News

Update From Physics Habitat for Humanity Team

The Duke Physics Habitat for Humanity volunteer team had their first build of the new academic year on Saturday September 27, 2014! Prof. Dan Gauthier and graduate students Meg Shea and Kristen Collar came out to help build a new home in Durham. Together, they helped complete the construction of the porch of the home which required cutting wood, building joists, drilling holes, and working in the home’s crawl space. The Durham Chapter of Habitat for Humanity greatly… read more »

Prof. Emeritus Horst Meyer Honored with Duke University Medal

Prof. Emeritus Horst Meyer was honored with the University Medal at this years Founders' Day ceremony held Friday, September 29, 2014. Prof. Meyer received this award in recognition of his generous and energetic support of the Duke Gardens and chamber music and Duke as well as his extraordinary research and mentoring contributions to the Physics Department. Watch video from the event here where Prof. Meyer can be seen from 49:10 to 52:05. read more »

Prof. Behringer and Others Awarded Research Grant

Prof. Bob Behringer and collaborators Bulbul Chakroborty (Brandeis) and Corey O'Hern (Yale) have been awarded a W. M. Keck Foundation Science and Engineering Research Grant for their study "Self-Assembly in the Macro-World". This project will involve studies to understand the jamming transition and the assembly of complex structures for collections of particles. The Keck Foundation has provided $1,000,000 for the support of this project. read more »

Prof. Gauthier Delivers Lecture in Scotland

Prof. Daniel Gauthier gave a lecture at the at the Experimental Chaos and Complexity (ECC) Conference on his research on "Autonomous Boolean networks for experimental network science and chimera states." The conference was attended by approximately 100 people from the diverse and interdisciplinary community of scientists interested in nonlinear dynamics and complexity. The talks ranged from the dynamics of fruit flies in flight, algae blooms in the oceans of the world, turbulence in fluids, as well as… read more »

Article on Novel Solid Phase Highlighted as PRE Editor's Suggestion

A paper by a group led by Prof. Joshua Socolar to Physical Review E has been highlighted as an Editor's Suggestion. Entitled "Emergence of limit-periodic order in tiling models," the paper describes the theory of formation of an ordered solid that is not a periodic crystal. Read it here. The lead author on the paper was graduate student Catherine Marcoux, and in addition to Socolar the team included Prof. Patrick Charbonneau and two Duke physics majors, Travis… read more »

Plesser's Balancing Act

The department held its annual picnic at Duke Forest this past Saturday, August 23. It was a success as usual and included a new activity: tightrope walking! Here is a photo of Prof. Ronen Plesser showing off his balancing skills. Thank you to Prof. Mark Kruse for sharing this image. read more »

Prof. Kotwal Appointed US Coordinator for VLHC

Prof. Ashutosh Kotwal has been appointed the US Coordinator for a global effort to motivate and design a new proton-proton collider of much higher energy than the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) currently operating at CERN. Prof. Kotwal has recently concluded studies that motivate a major upgrade of the LHC. This upgrade project has been ranked as the highest priority in the medium term by the US and Europe. As a result, the LHC will continue to operate for another 15-20 years and we are optimistic that it… read more »

Two Graduate Students Pass Final Dissertations

Congratulations to the following students who have recently passed their final dissertations: Mauricio Pilo-Pais, "Â Metallic Nanstructures Based on Self-Assembling DNA Templates for Studying Optical Phenomena" on Tuesday, July 22, 2014. Pilo-Pais' advisor is Prof. Gleb Finkelstein. Christopher Pollard, "Resonances in the Lepton Plus Jets Channel from Proton-Proton Collisions at $\sqrt{s} = 8$~TeV with the ATLAS Detector" on Thursday, July 24, 2014. Pollard's advisor is… read more »

New Faculty Profile: Thomas Barthel

In July 2015, Thomas Barthel will join the Duke faculty as the Charles H. Townes Assistant Professor of Physics. Barthel studies the quantum mechanics of many-particle systems using computer simulations and analytical techniques. “I like to solve problems which either have high technological interest or are of some fundamental nature,” Barthel said. “I want to contribute to understanding these very complex problems.” As one example, he cited high-temperature superconductivity, which still lacks a thorough… read more »

New Assistant Professor Sara Haravifard

Sara Haravifard has enjoyed experimenting with magnets and phase changes her whole life. As a little girl, she loved to watch boiling water jiggle the lid of a pot. “I was amazed at how water changes to a different phase and there is energy involved that can move things,” she said. At school, she was captivated by the slow-motion fall of a magnet through a copper pipe. Today, she studies phase changes and magnetic moments of crystals in an environment of low temperature, high pressure, and a high magnetic… read more »

