News

Graduate Student Johnson Accepted as Arms Control Fellow at SURF

Graduate student Tyler Johnson has been accepted as an Arms Control Fellow at the Stanford US-Russia Forum. The Stanford US-Russia Forum’s mission is to facilitate research and cooperation in areas of mutual interest to both the United States and Russia as well as link emerging scholars and leaders in the US-Russia space. This year’s fellows were chosen from a pool of more than 700 applications from 215 universities in Russia and the United States, a 5% acceptance rate. They hail from 11 countries,… read more »

Department Members Recreate Vintage Saxophone Sound

A Bass Connections project lead by TUNL Research & Development Engineer Matthew Busch and Prof. Joshua Socolar has been featured in DukeToday. Busch and Socolar combined their teaching and research interests with a common love of jazz and the sounds produced by great saxophone players. Undergraduate researchers Gia Jadick (Physics '20) and Max Bartlett (Computer Science '20) made great progress in documenting the design and acoustic characteristics of… read more »

Conjuring Coltrane

If he could bottle the sound, he would. In his backyard music studio in Durham, Matthew Busch lifts his saxophone to his lips, takes a breath, and plays four languid notes. He ascends from an E to an A, then plays up an octave, holding each note for four beats. He switches to another mouthpiece, plays again. Repeats with a third. Busch describes the sound coaxed from each thumb-sized mouthpiece like he’s describing a favorite wine. One, a Selmer tenor sax mouthpiece from the 1950s, is expressive, balanced, bright. Another,… read more »

2020 Triangle Hard Matter Workshop Was a Resounding Success

In a year of compressed academic calendars and virtual conferences, the Duke Materials Initiative (DMI) pivoted from holding the first Triangle Hard Matter Workshop in person to hosting the event virtually. Over 300 faculty, postdoctoral associates and PhD students from not only Duke, North Carolina State and the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill, but also from across the U.S. and overseas, including Germany and China, attended the event. Each of the sessions, focused on one of three tracks: Energy Materials,… read more »

The Passing of John Kolena

We are very sad to share the news that John Kolena has passed away. Dr. Kolena was an instructor at the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics and at Duke University. For many years, he taught astronomy and astrophysics classes in the Physics Department. After his retirement, he kept his connection to Duke, attending talks and interacting with the department community. He will be greatly missed. His obituary may be found here. Update: The North Carolina School of Science and Math will… read more »

An Update from the Duke Quantum Center

It is an exciting time at Duke University as the Quantum Center is growing. Originally envisioned by Prof. Jungsang Kim's quantum information lab, it has expanded to include Prof. Kenneth Brown since 2018 and over the next year we will welcome Marko Cetina, Crystal Noel, and Kim and Brown's long-time collaborator Christopher Monroe. Click here to read DukeStories' dynamic "More Possibilities… read more »

Undergraduates Are Doing Real Research in Trinity College, And Everyone Benefits

When you run scientific studies that include infants, something will always go wrong. Families will be late or sick. The babies won’t behave. Or maybe, as happened at the Wilbourn Infant Laboratory at Duke (WILD), you’ll have to make a last-minute run to the store to buy a big pack of toothbrushes. In an interactive study, 20-month-old infants played with a variety of objects—things like a fake cookie and a toy apple, all of which the researchers had ensured were safe for infants. “We had it down,” said Makeba Wilbourn,… read more »

Alum Miller Featured on #BlackInAstro

Alum Katrina Miller ('16) is currently a PhD student at the University of Chicago and was featured as part of the #BlackInAstro series on Astrobites during Black In Physics Week. Read Miller's interview here. From Miller's Duke Physics advisor Prof. Phil Barbeau: "I met Katrina in her Physics 152 class, and more than any of the other 300 students in that class, she was the one who most clearly thought about Physics the way I do. Katrina is right that it can be scary to… read more »

Marko Cetina: Building Quantum Machines to Understand Physical Processes

In July 2021, Marko Cetina will join Duke University’s Department of Physics as an Assistant Professor. An atomic, molecular and optical physicist, Cetina has used his wide-ranging research in light, lasers and atoms to both explore the basic physics of quantum phenomena and support the development of improved technology necessary for today’s leading quantum machines. Cetina will come to Duke from the University of Maryland, where he worked at the Joint Quantum Institute alongside Chris Monroe, who joined the Duke faculty… read more »

Mueller Enters Next Phase With Feshbach Prize

When he received the email announcing that he had won the 2021 Herman Feshbach Prize, Berndt Mueller was in the hospital recovering from surgery. “Suddenly I get that email,” Mueller said. “It was totally unexpected.” Awarded each year by the American Physical Society, the $10,000 Feshbach Prize honors “outstanding research in theoretical nuclear physics.” Mueller was selected for his contributions to the scientific understanding of the quark-gluon plasma that filled the universe shortly after the Big Bang, which has proven… read more »

