SIGNIFICANT EVENTS - SCIENCE EVENTS
09/27/02

Berkeley Group Gains, Loses Members

Dr. Tom Haard, formerly of Northwestern University, joined the Berkeley group to work on development of the next generation superfluid rotation sensor. Haard and graduate student Emile Hoskinson recently completed testing of a rejuvenated ultralow temperature cryostat. They were able to achieve a significant reduction of acoustic noise generated by the so-called 1K pot by making modifications based on work in Germany. This improvement will lower the noise level of any very low temperature experiment whose sensitivity is limited by acoustic disturbances.

Neils Bruckner submitted his thesis on the development of an enhanced-sensitivity superfluid phase-slip gyroscope. The new device has two orders-of-magnitude greater pick-up area than the previously reported prototype device. Bruckner, who held a NASA fellowship during this graduate work, also submitted a manuscript describing his gyroscope to the Journal of Applied Physics.

Ray Simmonds received his PhD degree from UC Berkeley for his work on superfluid Josephson physics. Simmonds, who helped develop the Josephson gyroscope, received a prestigious National Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship to work at NIST in Boulder. During much of his thesis research, Simmonds was supported by a NASA GSRP grant. Ray was the student responsible for doing the experiments studying the superfluid Shapiro Effect, and for making the prototype superfluid dc-SQUID in He³. He was also the key student contributor to the discovery of novel dissipation mechanisms in Josephson weak links. All his work is described in the July 2002 Rev. Mod. Physics article that is on the web, but not yet in the libraries.