News

2014 Undergraduate Poster Session

The Undergraduate Poster session was held on April 22, 2014. Seven students were inducted into Sigma Pi Sigma, the national physics honor society. The top poster prize went to Melody Lim, second place was Yiqiu Zhao and Zinzi Zhang and Chris Flower tied for third place. Congratulations to all the undergraduate students on their hard work well done. Melody Lim… read more »

Eugene Rabinovich Admitted to Cargese Summer Institute Workshop

Duke Physics and Math undergraduate major Eugene Rabinovich has been admitted to the Cargese Workshop on Holography and String Theory this summer. This is a highly competitive program normally directed to advanced graduate students and postdocs. Rabinovich was recently named a Faculty Scolar and a Goldwater Scholar. In case you missed that news, please read the story here. read more »

Two Graduate Students Pass Doctorial Dissertations

Two more students have successfully defended their theses for their PhDs: Christopher Coleman-Smith, "Using Gaussian Processess for the Calibration and Exploration of Complex Computer Models" on April 8, 2014. Coleman-Smith's advisor is Prof. Berndt Mueller. Ethan Robert Elliott, "Quantum Transport and Scale Invariance in Expanding Fermi Gases" on April 9, 2014. Elliott's advisors are Profs. Steffen A. Bass and John Thomas. read more »

Planetary Scientist Robin Canup Models the Origins of Moons

Duke physics alum Robin Canup, ‘90, has been thinking about moons—and their origins—ever since graduate school at the University of Colorado (CU). She was halfway through her PhD thesis on Saturn’s rings when, she says, “I got this idea that I wanted to start working on the origin of the moon. My thesis advisor was very supportive, so I changed the topic of my thesis. I’m forever grateful to him for that.” In fact, he suggested that she send a grant proposal to NASA, with the result that she had funding… read more »

Two Second Year Graduate Students Recognized by National Science Foundation

Two second year graduate students, Emilie Huffman and Anne Watson, were recognized earlier this month by the National Science Foundation. Both students had applied for the graduate research fellowship last Fall. Anne Watson, who is working with Prof. Gleb Finkelstein in experimental condensed matter physics for her PhD, was offered the fellowship and Emilie Huffman, who is working with Prof. Shailesh Chandrasekharan in theoretical quantum many body physics… read more »

Five Graduate Students Pass Their Doctoral Dissertations

Congratulations to the following graduate students who recently passed their PhD defenses! Dr. Yuan Lin, "A Quantitative Poly-energetic Reconstruction Scheme for Single Spectrum CT Scanners" on March 5, 2014. Yuan's advisor is Prof. Ehsan Samei. Dr. Shangying Wang, "Quantifying Gene Regulatory Networks" on Tuesday, March 18, 2014. Shangying's advisors are Profs. Sridhar Raghavachari (Neurobiology) and Nicolas Buchler. Dr. Di-Lun Yang, "… read more »

Another Outstanding Fermion Sign Problem Solved

Second year graduate student Emilie Huffman and Prof. Shailesh Chandrasekharan have recently solved an outstanding sign problem that had remained unsolved for almost 30 yrs. Sign problems arise when one tries to design Monte Carlo methods to compute quantum amplitudes in quantum many body physics. Although Feynman taught us how one can compute such amplitudes by summing over an exponentially large number of classical paths, to perform such a sum exactly is almost always impossible in… read more »

Eugene Rabinovich Named a Faculty Scholar and a Goldwater Scholar

Duke Physics and Math major Eugene Rabinovich, has been named a faculty scholar, the highest honor Duke's faculty bestows upon undergraduate students. The last physics major to win this award was Vivek Bhattacharya (Economics and Physics) in 2012. In addition, Eugene has been named a Goldwater Scholar. This is the second year in a row that a Duke Physics major has won this prestigious award (Kushal Seetharam, a double major in Physics and ECE, was a Goldwater last year).… read more »

Members From Behringer Lab Present Work at March APS Meeting

The recent March APS meeting in Denver provided an excellent forum for seven undergraduates who have been working in the Behringer lab over the past year or more. Yaqi Hou, Melody Lim, Audrey Melville, Alec Petersen, Jenny Su and Jeremy Ward had talks in this meeting. Melody, Audrey, Alec and Jenny are Duke undergrads. And Melody, Audrey and Alec presented talks at the APS March 2014 meeting, in person. Yaqi is a visiting… read more »

Alum Jamie Bock Featured on Phys.org

Prof. Jamie Bock (Duke Physics '87) from Caltech was one of the leaders of the group which achieved the recent exciting experimental result on gravitational waves from the earliest time, detected by the BICEP2 telescope at the South Pole. An interview with Prof. Bock is featured on the Phys.org website. Read "Building BICEP2: A conversation with Jamie Bock" online here. More material on these results along with pictures and the paper can be found here. You can also read DukeToday's article "Duke… read more »