Kotwal Lectures at CTEQ Summer School, IHEP and Tsinghua University

Prof. Ashutosh Kotwal recently lectured at the CTEQ Summer School on Particle Physics, which was hosted by Peking University this year in Beijing. He lectured on QCD and Electroweak Phenomenology. During the same trip, he gave a colloquium at Tsinghua University and a seminar at the Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP) in Beijing. In his seminar he discussed precision electroweak measurements and what they tell us about the energy scale of new physics beyond the Standard Model of Particle Physics. He… read more »

Dannenberg Publishes Research in Physical Review Letters

A paper describing Paul Dannenberg's (Physics '13) undergraduate research on noise-induced transitions in nonlinear systems has recently appeared in Physical Review Letters. The paper is titled "Steering Most Probable Escape Paths by Varying Relative Noise Intensities" and can be viewed here. This research was commenced during Paul's senior year at Duke and was supervised by Prof. Stephen Teitsworth and done in collaboration with John Neu, Adjunct Professor of… read more »

Duke Physicists at Neutrino 2014

The Neutrino 2014 conference which was held in Boston this year is the premier conference in neutrino physics and is held biannually. Duke faculty, researchers and students played a highly visible role in this year's meeting. Prof. Chris Walter gave the T2K experiment's talk and Prof. Kate Scholberg gave a review talk on supernova neutrinos. Prof. Phil Barbeau also gave a talk on coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering. Additionally, Duke neutrino group postdoc… read more »

T2K Experiment Video Explaining New Neutrino Flavor Appearance

Earlier this year the T2K experiment announced an important new result where the appearance of a new neutrino flavor in an oscillation experiment was definitively seen for the first time. You can see the earlier physics news item here. The T2K experiment has now produced a video explaining the experiment in more detail that you can watch here in English and here in Japanese. The Duke neutrino group, led by Profs. Kate Scholberg and Chris Walter, plays a leading role in the T2K experiment. read more »

Undergraduate Research Story: Cathy Li, junior

Goldman Sachs Summer Research Fellow Cathy Li is using what she learned in the classroom to extend machine learning techniques by using optical systems. The junior is a physics major with minors in philosophy and electrical and computer engineering. With Prof. Dan Gauthier, Robert C. Richardson professor of physics and professor of electrical and computer engineering, Li studies spatial-temporal chaos in optical systems with application in machine learning. Machine learning means that no… read more »

Graduate Student Chao Peng is a Winner of 2014/2015 JSA Graduate Fellowship

Physics graduate student Chao Peng who works in Prof. Haiyan Gao's group is among the winners of the 2014/2015 Jefferson Science Associates (JSA) Graduate Fellowship for research at Jefferson Lab. Peng is currently stationed at Jefferson Lab in preparation for a new high precision experiment on the proton charge radius. See the press release here. At the 2014 annual users group meeting at Jefferson Lab in early June, Peng also received the first prize in the annual poster… read more »

Kruse's Course with Literature Professor Featured in Symmetry Magazine

Profs. Mark Kruse and Kate Hayles (of Duke's Program in Literature) have developed a course called Science Fiction, Science Fact. This course has been featured on the front page of the website for Symmtey Magazine. Read the story "Science fiction or science fact?: In a new class at Duke University, professors from different realms explore the intersection of literature and physics" here. Look for this class' future offerings under PHY 190S and LIT 390S. read more »

Former PhD Student Xin Qian Receives DOE Early Career Award

Dr. Xin Qian (PhD, Duke Physics '10, advisor: Prof. Haiyan Gao), now a staff scientist at Brookhaven National Laboratory's Physics Department, is a winner of the DOE's Early Career Award. Qian was selected by the Office of High Energy Physics for "Detector Development towards Precision Measurement of Neutrino Mixing." Of the 35 selectees, 17 are from 10 national labs and were chosen based on competitive peer review from about 750 proposals. To see the full list of selectees and the DOE-… read more »

Physics Major Jack Matteucci Awarded 2014 Daphne Chang Award

The Department of Physics awards annually the Daphne Chang Memorial Award to honor students who excel in undergraduate research in physics. This year's recipient is Jack Matteucci (Trinity 2014). Under the mentorship of Prof. Al Goshaw, Jack did his research using data collected from the ATLAS detector at the CERN Large Hadron Collider. He studied 8 TeV proton-proton collisions producing the neutral carriers of the electroweak force, photons and Z bosons. The goal of his research was to… read more »

Wilson Works Behind the Scenes

It's not often we get a look at the work that goes on behind the scenes in the department. Here Physics' Data Processing Specialist Barry Wilson works on set-up for an updated screen for the lobby. The new screen will continue to provide news and event updates in Duke Physics, as well as the wider physics field, with a fresh look. read more »