Dennis Krause came to Wabash in 1998 after finishing a three-year stint as a visiting professor at Williams College. Wabash was a perfect fit for Prof. Krause who discovered he wanted to teach at a quality liberal arts college while an undergraduate at Saint Olaf College in Minnesota. At Wabash he is also able to collaborate with researchers at Purdue University (where received his Ph.D. and where he is an adjunct physics professor) and IUPUI in Indianapolis. While he is a theoretical physicist, Prof. Krause works closely with experimentalists since he believes that physics must be firmly grounded in experiments, which provide the true test of a theory’s validity. He has a wide range of research interests that include quantum mechanics, quantum electrodynamics, unstable particles, the Casimir force,  and the search for new forces and extra dimensions.

Prof. Krause sees research and teaching as being integral to each other. To see what a physicist really does, a student needs to work on a problem with no known answer. And to teach, a teacher must go beyond the textbook and know how physics is really done.   He has brought his research into the classroom and involved students in his research, and he has used ideas inspired by his teaching in his research. It is also important to Prof. Krause to use the latest results of physics education research to try to better understand how his students think and to improve his teaching. All of this takes up most of his time, but when he needs a break, Prof. Krause can be found running the streets of Crawfordsville or perfecting his skills as the Physics Department’s unofficial “grillmeister.”

Ph.D. Physics, Purdue University, 1994
M.S. Physics, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 1987
B.A., Physics, Saint Olaf College, 1984

PHY 111—General Physics I
PHY 112—General Physics II
PHY 209—Thermal/Relativity Physics
PHY 210—Modern Physics
PHY 278—Special Topics: Introduction to Cosmology
PHY 315—Quantum Mechanics
PHY 388—Independent Study: General Relativity
Freshman Tutorial—Confronting the Mysterious

 “A Quantum Twin Paradox,” at the Meeting of the Anacapa Society, Hamline University, May, 2012.

“Clocks Viewed by Relativistic Observers,” Annual Meeting of the Indiana section of the American Association of Physics Teachers, IUPUI, April 2012.

 “Measurement and Uncertainty the GUM Way," Annual Meeting of the Indiana section of the American Association of Physics Teachers, Plainfield High School, April 2011.

“An Energy Conservation Lab using a Vertical Simple Harmonic Oscillator," Annual Meeting of the Indiana section of the American Association of Physics Teachers, Indiana University, April 2009.

“Searches for solar-influenced radioactive decay anomalies using spacecraft RTGs,” D. E. Krause, B. A. Rogers, E. Fischbach, J. B. Buncher, A. Ging, J. H. Jenkins, J. M. Longuski, N. Strange, P. A. Sturrock, Astroparticle Physics 36, 42–46 (2012).

“Casimir force between a microfabricated elliptical cylinder and plate,” R. S. Decca, E. Fischbach, G. L. Klimchitskaya, D. E. Krause, D. Lopez, and V. M. Mostepanenko, Physical Review A 84, 042502 (2011).

“Capacitance Measurements and Electrostatic Calibration in Experiments Measuring the Casimir Force,” R. S. Decca, E. Fischbach, G. L. Klimchitskaya, D. E. Krause, D. Lopez, U. Mohideen, and V. M. Mostepanenko, International Journal of Modern Physics A 26, 3930–3943 (2011).

“Observation of the Thermal Casimir Force is Open to Question,” G. L. Klimchitskaya, M. Bordag, E. Fischbach, D. E. Krause and V. M. Mostepanenko, International Journal of Modern Physics A 26, 3918– 3929 (2011).

“Can a String’s Tension Exert a Torque on a Pulley?” D. E. Krause and Y. Sun, The Physics Teacher 49, 234–235 (2011).

Purdue University Special Initiative Dissertation Year Fellowship (1993)
Purdue University Physics Department Edward S. Akeley Prize (1994)
Wabash College McLain-McTurnan-Arnold Research Scholar (2004)

"Center of Mass and Relative Motion" with Nicholas Reese

“Quantum Unstable Particles” with Zachary Rohrbach

“Problems with Pulley Problems” with Yifei Sun

“1-Dimensional Casimir Force” with Diego Aliaga

“Energy Conservation in a Massive Spring System” with Sabir Shrestha