Over the past several months, our seniors have worked on their capstone projects with faculty advisors to develop their ideas, listened to the needs of project sponsors, and collaborated with fellow students to design, build and test prototypes.
This week, they'll be putting their knowledge and skills into practice by sharing their team projects, demonstrating how they have transformed their innovative ideas into work that has real-world impact.
Check out all the projects available on the Senior Design web site. Our volunteer judges will select the top team projects for each discipline, which will be presented at the live showcase on April 24.
The awards ceremony will be held on Friday, April 24, at 3:30 p.m. to announce the awardees from each discipline — computer science, electrical and computer engineering, industrial engineering and management systems, interdisciplinary, materials science and engineering, and mechanical and aerospace engineering — as well as the top project, Best in Show.
]]>Abstract: The optical frequency comb has enabled a wide range of frequency, time and distance metrology applications due to its precise, rigid, and referenced optical output. However, the very rigidity which makes the frequency comb an excellent time-frequency ruler places limits on its applicability for comb-based sensing applications with many operating far from quantum-limited sensitivity. For instance, frequency-comb-based two-way time transfer relies on the detection of an incoming optical comb pulse train from a distant location. These incoming comb pulse trains may be weak and amplification is costly – operation close to the quantum limit would dramatically increase the scope of what is possible in terms of range, SWaP (size, weight and power), and link loss. In turn, that increased scope would enable comparison of state-of-the-art optical clocks for the future redefinition of the second, a wide range of fundamental physics tests and chronometric geodesy.
Here, I will present our development of a quantum-limited approach to optical time transfer that relies upon a time programmable frequency comb to break the inherent trade-offs which result from the rigid operation of a traditional comb. These programmable combs have a pulse time and phase which can be digitally controlled with ±2-attosecond accuracy allowing for their use as an optical tracking oscillator. Using frequency combs as optical tracking oscillators to reach the quantum limit for optical time transfer, we have been able to demonstrate sub-femtosecond time transfer across a 300-km terrestrial free-space link with greater than 100 dB of loss, a factor of 10,000 times lower received power threshold than previous frequency-comb-based approaches. I will show results from this 300-km demonstration as well as more recent work connecting optical atomic clocks across open air paths.
About the Speaker: Dr. Laura Sinclair is the Optical Time Transfer Project Lead in the Fiber Sources and Applications Group – part of the Communications Technology Laboratory at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Boulder, Colorado. She received a B.S. in physics from the California Institute of Technology in 2004, a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Colorado, Boulder in 2011 and was a post-doc at NIST Boulder, including as a National Research Council (NRC) post-doctoral fellow, before joining the staff. She has been awarded a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) (2019), a Department of Commerce Gold Medal for Scientific/Engineering Achievement as part of the Boulder Atomic Clock Optical Network Collaboration (2019), a NIST Excellence in Technology Transfer Award (2024), the Arthur S. Flemming Award for Basic Science (2024), and an Optica Fellow Award (2026). Her research focuses on the development of optical frequency combs and their wide-ranging applications particularly to optical time transfer and ranging. With the Optical Time Transfer Project Team, she has recently demonstrated optical time transfer at the quantum limit achieving sub-femtosecond time synchronization over 300 kilometers of air.
]]>Dr. Steven J. Miller from Williams College will speak at this week's colloquium on "Benford's Law: Why the IRS might care about the 3x+1 problem and zeta(s)."
Abstract: Many systems exhibit a digit bias. For example, the first digit base 10 of the Fibonacci numbers or of 2^n equals 1 about 30% of the time; the IRS uses this digit bias to detect fraudulent corporate tax returns. This phenomenon, known as Benford's Law, was first noticed by observing which pages of log tables were most worn from age -- it's a good thing there were no calculators 100 years ago! We'll discuss the general theory and applications, talk about some fun examples (ranging from the 3x+1 problem to the Riemann zeta function), and if time permits discuss some current open problems suitable for undergraduate research projects.
Speaker Bio: Graduated with a B.S. in math and physics from Yale and a Ph.D. in math from Princeton, Miller has supervised 600+ students and written 200+ papers in accounting, computer science, economics, geophysics, marketing, mathematics, operations research, physics, sabermetrics, and statistics. He's the Associate Director of the Williams SMALL REU, a founding member of the Polymath Jr Summer Research Program (and always looking for new collaborators), and the President of the Fibonacci Association. He loves multi-tasking, preferably with his family (who have published a few papers with him, and some interesting bridge problems), and can teach people how to poorly solve a rubik's cube in under an hour.
]]>This event is sponsored by the Florida SBDC at UCF.
]]>This event is sponsored by the Florida SBDC at UCF.
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