Five physics undergraduate students attended the 46th Canadian Undergraduate Physics Conference, held in Halifax, Nova Scotia from October 21-25, 2010. Congratulations to Megan Murphy who was awarded third place in the category of medical/biological physics for her presentation on Tracking MinD protein oscillations as an in situ indicator of cell viability.
Phys Phest, a symposium of talks by M.Sc. students who are completing their first year in our program, was held on September 8th. The audience was treated to eleven excellent presentations on a diverse range of high-quality research. The presentations were judged by members of the audience.
The poster session, featuring the work of undergraduate summer research assistants in the Department of Physics, was held on August 17.
The quality of each poster and the associated research at this second annual event continued to impress all those in attendance. The unenviable task of choosing amongst the competitors fell to the judging team of graduate students Kyle Leach, John Russell and Corey Kelly, who selected the top three.
With collaborators Carlos Palenzuela and Steve Liebling, Prof. Luis Lehner discovered by numerical simulations that merging supermassive black holes can give rise to powerful emissions of plasma collimated into a single jet. This single jet is the result of the merger of the individual jets attached to each black hole, which merge together as the black holes merge. This effect has clear observational consequences, and will permit the precise localization of the system which hosts the merging black holes.