Physics instruction at Cal Poly is conducted in a variety of formats by skilled professionals who focus on building an inclusive and welcoming learning community so that all students achieve proficiency. Learn by Doing is a guiding principle that permeates the physics curriculum. A major emphasis on laboratory investigations, especially at the upper division, complements students' theoretical and computational grounding. At the lower division level, several sections of courses are taught in a studio environment using materials developed on the basis of research on the learning and teaching of physics.
Modified from physics.calpoly.edu
Senior Projects from 2016
Probing the Source of Ionization of Gas in Local Active Galaxies, Jake J. Haslemann
Spontaneous Parametric Down Conversion of Photons Through β-Barium Borate, Luke Horowitz
Teaching Numerical Methods in the Context of Galaxy Mergers, Maria Kourjanskaia
Probing the Fitting Accuracy of Active Galaxy Spectra, Aaron T. Line
Elasticity of Cylindrical Black Holes, Conrad Pearson
Spontaneous Parametric Down-Conversion in a Beta Barium Borate Crystal, Nicholas Williams
Senior Projects from 2015
Evidence of Attenuation of VHE Blazar Spectra by Extragalactic Background Light, Cameron Allen
A Lego® Brewster Angle Microscope for Quantitative Monolayer Film Analysis, Nicholas Benz
Critical point pairs for smectic-A* - smectic-C* phase transitions., Ted Cassirer
An Extremum Principle for Charged Black Holes, Shaker Von Price Funkhouser
Electromagnetic Calorimeter Calibration: Getting Rid of the Trash, Jacob P. Gamble
Determining the Relationship Between the [OIII] 5007 Å Emission Line Profile and the Stellar Velocity Dispersion in Active Galaxies, Nathaniel Milgram
Simulation of light scattering from Brownian particles, Raymond Mullen
Transition Orbits of Walking Droplets, Joshua Parker
Low Intensity Gamma-Ray Spectroscopy of the Lake Labyrinth Meteorite, Tristan C. Paul
Thermodynamic Effects of a Local Bell State Projection Interaction in a One-Dimensional Dynamic Spin System, Nickolas H. Pilgram
Characterizing Double and Triple Laser Beam Interference Patterns in the Context of Trapping Atoms for Quantum Computing, Ian E. Powell
CUORE Image Analysis and CUORE-0 Shifting: A Contribution to the Search for Neutrinoless Double Beta Decay, Dakota Christopher Rose
Frequency of Seyfert Type Transitions in a Sample of 102 Local Active Galactic Nuclei, Jordan Runco
Simulations of HL-LHC Crab Cavity Noise using HEADTAIL, Stanley Steeper
Saddle Force Mapping, Molly Totten
Correlations in Intensity Fluctuations From a Quasi-Thermal Light Source: An Application of Hanbury Brown & Twiss, Christopher Watanabe
Senior Projects from 2014
Investigation of the Supercritical Bifurcation in a Simple Magneto-Mechanical System, Bo Baker