Rustgi Lectures
10/2/93, The Moti Lal Rustgi Memorial Symposium
Joseph Levinger, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Bruce D. McCombe, University at Buffalo
T. Sandhu, Oakwood Hospital, Dearborn, MI 3/14/96, Herman Feshbach, Massachusetts Institute of Technology 9/13/96 Leon Lederman, Nobel Laureate, Director Emeritus for Fermilab, 9/26/97, John Dirk Walecka, College of William and Mary 9/25/98, Wolfgang Ketterle, Massachusetts Institute of Technology 9/9/99, Lawrence M. Krauss, Case Western Reserve University 9/8/00, Horst Stormer, Nobel Laureate, Columbia University 3/15/02 Douglas Osheroff, Nobel Laureate, Stanford University 10/18/02 Chris Quigg, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory 10/10/03 Rocky Kolb, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory 10/01/04 Klaus von Klitzing, Max-Plank Institut
für Festkörperforschung (Stuttgart, Germany) 09/23/05 Alan Guth, Victor F. Weisskopf Professor of Physics (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Inflation proposes that the expansion of the universe was propelled by a repulsive gravitational force generated by an exotic form of matter. After more than 20 years of development and scrutiny the evidence for the inflationary universe model now looks better than ever. In particular, inflation can explain the uniformity of the universe, the value of its mass density, and the properties of the faint ripples that are now being observed in the cosmic background radiation. It even offers a possible explanation for the origin of essentially all the matter in the universe. The recently discovered acceleration of the cosmic expansion has radically altered our picture of the universe, but has also helped to confirm the basic predictions of inflation. When the mass density needed to drive this acceleration is added to the previously known contributions, it sums to just the value predicted by inflation for the total mass density of the universe. Professor Guth was a student at MIT from 1964 to 1971, acquiring S.B., S.M., and Ph.D. degrees, all in physics. His Ph.D. thesis, done under the supervision of Francis Low, was an exploration of an early model of how quarks combine to form the elementary particles that we observe. During the next nine years, Guth held postdoctoral positions at Princeton University, Columbia University, Cornell University, and the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), working mostly on rather abstract mathematical problems in the theory of elementary particles. While at Cornell, however, Guth was approached by a fellow postdoctoral physicist, Henry Tye, who persuaded Guth to join him in studying the production of magnetic monopoles in the early universe. This work changed the direction of Guth's career. The following year at SLAC he continued to work with Tye on magnetic monopoles. They found that standard assumptions in particle physics and cosmology would lead to a fantastic overproduction of magnetic monopoles, a conclusion that was reached slightly earlier by John Preskill, then at Harvard (now at Caltech). Guth and Tye began a search for alternatives that might avoid the magnetic monopole overproduction problem, and from this work Guth invented the modification of the big bang theory called the inflationary universe. In September 1980 Guth returned to MIT as an associate professor. Guth has since been elected to the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and has been awarded the MIT School of Science Prize for Undergraduate Teaching (1999), the Franklin Medal for Physics of the Franklin Institute (2001), and the Dirac Prize of the International Center for Theoretical Physics in Trieste (2002). He is now the Victor F. Weisskopf Professor of Physics and a Margaret MacVicar Faculty Fellow at MIT. 04/06/07 Dr. Stuart Parkin
(IBM Almaden Research Center
San Jose, California)
Today, nearly all microelectronic devices are based on storing or flowing the electron's charge. The electron also possesses a quantum mechanical property termed "spin", that gives rise to magnetism. Electrical current is comprised of "spin-up" and "spin-down" electrons, which behave as largely independent spin currents. The flow of these spin currents can be controlled in thin-film structures composed of atomically thin layers of conducting magnetic materials separated by non-magnetic conducting or insulating layers. The resistance of such devices, so-called spin-valves and magnetic tunnelling junctions, respectively, can be varied by controlling the relative magnetic orientation of the magnetic layers, giving rise to magneto-resistance tailored for different applications. Recent advances in generating, manipulating and detecting spin-polarized electrons and electrical current make possible new classes of spin based sensor, memory and logic devices, generally referred to as the field of spintronics. In particular, the spin-valve is a key component of all magnetic hard-disk drives manufactured today and enabled their nearly 1,000-fold increase in capacity over the past seven years1. The magnetic tunnel junction allows for a novel, high performance random access solid state memory which maintains its memory in the absence of electrical power. The respective strengths of these two major classes of digital data storage devices, namely the very low cost of disk drives and the high performance and reliability of solid state memories, may be combined in the future into a single spintronic memory-storage technology, the magnetic racetrack. We discuss the future of spintronic devices including, for example, the possibility of the life recorder, a device that could record everything you see or hear throughout your lifetime2.
