Fran Mateycik
Goal: Create Demonstrations that may be helpful for the ScIT courses and Physics Outreach.
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Advisor: Dr. DJ Wagner
Advisor: Dr. G.-C. Wang
Goal: Create Nanotechnology demonstrations that may be helpful for the Science of Information Technology Course.
Science of Information Technology (ScIT) is a novel course introducing students to the physics underlying information technologies.
Goal: Create Nanosprings demonstrations that can be used for Physics Outreach.
These demonstrations were created to expand the general understanding of one
particular section of the vast nanotechnology field. These animations target high
school and accelerated middle school students and are designed to both stand on their
own or be used as guides for classroom instruction.
Since I am a coordinator for many Physics Outreach Events, these animations, along
with the knowledge of how to create more Macromedia Director animations, will be
very helpful in the next couple years as physics outreach for the department grows.
ScIT is unique because:
•It is an upper-level physics course with no prerequisites;
•It combines discussions of fundamental physical principles with information system
applications that interest students;
Also, since they are published online, others will be able to access these files and learn
more about Nanosprings.
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•It brings world-class researchers with several different specialties into a classroom to
talk about the current state of research;
•It attracts students from diverse concentrations, with performance in the course
essentially independent of physics background.
The Science of Information Technology course material is being heavily revised and the NSF has funded a project to develop a complete
online textbook. With this new textbook, along with this very unique course, educators envision a growth in educated technology users in
our coming generations. My primary responsibility for the first five weeks of REU were to create material for the nanotechnology portion of
the online text.
Macromedia Director Program
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The course material has a very broad range of physics topics including these four units: Information Transfer,
Information Storage, Information Processing, and Future Information Technologies.
I worked with Dr. Wagner more specifically to add material to computing implications of nanotechnology section.
My projects included animating and illustrating the mechanical properties of nanotubes and interconnects, while
verifying sources and facts within the text created a year previous.
Graphite
I also helped develop animations based on our current computing technology. Energy bands, electron and hole
movement, semiconductors, and doping are all as important as nanotechnology for our future technology. They
are also basic physics concepts that could apply to possible future uses of nano-structures.
These few pictures illustrate some examples of work done.
Nanocar
To the side, we can see five screen shots of the Nanosprings animation.
The first screen shot is of the menu where we can see a listing of the topics covered (the
numbers following the topics listed below represent the screen shot number.):
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•Hooke’s Law [2],
•Oblique angle Deposition using Electron beam evaporation [3],
•Glancing Angle Deposition using Thermal evaporation [4],
•and nanospring mechanics [5]
which just happens to be very similar to that of Macroscopic Springs.
Physics Education Research Conference
Interconnect
The annual meeting for PERC was held in Madison Wisconsin. Dr.
Wagner, along with JJ Rivera and I went to the Conference for the
presentation of our findings related to the cognitive model of optical
fibers and Total Internal Reflection.
P-Type
N-Type
Posterboard Analogy (Energy Bands)
The assessment of student preconceptions and mental models in
physics seems to be a great way to understand and better fulfill a
student’s educational needs. With the help of Dr. Sybillyn Jennings
(Psychologist at Russell Sage College) and undergraduate assistants
(including me ), Dr. Wagner has produced several outlines based
on the progression of cognition within the students’ mind for optical
fibers and Total internal reflection. These outlines are very helpful for
future creation of curricular materials because they allow us to
change preconceptions and allow related physics subjects to connect
more easily in the students’ mind.
I am very close to finishing the instructional movies based on Nanosprings. The section
that must be finalized is based on current research done here at RPI. Dr. Singh along with
several other graduate students in Dr. Wang’s group are studying the compression of
Cobalt covered nanosprings due to an attractive magnetic force between the coils after
passing a DC current through a Platinum coated conducting AFM tip.
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The concept is based on simple electromagnetic and mechanical properties that may be
useful in the future.
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Since the tip of the cantilever of the AFM is covered in Pt, one can easily pass current into the tip and into the Co covered springs.
Since current passes through the spring like a wire, a magnetic field in the coil is generated. The current flowing in the coils are in the
same direction and therefore an attractive force between neighboring turns of the spring will be created. The attractive forces
compress the spring and the tip of the cantilever breaks contact with the top of the spring, therefore breaking the circuit. Since the
magnetic force is induced by the flow of current, the magnetic force will disappear with the break in the circuit and the spring will return
to its original state. Once it returns to such a length, the tip will touch to top of the spring once again and reconnect the circuit, starting
another cycle of compression and restoration.