Energy-Efficient Home for Physics
Critical Scholarship
Since 2011, the Brockman Hall for Physics has been Rice’s center for fundamental and applied physics research. The faculty and lab facilities now occupying the four-story, 111,000-squarefoot building were once scattered among five buildings. Doug Natelson, professor of physics and astronomy and of electrical and computer engineering, leads a lab group in Brockman that’s working to understand the electronic, magnetic and optical properties of solid materials and the physics behind those properties. “Condensed matter physics and nanoscale engineering have given us the basis for essentially all modern consumer electronics,” Natelson said. A fundamental understanding of this kind of physics will lead to further advances in electronics, photonics and applications such as clean energy and quantum computing. About half of Natelson’s graduate students are working on experiments involving atomic- or molecular-scale junctions between larger electrodes, measuring things like electronic “noise” and using optical techniques to examine how energy flows. The other half are applying nanoscale techniques to understand a couple of particular materials that have strong electron-electron interaction physics. Before Brockman Hall opened, Natelson’s lab was located on the third floor of the Space Science and Technology Building, “in a lab that was never really meant for physics,” he said. In the new space, the group has a separate room for nanoscale optics experiments. “This is a major improvement, since now my students can take optics data without having to turn off all the lights in the whole lab,” he said. With physics and astronomy and electrical and computer engineering faculty in closer proximity, Natelson said, “It’s very easy for me to go ask their opinions, and my students can interact with theirs much more readily.” Thanks to funding from the A. Eugene Brockman Charitable Trust, Rice’s physics community has a home. As President David Leebron said, “The impact of Brockman Hall goes beyond bricks and mortar. This facility forges new pathways between science and engineering, between theory and practice and between Rice’s first and second centuries.”
“One of the things that modern society has damaged has been thinking. Unfortunately, one of the damaged ideas is that of nature itself. How do we transition from seeing what we call ‘nature’ as an object ‘over there’?”
—LYNN GOSNELL
—Tim Morton, www.ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com
The author of numerous works on philosophy, culture, literature and ecology, Tim Morton holds the Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice, which was funded during the Centennial Campaign by Lawrence “Larry” Guffey ’90 and his wife, Lucy Mackilligin Guffey, in honor of Larry’s mother. A relative newcomer to the Department of English, Morton describes his new academic home as “a wonderful department of creative, generous people.” Morton was trained as an English literature scholar and holds a Ph.D. from Magdalen College, Oxford University. “My specialty was and is Romanticism — Wordsworth, Austen, Shelley, Byron,” he said. This summer, he presented talks at the Wordsworth Summer Conference and the International Byron Conference, both in the United Kingdom. He was also a keynote speaker at Tuned City Brussels, a conference about sound. His subject? Earworms, “those irritating tunes or parts of tune that seem to live rent-free in our heads.” Morton’s studies include music and food. “That was my early career, a very detailed historical study of food and literature,” he said. Morton’s blog, “Ecology Without Nature,” collects his talks, publications, interviews, reports and musings, both scholarly and personal. Along with department colleague Joseph Campana, associate professor of English literature, Morton received a Rice Arts Initiative Fund grant for this academic year. They’ll create a range of programs, classes and guest artist events to examine ideas of energy, ecology and sustainability, with a local angle. As part of this program, artist Marina Zurkow will visit campus. Zurkow’s work is imaginatively cross-disciplinary and includes animation, sculpture, performance and print. As part of Zurkow’s residency, she’ll help create a meal “in which all the foods are only a degree or two of separation away from the fossil fuel industry,” Morton said. This artist residency and more are all part of an undergraduate course on consumption and consumerism, which Morton is teaching this fall. He thoroughly enjoys his time in the classroom. “Rice undergrads,” he said, “are effervescent.” —LG
38 R i c e M a g a z i n e · FALL 2 0 1 3