Office: SET 286
Telephone: (256) 765-4881
Fax: (256) 765-4795
E-mail: dbthompson@una.edu
Personal Website: Brian's Website.

Professor of Physics

Education:
B.S. Kentucky Wesleyan College 1987
M.S. University of Kentucky 1990
Ph.D. University of Kentucky 1994

Brian joined the UNA faculty in 1999 after working at synchrotron radiation laboratories in the United States, England, and Italy.

At UNA he and his research students first built an optical tweezers and then used it to study fluorescence emission from dye-doped microspheres:

https://www.osapublishing.org/oe/abstract.cfm?uri=oe-18-18-19209

More recently, he and his research students have been studying gemstone reactions with light:

https://gem-a.com/images/Documents/JoG/2014/JoG-2014-34-4-LR.pdf

https://www.gia.edu/gems-gemology/fall-2017-photoluminescence-spectra-emeralds

Lately he has been making full-color holograms of opals:

Photos show an Australian black opal with red flash and a full color hologram of the opal. Which is which? At first one might think only red light is needed to make a hologram of this opal, but then notice the white reflected light at the bottom left corner of the opal and its holographic image.

Brian teaches courses in Introductory Physics, Technical Physics, Intermediate Physics Laboratory, Classical Dynamics, and Electricity & Magnetism and Electromagnetism. Occasionally, on demand, he teaches an Optics course.