PHZ3400 Term Project

Term Project:

A term paper, at least 2000 words on a certain topic is due on Wednesday, April 22. Following the completion of these papers, during the last week of classes, students will give 5-minute presentations, where they will share what they have learned on this topic with the rest of the class. Instead of presenting these paper in printed form, students will contribute the corresponding materials (including as many graphs, pictures, tables as possible) to the set of our course Wiki-pages. Each paper should be presented on a separate page, which should be linked to the other course Web pages, as appropriate.

A list of suggested topic will be listed below. If you prefer to work on a topic that is not on the list, you must get prior approval. There is quite some flexibility in the scientific content and the depth into which you address the scientific issues. You are encouraged to discuss these with me in the process. The paper must be in your original words, with proper references if previous work is cited. The quality and the presentation of the term paper will contribute 10% to the final grade.

Sample topics:

1. Collective phenomena in economy and society -- Kim Wynne
2. Self-organized criticality and earthquakes -- Sean Kuvin
3. Glassy freezing and traffic jams (specifically: Metallic Glasses) -- Shawn Havery
4. Nucleation, droplets, and the physics of clouds -- Steven Dolly
5. Liquid Crystal -- Matt Hoza
6. Phase transitions in biological systems --Nick DeGuzman
7. Inflatory Universe and phase transitions of early matter -- Ron Frey
8. Group theory classification of crystalline symmetries
9. Crystal growth -- Peter Gallagher
10. Quasi-crystals
11. Experimental methods for determining crystal structure -- Chris Cowdery
12. Fermi surface probes using high magnetic fields
13. Scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) of high Tc cuprates
14. Strong electronic correlations and the Mott metal-insulator transition -- Arin Brown
15. Unconventional superconductivity in nearly-magnetic metals -- Travis Robbins
16. Geometrically Frustrated Materials -- Alison Pawlicki
17. Super Liquids: A Look at the Phenomena of Superfluidity and Superheated Liquids -- Holly Brown
18. Solid State Physics of Neutron Stars -- Nicholas Fitzsimmons

Please add more topics, as appropriate. And put your name next to the topic you selected, in order to 'reserve it" for yourself.