School of Physics News, Monash University Physics

The School of Physics has been awarded the inaugural Edmund Optics bursary valued at $5000. The bursary recognises Monash's commitment to teaching and research in all areas of optics. Edmund's Asia-Pacific marketing director Clark Harris presented Monash's Dr Lincoln Turner with the bursary, which will be used to purchase a high-precision helium-neon laser for the second and third year teaching laboratory.

AIP Award

The Victorian Branch of the Australian Institute of Physics is pleased to announce that Ms Dilani Kahawala from Monash University School of Physics is this years winner of the Laby Medal for the best honours thesis. Dilani's thesis title was "The supersymmetry inverse problem". Since then, a paper based on her thesis has been submitted to Physical Review D. In the meantime Dilani is working with Lisa Randall and Howard Georgi at Harvard as a graduate student.

Contributions of Astronomy to all of Science

Professor Penny Sackett, Chief Scientist for Australia, discusses the connections between astronomy and the other sciences during an International Year of Astronomy public lecture at Monash University.

3rd Year Physics Award 2009

Tony Grubman (right), David Ludowyk (centre) from CUP and Leon Clark (left)
Photograph by S. Morton

Two Third Year Physics students, Tony Grubman and Leon Clark, have been awarded the 2009 book prize by David Ludowyk from Cambridge University Press. This annual book award is presented to the best student(s) in PHS3031 - Foundations of Contemporary Physics, and is made possible through the generosity of Cambridge University Press.

Teaching Award

Congratulations to Associate Professor David Paganin, from the School of Physics, on winning a 2009 Australian Learning and Teaching Council (ALTC) Citation Award for outstanding contributions to student learning. Monash received four of these national awards this year. As a sidelight, the Faculty of Science has so far attracted only one of these prestigious awards each year since their inception. The ALTC citation (value: $10,000) will be presented to David at an awards ceremony on Monday 10th August at the National Gallery of Victoria International, Melbourne. David's citation reads: “For inspiring, enthusiastic and innovative research-led Physics teaching that equips the Physics students of today with the skills to thrive as working scientists of tomorrow.”

School of Physics begins research at a new ultra-bright x-ray coherent diffraction facility.

$ultra-bright x-ray coherent diffraction facility$
Photo by Steve Morton.

A new ultra-bright x-ray facility has been recently commissioned at the School of Physics. The facility can produce diffraction images of nanostructures with spatial resolution of better than 5 nm. A 3rd Year Physics student, Stephanie Windebank (pictured on the right) has conducted a mini-project, under supervision of A/Prof. Andrei Nikulin (pictured on the left), to study specific Bragg diffraction patterns from a rolled multilayered AlGaAs nano-tube.

Opening of the Hutton-Westfold Observatory

Associate Professor Michael Morgan with Dr Dot Hutton and Mr Simon Westfold

The new Hutton-Westfold Observatory was opened on Monday 23rd of March, and will be used extensively by Monash students of astrophysics. With this new facility, students will observe clusters of stars thousands of light years away and search for the presence of dark matter in distant galaxies. The observatory is named in honour of the late Don Hutton and the late Kevin Westfold, who made great contributions to astronomy and student learning at Monash University over the course of several decades.

Jayden Newstead wins AIP prize for 3rd year laboratory

Monash student Jayden Newstead has received the Third Year Physics Practical Award from the Australian Insititute of Physics. The Award of $250 is given annually for the best practical report by a third year student at a Victorian university. Jay elected to substitute some of the standard practicals for the opportunity to work on a research mini-project. Instead of doing a third-year practical, Jay designed a new one. Jay's new experiment, titled “Faraday Rotation: A New Twist on Signal Transmission”, uses a laser beam to transmit an audio signal from the student's iPod (or similar) across the lab to a receiver which converts the laser beam back into sound. The “twist” is the use of polarisation modulation, rather than more conventional amplitude or frequency modulation, to encode the signal onto the laser beam. Project supervisor Dr Lincoln Turner suggested that Jay use the unconventional modulation mode as it allows extremely high-fidelity transmission with the residual noise due to the finite number of photons in the laser beam. “It enables students to ‘hear’ that the light beam is made up on individual photons”, Dr Turner said. The new practical will become part of the third-year teaching laboratory in 2009.