Some research experiences are experimental, attempting to discover something through trials of hypotheses. Other projects are theoretical in nature, attempting to answer a question by pen-and-paper methods, as was Sara Waters' task. Her question: Should we get rid of our calorimeter, haul another one over (from thousands of kilometers away) and install it? It would be such a waste if no benefits came to the scientists who sought to upgrade their technology.

The negotiations were between two collaborating labs: KEK (Japan) and KTeV (Chicago). KEK wished to have KTeV's great calorimeter, but its usefulness over KEK's was not certain. That's where Sara Waters, her mentor Dr. Yau Wah, and Dr. Wah's group at the University of Chicago came to the rescue. For the first four or five weeks, she was given background and had to learn Fortran. She would then decide (by computer simulation) whether this deal was worth it by measuring the signal noise improvement of the KTeV electromagnetic calorimeter over the Japanese calorimeter. Sara admits, "The motivation was certainly interesting; however, the work wasn't." No pain, no gain, folks! Ultimately, Sara showed that the arrays of the replacement calorimeter reduced signal noise by 100 times. She showed lament for the old KEK calorimeter, saying, "It will have much loneliness." Such is life, Hardware of Olde.

Mandi spent her summer doing theoretical research at the University of Central Florida, under the guidance of Dr. Boris Zeldovich as a part of the REU (Research Experience for Undergraduates) program. She chose to do theoretical research because she, "Tends to break things, and wanted to stay away from the billion-dollar laser." Her work at UCF was divided into two parts. In the first part, she attempted to solve the problem of conformal invariance of wave equations in spherical space. She and Dr. Zeldovich would spend six hours at a time brainstorming. After brainstorming, her head would hurt, but she enjoyed it for the most part. While they were ultimately unsuccessful, they did make great leaps forward in the governing mathematics. In the second part or research, Mandi assisted Dr. Zeldovich with his other area of expertise: educational tools. He makes mechanical analogs of physical laws to demonstrate them in a visual manner. With Mandi's help, he made a bifrequency pendulum, demonstrating that frequency and refractive index are independent of its angle. Over all, she greatly enjoyed her summer experience with the REU program.

This past summer, Layla Booshehri participated in the Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) at Rice University. Her research dealt with non-degenerate pump-probe spectroscopy of single-walled carbon nanotubes, with Junichiro Kono as her research advisor. Single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs) are thin, hollow tubes of carbon and were first discovered in 1993 by researchers at the NEC Fundamental Research Laboratory in Tsukuba, Japan and at IBM's Almaden Research Center. Single-walled carbon nanotubes provide new opportunities to explore one-dimensional quantum physics. Much of the research performed on SWNTs focuses on elucidating their magneto-optical properties. To study the properties of these SWNTs, Layla employed the technique of non-degenerate pump-probe spectroscopy, a powerful method for investigating electronic and vibrational properties of nanotubes. In non-degenerate pump-probe spectroscopy, a laser and a white-light continuum probe are used to determine the changes induced at photon energies that are different from that of the pump. Layla's research led her to the study of excitons, which can be considered as electron hole pairs in a semiconductor. Her results provided new insight on unresolved issues such as the magnitude of one-dimensional band gap renormalization and contributed to a better understanding of the nonlinear optical properties of carbon nanotubes.

Doug Sparks spent his summer at the Rice Quantum Institute doing theoretical work on a new method of approximating the evolution of quantum systems. In brief, the problem is this: for most physically interesting systems, the time-dependent Schrodinger equation which governs the system's evolution can't be solved exactly. All of you familiar with quantum mechanics know the process: given a system's Hamiltonian, you can find its possible energy states (or energy eigenstates) and its wave function, and once you have these two, you can determine the wave function's evolution. Another crucial point is that any wave function can be written in terms of any complete set of functions, i.e. as a linear combination of any basis set.

Doug expanded a 2-D wave function into a basis set called the Daubechies wavelets. As engineers noticed long ago, this basis set results in more localized waves, and it compresses information stored in the initial waves very efficiently. (Doug pointed out that the FBI uses Daubechies wavelets techniques to store their images.) Expanding the wave function in this basis reduces computing time, and as expected, Doug's wave function evolved successfully when compared to previous results. All in all, it seemed that Doug, like all other presenters, enjoyed his summer at Rice!