News

Physics Faculty Duo Creates Bilingual Children’s Books to Make STEM Fun

Professor of Physics Cindy Schwarz and Assistant Professor of Physics Juan Merlo-Ramirez are working on various initiatives, including writing children’s books in English and Spanish, to inspire Latinx children to learn about science.

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Luke’s paper has been published on January 25th 2022. There, we have demonstrated the existence of topological phases in a classical system consisting of an elastic string and metallic masses. The paper can be found here: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1402-4896/ac4ed2

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This summer 2023, Madeleine Carhart and Katie Canavan developed a process to fabricate micro- and nano-structures using electron beam lithography (EBL) under Pro.f Merlo’s advising. The maximum resolution achieved is ~200 nm. Below, there is a colored SEM picture of the Vassar College seal fabricated using EBL. The red regions represent Ag while the gray represents ITO. The scale bar represents 10 microns or roughly the size of a red blood cell.

Canavan, Carhart, Merlo. 2023

It is important to mention that we used the electron scanning microscope (SEM) at the Earth Science and Geography department at Vassar. This SEM is intended only for imaging, but we managed it to work as an EBL machine.

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Our paper on anisotropic generation of surface plasmons in Au crystals has been published in the IEEE Photonics Journal. The paper can be found here: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10234094

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Our paper on three-dimensional mapping of magnetic field components has been accepted in the IOP Journal of Optics. The paper can be found here: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/2040-8986/ad21e0