Eduard, Sasha, and I Go to the Black Sea

During the coffee break I tell Eduard that one of the bigwigs from his lab creeps me out. To him this is no surprise. He asks if I have gone swimming in the Black Sea. No. Not yet. I plan to go this afternoon, when most of the conference participants are on an excursion to a botanical garden. He decides I need an escort. Eduard is older than my mother, born in 1935. I have known him for over twenty years. Yesterday my children chided me for not including Eduard in our skype session. Today he and I sit outside the conference center, on the floor of a stone balcony, where the wireless is decent. On my little netbook each of our faces, Eduard’s and mine, are cut in half. The kids streak around in the other screen of my netbook, leaving contrails. [excerpt

Approach

This short nonfiction piece is about my interaction with a woman on the streets of Kiev

On Marie Curie and Me

When people discover I am a nuclear physicist, they often say, Oh, like Marie Curie! And yes, I am like Marie in that I have woman parts, I study nuclei, I have two children and a physicist husband. But had I lived in her time, I would not have been that rare female admitted to the Sorbonne. I could not have quietly made the top scores on the math and physics examinations. I am impulsive and thin-skinned, my occasional cleverness passing for deeper talent. I would probably have been a cleaning girl, pregnant at 15, unable to speak any language but my native one, whatever mine might have been back in 1891. [excerpt

On Getting Dressed

I lean against the chalkboard and wait for the young woman to speak. I feel especially put together because I am wearing an outfit; I bought all three pieces at the same time, indicating my financial stability and dedication to appearance. It is a Friday, and this introductory physics student is casual in her sorority letter jersey, jeans and sneakers. Her hair is long, her skin porcelain; these traits do not distinguish her from her sorority sisters. She is exceptional, however, in her habit of obsessively leaning forward in her front-row desk, as if preparing to dive over the top. Perhaps she is an equestrian, so accustomed to having only her legs and hands in contact with her horse that she does the position whenever she is eager. She grips the desktop, her feet swept back, athletic, energized, in the two-point position of an event jumper. “Professor Stephenson, you must need to do laundry.” I laugh a little at my own expense, inspect my skirt for chalk. “You wore that same outfit last class.” I am relieved. This sorority woman, this possible equestrian, is only commenting on my absent-mindedness. She keeps leaning forward, waiting for my response. Her ponytail fans down the back of her soft cotton jersey. I smile at her. She is so very pretty. I also register the surprised faces of the other students and how they pause; I see with full clarity the sorority girl’s strong white fingers, her confident hands, that same confidence in her voice as she addresses a professor as if we were peers. Still smiling, I turn towards the ever-forgiving slate board. I pick up the chalk and write Ohm’s Law on the cool, flat, forgiving gray surface. Class begins. [excerpt

Doe Dose

A plastic fawn, palm-sized, lives on my office desk. He gazes at my open office door. His right front hoof is raised, poised for haste. The deer of my Mississippi childhood were the Virginia whitetail, Odocoileus virginianus virginianus. As a child ten years or so, fresh from reading Felix Salten’s Bambi, I rested my forehead against backseat car windows and took in miles and miles of Mississippi forest. Commutes between school and our isolated house were long. I imagined myself a whitetailed doe, keeping up with the car through those woods, a blur of velvet hide and muscle. I now walk to campus in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. The odocoileus virginianus virginianus, the Virginia whitetail, emerge from the battlefields, animal grace among memorials and hardwoods. My round-eyed dog and I greet all deer with silence when we exercise in the morning light. [excerpt

All Skate

Let me go back. I am in sixth grade, I am eleven. It is a springtime afternoon, I am the only child still wandering the halls of Mary Ida Raines Elementary School. My stepfather and all the other teachers are required to stay until some designated time, hemmed in by state guidelines. A friend has lent me roller skates. I must have told her that I had never roller skated, never gone to the skating rink for a birthday party on a Saturday afternoon or with my family on a Friday night for a dinner of greasy cheese pizza. And so, of course, I own no skates, nor do I know how to use them. [excerpt

First Observation of 15Be

The neutron-unbound nucleus 15Be was observed for the first time. It was populated using neutron transfer from a deuterated polyethylene target with a 59 MeV/u 14Be beam. Neutrons were measured in coincidence with outgoing 14Be particles and the reconstructed decay energy spectrum exhibits a resonance at 1.8(1) MeV. This corresponds to 15Be being unbound by 0.45 MeV more then 16Be thus significantly hindering the sequential two-neutron decay of 16Be to 14Be through this state

Neutron Correlations in the Decay of the First Excited State of 11Li

The decay of unbound excited 11Li was measured after being populated by a two-proton removal from a 13B beam at 71 MeV/nucleon. Decay energy spectra and Jacobi plots were obtained from measurements of the momentum vectors of the 9Li fragment and neutrons. A resonance at an excitation energy of ∼1.2 MeV was observed. The kinematics of the decay are equally well fit by a simple dineutron-like model or a phase-space model that includes final state interactions. A sequential decay model can be excluded

Neutron Resonance Spectroscopy of 106Pd, and 108Pd from 20–2000 eV

Parity nonconserving asymmetries have been measured in p-wave resonances of 106Pd and 108Pd. The data analysis requires knowledge of the neutron resonance parameters. Transmission and capture γ-ray yields were measured for En=20–2000 eV with the time-of-flight method at the Los Alamos Neutron Science Center (LANSCE). A total of 28 resonances in 106Pd and 32 resonances in 108Pd were studied. The resonance parameters for 106Pd are new for all except one resonance. In 108Pd six new resonances were observed and the precision improved for many of the resonance parameters. A Bayesian analysis was used to assign orbital angular momentum for the resonances studied

Parity Violation in Neutron Resonances of Palladium

Parity violation in p-wave neutron resonances of the palladium isotopes 104, 105, 106, and 108 has been measured by transmission of a longitudinally polarized neutron beam through a natural palladium target. The measurements were performed at the pulsed spallation neutron source of Los Alamos Neutron Science Center. The rms weak interaction matrix elements and the corresponding spreading widths were determined for 104 Pd, 105 Pd, and 106 P