I’m in the process of putting together my tenure documents (I know I’ve been saying this for weeks. It’s a long process, OK?). Most of these are really not appropriate for reproduction here, but I’ll post a few of the things I’m writing, when it’s reasonable to do so.<\/p>\n
A major part of the tenure process is finding external reviewers for the research material. As most institutions don’t really have enough people in a given sub-field to assess research in-house (especially at a small college), and as trusting such an assessment would be a little dodgy, the research review is traditionally conducted by people from other colleges and universities. The candidate’s publications and other materials are sent out to three external reviewers, who write a report judging the quality of the work, and that report is a key part of the tenure determination.<\/p>\n
I don’t know how it’s done elsewhere, but the procedure here is to send a description of the candidate’s research out to various experts– typically journal editors, from what I’m told– and ask them to recommend people to serve as reviewers. Which means that somebody has to produce a short description of the research, and since nobody else local usually understands it, that task falls on the candidate.<\/p>\n
So, below the fold you’ll find my one-paragraph description of my research specialty:<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\nDr. Orzel’s research is in experimental atomic, molecular, and
\noptical (AMO) physics, focussing on the study of cold and
\nultra-cold samples of atoms prepared by laser cooling. He has
\nperformed extensive studies of ionizing collisions between
\nrare-gas atoms in metastable states (including optical control of
\ncollisions, time-resolved collisions, collisions in optical
\nlattices, and collisions in spin-polarized samples), and has
\nstudied the manipulation of atom number statistics in a
\nBose-Einstein condensate (BEC) placed in a periodic optical
\npotential. At Union College, he has built a laboratory for the
\nlaser cooling and trapping of metastable krypton and argon (either
\ncan be cooled with the same optical system, as the laser cooling
\nwavelengths for these two elements are separated by less than
\n1 nm), and plans two main research projects for the apparatus.
\nOne project, developed in collaboration with Daniel McKinsey at
\nYale University and funded by the National Science Foundation, is
\nto apply the technique of Atom Trap Trace Analysis (ATTA)
\n(developed by Z.-T. Lu and colleagues at Argonne National
\nLaboratory) to measure extremely low levels of krypton
\ncontamination in other rare gases by trapping and detecting single
\nkrypton atoms. The ATTA technique can measure the krypton
\nconcentration at the Kr\/Rg ~ 10-14<\/sup> level in only a few
\nhours, a significant improvement in both sensitivity and speed.
\nMeasuring krypton contamination at these very low levels is
\nextremely important for current efforts to build astrophysical
\nparticle detectors using liquid rare gases as a scintillation
\nmedium, such as the proposed CLEAN neutrino detector and the XENON
\ndark matter detector. The second project, funded by a grant from
\nthe Research Corporation, is to extend earlier studies of cold
\ncollisions in metastable xenon into argon and krypton, in
\nparticular looking at the previously unmeasured collision rates in
\nspin-polarized samples. Spin-polarization strongly suppresses the
\ncollision rate in metastable helium, but has essentially no effect
\nin xenon. Theory predicts a significant suppression of the
\ncollision rate in spin-polarized argon and krypton, but this
\neffect has not yet been measured. Measuring these rates will help
\ntest these theoretical predictions, and also provide important
\ninformation about the interatomic interaction potentials for these
\natoms.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n(OK, that may be straining the definition of “paragraph” a bit– were it part of a student lab report, I’d demand some paragraph breaks in there, but there’s no way to both be complete and perfectly grammatically correct…)<\/p>\n
Some people have claimed that this is the single most important piece of writing for the tenure case, as it will ultimately determine the composition of the external review committee. I’m not sure how true that really is– while I wouldn’t want string theorists judging my work, I don’t think the reviewers need to be in exactly the same sub-field I am– but at any rate, it’s done.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’m in the process of putting together my tenure documents (I know I’ve been saying this for weeks. It’s a long process, OK?). Most of these are really not appropriate for reproduction here, but I’ll post a few of the things I’m writing, when it’s reasonable to do so. A major part of the tenure… Continue reading What I Do for a Living<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,19,7,54],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-497","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","category-experiment","category-physics","category-tenure_chase","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/497","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=497"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/497\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=497"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=497"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=497"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}