Dr. Stuart S.P. Parkin is an experimental physicist at IBM's Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California. His discoveries into the behavior of thin-film magnetic structures were critical in enabling recent increases in the data density and capacity of computer hard-disk drives.
Parkin also made key discoveries that led to IBM's pioneering use of the giant magnetoresistive (GMR) effect to read disk-drive data bits that were far smaller than could have been previously detected. He was the first to use sputtering techniques to create GMR structures, which consist of thin magnetic layers separated by non-magnetic metals. The electrical resistance parallel to the planes of such structures can change dramatically according to whether the magnetizations of consecutive magnetic layers are in the same or opposite directions (parallel or anti-parallel alignment, respectively).
In 1991, he discovered that slight changes in the thickness of the non-magnetic spacer layer caused large oscillations between parallel and anti-parallel magnetic alignment. And in 1994, Parkin and his IBM Research colleagues used this basic information to design and create GMR elements for what proved to be the most sensitive disk-drive read/write head made at that time. Subsequently, IBM introduced the GMR head in its disk-drive products in 1997. It is now used in all of the world's total production of disk drives. The GMR head has been a key enabler of the more than 30-fold increase in disk-drive data densities from 1997 to present (2.4 to more than 70 gigabits per square inch).
Parkin is currently studying magnetic tunnel junctions --which require just a few atomic layers of an electrical insulator between magnetic layers to create large resistance changes perpendicular to the layers' planes --and their use in both disk-drive recording heads more sensitive than GMR heads, and a new type of solid-state non-volatile magnetic random access memory (MRAM). Tunnel-junction heads may enable data-storage densities beyond 100 billion bits per square inch. Magnetic RAM chips could lead to instant-on computers with much better performance, energy-efficiency and battery life because they could combine the best attributes of the three major memories in use today: the data density (and thus low cost) of DRAM, the speed of SRAM, and the non-volatility of Flash memory. In 2001, IBM began an MRAM development program with Infineon based at IBM's Advanced Semiconductor Technology Center in East Fishkill, N.Y.
In May 1991, Parkin was awarded the Materials Research Society's Inaugural Outstanding Young Investigator Award and the Charles Vernon Boys Prize of the Institute of Physics (U.K.). In 1999, he was awarded the American Institute of Physics (AIP) Prize for Industrial Application of Physics. Dr. Parkin shared both the American Physical Society's International New Materials Prize (1994) and the European Physical Society's Hewlett-Packard Europhysics Prize (1997) with Albert Fert of University of Paris-Sud in Orsay, France, and Peter Grunberg of KFA Julich in Germany. Dr. Parkin is a Fellow of the American Physical Society. In 1997, he was elected to IBM's Academy of Technology and named one of IBM's Master Inventors. In 1999 he was named an IBM Fellow -IBM's highest technical honor --and in May 2000 he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society (London). R&D Magazine named Dr. Parkin "Innovator of the Year" in 2001. Since 1997, he has served as a Consulting Professor in Applied Physics at Stanford University.
A native of Watford, England, Dr. Parkin received his B.A. (1977) and was elected a Research Fellow (1979) at Trinity College in Cambridge, England, and was awarded his Ph.D (1980) at the Cavendish Laboratory, also in Cambridge. He joined IBM in 1982 as a World Trade Post-doctoral Fellow, becoming a permanent member of the staff the following year.
04/04/08 Dr. Lee Smolin
(Perimeter Institute of Theoretical Physics, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada)
A major problem in physics is the need for a single theory that combines Einstein's theory of space, time and cosmology-general relativity, with quantum theory. No approach is currently complete, but several approaches predict that space and time are discrete.
That is, just as matter is composed of atoms, space itself is composed of building blocks. These are predicted to be extremely small-twenty powers of ten smaller than atomic nuclei.
Michael G. Fuda, University at Buffalo
Relativistic Quantum Mechanics of Few Particle Systems
Professor M.L. Rustgi's Contributions to Nuclear Physics
Professor Levinger was Moti Rustgi's Ph.D. thesis advisor.
