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March 2008
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GSC Approves New Committee Structure

At the last meeting (03/06), the GSC Board of Directors approved sweeping changes to its committee structure, reducing the number of committees from 9 to just 4. These changes were made to streamline the operation of the GSC and to help improve attendance at committee meetings. Additionally, each of the new committees was given an explicit charge and set of permanent agenda items. These changes were also designed to help the student body understand the structure of the GSC, so it can more effectively participate by knowing which committee is responsible for various aspects of student life.

Prior to this month's meeting, the BoD operated the following committees:

GSC Academics Committee

GSC Budget Committee

GSC Housing Committee

GSC Publications Board

GSC Social Committee

GSC Quality of Life Committee

GSC Underrepresented Students Committee

GSC NSO

GSC Steering

Now, the board has only 4 committees, which are outlined below and illustrated in the figure:

Social: The Social Committee's charge is to plan and organize social events for the graduate student community, including under-represented student groups. The Social committee is responsible for ensuring that the following events are successful: NSO, URS programming, GUSH, term parties, Gradiators, Quickfund events, Athletics, and any other initiative to improve social life at Caltech it chooses to pursue. It is responsible for appointing representatives to- Athletics & Physical Education.

Academic: The Academics Committee's charge is to help foster an environment in which graduate students can learn to become leaders in their academic fields. The Academics Committee oversees several events including: the Everhart Lecture Series, the GSC teaching/mentoring awards, and course evaluation surveys. It is responsible for appointing representatives to- Academic Policies, Convocation Committee, Graduate Studies Committee (GSC2), Library Committee, Patents and Industry, Career Center Committee, and Computing Advisory Committee.

Advocacy: The Advocacy Committee is responsible for representing graduate student interests to the institute. Major responsibilities of the Advocacy committee include: Healthcare, Housing, Stipends, and Discrimination. Each month the Advocacy committee will review the status of each of these areas of student concern and communicate this information to the BoD, the VP-SA, the GSC2, Caltech Y, and any other relevant entities. The Advocacy Committee is responsible for an annual survey based on a template, which will assess these issues over time. It will also coordinate Graduate Student action in response to our needs. It is responsible for appointing representatives to Foreign Students Committee, Graduate Studies Committee (GSC2), Health Committee, Scholarships & Financial Aid, Student Housing, Parking Advisory Committee, Recruiting and Retaining Women and Minority Faculty, and Diversity Council.

Steering: The Steering Committee creates and implements the vision of the GSC. Steering runs BoD meetings, sets the agenda, compiles and uploads minutes, creates the budget, and communicates the GSC's views through publications. Specifically Steering is responsible for appointing a gscnews Editor, a Technique Editor, a webmaster, and a Display Czar. Steer consists of the Chair, Vice Chair, Executive Director, and Treasurer. It is responsible for appointing representatives to- Educational Outreach Committee, Faculty Board, Institute Programs Committee, Alumni Board Committee, Alumni Fund Advisory Council, Moore-Hufsteadler Fund Committee, and ASCIT/IHC Meetings.

Additionally, this proposal improves the GSC self-evaluation and institutional memory by requiring that committee chairs submit their reports to the Executive Director, who will evaluate each committee's effectiveness by submitting a standardized report to the BoD Chair before the monthly meeting. The Executive Director will report to the BoD on committee effectiveness and participation.

In this new structure, there is no Under-represented Students (URS) committee; however, it should be emphasized that the GSC maintains a strong committment to the interests of these student groups. We have merged the priorities of the URS with the Social and Advocacy committees as permanent agenda items and created a URS Advocate to give URS issues to greater exposure to the rest of the BoD. The URS Advocate will report on the status of under-represented student groups on campus and advocate for programming and support relevant to their needs. The URS Advocate should be a member of both the Social and Advocacy committees and should also be the GSC representative to the Diversity Council. The budgetary line item for URS programming has been divided between the Social and Advocacy committees, and requires approval of the URS Advocate before it can be used for any purpose.

The board hopes that this new structure will facilitate coordinated activity by bringing committee members together to work on a focused set of goals. We also hope that the inner workings of the GSC BoD will be more transparent to graduate students; in fact, we encourage students to attend committee meetings whenever possible.

