S.S. Papadopulos and Associates has invited SCS doctoral student Hailin Deng for a summer internship position. S.S. Papadopulos is an environmental and water resource consulting firm established in 1979 to provide professional consulting services for groundwater issues, contaminant studies, remediation, geochemistry, and surface-water hydrology.

Image courtesy: K. Smith, S. Sablin, L. Gelb (numerical simulation), B. Futch, K. Beason and D. Banks (visualization).

Modern optical and electronic systems are very sensitive to contamination by minute particles. A group of present and former FSU researchers are studying a nano scale cleaning system in which no chemicals are used, only water and the intense energy from a laser beam. The image shows a thin film of water, deposited over a dirt particle (yellow) adhering to the surface. Laser heating of the base layer of the water lifts both the water molecules and the dirt off the surface.

Image courtesy: S. Hill Thompson, G. Brown, P.A. Rikvold

Nanometer sized magnetic particles and ultrathin magnetic films are important materials for components of future electronic technologies, such as ultra-high density recording media and memories. The SCS Materials Science group (Prof. Rikvold and collaborators) use large-scale computer simulations to study the dynamics of magnetization reversal in such structures. Their work is funded by the National Science Foundation.

The School of Computational Science hosted guests from all over campus for our 2008 Graduate Student Research Xposition, held 3-5pm on Wednesday, April 9, 2008. The venue for the event was the SCS seminar room on the 4th floor of the Dirac Science Library.

Hurricane models are continuously upgraded and refined by mathematicians like Dr. Michael Navon at SCS. He and his FSU group, and collaborators across the US, are working on improving the mathematical foundation of the models. One of the questions Dr. Navon is currently working on is data assimilation. Simply speaking, this is about how to update your model with new data from observations, and about how much you should trust new measurements compared to the well-founded data from the model, which is based on thousands of earlier measurements.