Shallow Impurities in Semiconductor Quantum Well and Superlattices
Dose Distribution Optimization for Conformal Radiation Therapy
T. Sandhu did his Ph.D. thesis with Moti Rustgi.
High Tc Superconductivity, SQUIDS and Brains
The Evolution of a Nuclear Reaction
Professor Feshbach is a member of the National Academy of Science, and
is a recipient of the National Medal of Science (1986), as well as the
T.W. Bonner Prize in Nuclear Physics (1973). He is a former President
of the American Physical Society (1980-1981). Besides his many
research publications, he is co-author with P.M. Morse of the classic
text, Methods in Theoretical Physics; as well as co-author with
A. deShalit of Theoretical Nuclear Physics.
Miletus to the Supercollider
In 1956, Professor Lederman and his team from Columbia University
discovered the long-lived neutral K-meson particle. In 1961,
Professor Lederman and his group discovered the muon neutrino, which
provided the first proof that there was more than one type of
neutrino, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1988.
In 1977, he and his collaborators discovered evidence for a new
elementary particle called the bottom quark. A broad spectrum of
innovative experiments he led at Brookhaven National Laboratory,
Fermilab, and the CERN laboratory in Geneva set the paradigm for
modern nuclear physics and particle physics research. He was chairman
of the board and past president of the American Association for the
Advancement of Science (1991-93). He is a member of the National
Academy of Sciences. Besides the Nobel Prize (1988), he has received
the National Medal of Science (1965), the Wolf Prize in Physics
(1983), and the Enrico Fermi Award (1992).
Electron Scattering and Nuclear Physics
Professor Walecka won the prestigious Bonner prize in Nuclear Physics
on 28 November 1995; "for his preeminent theoretical guidance and
inspirational leadership in exploiting electromagnetic and weak probes
of the nucleus and for his fundamental contribution to the
understanding of the nucleus as a relativistic quantum many-body
system." Dr. Walecka was formerly Professor of Physics at Stanford
University, and from 1986-92 he was Scientific Director of CEBAF, now
known as the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility. At
present he is Senior Fellow at CEBAF and Professor of Physics at
William and Mary, as well as Governor's Distinguished CEBAF Professor
of the Commonwealth of Virginia. He is the author of six books and
more than 130 publications in scientific journals.
Matter Made of Matter Waves/Bose-Einstein Condensation and the Atom Laser
Professor Ketterle holds the John D. MacArthur chair at MIT, and is a
Fellow of the American Physical Society. His awards include the
Michael and Philip Platzman Award (MIT,1994), a David and Lucile
Packard Fellowship (1996), the Rabi Prize of the American Physical
Society (1997), the Gustav-Hertz Prize of the German Physical Society
(1997), and the Discover Magazine Award for Technological Innovation
(1998). He was the Distinguished Traveling Lecturer of the Division of
Laser Science of the American Physics Society (1998-1999). He is among
the first scientists to observe the phenomenon of Bose-Einstein
condensation in dilute atomic gases, and to realize the atom laser.
The Physics of Star Trek
Professor Krauss is active in the emerging field of particle
astrophysics, in which the cosmological implications of ideas
concerning fundamental interactions, and astrophysical and
cosmological constraints on particle physics are explored. He is the
author of over 170 scientific publications as well as numerous popular
articles and books on physics and astronomy. The books include; The
Fifth Essence: The Search for Dark Matter in the Universe, Fear of
Physics, The Physics of Star Trek, and most recently, Beyond Star
Trek. He is the recipient of a Gravity Research Foundation First
Prize Award (1984), and a Presidential Investigator Award (1986), and
he is a Fellow of the American Physical Society.
Fractional Charges and Other Tales from Flatland
Professor Stormer shared the 1998 Nobel Prize in Physics with Daniel
C. Tsui and Robert B. Laughlin "for discovery of a new form of quantum
fluid with fractionally charged excitations".
What Happens at Absolute Zero?
Professor Osheroff shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in Physics with
Professors David M. Lee and Robert C. Richardson of Cornell University
"for their discovery of superfluidity in Helium-3."
