SFU Graduate Studies

Michael Steger, a PhD student in Mike Thewalt’s Semiconductor Spectroscopy Lab in SFU’s Department of Physics, has had a great year using optical spectroscopy to study the fundamental properties of semiconductors.

His research into highly isotopically enriched silicon, which enables optical spectroscopy at much higher resolution than natural silicon, led him to become first author on an invited paper presented at the International Conference on the Physics of Semiconductors in Seoul. This paper describes a novel method for studying nuclear spins in silicon, which might lead to a new approach for a silicon-based quantum computer.

Michael has also just wrapped up an invited review for the Journal of Applied Physics, which will form the core of his PhD thesis. This work describes a new technique of ‘isotopic fingerprints,’ which has led to a surprising reevaluation of what were thought to be very well known luminescent defect centers in silicon.

Michael is also a budding entrepreneur. In his free time, he developed PhotoPosterMaker, a tool to quickly make professional collages out of photos. It’s now available for sale in the Mac App Store.

• Semiconductor Spectroscopy Lab
• Links to Mike Steger’s published papers
• PhotoPosterMaker for Mac

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Congratulations to Michel Trottier-McDonald, who has received an Alexander Graham Bell Graduate Scholarship (NSERC) for $105,000 to support his PhD program in high energy physics at SFU’s Department of Physics.

Michel has been involved for the last three years in the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland. His work is aimed at finding experimental evidence of the mechanism that gives mass to the fundamental particles making all the matter in the Universe. The favorite explanation is called the Higgs mechanism, and particle physicists have been on the hunt for many decades to find its elusive manifestation: the Higgs boson.

With the ever increasing amount of data collected by the ATLAS detector, it is becoming clear that the hunt for the Higgs boson is coming close to an end. Within a year or so, particle physicists should be able to tell if the Higgs mechanism is real or not.

Michel works on developing new techniques in order to increase the sensitivity of the search for the Higgs boson. For this, he is testing the limit of what the ATLAS detector can see. There is a chance that such techniques enable him and the ATLAS collaboration to see the Higgs before anyone else.

• ATLAS collaboration
• Physics Department, SFU
• High Energy Physics Group
• Michel’s Facebook page
• Michel’s blog: The Large Idea Collider
• Michel’s musical project: Motionthink

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The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers  (IEEE) is holding a symposium in Vancouver this July 24–27: The 20th IEEE International Symposium on Applications of Ferroelectrics, jointly held with the International Symposium on Piezoresponse Force Microscopy & Nanoscale Phenomena in Polar Materials.

Graduate students are invited to participate in the short courses on Sunday, July 24 and in the poster competition. Some financial assistance may still be available.

They’re also looking for student volunteers to help out at the symposium. Volunteers can request to be an attendant at specific sessions and will receive full admission to attend lectures and sessions around their volunteer schedule.

For information on how to get involved, contact Regan Belan, MSc candidate in chemistry, by email to rab11@sfu.ca

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SFU physics PhD student Mohammad Dehghani Ashkezari (front right) and his supervisor professor Mike Hayden (back right) are part of an international team of scientists that has managed to capture and hold onto some atomic antimatter for over 16 minutes.

Their results were published in Nature Physics today: “Confinement of antihydrogen for 1,000 seconds“.

The Vancouver Sun reports:

The team created a cylindrical container or “magnetic bottle” that is about five by 25 centimetres. It uses magnets to keep the anti-hydrogen atoms from touching its walls, suspending the antimatter atoms away from any matter that would cause their destruction.

Now that they’ve sustained their anti-hydrogen atoms for 1,000 seconds, scientists can began to examine them and see how they compare to ordinary hydrogen atoms.

The SFU scientists are part of an international ALPHA Collaboration based at CERN, in Switzerland.

• Nature Physics: “Confinement of antihydrogen for 1,000 seconds“
• CBC News:  “Antimatter atoms trapped for 16 minutes“
• Vancouver Sun: “Canadian scientists capture antimatter atoms in a bottle“
• Mike Hayden research group
• SFU Public Affairs backgrounder: “Scientists capture antimatter atoms“

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Congratulations to this year’s Convocation Medal Winners who will receive their awards at our Spring Convocation, June 14–17, 2011.

Governor General’s Gold Medals
The Governor General’s Gold Medals are awarded to the two SFU graduate students who achieve the highest academic standing upon graduation from a master’s or doctoral degree program.

• Jesse Cale, PhD, School of Criminology. Thesis: The antisocial trajectories in youth of adult sexual aggressors of women: A developmental framework for examining offending, motivation, and risk of recidivism in adulthood
• Karel Lucien Casteels, PhD, Department of Mathematics. Thesis: The combinatorial structure of the prime spectrum of quantum matrices

Dean of Graduate Studies Convocation Medals
The Convocation Medals for graduate studies recognize graduating students from each faculty whose cumulative grade-point averages place them in the top five per cent of their class.

