Table of Contents:

Letter from the Chair
Win a SESAPS Mug
SESAPS Meeting 2012
Call for SESAPS Awards Nominations
Minutes of 2011 Ex Comm Meeting
Roster of 2012 Executive Committee Members

Letter from the Chair

Warm thanks to outgoing SESAPS Executive Committee members and welcome of new ones: Please join me in expressing gratitude to our retiring SESAPS Executive Committee Members. Their hard work in this purely voluntary capacity helps to make physics an exciting and rewarding career choice for students in the southeast. Thank you to Prof. Paul Cottle of Florida State U for his four years of service in the chair line and Prof. Matthew Edwards of Alabama A&M for his service as Member-at-Large from Jan 2008 to Dec. 2011. Prof. Laurie McNeil (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) retires from her role as Chair to become SESAPS Past Chair; Richard Haglund (Vanderbilt) moves from Vice Chair to Chair-Elect; and we welcome our newest members: Mary Ellen Zvanut (University of Alabama Birmingham) as Vice Chair and John Yukich (Davidson College) as Member-at-Large for the Jan 2012 to Dec 2015 term.

Notes on SESAPS 2011: The SESAPS 2011 annual meeting was held from Oct. 19-22 in Roanoke Virginia, hosted by Virginia Tech and local organizers Leo Piilonen, Michel Pleimling, and Beate Schmittmann (chair of the VT Physics Dept). Nearly 300 physicists participated from all over the SESAPS region, including Puerto Rico. Two sessions were held to celebrate physics milestones: the 100th anniversary of the discovery of the atomic nucleus (organized by Paul Cottle, FSU), and the 100th anniversary of the discovery of superconductivity (organized by Norman Mannella of U. Tennessee). The program and slides can be found at http://www.phys.vt.edu/sesaps/. Congratulations to the co-winners of the "Best Undergraduate Poster Presentation" contest: Christopher Frye of the University of Central Florida, "Identifying Electromagnetic Events in the Forward Hadron Calorimeter" and William Love of Virginia Tech, "Characterization of large-scale velocity fluctuations in the Princeton MRI experiment." Honorable mention was earned by two students from the North Carolina School of Science and Math: Mithi de los Reyes, "Use of Spray Adhesives for the Manufacture of 3-D Capillary Origami Microstructures" and Nishkala Shivakumar, "Acoustic Radiation from Smart Foam for Various Foam Geometries." Congratulations to the co-winners of the "Best Undergraduate Oral Presentation" contest: David Abbott from the University of Virginia, "Study of the Sensitivity of Plastic Scintillators to Fast Neutrons" and Ahmed Roman of Virginia Tech, "Boundary conflicts and cluster coarsening: Waves of life and death in the cyclic competition of four species."

The care and feeding of SESAPS history: The history of the SESAPS organization is a long and rich one. To help document it and make information available to future generations, the American Institute of Physics’ Neils Bohr Library and Archives has an agreement to accept material on SESAPS. If you have material you would like to share, please contact Amanda Nelson, Archivist. You will receive a deed of gifts for records received. Please look in the basement of your department and see if you have any historical jewels collecting dust there.

New rules on student travel fellowships: In order to be eligible for a student travel fellowship, valid for travel to make a presentation at an annual SESAPS meeting, you now need to be a member of SESAPS. This is free once you are a member of the APS. And the APS is currently offering a one year free trial membership for new student members. To apply for a SESAPS travel fellowship, see Student Travel Grants. The deadline for applying is one week after the abstract deadline. The abstract deadline for SESAPS 2012 is 19 Sep 2012.

New method for producing SESAPS bulletin – going green: While the APS provides a web-site version of annual meeting schedules and abstracts, and the local organizers have a local web-site specific to their annual meeting, in the past SESAPS has paid an external vendor to typeset a hard-copy bulletin booklet. Some Sections do not provide hard copies to meeting registrants; some pay the APS several thousands of dollars each meeting to create one. In an effort to divert money into the student fellowship funds from the funds we previously spent on providing the bulletin booklet, this year we are trying something new. We will provide a pdf file of the information. Ideally, people will download that pdf onto their handheld device to access off-line (connectivity can be a problem at these large meetings). Some may prefer to print out copies at home to take with them. A modest number of hard copies will also be made available at the meeting site. For a rough version of what the pdf looks like using 2011 data (minus the preamble info, which will be present for 2012), see the following template from 2011. If you object to the new format, please email me about it rps@phy.duke.edu

Upcoming SESAPS elections: You will shortly be receiving email ballots asking you to vote for new SESAPS Executive Committee Members. Please participate. This is also a good opportunity for you to consider if you would like to serve SESAPS yourself by nominating someone (including yourself) to run in the 2013 (next year's) election. Please contact me (rps@phy.duke.edu) if you would like to do so and I will share the information with the next Vice-Chair, who will run the next election.

