Daniel Mladek, YC’26 Physics (Intensive) and Humanities double-major and a member of Sigma Pi Sigma, received a Robert C. Bates Yale Postgraduate Fellowship which will help fund his research abroad.
The Robert C. Bates Postgraduate Fellowship, from the endowments of Jonathan Edwards College, supports seniors who, after successfully navigating an undergraduate education at Yale, have designed a 3-12 month project to build on their Yale experience through further research, an internship, or other creative projects that contribute to society. Projects must be conducted outside of the continental United States, immediately after graduation.
Mladek commented, “I was honored to be awarded a Fulbright Scholarship for atmospheric physics research in Austria. However, I also received the Robert C. Bates Yale Postgraduate Fellowship to conduct Geophysics research at the Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich, Germany for 10 months. I decided to take the Bates Fellowship since the research in Munich aligns better with my long-term interests. Alongside Prof. Heiner Igel I will be conducting rotational seismology research for the Rotations in Physics, Geodesy and Geophysics (RING) and the Rotational Motions in Seismology (ROMY) projects. Rotational seismology, which is a relatively understudied field, is being actively reshaped by these projects under the supervision of Prof. Igel. Additionally, as a prominent scientist in geophysics, Prof. Igel’s advice and mentorship will be invaluable for my career and future ambitions. My goal is to use my understanding of physics and geophysics to help battle the current climate crisis!”
RING Project
From the RING website, “Ring laser gyroscopes are highly sensitive inertial optical interferometers, exploiting the Sagnac effect on two counter-propagating laser beams in a ring cavity enclosing an area. Today, this technology has matured to routinely obtain the precession and nutation motion of the rotational axis of Earth, which moves by as little as 50 arc seconds per year: ring laser are excellent sensors to observe geophysical phenomena of the system Earth. Apart from variations in the global Earth rotation that influence the rotational velocity or the orientation of Earth in space, a ring laser also senses local seismic ground motion, the rotational component of the microseismic background and the earthquake-induced toroidal eigenmodes of Earth. Sensitivity and stability of current ring lasers are limited by processes not yet fully understood. This includes the dynamics of the gaseous laser medium, thermal coating noise and birefringence of the mirror coatings, coupling between the counter-propagating laser modes, as well as Rayleigh scattering from the residual gas. This project aims to systematically study and understand these phenomena, and to devise methods to mitigate or correct for these systematic effects. Improved ring lasers will reach the quantum shot noise limit even for extended integration times, and will provide high-quality and worldwide unique data to the other projects within the interdisciplinary RING research unit.”
ROMY Project
From the ROMY website, “When the ground shakes from earthquakes, the oceans, or the atmosphere, it not only translates (up-down, sideways), but also undergoes rotational motions. To fully characterize seismic sources and wave fields theoreticians have insisted for decades that these motions should also be measured. However, this was hampered by the substantial technical difficulties in observing rotational motions with the necessary sensitivity. This implies that the observation of the complete ground motion is still an unsolved problem. Based on promising pilot studies in the past years, we aim at breaking new ground with an innovative instrumentation strategy that would allow solving this outstanding problem. If the strategy is successful the new observable is expected to have an impact in a wide range of fields. We aim at the establishment of the first-of-its-kind six-component seismic observatory based on ring-laser technology, the field deployment of portable fibre-optic based rotation sensors, the integration of the new observations with the global seismological data infrastructure, and the reporting of discoveries in a variety of fields based on the new observable. At the end of the project we expect to have substantially pushed forward the emerging field field of rotational seismology with new standards, and recommendations for the use of rotation sensors in Earth sciences and engineering. We expect advances in understanding 1) the dynamics of volcano’s interior, 2) the origin of the Earth’s ocean generated noise field, 3) and seismic inverse problems for structure and source using the new rotational observables.”