What's New?

New content and hot topics in the JRM Lab.

Hot Topics

Colleagues and friends are invited to celebrate Kevin Carnes' retirement at 1:30 p.m. on Monday, May 6, in Room 119 of Cardwell Hall. Kevin is retiring after more than four decades working in the James R. Macdonald Laboratory of the physics department at K-State. He currently serves as a research professor in physics and as associate director for operations in the Macdonald lab, where he has managed several successful upgrades over the years.
Former JRM professor and now NIST division chief Kristan Corwin will present the James R. Neff Lecture at 4:30 p.m. Tuesday, March 26, in Room 103 of Cardwell Hall. The James R. Neff Lecture Series is an endowed series of popular lectures in Physics.
We're delighted to announce Daniel Rolles' promotion to full professor, he having shown excellence in teaching and research. See the full list of promotions via K-State Today.
Long-time Physics office manager Peggy Matthews passed away on 15 February. Services are on Thursday and Friday, 22-23 February, at Yorgensen-Meloan-Londeen funeral home. Peggy was the person who knew everything and got things done. May she rest in peace.
Seventy-two Kansas State University faculty members are receiving promotions in rank, with 30 faculty members earning tenure. Earning promotion to full professor of Physics are Matthew Berg and Vinod Kumarappan. Vinod is a JRM group member who develops methods to align and orient small molecules in the gas phase, and to study ultrafast physics in the molecular frame.
Two distinguished Kansas State University researchers, Timothy Musch and Uwe Thumm, are recipients of the prestigious Higuchi-KU Endowment Research Achievement Awards. The awards are the state higher education system's most prestigious recognition for scholarly excellence. Uwe is the recipient of the Olin Petefish Award in Basic Sciences. His work includes understanding the interaction between light and matter in time and space. Uwe is the fourth Petefish award winner in the Physics department.
We are grateful to K-State College of Arts and Sciences Interim Dean Chris Culbertson for providing the funding and leadership that led to a deferred maintenance award for our department. The cooling system replacement in the JRM Lab will allow our laser systems to run much more efficiently and effectively resulting in greatly improved experiments for Kansas State University students, staff, and faculty.

Local Research in the News

JRM research was featured in the Science magazine "In The Pipeline" blog by Derek Lowe this March. The piece is titled "Very Small and Very Fast" and marvels at how the work "illustrates being able to determine molecular species on a very small scale and (even more importantly) on an extremely short time scale, and it's like getting a chance to look at the secret machinery of the chemical world - things that you knew had to be there but assumed would always be hidden". Our original paper was published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS).
The Office of the Vice President for Research announces the recipients of the 2024 GRIPex: AI in the Disciplines awards. GRIPex aims to increase interest and capacity in leveraging artificial intelligence across university disciplines and is a follow-up program to the larger Game-Changing Research Initiation Program launched in 2022. The 2024 GRIPex awardees include our own Daniel Rolles and collaborators doing "AI-based Molecular Image Analysis for Ultrafast Laser Experiments," to the tune of $179,249.
JRM Lab director Artem Rudenko has been awarded an APS Fellowship "for outstanding contributions to the understanding of correlated few-particle dynamics in strong field interactions with atoms and molecules and for leadership in developing and conducting coincident molecular imaging experiments at x-ray free-electron laser facilities". Artem joins five other current and four past JRM researchers in being so honored. See the full list of Kansas State's fellows at the American Physical Society.
The JRM Lab was featured in a recent issue of K-State's research magazine, "Seek". The article, "Laser Focus", highlights our work in ultrafast AMO physics and our many collaborations. Seek combines a variety of written content with creative photography and innovative design to tell the stories of university researchers.

Web Site Updates

Welcome to the Spring 2024 semester! A variety of updates have been made to our schedules, directories, publications and archives to keep things up-to-date.
The news comes thick and fast around here! In March we were featuring an APS TV video about the lab; come April we announced our participation in the CXFEL project; that was just before the K-State Seek magazine published an article on us! The Kansas State Collegian student newspaper has also published a story on our CFEL funding. In October we were delighted to learn that some of our AMO collaborators had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for developing attosecond ultrafast laser techniques. Our news can be followed on this page and our past features are archived and accessible via our publications page.
The departmental newsletter for 2024 is out, including lots about the major changes happening in the JRM Lab. You can also keep up on all the ongoing departmental news and special events via our new and improved website.
Our Publications page now has a running report of the 2024 papers published to date, and the 2023 papers have been archived. Links to all of the publications lists on the sitemap have been updated accordingly.