Everhart Lecture: Symmetry and Simulation

How Geometry Affects Scientific Computing from the Solary System to your Microwave Oven
Ari Stern
April 2, 4-5p, Baxter Leture Hall

How do we model change in physical systems? Ever since Newton proposed his laws of motion, the answer has been: differential equations. Solving these equations lets us make predictions about the future, or even the pastÑbut for most complex systems in science and engineering, it is impossible or impractical to obtain exact solutions. Therefore, we must rely on numerical simulation to compute approximate answers. With computing power cheap and ubiquitous, these simulations can now be carried out better and faster than ever before. However, even some of the ÒbestÓ numerical methods have a serious prob- lem: in trying to simulate the laws of motion accurately, they end up breaking other physical laws, such as the conservation laws for momentum and energy. For many problemsÑfrom long-time simulations of the solar system, to molec- ular dynamics, to computing the resonant frequencies of a microwave ovenÑ failure to preserve these sorts of features can result in a major loss of predictive power.

These properties can best be understood in terms of geometric mechan- ics, a powerful branch of classical mechanics that incorporates mathematical tools from differential geometry and calculus of variations, but which has un- til recently seen very little use among applied mathematicians. Recent work (including my own) has shown that by bringing together geometric mechanics and numerical analysisÑsymmetry and simulationÑwe can develop numeri- cal methods that accurately model dynamics while preserving the underlying geometric structures.

In this talk, I hope to bring the audience on a tour of recent advances at this rich intersection of geometry, physics, and computation. Along the way, we will pick up many important threads that run back through the history of mathematics and physics, from Kepler and Newton to the present day. This will be accompanied by a variety of examples and simulations, from planetary orbits to electromagnetic waves.

Social Committee Report

The Social Committee met Friday, Feb. 8, and the following is a summary of the discussion and subsequent related events. The valentine's day chocolate GUSH, organized by Eliza Franco, went on as planned, and was a success. We discussed having our winter term party on the 29th, as the Jeopardy-type event with USC had been delayed. However, this term party has subseqeuntly been delayed and will be discussed at the next meeting.

Ronnie reported having discussed with Prof. Chameau the idea of a subsidy for students that are below the recommended minimum student wage, and that this was not feasible. I proposed changing the housing lottery system so housing is guaranteed to students that are below the recommended minimum wage, with a lottery for the rest. The issue was later raised (at a meeting with the VP for student Affairs), that cheaper housing can be found off-campus. I still think this upper-bound for housing costs for graduate students is on of the best solutions we can reach.

I raised the question of how minimum graduate student wages compare with the broad definition of poverty in the US. The lowest paid students at Caltech make approximately $21,000-22,000, and the national poverty line is $10,500. However, for a person working 40 hours a week at a minimum wage job in California however, the annual pay is over $16,500. If this job was at, say, McDonalds, available retirement matching plans would enable you to have an effective salary before taxes of over $17,500. The observation that retirement benefits are better at McDonalds than at Caltech (where no matching program exists for graduate students) has led me to make email contact with the Caltech benefits office to discuss this option.

We have still made little progress on getting corporate/MHF sponsorship for social events. However, Scott, Ophelia, Ronnie, and Lauren are still working on this, and we will get a report at our next meeting. A concern was raised by Ronnie about whether or not we will be able to find a location for Gradiators with all the construction on campus. If not, we need to have funding to move the event off-campus. I sent an email to someone at the Alumni office, but have not received a reply. We decided Gradiators should take place in May or June, a more exact date will be discussed at a later date.

IM sports reform was briefly discussed, but we were awaiting input from Chris K, the Athletics sub-committee chair. Subsequently we have decided to have a town-hall style meeting where all captains from all sports are invited, but no more than 2 representatives per team may attend. Further details will be discussed at the coming meeting. We also discussed possible collaborative efforts with the Caltech Y, such as a trip to Catalina Island or a Ski Trip. Ronnie, Scott, and myself have all subsequently attended Caltech Y meetings, and will be proposing these ideas in the coming months.

It was noted that graduate students can no longer purchase alcohol with our campus IDs, regardless of age. I have subsequently followed up with Caltech Dining Services (and the legal department) and have found that the issue is irreparable. Some students with fellowships have the money deposited directly into their bursar's account, and this money cannot be spent on alcohol. As such, to protect their liability even though there is not necessarily any direct evidence of this having taken place, cards can no longer be used to purchase alcohol.

