Things I've Learned with Professor Colin Broholm: Physics and Life

Department of Physics and Astronomy Professor Colin Broholm is known for his research on neutron scattering and condensed matter physics. He currently is teaching General Physics II for the Physical Sciences.

Broholm was born in Denmark. He received his masters in Physics and Electrical Engineering from The Technical University in Denmark, and got his doctorate in physics at the University of Copenhagen in 1988. He then became a postdoctoral member of the technical staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories in New Jersey. He started working at Hopkins in 1990.

Broholm sat down with the The News-Letter to talk about his General Physics class, his research and his personal life.

 

News-Letter(N-L): You're from Denmark, but your accent isn't a typical Denmark accent, can you explain that?

Colin Broholm (CB): I did grow up in Denmark, but my mother was British, and she came from Hertfordshire, just outside London, so my accent is influenced by the fact that she taught me English from when I was a little child. But I grew up in Denmark, so that gives another interesting Scandinavian twist to it. So people typically have a hard time placing exactly where I come from. And then, of course, on top of that I've been in the states for 27 years. So that's where all the accents come from.

 

N-L: Can you talk about the experiments that you do in your class?

CB: Some of the experiments we're going to do through the semester are quite exciting. They're safe, but we have to do exactly the right thing, and if not, we can get into trouble. For me, the experiments are really the essence of what physics are about.

This is just what makes it very exciting to be a scientist, and I'm trying to bring a little bit of that into the class through these experiments.

 

N-L: Is that why you chose physics?

CB: Yeah, I think it is. I was initially in electronic engineering, and then, somehow, I got gradually driven more and more into the direction of doing physics. It was for this reason that I was really fascinated with the deeper explanations for why nature behaves the way it does. I really enjoy engineering as well, and I enjoyed, actually, as a student, many aspects of it, concepts of building something that actually works and making use of those different types of technology and different types of sciences.  I wanted to get deeper to the bottom of it, so that's what drove me in the direction of science. It's all tied up with experiments and trying to understand nature the way we see it.

 

N-L: How did you choose Hopkins?

CB: That was pretty clear in a sense that Hopkins was the right place. It came about because I'm using a particular type of technique, which is something called neutron scattering.     

It turns out that Hopkins is quite close to the Nist Center of Neutron Research in Gaithersburg, MD. We do experiments there, and to do my type of research, I need to do experiments in these facilities. Gaithersburg is nice and close to Hopkins and that sort of drew me to this general region. Otherwise, I think Hopkins is a tremendous place. This department is a very lively department of physics. There's a lot of activity going on. I appreciate all the different areas of research that we have.  

 

N-L: How many different classes have you taught?

CB: Maybe 10 different classes. I've taught graduate classes for several years. When I came, I did condensed matter physics and I did a physics seminar. I've taught magnetism and I taught a scattering course. I've taught courses for physics undergraduate majors. I've taught this big course a couple of times in the past. That's how we like to do it in this department. We like to meander around between courses; we don't do the same thing too much.  

 

N-L: Can you tell me more about your research?

 CB:  We have several papers on the way right now. There's one paper which talks about a variant of this lattice which is two-dimensional which we're soon submitting to Nature. There's another paper also being submitted to Nature. Those are just on the way, but we don't know if they will be accepted. We have another paper that's recently been accepted in Science, which reports something in this ilk. There's a lot of activity in this general area, and we feel that there's a lot of progress being made.

 

N-L: What were you like as an undergraduate?

CB: I was quite focused on the work and quite competitive. I really liked making the grades. Even in high school I was like that. There was an engineering school in Denmark. It's a different arrangement there because once you get to that stage you're basically doing the professional stuff. Everything is math and chemistry and physics. We've forgotten about the humanities and social sciences, so we end up coming out a little bit shallow compared to our liberal arts system here. So I was very, very focused on doing all of that stuff. You learned a lot. I do like the U.S. system in the sense that you have a broader view. I think that's important.   We had something that was called an "uncle" group. When you arrived at the university, you were assigned to a little group of five or six students to give you a social context. The reason it was called an "uncle" group was because there was an older student who would give you some advice. It was arranged alphabetically.

My wife, she's Mexican actually, we got married, and then she took one of her sisters and brought her to Denmark. The sister met one of the people from this group and somehow the sparks were flying, and they ended up getting married. Now we have these three Mexican-Danish families of engineers and my wife's family from Mexico. This "uncle" group still persists. We still meet each other from time to time, obviously, because we're related like that.

           

N-L: How did you meet your wife?

CB: My father was living in Houston at the time, and so I was visiting him in Houston, and then we decided that we should go to a trip to Mexico together. We went to Cancun on a vacation there for a week. My future wife and her family popped up and they wanted us to take a photograph. We did that and chatted with each other and then we left on our merry way. Two days later, we had traveled to another city in Mexico, and then we met the same family again, so it was an interesting coincidence. Then we sat down and had a cup of coffee and chatted for a while and we exchanged addresses. I went home again, and that's when I went through my graduate studies. Two years later, I was looking through my address book, and thought, "Oh, this was interesting, I met this nice Mexican girl." I thought it would be fun if I could still get in touch with her, so I wrote a nice letter.  It escalated, and we traveled and we met each other, and finally, we got married in 1987.

 

N-L: Do you have any advice for undergraduates here?

CB: You've come to an institution that has a very broad range of inquiry that's going on. I think that you should try to make use of this time you have to find your own passion. You might have come with some ideas for what you think is going to be challenging and where you have an impact, but this is going to be the time where you can become informed and see if you can really find your passion. We do want you to study hard but you shouldn't be studying so hard that you can't find time to expose yourself to things that you otherwise would not be able to see. You should use the professors, just come and talk to us. That is what we're here for. We don't bite or anything.