Officially employed

I am excited to announce that I will be joining the faculty at Pacific University this fall. I have accepted an offer for a tenure-track position that is a joint appointment between the Department of Physics and the School of Optometry. I am looking forward to teaching physics in a liberal arts setting, and also to have the opportunity to teach optics to the next generation of optometrists.

I will also continue my research in nonlinear optics and atom trapping, and will mentor undergraduates in summer research and senior capstone projects. In the meantime, I am still hard at work writing my dissertation and getting ready to defend in April. I don’t imagine I’ll be posting much between now and then, but I hope to be back at it again soon.

Math fonts in LaTeX

Tired of Computer Modern or Times when you turn to LaTeX to document your hard work? This post outlines the relatively simple process of using another font that adds a bit more style to your documents. The general challenge is to find a font for the math that matches the text font. This is solved with the mathdesign package for LaTeX.

Job Search: he shoots, he scores!

Well you may have noticed a lack of new posts for a few weeks. Chalk it up to me entering the initial thesis-writing phase, combined with job applications, interviews, and the general associated chaos.

The good news, of course, is that the job search process has gone well. After two enjoyable interviews, I have received my first offer (let’s say it’s from from Liberal Arts College A). I’m trying to find out as much as I can from Liberal Arts College B before too long, in order to make the decision as informed as possible. This is the funny gray area that everyone always talks about. I have been leaning towards A, and I’m very excited to have an offer from them… but it a lot of ways it’s like “deal or no deal”… I wonder what is in case B.

NOVA | Absolute Zero | PBS

Part II of a very cool NOVA series airs on PBS stations tonight. Pun absolutely intended. Second pun not as intended, but still amusing.

Many all-star players from the Atomic, Molecular and Optical physics world, several of which are Nobel Laureates, make appearances on this second part of the program. The first part aired last week and covered many interesting aspects of early thermodynamics. One great piece of trivia was about the original Celsius scale, and the fact that it was originally reversed, with zero for the boiling point of water, and 100 for the freezing point. This is really too bad, since he was very close to getting the right sense of temperature. Many argue that the thermodynamic beta is a more direct representation of temperature. Since Beta scales as the inverse of T, Celsius’ original scale at least went the right direction, even if the degree sizes weren’t right.

NOVA | Absolute Zero | PBS

Fimo fractals and fancy fiber

Evilmadscientist has a well-documented project on drawing (stretching, not sketching) fimo into fractal patterns. You can start with a set of four triangular rods, stacked together into one larger triangle, strech them out to make them skinny, stack them in with four other similar assemblies, and iterate to make fractals. Aside from the fractal part, this technique is identical to how photonic crystal fibers (PCF) are formed, which got me thinking…

DataGraph gets LaTeX

In a previous post, I listed DataGraph as one of my most-used mac apps. Its status as most-used just got a major boost with the addition of LaTeX functionality in the text label fields. To see this feature it action, you’ll have to download the latest beta from the DataGraph website. I’ve posted some screenshots below the fold.

Animating PNG files

I have struggled with optimizing the process of animating PNG files. I have code that generates a PNG image based on an array of data, which, in my case is the intensity of an optical beam, but it can be anything. I have found various options ranging from quick-and-dirty to fairly robust. MEncoder plays a role in several of them, and it was no easy feat to find a combination of flags that properly encode the video for playback on linux and Mac platforms. Here, I present my two most promising options so far.

To clarify the usage, the commands quoted are what I used on a linux machine, which where I run C++ code to generate the images. I want to view movies on both linux and mac platforms (especially since I give presentations on my mac). The viewing is done with either mplayer (linux) or quicktime player (mac).

Photoelectric Effect

A discussion at one of our recent group meetings, reminded me of the interesting history behind the observation of the Photoelectric Effect. Some of these classic papers are quite impressive, especially as experimental feats. While the photoelectric effect was first observed by Heinrich Hertz, Phillip von Lenard, and others, it was the experiment of Robert Andrews Millikan that finally showed Einstein’s theory to be correct.

Writing PNGs from C++

To continue the series on using C++ to replace MATLAB, here are some details about using the pngwriter library. Included below is a function that I use in various places to write a 2D array to a png file. This can be left in a header somewhere and used in a similar way to MATLAB’s imagesc() function.

I’d be happy to post more details if anyone is interested, and I’ll try to keep up with posts about the process I followed to port from MATLAB to C++.

Mac Apps, round 1

Inspired by a recent post by Sujit Datta, I decided to start a series covering my favorite Mac applications. These are generally physics-type applications but should be useful to a wide range of people in any field of science.