The Coming Revolutions in Particle Physics
Chris Quigg is internationally known for his studies of heavy quarks
and his insights into particle interactions at ultrahigh
energies. From 1974 to 1991 he served on the faculty of the University
of Chicago. He has been Visiting Professor at
The Quantum and the Cosmos
Edward W. Kolb (known to most as Rocky) is a founding head of the
NASA/Fermilab Astrophysics Group at Fermi National Accelerator
Laboratory and a Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at The
University of Chicago.
A native of New Orleans, he received a Ph.D. in physics from the
University of Texas. Postdoctoral research was performed at the
California Institute of Technology and Los Alamos National Laboratory
where he was the J. Robert Oppenheimer Research Fellow. He has served
on editorial boards of several international scientific journals as
well as Astronomy magazine.
Kolb is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a
Fellow of the American Physical Society. He was the recipient of the
2003 Oersted Medal of the American Association of Physics Teachers
and the 1993 Quantrell Prize for teaching excellence at the
University of Chicago. His book for the general public, Blind
Watchers of the Sky, received the 1996 Emme Award of the American
Aeronautical Society.
The field of Rocky's research is the application of
elementary-particle physics to the very early Universe. In addition
to over 200 scientific papers, he is a co-author of The Early
Universe, the standard textbook on particle physics and cosmology.
In addition to writing articles for magazines and books, he teaches
cosmology to non-science majors at the University of Chicago and is
involved with pre-college education, participating in Fermilab's
Saturday Morning Physics Program for high-school students and the
Department of Energy high-school physics program for gifted students,
as well as lecturing in institutes and workshops for science teachers.
He has traveled the world, if not yet the Universe, giving scientific
and public lectures. In addition to occasional lectures at Chicago's
Adler Planetarium, Rocky is a Harlow Shapley Visiting Lecturer and
Centennial Lecturer with the American Astronomical Society. In recent
years he has been selected by the American Physical Society and the
International Conference on High-Energy Physics to present public
lectures in conjunction with international physics meetings. Also on
the international scene, he was the Shell Key Lecturer in Edinburgh,
presented a special public lecture in Salonika Greece as part of the
cultural celebration of that city, and was selected to address the
president of Pakistan as part of the celebration of the 50th
anniversary of the founding of the country. He has also presented
public lectures at the Royal Society of London, and in Rio de
Janeiro, Valencia, and Barcelona.
He is a past Fellow of the World Economic Forum held in Davos,
Switzerland. In recent years, Rocky was the Buhl lecturer in
Pittsburgh, the Oppenheimer lecturer in Los Alamos, the Arthur
lecturer at New York University, a Distinguished Lecturer in
Cosmology at the National Science Foundation, and in Athens (Ohio)
and Troy (New York) he presented the Graselli Lecture and the Resnick
Lecture. This year he will be the Landsdowne lecturer at the
University of Victoria in Canada, and the James lecturer at Purdue
University.
Rocky has appeared in several television productions, and can also be
seen in the OMNIMAX/IMAX film The Cosmic Voyage.
From Micro- to Nano Electronics: A Quantum Leap
The scaling laws for the miniaturization of microelectronic devices break down if the wave nature and the discrete charge of electrons dominate the electronic properties. These quantum phenomena do not mark the end in the miniaturization of devices but open the possibility to create new devices with new functions where for example the energy quantization of electrons in confined structures, tunnel phenomena through barriers and single electron charging of small islands play an important role. The talk gives an overview about the physics, technology and application of semiconductor quantum structures and discusses some recent basic research activities of my group in this field.
Cosmic Inflation and the Accelerating Universe
The Spin on Electronics!
1. Stuart Parkin et al., Magnetically engineered spintronic sensors and memory. Proc. IEEE 91, 661-680 2003).
2. Kevin Maney, "Every move you make could be stored on a PLR", US Today, September 8, 2004.
Using the universe as a microscope to probe the micro-structure of space and time
Poster is now available
4:30 pm, 225 Natural Sciences Complex
Until recently it was believed that no experiment could check that prediction because it would require an accelerator as big as a galaxy. But in the last ten years it was realized that we have access to galaxy sized accelerators as well as to detectors the size of the universe. Amazingly, observations of very high frequency light and very energetic particles which travel to us from across the universe contain information about the micro-structure of space on scales quantum theories of gravity predict are discrete. Cosmic ray detectors such as AUGER and gamma ray detectors, MAGIC, GLASS and others are already providing us with information which rules out some approaches to quantum gravity. Near future observations may soon discriminate between several major approaches to the problem including possibly string theory and loop quantum gravity.