{"id":126186,"date":"2020-08-28T08:16:35","date_gmt":"2020-08-28T14:16:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/communique.uccs.edu\/?p=126186"},"modified":"2020-08-28T13:42:19","modified_gmt":"2020-08-28T19:42:19","slug":"all-female-physicist-team-publishes-research-on-magnetic-domain-walls","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/communique.uccs.edu\/?p=126186","title":{"rendered":"All-female physicist team publishes research on magnetic domain walls"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/a>
Alex Stuart ’19 and former associate professor of physics Karen Livesey at the College of Letters, Arts and Sciences Award Ceremony in 2018.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

An all-female team of Colorado physicists, including former associate professor of physics Karen Livesey and UCCS alumna Alex Stuart \u201919, recently published scientific research on the properties of magnetic domain walls.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhen we submitted the paper to the Journal of Magnetism and Magnetic Materials, I realized I\u2019d never seen this before,” said Karen Livesey, former associate professor of physics at UCCS. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

“I couldn\u2019t find any data, because a lot of physicists publish with their initials, not their full names, so their gender is hidden from the equation. But I have never seen a paper where all four authors were women.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Physics has the lowest percentage of female researchers of\nany academic discipline in the United States. For Livesey, part of the magic of\nthe paper \u2013 titled \u201cAnalytic calculation for the stray field above N\u00e9el and\nBloch magnetic domain walls in a rectangular nanoribbon\u201d \u2013 was that publishing\na paper written by four female authors was purely incidental.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe didn\u2019t set out to have an all-female team. It just happened,\u201d Livesey said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a>
A schematic of a magnetic domain wall.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

The paper originated in a project Livesey assigned to Stuart\nas part of her undergraduate work in computational physics at UCCS: devising a\ncalculation that could determine the nature of magnetic domain walls existing\nin a given material.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Prior to Stuart\u2019s work on the project, the only way to predict the structure of a magnetic domain wall was by running a time-intensive calculation. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Using funding from the National\nScience Foundation, the Undergraduate Research Academy and the College of\nLetters, Arts and Sciences\u2019 Faculty-Student Collaboration Award, Stuart and Livesey\nwere able to produce a fast, simple analytic tool that can accurately determine\nthe domain wall structure \u2013 in just seconds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The work was verified by Kristen Buchanan, associate\nprofessor of physics at Colorado State University, and Buchanan\u2019s research assistant\nCarla Quispe-Flores. The project itself rested on research completed by another\nUCCS physics alumna, Miriam DeJong \u201915, who produced a now-heavily cited\nanalytic expression that helps to predict the properties of magnets. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a>
Stuart alongside her award-winning poster presentation at the 2018 Front Range Advanced Magnetics Symposium.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe reason people are interested in these domain walls is that they are regions where magnetization switches from up to down,\u201d Livesey explained. \u201cYou can encode information with them in the form of ones and zeroes. And because they\u2019re very small regions, just a few atoms wide, you can encode information very densely.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But for Stuart, the true importance of the project was that\nit provided mentorship from another female physicist \u2013 and it was the launchpad\nfor her career in physics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThis was my first introduction to doing a scientific research\nproject,\u201d Stuart said. \u201cI was able to work with another female physicist and\nlearn what Karen had to teach me, whether it was the actual physics or how to\nhandle myself on a project. It gave me motivation to be where I am today.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Livesey agrees.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWorking on a science project is not just about learning the\nmaths and the physics,\u201d she said. \u201cThere are a lot of soft skills to learn when\nyou\u2019re working together on a science project: learning how to do poster\npresentations and talk to people, learning to write a scientific paper.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI\u2019m so grateful for the opportunities I was afforded while I was at UCCS,” Stuart said. “It\u2019s cool to feel confident in my skills.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Livesey is now pursuing a new faculty position at the University of Newcastle in Australia, and Stuart is now in the second year of her physics Ph.D. at Colorado State University working with Buchanan. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Both Livesey and Stuart are involved in multiple theoretical physics research projects that have kept them busy, even through a pandemic. In many ways, their collaboration was simply business as usual.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIn the physics department at UCCS, this is the norm: to work with undergraduate students and to include them on meaningful, cutting-edge research projects,\u201d Livesey said. \u201cWe bring undergraduate students in alongside faculty and graduate students. It\u2019s a culture of supporting each other, doing work together and doing it well.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And perhaps one day \u2013 thanks in part to their efforts \u2013 seeing a physics paper published by an all-female team will feel like business as usual, too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An all-female team of Colorado physicists, including former associate professor of physics Karen Livesey and UCCS alumna Alex Stuart \u201919, recently published scientific research on the properties of magnetic domain walls. (More)<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"author":27,"featured_media":126216,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1,48],"tags":[86,124,302,329],"class_list":["post-126186","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-all","category-science-and-tech","tag-college-of-letters-arts-and-sciences","tag-department-of-physics-and-energy-science","tag-office-of-research","tag-research"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/communique.uccs.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/08\/Livesey-Stuart.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1mBpJ-wPg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/communique.uccs.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126186","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/communique.uccs.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/communique.uccs.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/communique.uccs.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/27"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/communique.uccs.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=126186"}],"version-history":[{"count":24,"href":"https:\/\/communique.uccs.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126186\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":126268,"href":"https:\/\/communique.uccs.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126186\/revisions\/126268"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/communique.uccs.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/126216"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/communique.uccs.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=126186"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/communique.uccs.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=126186"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/communique.uccs.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=126186"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}