Geology students find unsafe levels of nitrate in Barton County wells
K-State and Barton Community College students, led by K-State’s Matthew Kirk, associate professor of geology, partnered on a year-long analysis of private water wells in Barton County and found nitrates at levels considered unsafe for human consumption.
The students are part of the Kansas Groundwater GEOPAths undergraduate research program supported by the National Science Foundation and K-State’s geology department.
Read the full Great Bend Tribune story.
K-State Physicists collaborate with 2023 Nobel laureates
K-State’s physics department has close ties with this year’s winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics. J.R. Macdonald Laboratory researchers have been collaborating with the Nobel laureates on attosecond research for years.
The three Nobel laureates—Pierre Agostini, The Ohio State University; Ferenc Krausz, Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics; and Anne L’Huillier, Lund University—created new tools for exploring the world of electrons inside atoms and molecules. They demonstrated a way to create attosecond pulses of light that can be used to measure the rapid processes in which electrons move or change energy. (An attosecond is so short that there are as many in one second as there have been seconds since the birth of the universe.)
K-State researchers have contributed significantly to attosecond science, which seeks to understand and control light-matter interactions at timescales commensurate with electronic motion in atoms and molecules. Such interactions play a critical role in chemical and biological processes like photosynthesis, cell replication and energy flow, and vision.
The physics department, world-renowned for its ultrafast intense laser research, hosted an international attosecond physics conference in 2009, which Nobel laureates L’Huillier and Krausz attended. Nobel laureate Agostini, who once mentored K-State physics assistant professor Cosmin Blaga, delivered a colloquium here in 2005. They have 23 joint publications so far.
The physics faculty recently gained assistant professor Meng Han, an expert in attosecond light pulse generation, characterization and application.