Corcovilos Lab

photo of Ted Corcovilos

Theodore (Ted) A. Corcovilos, Ph.D.

Associate Professor of Physics
Duquesne University

Warning

Website under repair! I moved to a new platform, so some things may look a little funny while I reformat everything. Also, old links to pages herein are probably dead now. Please excuse my mess!

Experimental atomic physics research at Duquesne University and Pittsburgh Quantum Institute.

Research interests include ultracold atoms, related optics, chemical spectroscopy, environmental hazards.

Teaching interests include undergraduate physics, especially upper division courses.

More info about where to find me online.

A brief video describing our research:

Latest blog posts

More webpage features

I turned on some new website features like comments, search, and social media hooks.

Optics in Homogeneous Coordinates, Imaging Points

Our new 3×3 ray matrices give us shortcuts to finding images.

New website

I updated the engine for the website. Watch for more updates soon!

Optics in Homogeneous Coordinates, Coordinate Tranformations

Last time we added an extra row and column to our ABCD matrices. What can we do with these?

Optics in Homogeneous Coordinates, Introduction

I introduce the homogeneous representation of rays and extend the ABCD matrices to include rotations and translations (properly!).

Our New Master’s Program

I discuss how we built our new Professional Master’s in Applied Physics program at Duquesne.

A student caught me studying

A student caught me studying, so I had to explain my teaching philosophy.

Time Travel Lecture

I gave a fun talk to Eric Vogelstein’s Philosophy of Star Trek class about time travel.

New Paper! Generating quasicrystal optical potentials

We recently published a paper about how we are generating the quasicrystal optical potentials for our ultracold atom experiment.

Geometric Algebra - beyond vectors

I stumbled onto the topic of Geometric Algebra (Clifford Algebra) a while back. Does it help us understand physics?

Visiting the FELIX Free Electron Laser

I visited the FELIX Free Electron Laser facility at Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, to do some spectroscopy experiments with Mike Van Stipdonk.

Hug a math professor!

A brief meeting with a math colleague opened both of our eyes about helping our students.

Thoughts on the graduate admissions process

The DAMOP session on graduate admissions was enlightening and disheartening. Best practices are not being followed by schools or by students. I’ll discuss a little of what I learned here.

DAMOP, Part 1 - Navigating a conference

Instead of describing the science I’m seeing this week at the DAMOP meeting, I decided to do a couple of meta posts on conferences in general. This first one discusses what happens at a science conference and what to do while you’re there.

DAMOP 2018 prelude

Preview of the 2018 DAMOP conference.

Mr. Adam Clock, please report to the ticket counter.

I’m still amazed that we can measure relativity in such a simple way as putting clocks on airplanes.

Quantum State Guessing Game

For a couple of years I’ve been polishing up a classroom activity to demonstrate how quantum measurements work on a simple qubit system. Here I’d like to summarize the game in simple terms for non-experts.

Lead in Drinking Water, Part 2 (Ethics)

Before I describe how we measure lead in drinking water, I want to discuss some of the new (to me) meta issues associated with this project. A lot of these things are uncommon for physics research, but will be familiar to folks in biology or medicine. I am a rank amateur on these issues, so consider this an imperfect discussion by someone still finding his way.

Use a French press coffee pot backwards

I found a different way of using a french press coffee pot that keeps the coffee from getting bitter if you don’t drink it right away.

Lead in Drinking Water, Part 1 (Background)

One of my major research projects is building an inexpensive handheld device for measuring the amount of lead in drinking water. This is the first of several planned posts on the project. Today, I’d like to introduce the problem we’re trying to solve and talk particularly about lead in Pittsburgh’s drinking water.

Reading List, March 2018

I read a lot. It’s probably my biggest hobby. Here’s what’s sitting on my desk or in my ebook right now.

Simple eye test without fancy equipment

Most of us are familiar with the refraction exam done by optometrists to determine our eyeglass prescription. Here’s a different method without the fancy equipment. The only tool we need is a tape measure and an object to look at, like a chart or point-source of light like an LED.

Welcome

Welcome to my new website and blog.