• Colin Campbell, PhD, Faculty of Business Administration. Thesis: Consumer motivations for creating and consumer responses to consumer generated advertising
• Stephanie Campbell, PhD, Department of Geography. Thesis: Productive consumption of the ‘livable’ neighbourhood: The case of Commercial Drive, Vancouver, BC
• Angela Cescon, MPH, Faculty of Health Sciences. Thesis: In search of reason: Prevention of mother-to-child transmission (PMTCT) failures in the era of programmatic scale-up in Soweto, South Africa
• Caroline Greaves, PhD, Department of Psychology. Thesis: Progression towards sexual re-offence: Detailing the offence cycle and contributing factors in high-risk sexual offenders
• Hayley Jones, MA, School for International Studies. Thesis: Conditional cash transfers, labour markets, and poverty reduction: A pilot study of Brazil’s Bolsa Família
• Zaid Jumean, PhD, Department of Biological Sciences. Thesis: Communication of codling moth larvae: Identification and functional role of their aggregation pheromone
• Neil (Anil) Narine, PhD, School of Communication. Thesis: The cinematic network society: Ethical confrontations with new proximities to human suffering in the information age
• Kathryn Ricketts, PhD, Faculty of Education. Thesis: The suitcase, the map, and the compass: An expedition into embodied poetic narrative and its application toward fostering optimal learning spaces
• Kathleen Ross, EdD, Faculty of Education. Thesis: The effect of institutional merit-based aid on student aspirations, choice and participation: A mixed methods approach
• Dennis Storoshenko, PhD, Department of Linguistics. Thesis: A cross-linguistic account of reflexivity using synchronous tree adjoining grammar
• Michel Trottier-McDonald, PhD, Department of Physics. Thesis: Identifying hadronic tau decays using calorimeter topological clusters at ATLAS
• Jing Wang, PhD, School of Engineering Science. Thesis: Cooperation and joint source-channel transmission in wireless networks

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The Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics and the Institute for Quantum Computing will be hosting the Women in Physics Canada conference in Waterloo, Ontario, from July 19-21, 2011.

The conference is for young women in physics and its main component will be student presentations, along with keynote lectures, opportunities for discussions with senior physicists, and interactions with invited speakers and local researchers.

Up to $600 of financial support is available; applications must be made by April 29, 2011.

• Women in Physics Canada conference
• Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics
• Perimeter Institute: Current and future conferences
• Perimeter Institute: Resources for teachers
• Perimeter Institute: Videos of past public lectures

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Applications are now open for the 2012-13 International Fulbright award in Science and Technology. The award includes tuition at a top US university for three years, a monthly stipend, travel support, and many other benefits.

Applicants must be Canadian citizens planning to complete a PhD in science or technology. More information for Canadians is available at the Fulbright Canada website. More information on the award is available through the Fulbright Science and Technology Awards website.

Apply online at the Foreign Fulbright Program application page. Application deadline: May 31, 2011.

• Full list of Fulbright awards for Canadian Master’s students
• Full list of awards for Canadian PhDs

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The Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada has announced the Innovation Challenge Award for graduate students in the natural sciences or engineering.

This national competition recognizes and rewards the power of an entrepreneurial spirit within Canada’s brightest young minds. There are three awards: one $10,000 grand prize and two $5,000 runner-up prizes. Honourable mention prizes may also be awarded if applications are deemed meritorious.

Eligible nominees must:

• have conducted research within the natural sciences or engineering at the Master’s or PhD level at an eligible Canadian university.
• have submitted, or expect to submit, their thesis between May 15, 2010 and May 1, 2011 (students must successfully defend their thesis before the award is offered).
• be Canadian citizens or permanent residents in Canada at the time of nomination

Two nominations may be made by each Canadian university. To be considered for one of SFU’s nominations, please submit the following to melaniem@sfu.ca by Monday, March 28, 2011:

• A one-page summary, reviewed and signed by the your supervisor, that describes your research and the primary commercial product or service that could be implemented or developed through application of the research results
• Your up-to-date curriculum vitae that provides information on your contributions to publications (including patents) and collaborative research activities, and including full contact information.

SFU’s Innovation Office will select the nominee(s) that will be put forward from SFU, and assist with the completion of the required documentation, including a detailed six-page proposal, for submission to NSERC by their deadline of May 2, 2011.

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SFU physics professor Mike Thewalt and his lab are in the news this week for their contribution to the field of quantum computing, as published in Nature.

CBC News reports on why this is significant:

Quantum computers have the potential for exponentially greater computing power than conventional computers. They are based on laws of physics that apply to very small particles like electrons and are very different from the classical laws of physics that we are familiar with in daily life.

Current PhD students Michael Steger and Kamyar Saeedi, and Dr. Albion Yang, who obtained his PhD in Fall 2010, were all involved in Dr. Thewalt’s studies of isotopically enriched silicon at SFU.

• Entanglement in a solid-state spin ensemble (Nature article)
• Thewalt Lab
• SFU Physics Department

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