Undergraduate Physics Research Symposium

April 9, 2005

Each year the Physics Department at James Madison University hosts the Undergraduate Physics Research Symposium. The symposium offers students a unique opportunity to present their work and allows faculty to showcase their research programs in front of the campus community. The format of the meeting is a three-hour morning session reserved for oral presentations (with one coffee break), followed by a poster session in the afternoon. All interested JMU students and faculty are cordially invited to attend this enjoyable and stimulating event.

The meeting is scheduled for Saturday, April 9, 2005. The morning session will be from 9:00am to 12:00pm, while the afternoon session will commence at 1:30pm. The event will take place at the College Center, Ballroom A.

ABSTRACTS

Abstracts should be no more than 300 words and should be submitted electronically at the following web address. The abstracts will be published in the Symposium brochure and on the web at LINK. The deadline for abstract submission is February 28, 2005, at 5:00pm EST.

PROGRAM

MORNING SESSION (9:00-12:00)

                        9:00 am: Jacob H. Forstater Control of Boiler Power Dissipation at the LEGS-JMU Hydrogen Distillery

                        9:15 am: Amelia Cohen Creating a LabVIEW Interface for a Residual Gas Analyzer

                        9:30 am: Scott Fix Growing Carbon Nanotubes: Tiny Crop Yields with Big Possibilities

                        9:45 am: Matthew Miller Work on the Support Apparati for the Mulan Project

                        10:00 am: Christopher J. Church The MULAN Detector Calibration System

                        10:15 am: Seth S. Henshaw Interpolation of Magnetic Fields: An Analysis of the Lagrangian Interpolation Technique

10:30-10:45 am: Coffee Break

                        10:45 am: Nicholas Giffen and Laura Marafino Chaos and the Double Pendulum

                        11:00 am: Sean Geary Force Networks in Jammed Granular Flows

                        11:15 am: O. K. Baker (Hampton University) The Revolution in Particle Physics


                    POSTER SESSION (1:30-3:00 pm)

John Hall, Ty Nelson, Danielle Miller Photometric Observations of Variable Star

Rebekah Esmaili, Michael McGrath, and Adam Stavola The Effect of Backgrounds on the Measurement of the Lifetime of the Muon

James Ferrer The Gas Handling System for the BONUS Detector at Jefferson

Brian Utter Connecting Microstructure to Equations of State in Granular Flows 

Scott Paulson On the mechanism of thyroid hormone action