Duke Physics News

l-r: Bernhard, Shea, Collar, von Puttkamer

What do first-year graduate students like about Duke Physics? “It’s a strong department—strong in many different areas,” says Meg Shea, who earned her BS at Yale. “Here there are lots of options.”

Shea likes the structured way in which the department introduces new graduate students to all the options. In a series of seminars over the course of the year, professors from each research group give talks about their work. The seminars include dinner, and the casual atmosphere allows students to get to know members of the faculty and their research. Shea appreciates the fact that incoming students don’t have to commit to a specialty and an advisor right away, as students at some universities do.

She’s considering working with the high-energy experimental group this summer. “My goal is to figure out if the day-to-day life of a high-energy experimentalist will suit me,” she says. The students say most of them will probably end up choosing an advisor from the group they work with this summer, although even then it’s not too late to switch to another group.

Jonah Bernhard, from Swarthmore College, says he was attracted to the interdisciplinary opportunities at Duke. He’s interested in applied physics—fabricating materials or devices. “If the professor you want to work with is in chemistry or engineering you can do that,” he says.

Timm von Puttkamer, who graduated from Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, also likes the interdisciplinary nature of Duke Physics. He wants to study mathematical physics and string theory. “At my home university, math and physics were in completely different places in the city,” he says. “Here they are across the hall.”

Although the students say the work load is heavy, and they are expected to be more self-directed than in college, they have found the department to be supportive. Kristen Collar of Florida State University says, “Some of the other programs I looked at had a competitive atmosphere among the students. I wanted a department where they wanted me to be here and wanted me to make it.” (more…)

Graduate student Hung-Ming Tsai‘s figure in his PhD publication “Entropy production and equilibration in Yang-Mills quantum mechanics” was chosen by Physical Review E as “Kaleidoscope” figure. View the image here and read the paper here.