Additionally, club night was a success in terms of the event and numbers from other schools. Numbers on our end exceeded expectations, and we ended up taking a third bus so more students could attend, although this wound up running a deficit similar to the one in the proposal. The resulting amount will be taken from the general budget as discussed at the last meeting. Finally, in light of the regular progress made through talks with the Office for Campus Life, Housing Office, Graduate Student Office, and Vice President for Student Affairs, it was suggested that we make an effort to interface with more bodies on campus, such as other Vice Presidents, the Vice Provost, and the Provost. No progress has been made to date on this front.

The next social committee meeting will be held Friday, March 7 at 5pm at Broad Cafe. All graduate students are welcome to attend.

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Physicists Transcribe Entanglement into and out of a Quantum Memory

Scientists at the California Institute of Technology have laid the groundwork for a crucial step in quantum information science. They show how entanglement, an essential property of quantum mechanics, can be generated between beams of light, stored in a quantum memory, and mapped back into light with the push of a button.

In the March 6 issue of the journal Nature, Caltech Valentine Professor of Physics H. Jeff Kimble and his colleagues demonstrate for the first time an important capability required for the control of quantum information and quantum networks, namely the coherent conversion of photonic entanglement into and out of separated quantum memories.

The new work, Choi says, "is a proof-of-principle demonstration that entanglement between material systems can be generated deterministically by mapping the entanglement of light to and from two spatially separated quantum memories." The Caltech team separated the processes for generating and storing the entanglement, thereby breaking a previous inherent link between the quality and probability of state preparation. "In a general context, our work represents an important step in laboratory capabilities for the creation and manipulation of entangled states of light and matter. We hope that our results will be useful as a tool in the effort to realize quantum repeaters and thereby scalable quantum networks over long distances," remarks Kimble.

In the Caltech experiment, a single photon is first split, generating an entangled state of light with quantum amplitudes for the photon to propagate two distinct paths, taking both at once. The Caltech team in turn transcribed, or mapped, the entanglement onto distinct atomic ensembles separated by one millimeter. To create the interface between the light and matter, the team employed laser-cooled cesium atoms whose atomic states interact with a control laser to create destructive quantum interference, making the atomic ensembles either invisible or highly opaque to the input light. Called Electromagnetically Induced Transparency and pioneered by S. Harris at Stanford University, the mechanism manipulates the speed of the light for the incoming entangled photon and that kicks off the entire procedure.

"We can reduce the speed of light to the speed of a train, and then in fact stop the light inside the matter by slowly turning off the control laser, where now the quantum information--the entangled state of light--is stored inside the atomic ensembles," Choi describes. "By turning on the control laser again, we can reversibly accelerate the 'stopped' light back to the speed of light and restore the quantum entanglement as propagating beams of light."

In this experiment, the photonic entanglement was mapped into the atomic ensembles in a time ~ 20 nanoseconds and then stored in the atomic ensembles for one microsecond, with storage times extendable up to 10 microseconds. The photonic entanglements of the input and output of the quantum interface were explicitly quantified with a conversion efficiency of 20 percent. However, the researchers emphasize, real-world realization of a quantum network remains far out of reach even with these parameters and the state-of-the-art of quantum controls. Choi comments, "Further improvements in quantum control and storage capabilities in matter-light interfaces will lead to fruitful and exciting discoveries in Quantum Information Science, including for the realization of quantum networks."

Hip-Hop

Time: Every Thursday 9-10 pm
Start Date: April 3
Location: Braun Gym; Multipurpose Room
Instructor: Aukai Cain
Cost: $25/term students, $5 trial fee. $50/term non-student, $10 trial fee. 8 classes/term. Hip-hop grew out of the street dance movements in LA and New York. It has a high-energy, free-form style that is suited to dancers of all levels. Our professional instructor, Aukai Cain, has appeared on American Idol and Good Morning America. Come in comfortable clothing and tennis shoes or dance sneakers and be ready to jam with Aukai and the Dance Troupe!

Bellydance

Time: Every Saturday 12:45-1:45 pm
Start Date: April 5
Location: Braun Gym; Multipurpose Room
Instructor: Leela
Cost: $25/term students, $5 trial fee. $50/term non-student, $10 trial fee. 8 classes/term. Bellydance is an empowering and beautiful form of dance. Taught by our professional instructor Leela, this cardio workout will leave you toned, energized and wanting more! Come join Leela and the Dance Troupe, and be ready to shimmy. No special shoes required. This class is for dancers at all levels of ability.

