Daniel has also been newly awarded a National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (NSF CAREER) grant.
In related developments. a group including both professors Daniel Rolles and Artem Rudenko have published new work conducted at the American hard x-ray FEL, the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS). The paper appeared in October in Nature Communications, and is the subject of a press release from DESY.
The latest work by Uwe Thumm's group has been featured on the cover of the 01 June issue of Physical Review Letters. The paper is titled "Imaging plasmonic fields with atomic spatiotemporal resolution".
A recent Physical Review Letter by the Ben-Itzhak and Esry groups has been featured in the "Physics Update" section of the May Physics Today.
Derrek Wilson, a JRM doctoral student, was selected as the 2017 Ultrafast Optics XI Conference award winner in the Ultrafast Optical Phenomena Technical Group Outstanding Poster Presentation Award. Derrek presented his poster "Generating few-cycle pulses in the long wave infrared for use in strong field science" in Jackson, Wyoming, October 8-13. Derrek received a certificate as well as a monetary prize.
See older press releases concerning ultrafast physics at JRM.