Below please find sections that provide information on SESAPS 2012, our promotional drive for new SESAPS members, and information about SESAPS awards.

I look forward to seeing you at SESAPS 2012 in Tallahassee!

Best regards,

Roxanne P. Springer
Professor of Physics
Duke University

Win a SESAPS Mug by Increasing SESAPS Membership

As you probably already know, once you are a member of the APS, joining SESAPS is free. But the benefits to SESAPS are vital: for every member of the APS who joins SESAPS, SESAPS obtains funds from the APS so that we can offer travel support to SESAPS students who make presentations at SESAPS annual meetings. Students are the lifeblood of the SESAPS organization, and the future of physics in this country. So please commit to finding colleagues -- students/scientists/postdocs/faculty members -- at your school, college, or university, who have neglected to join SESAPS and encourage them to do so. The next student who receives a travel award may be yours! To acknowledge the importance of this task, for every three new members you bring to SESAPS, you will receive a SESAPS mug. Every new member will also receive a SESAPS mug. The complimentary mug offer will be valid from the time you receive this newsletter until the registration deadline for SESAPS 2012, which is November 7, 2012.

Here is how to proceed: If your colleague is already a member of APS, please ask him/her to email Jennifer Pirnat (APS Membership Marketing Administrator) with a request to be added to SESAPS. Joining SESAPS is free for anyone who is already an APS member

If your colleague is not an APS member, he/she will have to join first by going to http://www.aps.org/membership/join.cfm, and then email Jennifer Pirnat to receive the mug.

Then email Jennifer Pirnat yourself with the names of your new SESAPS colleagues in order to claim your own mug.

The 79th Annual Meeting of the Southeastern Section of the American Physical Society (SESAPS 2012)

The 79th annual meeting of SESAPS will be hosted jointly by the Departments of Physics at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University and Florida State University. The meeting will take place from Wednesday, November 14th, 2012, to Saturday, November 17th, 2012, at the Double Tree Hotel in downtown Tallahassee. In addition to an exciting scientific program, the meeting will feature tours of selected research facilities from both institutions, events for undergraduates, and a poster session. A public lecture is also planned. For more information, see the meeting website at SESAPS 2012

The abstract deadline is 19 September 2012; the housing deadline and early registration deadline is 19 October 2012; the regular (higher fees apply) registration deadline is 7 November 2012.

The local co-organizers are Charles Weatherford (FAMU) and Winston Roberts (FSU). The SESAPS 2012 Program Chair is SESAPS chair-elect Richard Haglund (Vanderbilt). Recommendations for session topics and speakers may be sent to him at richard.haglund@vanderbilt.edu.

Awards for undergraduates: A boxed set of Feynman’s Lectures will be given to the “Best Undergraduate Poster” and “Best Undergraduate Oral Presentation” winners. To enter, indicate that you wish to do so in the “Special instructions” box of the APS abstract submission page.

Travel support will again be available to students who are SESAPS members and are presenting research papers in SESAPS sessions. See Student Travel Grants for information on how to apply.

Annual SESAPS Awards

Your help is sought in advertising the upcoming deadline for annual nominations for the three SESAPS awards. The deadline for nominations for SESAPS awards is August 3, 2012. These awards will be presented at our Annual Meeting in November.

The Jesse W. Beams Award recognizes especially significant or meritorious research in physics, the major portion of which was carried out in the ten-state SESAPS region in the Southeast. The George B. Pegram Award honors someone with a career of "Excellence in the Teaching of Physics in the Southeast." The Francis G. Slack Award honors persons who have during their career exhibited "Excellence in Service to Physics in the Southeast."

The required nomination materials consist of a CV, a nominating letter and up to three supporting letters (a maximum of two pages each). One of the letters should be from an institution other than the nominee’s home institution. No other supporting documents are needed, but may be included. We particularly encourage you to think of potential women and minority candidates. If at all possible, the entire nomination should be sent in the form of a single pdf file to the Award Committee Chair. If electronic submission is not possible, then four copies of the nomination materials should be sent to the appropriate chair’s address given below. The nominator is also asked to notify the Chair (Roxanne Springer) and Vice Chair (Mary Ellen Zvanut) of the Section by email informing them of the submission. Nominations will be considered active for three years; updating materials for nominees not chosen in the prior year is encouraged.

Beams, Pegram, and Slack Award Donations

The Southeastern Section’s three awards are largely funded by donations from members. If you would like to contribute to the Beams, Pegram, or Slack Funds, please send a check made out to SESAPS to our SESAPS Treasurer Dr. John Shriner, Department of Physics, Box 5051, Tennessee Technological University, Cookeville, TN 38505. Please include your name, the total amount of the donation, and the amount to be credited to each award fund (Beams, Pegram, and/or Slack). Thank you for your continuing support for these awards.

2012 SESAPS Executive Committee