Let me introduce you to a graduate of these Evergreen programs in physics. Peter Schwindt started with Matter and Motion, designed and built a sailing hydrofoil in Energy Systems, and now he's an intern at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
	Faculty physicist, Dr. E. J. Zita QuickTime Audio - 2.3 MB

	Landscape outside Los Alamos

			So, my experiment is to quantify the wave-particle duality, and... everybody's pretty familiar with the fact that light can either behave as a wave or as a particle, and previous research has always looked at light behaving as a wave or light behaving as a particle, and what we're trying to do is look at this middle ground where light can behave somewhat like a particle and somewhat like a wave.

			The way we do that is we send the light through an interferometer which splits the light into two equal paths, and depending on how we manipulate the light with the interferometer we can see particle-like behavior or wave-like behavior or we can see the in-between, where we see both particle-like and wave-like behavior. And then we can attach numbers - distinguishibility for particle-like behavior and visibility for wave-like behavior.

			Now the graph shows visibility plotted against distinguishability. Visibilty is the quantity measuring the wave-like properties of the light, and distinguishibility is the quantity measuring the particle-like properities of the light. As you can see, the more particle-like the light becomes the less wave-like the light is.

And then kind of the cool physics of the things ... we can do things, well one thing we can do is a quantum erasure, which can erase the particle-like behavior and you'll see wave-like behavior. And another thing we can do is send in a mixed state of polarization which is polarization going every which way, and we'll find, and, we will see some pretty non-intuitive results from that.

			Now I wanted to talk a little about Evergreen. I think that Evergreen prepared me well for work here at the lab, and probably prepared me well for graduate school too. I think one of the reasons it has prepared me so well is that Evergreen focuses a lot on learning the science and getting at the ideas behind the problems that you're going through in physics classes, or your science classes, and getting a big picture rather than focusing on small details which you have to know in order to get the right answer on a test that's your grade.

			The other thing that's helped me out a lot is that Evergreen focuses a lot on self-motivation, working by yourself, but also on working with other people too. So here, I've been working a lot by myself in the lab, and so, being able to think for yourself is very critical, but also, I need to go back to talk to my boss about what I'm doing, what I'm doing in the lab. So - I'm pretty happy with the education I got at Evergreen. Thank you very much.

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