Duke Nuclear Physics Tied for 6th Place in the Country

In the latest rankings by U.S. News & World Report, the department of Physics is tied for the 29th place in the country. The magazine also ranked a number of specialty programs within the various disciplines. Within physics, nuclear physics tied for the sixth place together with California Institute of Technology, University of California-Berkeley, and Yale. For ranking information about other Duke departments and schools, you may read the Duke Today article here. read more »

T2K Experiment Highlighted in PRL

The T2K experiment's recent definitive measurement of the appearance of electron neutrinos from oscillation was highlighted in Physical Review Letters for opening the path to measuring CP violation in neutrinos. Click here for a pdf. You can read the viewpoint article here. The Duke neutrino group, led by Profs. Kate Scholberg and Chris Walter, plays a leading role in the T2K experiment. read more »

Gauthier Elected to Editorial Board of New Optical Journal

Prof. Daniel Gauthier has been named to the editorial board for a new open-access optical journal focused on high-impact results entitled Optica. The journal is just gearing up and will start to accept paper submissions in the coming months. The journal is sponsored by the Optical Society of America, which made an initial announcement of the new journal in February. The press release can be found here. read more »

The Passing of Dr. Geoffrey King Walters

It is with sadness to announce the passing of a Duke Physics PhD alumnus, Dr. Geoffrey King Walters. Dr. Walters was a Duke Ph.D. His dissertation work with William Fairbanks concerned the (first?) measurement of the 3He-4He liquid phase separation. Dr. Walters had a tremendously successful career, first in industry at Texas Instruments from 1957-1963, and then in academics and research when he joined the faculty of Rice University in 1963 as a Professor of Physics. From 1980 to 1999… read more »

Update on Physics Department Habitat for Humanity Team

The Physics Department’s Habitat for Humanity Volunteer Team has had a successful start! Our first build took place on December 14, and we didn’t let the rain stop us! We met at Durham Habitat for Humanity’s warehouse and constructed the interior and exterior walls for one of Durham Habitat’s current building projects. Graduate student Sean Finch, Prof. Dan Gauthier, and Machine Shop Specialist Richard Nappi are pictured here with the build site manager and another… read more »

Alumni Profile: Randall Ledford

“Students graduating now have got to keep learning, be flexible, and be open to new opportunities,” says Randall Ledford. “What they think they are going to do on graduation day is not necessarily what they are going to do for the rest of their lives.” Ledford should know. He left Duke Physics in 1976, new PhD in hand, to work as a researcher at AT&T Bell Laboratories in New Jersey. Today he is the Chief Technical Officer at Emerson Electric in St. Louis, and the President of Emerson Ventures, which is an internal… read more »

Hawbridge Charter School Tours TUNL, FEL and LENA

On January 22, 2014 the Department of Physics at Duke University and the Triangle Universities Nuclear Laboratory (TUNL) hosted a visit by a group of students, teachers and parents from the Hawbridge Charter School. Hawbridge Charter School is a rural charter school located in Saxapahaw, NC. The school comprises almost 200 middle and high school students who work in small classes with a dedicated faculty of about twenty teachers. Located adjacent to the Haw River makes the school ideally placed for the environmental theme… read more »

Graduate Student Laskaris Participated in the Global Young Scientist Summit @ one-north

Global Young Scientist Summit @ one-north (GYSS@one-north, January 19th-24th, 2014) was a gathering of young scientist, primarily graduate student and postdocs from all over the globe with internationally eminent speakers in Singapore. It was a conference covering fields ranging from biology, chemistry, computer science, engineering, mathematics, medicine, and physics. The speakers invited at the GYSS @ one-north are globally recognized scientists recipients of Fields Medal, Millennium Technology Prize, Nobel Prize,… read more »

Prof. Kotwal Speaks at New Physics Workshop and PASCOS2013

Prof. Ashutosh Kotwal was invited to speak at two venues recently, the Workshop on "The Energy Scale of New Physics" and the "Particles, Strings and Cosmology 2013" Conference. In the post-Higgs Boson discovery era, the focus has increased on ideas to explore the open questions not answered by the Standard Model of particle physics. A big question of theoretical and practical interest is, what is the energy level at which the new symmetries or new dynamics are revealed. How can we get an estimate of this… read more »

The Passing of Mr. Hurley Mulkey

It is with sadness to report that Mr. Hurley Mulkey passed away on the afternoon of Sunday, December 22, 2013. Many people in the department knew Mr. Mulkey very well as he was the business manager in the Physics Department for many years and was instrumental in acquiring equipment for TUNL in the early years of the consortium. Mr. Mulkey's son, Patrick Mulkey worked at TUNL for quite a long time as well. Funeral services were held at Clements Funeral Home on Saturday, December… read more »