A Look at Duke's Nobel Laureates

ACTIVE FACULTY ROBERT J. LEFKOWITZJames B. Duke Distinguished Professor of Medicine  Robert Lefkowitz, M.D., has been a member of the Duke faculty since 1973 as a professor of medicine and a professor of biochemistry and chemistry. He won the 2012 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, sharing the award with Brian Kobilka, who did postdoctoral work with Lefkowitz at Duke. The two were recognized for their work on a class of cell surface receptors that have become the target of prescription drugs,… read more »

Filling an AI and Materials Science Training Gap

The National Science Foundation has awarded Duke University a $3 million, five-year Research Traineeship grant to develop a program for graduate students to develop expertise in using artificial intelligence (AI) for materials science research. The aiM (AI for Understanding and Designing Materials), program will fill a vital workforce gap by training the next generation in the new convergent field of materials and computer science research.“To achieve the promise of the U.S. Materials Genome Initiative of… read more »

PhD Student Solves 40-Year Bioenergetics Mystery

May 6, 2021 Update: Jonathon Yuly and his co-authors, including Peng Zhang and David Beratan, were awarded Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences's 2020 Cozzarelli Prize for their paper on electron bifurcation. The award is given annually to six research teams whose articles have made "outstanding contributions to their fields." You can hear Yuly describe the paper in the video above or in an episode of PNAS's Science Sessions… read more »

Profs. Scolnic and Troxel Weigh in on the Latest Measurements of the Clumpiness of the Universe

Prof. Dan Scolnic and Prof. Michael Troxel have weighed in on the latest measurements of the clumpiness of the universe for an article in The Atlantic. Click here to read "The Universe Might Be Too Thin: Scientists may have found a new crack in our understanding of the universe". read more »

Duke Joins Peers on New National Quantum Initiative Advisory Committee

Duke University researchers Jungsang Kim and Christophe Monroe will join peers from the national labs, universities, federal agencies and industry on a new National Quantum Initiative Advisory Committee (NQIAC) recently announced by the U.S. Department of Energy and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). The NQIAC’s mission is to “counsel the Administration on ways to ensure continued American leadership in quantum information science” and was established by Executive Order as part of the… read more »

Fall 2020 Graduate Student Fellowships and Awards

The Fall 2020 graduate student fellowships and awards have been named. Mary Creason Memorial Award: Ryan Bouabid The recipient earns a monetary reward. Read more about the Mary Creason Memorial Award here. AAPT Outstanding Teacher Assistants of the Year, 2019-20: Son Nguyen and Erik Peterson Recipients receive an AAPT gift membership which includes electronic access to premier journals: The American Journal of Physics, The… read more »

New Faculty Profile: Chris Monroe

We are thrilled to welcome Prof. Chris Monroe to the faculty of the Physics Department. Prof. Monroe, a world-leading expert in Quantum-Information-Science, will join Duke University on January 1st 2021 with a joint appointment in Physics and ECE. Click here to read Pratt's new faculty profile "Chris Monroe: Realizing Ion-Trap Quantum Computers to Solve Unsolvable Problems." Photo credit: Pratt School of Engineering read more »

Chris Monroe: Realizing Ion-Trap Quantum Computers to Solve Unsolvable Problems

An international leader in quantum computing, architect of the U.S. National Quantum Initiative, and member of the National Academy of Sciences, Chris Monroe will join longtime long-distance collaborators at Duke to build practical quantum computers for use in fields from finance to pharmaceuticals Chris Monroe, one of the world’s leading experts in trapping atoms and manipulating their quantum state for applications in quantum information science, has joined the faculty at Duke University. With a dual appointment in the… read more »

Postdoc Pachal Discusses LHC Experiments with Symmetry Magazine

ATLAS Postdoctoral Associate Katherine Pachal was excited to get the chance to discuss searches for the LHC Run 3 with Symmetry Magazine. The next five years will be a very interesting time to search for new particles which travel a measurable distance in the detector before decaying. Although well-motivated, these signatures are historically under-explored due to the experimental challenges they pose. The Duke ATLAS group has invested significant effort in developing this research area and… read more »

Prof. Fischer and Team Prove Masks Block COVID-19 Droplets

Prof. Martin Fischer has worked with Duke physician Eric Westman to prove that masking is an effective safeguard against COVID-19 and determined which types of masks worked the best. Their Science Advances paper can be read online here, Duke Health's article "Inexpensive, Accessible Device Provides Visual Proof that Masks Block Droplets" is here, and Trinity College's "Here's Visible Proof Masks Work" here.   Photo Credit: Home Page photo, courtesy of Duke Health. read more »

Exploring the Mysteries of the Universe by Seeing the Invisible

Michael Troxel has always liked puzzles, especially challenging ones. Which is fortunate, since his job is solving some of the most perplexing, fundamental mysteries of the universe. “At some point in middle school I asked myself, What’s the hardest thing that I could try to do?” he said. “And at that point the hardest thing I knew about was astrophysics, so I think that was probably the first motivation for choosing this career, if I’m honest. But that was before I understood what it actually meant.” A cosmologist and… read more »