Recent Events
Science Saturday with the FM Science Museum
In a new collaborative outreach venture, on April 18, 2026, the Department of Physics partnered with the Fargo Moorhead Science Museum to organize and host our first-ever Science Saturday at the Fargo Public Library. More than 200 children and their families came downtown for a fun-packed morning of demonstrations and hands-on activities. Facilitated by NDSU Physics student and faculty volunteers, the activities included making slime, soapy science, magic magnets, and liquid nitrogen. The event was highlighted by two special attractions: Our undergraduate student club (SPS) built and demonstrated a cloud chamber to visualize particle traces from radioactive decays and the Museum debuted a new exhibit on gravity, featuring a gravity well that simulates the pull of a black hole. We look forward to continuing the partnership with future outreach events.
SPS Hosts Zone Meeting
From March 27–29, 2026, the NDSU Physics Department and its Society of Physics Students (SPS) chapter welcomed 35 undergraduate physics students from across North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa, and Nebraska for the annual SPS Zone 11 Meeting. SPS is a national organization of the American Institute of Physics (AIP) dedicated to fostering the next generation of physicists through research, leadership, and professional development. The meeting, organized by NDSU’s SPS chapter, featured laboratory tours by Dr. Andrew Croll and Dr. Khang Hoang, undergraduate research presentations, discussions of chapter activities, and a plenary lecture by astrophysicist Dr. Wayne Barkhouse from the University of North Dakota. Participants also enjoyed a visit to the MSUM Planetarium. The weekend provided students with an opportunity to exchange ideas, build professional connections, and celebrate their shared enthusiasm for physics. Our SPS students deserve special credit for organizing a memorable event that showcased NDSU’s strong undergraduate physics community.
Denton Group Work Featured on Journal Front Inside Cover
Recent work from the Denton group was featured on the inside front cover of the journal Soft Matter. The article, entitled "Modeling crystallization in concentrated suspensions of compressible microgels,” coauthored with graduate student Oreoluwa Alade, describes a computational study of liquid-solid phase transitions in concentrated suspensions of microgels — soft colloidal particles comprising microscopic cross-linked polymer networks that swell when dispersed in a solvent [O. E. Alade and A. R. Denton, Soft Matter 22, 5463 (2026)].
Physics Students Attend PHYSCON 2025
Eight undergraduate students from the Department of Physics attended this year's Physics and Astronomy Congress (PhysCon), held in Denver from October 30 — November 1. This triennial conference, the largest gathering of undergraduate physics and astronomy students in the world, brings together students, alumni and faculty members from around the country for a three-day bash featuring frontier physics, workshops, networking and fun. The event is supported by the American Institute of Physics and hosted by Sigma Pi Sigma, the physics and astronomy honor society. This year’s gathering was highlighted by inspiring plenary speakers, including Dr. Jocelyn Bell Burnell, discoverer of pulsars, and Nobel Prize winner Dr. Eric Cornell. The packed agenda also included Poster and Art sessions, a Career Expo and Grad Fair, networking opportunities and a dance party. To kick off their visit, students joined a tour of the Edgar Experimental Mine, part of which is dedicated to neutrino studies and the impact of high energy radiation on quantum information devices. Funding for the trip was made possible by a generous donation from NDSU alum Dr. Darrell Strobel.
Warren Christensen Secures NSF Funds
Warren Christensen has been honored with an NSF grant to support his research in the Physics Education Sphere. The grant, "Collaborative Research: Scaffolding the Calculus in Calculus Based Physics" will support this cutting edge work into how students understand both mathematics and physics! The award, totalling $230,111, will help support graduate students to work on this interesting problem with Warren! A great sight for the strength of education research at NDSU!
Erik Hobbie Secures NSF Grant
Professor Erik Hobbie has secured an NSF grant worth $427,935 to study Silicon Carbide nanocrystals. The work is part of the NDSU drive towards more sustainably developed materials. In this case, the Hobbie group is focusing on silicon and carbon to create fluorescent particles because they are both very abundant source materials. This provides a much better route to semiconductor devices than traditional materials which typically involve rare-earth metals. See more in the press release!
Croll Group Work on Journal Cover
The Croll group has recently published a paper entitled "Kuttsukigami: Sticky Sheet Design" in the journal Soft Matter. The project was a collaboration between graduate student Tim Twohig, faculty member Andrew Croll here at NDSU and Post-Doctoral Researcher Ravi Tutika, Ph.D. student Wuzhou Zu and faculty member Michael Bartlett at Virginia Tech. The work outlines a new method for creating structure with thin sheets, akin to origami, but with advantages such as the inclusion of a broader range of materials and reusability. The authors also point out how adhesion can be used to measure the mechanical energy stored in complex thin structures, such as the mobius strip. The editors liked the images throughout the work so much they featured the groups work on the journal cover.
