02-10-04

IOWA STATE PHYSICISTS HONORED BY AMERICAN PHYSICAL SOCIETY

AMES, Iowa -- Two faculty members in Iowa State University's Department of Physics and Astronomy have been elected bytheir peers as Fellows of the American Physical Society (APS).

John C. Hill and Michael Tringides, both professors of physics and astronomy and affiliated with the Ames Laboratory,were recently named APS Fellows, an honor granted to no more than one-half of one percent of the society's currentmembership. Thirteen ISU physics and astronomy faculty members are now APS Fellows.

Hill, a nuclear physicist, discovered a number of new nuclear species early in his career. In a series of experimentsat nuclear accelerators in the U.S. and Europe, he measured the large electromagnetic effects in collisions of veryhigh-energy-heavy nuclei. These processes limit the intensity of gold beams now being used in experiments at BrookhavenNational Laboratory on New York's Long Island, in an attempt to recreate conditions that existed at the very moment ofcreation of the universe, or the `Big Bang''. Hill's group built the first-level trigger for the $100 million PHENIXdetector at the lab's new accelerator. The trigger helps scientists select the relatively rare head-on collisions ofgold nuclei traveling near the speed of light that would most likely produce the quark-gluon plasma, a form of matterscientists believe existed only a few-millionths of a second after the Big Bang.

Tringides (Tring-ee-deez) works in the ISU/Ames Lab condensed matter physics group. His research includes the study ofthe microscopic processes that control the growth of new structures on atomically clean surfaces. New custom-madematerials, like ultrathin films or atomic islands, are grown in the lab by depositing single atoms on the surface. Thedimensions of the grown structures are only a few atoms wide; it is important to grow the structures in a uniform andreproducible way. Surprisingly, Tringides' group has discovered that it is possible to grow metal islands of the same"magic" height of 7-atoms instead of islands of random heights as is commonly the case. This opens up new pathways tothe miniaturization of devices.

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