Dennis Krause’s research not only exposes his students to cutting-edge physics, but it’s improving his teaching.
Krause is working with Purdue’s Ephraim Fischbach, Daniel Lopez at Lucent Technologies, and Ricardo Decca at IUPUI to better understand the Casimir effect—the attractive force between two surfaces in a vacuum. It’s research with implications for everything from nano-technology to unified theories of nature.
At the same time, he’s attempting to prove or disprove aspects of string theory [the best known of those unified theories] and searching for new dimensions and forces at a sub-micron scale. Krause and Fischbach already discovered that some string thory-inspired models are wrong, at least at the scale at which he’s working.
"Lucent is also interested in our work for nanotechnology applications," Krause says.
But his work on the project with experiment designer Ricardo Decca is informing his teaching.
"Ricardo’s an experimentalist, and I’m learning a lot about all the tricks that can be designed into an effective experiment for students. That’s really going to help me teach the experimental research course at Wabash."