Facility for Rare Isotope Beams

Program: Sonata No. 1 for Violin and Piano, B. 42 Ernest Bloch (1880-1959) I. Agitato II. Molto quieto III. Moderato Intermission Sonata No. 2 for Violin and Piano, Op. 36a Ferruccio Busoni (1866-1924) I. Langsam II. Presto III. Andante, piuttosto grave. Andante con moto Lin He is Associate Professor of Violin at the Louisiana State University School of Music and Associate Concertmaster of the Baton Rouge Symphony. Prof. He also teaches at the Las Vegas Chamber Music Institute, Summit Music Festival and Institute, Sewanee Summer Music Festival, InterHarmony International Summer Music Festival, Montecito International Music Festival and BayView Music Festival. He has performed at Carnegie Hall with principal players from the Metropolitan Opera, New York Philharmonic and Philadelphia Orchestra. Over the past seasons, he has performed the Bruch Scottish Fantasy with the Sonoma County Philharmonic, Chausson Poeme and Korngold Concerto with the Rapides Symphony Orchestra, Mendelssohn Violin Concerto with the Shippensburg Symphony, and the Sibelius Concerto with the Lake Charles Symphony. The 2024-2025 season of concerts include recitals in Oklahoma City University, Houghton University, University of Oklahoma, and the US premiere of the first edition of Verdi’s String Quartet. His recordings include “French Sonatas for Violin and Piano” with pianist Gregory Sioles and “Trios by Saint-Saëns, Piston, and Zemlinsky: Piano Trios” with cellist Daniel Cassin and pianist Constance Carroll, both released by Centaur Records. Recently, he shared the stage with the Shanghai String Quartet and violinists Charles Castleman and Richard Lin and presented solo recitals and master classes at Arizona State University, Florida State University, Longy School of Music, San Francisco Conservatory of Music, University of Houston, University of Las Vegas, University of North Texas, and University Alberta, Edmonton, Canada. Born in Shanghai, China, Lin He began his musical training began at the age of five and received his doctorate from the Eastman School of Music, where he studied under the tutelage of Zvi Zeitlin. Other major influences include Steven Staryk, Sylvia Rosenberg, Kyung Sun Lee, Paul Kantor and Dating He, concertmaster of the Shanghai Opera House for 22 years. Michael Gurt is Paula Garvey Manship Distinguished Professor of Piano at Louisiana State University. He won First Prize in the Gina Bachauer International Piano Competition in 1982, and was a prize winner in international competitions in Pretoria, South Africa, and Sydney, Australia. He has performed as soloist with the Chicago Symphony, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Utah Symphony, the Baltimore Symphony, the Memphis Symphony, the Capetown Symphony, the China National Symphony Orchestra, and the Natal Philharmonic Orchestra in Durban, South Africa. He has made solo appearances in Alice Tully Hall and Weill Recital Hall (Carnegie Hall) in New York, Ambassador Auditorium in Los Angeles, Orchestra Hall in Detroit, City Hall in Hong Kong, the Victorian Arts Center in Melbourne, Australia, Baxter Hall in Capetown, South Africa, and the Attaturk Cultural Center in Istanbul, Turkey. He has made several tours of Brazil and recently performed in Porto and Lisbon, Portugal. Gurt has collaborated with the Takacs String Quartet and the Cassatt String Quartet, and has performed at the Australian Festival of Chamber Music in Townsville, Queensland. He has served on the juries of both the Gina Bachauer International Piano Competition and the New Orleans International Piano Competition, and he has recorded on the Naxos, Centaur, and Redwood labels. Gurt serves as Piano Mentor at the National Music Festival in Chestertown, Maryland, and was the chair of the piano department at the Sewanee Summer Music Festival from 1987 through 2007. He has served as Piano Chair of the Louisiana Music Teachers Association, and has taught at two summer music seminars held at Tunghai University in Taichung, Taiwan. Professor Gurt holds degrees from the University of Michigan and the Juilliard School.

More than 50 years after the discovery of neutrons stars, their interior composition and structure remains unknown. Because the extreme densities and matter asymmetry in neutron star interiors are out of reach for Earth laboratories, the equation of state of bulk nuclear matter is unknown, with important implication for astrophysics and nuclear physics. Thankfully, measurements of neutron stars masses and radii are direct probes of the interior of these compact objects. In the past two decades, X-ray observatories have provided some measurements of neutron star radii and therefore some constraints on the dense matter equation of state. But recently, the results from the NICER Observatory have provided the most promising, robust and precise constraints. I will review some of the key results from the NICER mission (including the most recent measurements) and give an overview of other existing measurements of masses and radii, as well as present their impact on our knowledge of dense nuclear matter. Finally, I will detail future prospects to constrain the equation of state of dense nuclear matter with upcoming X-ray observatories.

Committee: Witold Nazarewicz (Chairperson), Metin Aktulga, Paul Gueye, Filomena Nunes, Johannes Pollanen. Thesis is available @ https://pa.msu.edu/graduate-program/current-graduate-students/draft-dissertations-for-review.aspx - Select student name

Committee: Witold Nazarewicz (Chairperson), Heiko Hergert, Ryan LaRose, Hendrik Schatz, Yang Yang Thesis is available @ https://pa.msu.edu/graduate-program/current-graduate-students/draft-dissertations-for-review.aspx - Select student name

In recent times, it has become commonplace to mention the unification of structure and reaction nuclear theory as one of the hot topics in low-energy nuclear physics. This interest is, of course, not new, but some present circumstances might have made it more acute. First, the experimental access to very weakly bound or unbound nuclei has blurred the limits between structure and reaction theory. Second, the fast development of computational tools and resources has rendered scattering problems tractable with bound states techniques. We will also address some ideas in the path to another important unification: the theory of direct and compound nucleus reactions. This line of research is important in order to address important processes, such as capture reactions, involving nuclei away from the stability valley, where an unusually low level density calls for the description of a transition between the statistical and direct reaction regimes.