Alumni Focus: Richard Sonnenfeld
Article reprinted from Fall 2006's Inside Physics [PDF].
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Richard Sonnenfeld chose an unusual field to research -- literally. A trail of unexpected academic and career choices brought him to lightning fields in central New Mexico.
After obtaining his BSE in physics and mechanical engineering at Princeton University, Sonnenfeld was uncertain what path to take for graduate school. “My choice was originally motivated solely by academic and career interests,” Sonnenfeld recalls. He accepted a spot in the applied physics program at Cornell when a friend (and UCSB Physics PhD) told Sonnenfeld he “owed it to himself” to check out Santa Barbara.
Sonnenfeld was intrigued by UCSB Professor Paul Hansma’s research on light-emitting tunnel junctions, and a persuasive conversation with his California girlfriend (now his wife of 22 years) sealed the deal. “I never for a minute regretted the decision to change schools,” he says now. “And it was the first in a long string of times when my wife has been wiser than I am.”
Sonnenfeld obtained his PhD in experimental physics at UCSB in 1987. For the next 15 years, he held a variety of positions. “I went from being a condensed matter/surface scientist, to tribologist, to disk drive engineer -- and then I switched to atmospheric physics.” In 2002, he joined the faculty of New Mexico Tech as associate professor and research scientist. “They were willing to gamble on a scientist who was changing fields mid-career. I had been doing instrumentation of some kind for 20 years.”
Sonnenfeld’s interest in tools and design was fostered at UCSB by Paul Hansma, who became his research advisor. “Dr. Hansma is an excellent engineer as well as being a scientist with very clear vision,” Sonnenfeld says now. “Though he urged me to focus on the science in graduate school, his enthusiasm and integrated approach to designing an instrument rubbed off on me and has stayed with me for my entire career.”
Sonnenfeld is member of a small faculty group associated with Langmuir Laboratory for Atmospheric Research based in the Magdalena Mountains of New Mexico. When the lab was founded in the 1960s, “Benjamin Franklin’s knowledge was almost state of the art,” Sonnenfeld says. “Since then, we have learned a lot about the electrical structure of thunderstorms and have some idea about how clouds charge. However, much remains unknown. For example, where is the charge in a lightning flash? There are some theories, but few measurements.”
A desire to answer that question led Sonnenfeld to develop a new generation of balloon-borne instruments, called electric field sondes, or Esondes. “We have been flying them for about three years now, and are just beginning to get some answers. Right now it looks as if a lightning flash deposits fresh charge every time it extends its channel, and we are trying to confirm this and see the details. If I keep flying, I hope I will be close enough to the initiation point of a lightning flash that I might be able to say something about the cosmic-ray theory of lightning triggering originally suggested by physicist C.T.R. Wilson.”
Studying lightning is dramatic, rewarding – and often dangerous. “To send an instrument into the hostile environment of a thunderstorm and have it send you back data is about as exciting as launching a spaceship,” says Sonnenfeld. “There is certainly plenty of adrenaline involved in getting a successful launch. Our equipment is fried with some regularity, but we have never had an injury in the field.”
This year, while continuing to develop his experimental lightning research, Sonnenfeld is piloting a computational mechanics course, which teaches computer modeling in a physics context. “My hope is this tool will help students appreciate physics in a different way and makes them much more employable in academia and out.”
Sonnefeld has advice to those in physics who might choose a non-traditional education and career path, as he has. “Students are still obsessed about making ‘correct choices.’ Where you attend school or what sub-field you enter is less important than going someplace where you feel comfortable and choosing a field that you can enjoy for the duration of a PhD thesis. The breadth and depth of my UCSB graduate education allowed me to change sub-fields of physics multiple times without ever feeling lost.”
- See more pictures of Richard Sonnenfeld’s atmospheric electricity studies:
www.physics.nmt.edu/~rsonnenf/atmospheric
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