The Department of Physics and Astronomy invites you to a colloquium sponsored by the OSA WSU Student Chapter featuring Philip J. Wyatt, founder and Chief Executive Officer of Wyatt Technology Corporation. Dr. Wyatt will present his talk, “Measuring Small Particles by Light Scattering…with a brief Historical Perspective,” Tuesday, April 19 at 4:10 p.m. in Webster B17.
Meet for refreshments before the lecture at 3:45 – 4:10 p.m. in the foyer on floor G above the lecture hall.
Philip J. Wyatt is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Wyatt Technology Corporation (www.wyatt.com) which, for the last 5 years of the award, was named by The Scientist magazine as “One of the best places to work in the world.”
He received his undergraduate education in liberal arts, physics and mathematics at the University of Chicago, and Christ’s College, Cambridge. His graduate education was completed at the University of Illinois (M.S.) and the Florida State University (Ph.D.).
The author of more than seventy articles, Wyatt has co-authored or contributed to eleven books, and was nominated by the National Academy of Sciences as one of fifteen finalists for this country’s first Scientist-Astronaut Selection Program. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, The American Physical Society, and the Optical Society of America. He has had over forty foreign and domestic patents issued relating to laser light scattering and other technologies.
In 2003, he was named Graduate of Distinction by the College of Arts and Sciences at Florida State.
Wyatt is the American Physical Society’s 2009 recipient of the Prize for Industrial Applications of Physics with the citation: “For pioneering developments in the physics of the inverse scattering problem: new applications of laser light scattering and the successful sustained commercialization of new related analytical methods and instrumentation.”
He is a Registered Agent before the U. S. Patent and Trademark Office, the past Chair of the American Physical Society’s Forum on Industrial and Applied Physics, and the Vice-Chair of the APS Group on Instrument and Measurement Science.
Abstract: Light scattering has always played a major role in the analysis and measurement of very small particles. Historically, measurements of light scattered at a plurality of angles from an ensemble of monodisperse particles (or even an individual particle) were compared to theory in order to extract their size and (sometimes) their structure. When particles are measured in a liquid media, as is generally the case for chemical analyses, an important approximationtheory is often applied to extract structural dimensions for more complex shapes. This so-called Rayleigh-Gans(R-G) approximation forms the basis for many types of determinations including the molar mass, size, and interactions of a variety of macromolecules in solution.
The presentation begins with a brief history of the scientists who first began using light scattering as an analytical tool. It then focuses on the extraction of certain size and structural features of a light scattering ensemble of various particle types, following fractionation to insure monodispersity, by extending the applicability of the R-G approximation to particles generally considered inapplicable. A simple analytical technique is shown to permit a more precise measurement of the so-called “Mean square radius” and, with it, the immediate extraction of key particle metrics.