Hula

Time: Every Sunday 6:15-7:15pm
Start Date: TBD
Location: Braun Gym; Multipurpose Room
Instructor: Claire Marie-Peterson
Cost: Free!

David Finckel, Cello, And Wu Han, Piano

Beckman Auditorium. Sunday, March 16, 3:30 p.m. This Coleman Chamber Music Concert will include works by Schubert, Beethoven, Webern, and Brahms. Caltech student admission: Fifty (50) free tickets are available to Caltech students (limit 2 tickets per Caltech I.D.). Call campus x4652 for information.

Marian Liebowitz, Clarinet, And Richard Thompson, Piano

Dabney Lounge. Sunday, March 30, 3:30 p.m. Entitled "Jewish Friends and Neighbors," this Lagerstrom Chamber Music Concert explores how Jewish composers worked within their communities and how non-Jewish composers have threaded Eastern European influences into their music. Admission: free. Call campus x4652 for information.

The Engineering of Cuisine

Beckman Auditorium. Thursday, April 3, 8 p.m. Chef and television personality Joey Altman will present this talk and demonstration as part of the Voices of Vision series. Admission: free. Call campus x4652 for information.

Tweaksters

Beckman Auditorium. Saturday, April 5, 2 p.m. Two quirky artists explore the laws of physics, then seemingly smash them to bits in a mix of dance, juggling, and acrobatics. Caltech student admission: $5 (unreserved seating). Call campus x4652 for information.

Janaki String Trio

Beckman Auditorium. Sunday, April 6, 3:30 p.m. This Coleman Chamber Music Concert will include works by Schubert, Schoenberg, and Mozart. Caltech student admission: Fifty (50) free tickets are available to Caltech students (limit 2 tickets per Caltech I.D.). Call campus x4652 for information.

Vasen

Beckman Auditorium. Saturday, April 12, 8 p.m. Vasen's traditional music with a modern attitude can invoke classical string quartets one moment, and upbeat folk and pop another. Caltech student admission: $5.00. Call campus x4652 for information.

Coleman Chamber Ensemble Competition Winners Concert

Ramo Auditorium. Sunday, April 13, 3:30 p.m. Winners of the Coleman Chamber Ensemble Competition will perform. Caltech student admission: $5.00. Call campus x4652 for information.

Patents

Thursday, March 20, 2:00-3:30pm
SFL, Room 328
Mike Slessor (Office of Technology Transfer) will present a review of the patenting process. This will be followed by a quick review of patent searching, locating English language patent equivalents, legal status issues, and current awareness techniques. Register

Caltech Project for Effective Teaching

The Caltech Project for Effective Teaching is continuing its workshop program and seminar series on teaching. These events provide valuable information for anyone seeking a career in teaching. Upcoming events for the Spring term include:

March 31, 6-8 PM - "Science in the everyday classroom: Individual lesson planning for middle to high school." workshop with Alycen Chan. RSVP required.

April 8, 5:15 - "Teaching Alumni Panel." A Q&A panel with Caltech alumni currently teaching at the high school to college level. Baxter Lecture Hall.

April 28, 5:15 - Seminar by Mike Brown, professor of Planetary Astronomy and winner of the Feynmann Prize for teaching. Beckman Institute Auditorium.

All of the above events qualify for the CPET certificate program. Questions or submissions for this program can be sent at any time to cpet@its.caltech.edu. For more information, visit Amnesty International Sunday, Mar. 16, 6:30 pm: Human-rights book discussion group meets at Vroman's Bookstore (695 E. Colorado Blvd in Pasadena), 2nd floor. This month our book is "Unbowed, A Memoir", by Wangari Maathai, the 2004 winner of the Nobel Peace Prize (for her contribution to sustainable development) and Kenyan cabinet member, who recounts her extraordinary journey from her childhood in rural Kenya to the world stage. Come and join the discussion, even if you haven't read the book.

Thursday, Mar. 27, 7:30 pm: Monthly meeting in the CalTech Y (on San Pasqual between Hill and Holliston, on the south side behind the two curving walls). We will be discussing the current state of issues on which we are working and plans for the coming month.

Tuesday, Apr. 8, 7:30 pm: letter-writing in the Athenaeum. We will meet in the Rathskeller in the basement. (Look for a table with the Amnesty sign.) Join us for actions on human-rights violations around the world, talk, and refreshments.