Back to Basics: An Interview with Dr. Iordanov

by Moses Simmons, Associate Editor

Dr. Tsvetelin Iordanov is an understated man at Georgia Southwestern and has taught at the university for 16 years. Dr. Iordanov is a fundamental building block at Georgia Southwestern through his research and teaching.

What kind of research are you currently working on?

“So what we’ve done most recently, which was done for undergraduate students. Most of it is theoretical, but there was one experimental, which took a long time in particular. We did focus on polymers, particularly the optical properties of polymers and the nonlinear optics. So like what happens when it triggers, which is a very big research topic in nonlinear optics. Then the more infrared part of the spectrum, which could be applied to lasers. Another project we did was related to band gaps, the gap between the conducting and valence banding in semiconductors. You need the band gaps to be specific distances to be a semiconducting material. So we were looking for silicon based plastics that had semiconducting properties, and were suitable for organic solar cells. However we had a huge selection of possible materials, so we characterized them theoretically. Another of my more recent projects was combustion properties of ketones and aldehydes, which are leftover from the combustion of diesel, to cut down on pollution. The Department of Energy was particularly interested in that.

The experimental project was actually related to aerosols, so we created an experimental method for measuring volatiles in aerosols. We measured the rate of nucleation, which is the of particles that come together to form a crystal, bubble, or droplet. This came from a student who just wanted to find a different solution and tried something different. The little change they made solved all our problems, and we published. That was a pretty neat paper, because it was experimental. It was published in the Journal of Chemical Education, because we were a small institution for education. These were all peer reviewed papers, because with chemistry you don’t get to publish anything without a peer review. The last project’s paper had nine reviewers, who weren’t saying no, but couldn’t understand it completely. Mostly because they weren’t physical chemists, and it was mostly all physical chemistry. However, we shouldn’t write something just for the sake of publishing, I (and my students) should contribute our leaf to the tree of knowledge.”

Without budget constraints, what would you research?

“Actually right now, what I really want to do, isn’t from budget constraints so much. It’s more about the time commitment and work of course, but I want to do research on the nuclear quantum effects on helium nuclei. Even though they have a heavier nucleus they don’t necessarily move as a proton, they still have a spin. Like with nuclear magnetic resonance all you do is use a radio frequency to test the spin out there of the nuclei. could ever fix it, because it’s a little bit broken and lack the money to fix the machine. So as you flip the spin, there is a field and as it spins it allows electrons to fall in one direction or the other. You’d see this as making ones and zeros, being the basic idea of quantum computing. Though there are laboratories doing this experimentally already. What I used to do with my work, I could translate something like that, and treat systems like this. Why quantum computing doesn’t work for any other systems, is because of the vibration of the molecules. Molecules vibrate all the time, and the spin is obscured by it. You have to lower the temperature to the nanokelvin, which wasn’t possible until very recently, to observe just the flip of the nuclei’s spin. Luckily you can just plug in zero kelvin in calculations. However if I don’t do it, I have the feeling someone else will do it very soon, unfortunately.”

What do you hope to see in the future?

“I hope to see junior high students being more interested in science, because for most part, that’s where it ends. It’s incredibly rare to get a student interested in science. Most of the time people will be more interested in something more applicable, like engineering. This is a fundamental science, the fundamental science, and that’s where the innovation comes from. The engineers didn’t do all the things to make a cell phone, they just applied the fundamental science. The fundamental science isn’t fully developed, it’s not. Some people tell me it’s wrong, but it’s not because your cell phone works right? Quantum chemistry is right, we’ll certainly add to it, at least I hope so. This isn’t going to happen unless we have students coming in to teach fundamental science to. It’s not a sustainable future for academia to not have the students to teach, or be interested in fundamental sciences. Unfortunately due to how everything works, this is being overlooked. I would just hope there’s more interest in fundamental science in the future.”