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The National Science Foundation has awarded a $141,920 grant to Andrew Kortyna, assistant professor of physics at Lafayette, for research on cold collisions of highly excited atoms.
The ongoing project is based in Kortyna’s laboratory at Lafayette’s Hugel Science Center, a $25 million, 90,000-square-foot building with state-of-the-art teaching and research facilities. The grant will strengthen the presence of laser-based experimental physics at Lafayette and increase the opportunities for students to participate in research.
One student already involved in the research is Timothy Bragdon ’04, a double major in physics and philosophy from Rahway, N.J., whom Kortyna is mentoring in a yearlong honors project based on work initiated prior to the NSF award.
“The maturing of laser technology over the past several decades has spurred renewed interest in atomic and molecular collisions,” says Kortyna, “It is now possible to study collisions at one-millionth of a degree above absolute zero. Motivations for pursuing this line of work include testing fundamental physical theories and providing detailed understanding of chemical processes important for future progress in fields such as nanomanufacturing.”
The exciting results being generated in low-temperature collision physics are reflected by the awarding of Nobel Prizes in 1997 and 2001 for breakthroughs providing new techniques for investigating very cold atoms. Kortyna seeks to use laser spectroscopic methods a bridge the gap between early collision experiments done at high temperatures and more recent work done below 1˚K (-458˚F).
Kortyna has been working in the field of cold molecular collisions for nearly a decade. Prior to coming to Lafayette, he taught and conducted research while holding a National Science Foundation fellowship at Colby College. Prior to that, he was a postdoctoral scholar at Caltech and did research at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he still collaborates with NASA scientists. He has also conducted research at Universität Kaiserslautern in Germany.
Before Bragdon began his honors project, he collaborated with Kortyna through Lafayette’s EXCEL Scholars program, which provides students a stipend for assisting faculty with research. The program has helped to establish Lafayette as a national leader in undergraduate research. More than 180 students participate in the EXCEL program each year, many of them going on to present their research in academic journals and/or at conferences.
The two researchers use spectroscopic methods to circumvent limitations imposed by thermal motion to investigate detailed atomic structure. The atomic structure observed by Bragdon is of scientific interest in its own right, says Kortyna, but the techniques he is developing will provide an important ingredient for studying cold collisions of atoms.
Bragdon’s efforts include the assembly and operation of a saturated absorption spectrometer. He has also built an integrated feedback circuit for locking the wavelength of laser light to a specific frequency.
“The custom nature of the equipment required for this project sets Timothy’s work aside from the typical undergraduate project,” says Kortyna. “Rather than purchasing off-the-shelf equipment, he has had to build the requisite equipment, acquiring skills in the design and fabrication of scientific instrumentation along the way. Using his new skills to engineer working scientific instrumentation and implement it in research provides him with valuable experience that he can use in a wide range of possible career paths.”
The opportunity to get involved in the development of instrumentation is strongly dependent on the presence of an active experimental physics program at Lafayette, adds Kortyna.
Bragdon says his EXCEL work with Kortyna gave him a new understanding of modern circuit design and its applications, and allowed him to discover connections among concepts encountered in his courses.
“EXCEL projects give students the ability to go beyond the textbook and experience a snapshot of the pursuit of actual discovery,” he says. “I have the ability to learn and produce simultaneously. That’s really exciting.”
Kortyna’s previous grants include awards from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the German Academic Exchange Service, and the Sigma Xi Scientific Research Society. He regularly shares his research through articles published in scientific journals and presentations made at scientific meetings and other academic institutions.
Kortyna received a Ph.D. from Wesleyan University and a B.S. from Juniata College.