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St. Mary's College of Maryland physics department works closely with Pax River labs
Friday, Feb. 4, 2011
 Click here to enlarge this photo Staff photos by REID SILVERMAN
Lab technician Kyle Gordon, a graduate of St. Mary's College of Maryland, helps physicist Frank Narducci align an infrared laser beam at the NAVAIR physics lab.
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St. Mary's College of Maryland is a public liberal arts school. Patuxent River Naval Air Station is a center for cutting-edge research, development, testing and evaluation of naval aircraft.
So what do a liberal arts college and a high-tech military base have to offer each other?
Pax River gives some students real-life access to real-life science and engineering labs. College students provide interns to scientists and engineers and, in some cases, hires to help fill the ranks.
The Navy base employs more than 10,000 engineers, counting civilians and contractor support, and has to hire as many as 1,000 a year to keep up, according to base officials.
Though only a limited number of graduates coming out of St. Mary's fit the needs at Pax River, those who do may be sought after as a valuable resource for the laboratories associated with the base.
Kyle Gordon, who graduated last year from St. Mary's College, fit that bill. He said he changed his focus in college from an education degree to experimental physics because of "the base and the relationship between the campus and the base."
After working at Pax River one summer with associate professor Charles Adler, "I just stayed because I really liked it here," the lab technician said.
"We run the experiment, the optics … and if we run into trouble we talk to Frank" Narducci, a physicist at Pax River, Gordon said.
Narducci said he has hired about 20 students as paid interns in recent years.
"It seems to be a kind of win-win situation," he said.
It is a relationship that has developed informally. There is no written memorandum of understanding between the base and college, but that could change in the future.
"It's informal, but it's a very strong collaboration," Narducci said.
The college started working with Pax River's atomic physics lab about seven years ago. "We realized we had a lot of research interests in common," Adler, chair of the college's physics department, said.
A number of St. Mary's students have done their St. Mary's Project — the culminating senior research project before earning a bachelor's degree — working at Pax River, Adler said.
"We can pool resources, we can bounce ideas off each other," he said.
Adler and his colleague, Joshua Grossman, assistant professor of physics, go to Pax River a couple of times a week to help work in Narducci's high-tech laboratory. They also work on base during the summer between college semesters.
Adler's lab on campus is funded through the college, but Grossman's college lab was funded in part by money from the Office of Naval Research.
"All the projects we give [the students] are real projects," Adler said.
Both the college and Narducci's lab at Pax River are working on experiments involving the cooling of atoms. Real-world applications being studied at the college and the Navy base include use in fine-tuning atomic clocks, Gordon said.
Labs at the college and base can split a laser beam using a series of lenses and mirrors. Using pressure associated with the light waves and specially tailored magnetic fields, atoms are slowed down and confined. The atoms are cooled to less than a 10,000th of a degree above absolute zero and slowed down to a few centimeters per second, allowing the students to study the atoms' properties. "In our case, but not every case, temperature and velocity are related," Adler said.
An ultra-sensitive atomic clock could be used in a Global Positioning System satellite to improve accuracy while tracking an object on Earth, Adler said. It also could be used in gravity sensors to better track anomalies in the ground, such as oil or an underground bunker, he said.
"Gravity affects the passage of time so there have to be really accurate clocks up there" in space, Gordon said.
"These guys now have their names on research papers that are published," giving the students a leg up when looking for a job, Narducci said.
About this series
St. Mary's College of Maryland is a state school situated on state land, but its professors and students also make their mark on the surrounding community, and some of its graduates go on to begin their professional lives here.
This is the second of three articles about the relationship between the college and the rest of St. Mary's County.
FEB. 2
College, county connect to offer opportunities for students to become teachers here.
COMING NEXT WEDNESDAY, FEB. 9
College's concern about St. Mary's River runs much deeper than just sailing and picturesque views.
