Physics Department News
News
December 4, 2007: Life may have begun in the protected spaces inside of layers of the mineral mica, in ancient oceans, according to a new hypothesis developed by Helen Hansma.
December 2007 : The silicon tracker of the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment at CERN -- of which Joseph Incandela is the US Project Leader -- has been installed.
December 2007 : Mark Sherwin and collaborators (including Phil Lubin) have been awarded a $1.75M grant from the Keck Foundation to use the FEL to study the motion of proteins.
December 2007 : Daniel Hone has been awarded the prestigious Edward A. Dickson Emeriti Professorship for 2007-08 by the Council of University of California Emeriti Associations.
November 13, 2007: David Awschalom quoted in BBC News article, Quantum Computing: Silicon electronics are a staple of the computing industry, but researchers are now exploring other techniques to deliver powerful computers.
Fall 2007: Department newsletter, Inside Physics, is now available online [PDF]
- find out more about Inside Physics
October 2007: Jeff Richman, along with five other UCSB faculty, was named American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAS) Fellow.
October 2007: Robert Antonucci is co-author of a paper published in the October 20 issue of the Astrophysical Journal, "Shocked Molecular Hydrogen in the 3C 326 Radio Galaxy System".
October 2007: UCSB Physics Professor Tommaso Treu has been selected as one of 20 recipients nationwide of the Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering for 2007.
October 2007: An international team of scientists led by UCSB Physics postdoctoral fellow Philip Marshall and professor Tommaso Treu have identified a tiny galaxy nearly halfway across the universe -- the smallest in size and mass known to exist at that distance.
September 2007: David Awschalom and his students have a feature article in the October issue of Scientific American, "The Diamond Age of Spintronics".
Fall 2007: “Elementary particle physics is at a crossroads,” says Joseph Incandela. A new giant particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), will be coming online in 2008 at the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland. The LHC will open up the exploration of the properties of matter down to distance scales of 10 -19 meters. Many physicists believe that at this length scale new physics processes could begin to manifest themselves, and that we may be on the threshold of a revolution in our understanding of matter and its interactions.
Two large international collaborations of thousands of physicists each have almost completed construction of two giant detectors to study particle collisions at the LHC. The UCSB experimental high energy physics group has been heavily involved in this program for many years. This year, Professor Incandela was elected Deputy Analysis Coordinator for the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) collaboration. This summer he moved with his family to Geneva to take on this new important responsibility in the management of the scientific program of the experiment. Professor Incandela’s stay at CERN will last about two years; during that time, he will continue to work with UCSB graduate students and postdocs, some of whom are now in Switzerland with him.
Fall 2007: David Cannell, together with Professor Marzio Giglio from the University of Milan, were responsible for The Gradflex experiment (GRAdient-Driven FLuctuations EXperiment), which was successfully flown aboard the European Space Agency ’s Foton-M3 mission, after about 6 years of development.
Launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, the spacecraft carried a payload of 43 experiments in a range of disciplines – including fluid physics, biology, crystal growth, radiation exposure and exobiology. The satellite returned to Earth in Kazakhstan after 12 days in orbit. With the equipment safely back on Earth, further experiments and extensive data analysis will continue.
August 2007 : David Awschalom's research is profiled in the BBC News article "Putting Electronics in a Spin".
July 2007: UCSB Physics Professor and Nobel Laureate Alan Heeger, with fellow researchers, creates a higher efficiency organic solar cell.
June 2007: UCSB Physics Professor Tommaso Treu has been awarded a UCSB Regents' Junior Faculty Fellowship Award, for support of his project "The duty-cycle of supermassive black holes: X-raying Virgo."
Summer 2007: Guenter Ahlers received the 2007 Fluid Dynamics Prize from the American Physical Society for "pioneering experimental work on fluid instabilities, low-dimensional chaos, pattern formation, and turbulent Rayleigh-Benard convection."
Summer 2007: David Gross was bestowed the honor of Doctor Philosophiae Honoris Causa at Ohio State University.
May 2007: David Awschalom's spintronics research is profiled in the May issue of Scientific American, "Spintronics Breaks the Silicon Barrier".
May 2007: KITP Director David Gross, who shared the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics, has been elected a fellow of the American Philosophical Society (APS), the oldest learned society in the country.
April 2007: David Awschalom was elected as one of the 72 new members of the National Academy of Sciences, in recognition of his distinguished and continuing achievements in original research. more
April 2007: UCSB Physics Professor Tommaso Treu is among the recipients of the National Science Foundation's prestigious Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program awards for his project "Dark Matter and Black Holes Over Cosmic Time".
February 20, 2007: Sergei Gukov and Tommaso Treu have been awarded 2007 Sloan Research Fellowships in Science and Technology. These awards are intended to enhance the careers of the very best young faculty members in specified fields of science.
2007: David Gross was elected a Honorary Fellow of the Indian Academy of Science, Bangalore, India. The Indian Academy of Sciences was founded and registered as a society in 1934 with the aim to promote the progress and uphold the cause of science, both in pure and applied branches.
Gross was also elected Foreign Fellow of the Indian National Science Academy. The fellowship will begin in 2008.
December 2006: Alan Heeger has been awarded the Eni Italgas Prize on Energy and Environment for his innovative research on solar cells made with plastic material: cheap, versatile and clean. The shared prize, that consists of a sum of 120,000 euros, is aimed to scientists that have achieved relevant results in research on energy sources and their relation with the environment. more
Fall/Winter 2006: Department newsletter, Inside Physics, is now available online [PDF]
- find out more about Inside Physics
November 15, 2006: The Santa Barbara Independent featured Ski Antonucci in "A is for Astronomy", the first article in a new series, "Curiouser and Curiouser: Plain Talk with Brilliant Scholars".
Appointments
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Frank Brown holds a joint position with the Departments of Chemistry/Biochemistry and Physics. He received his BS in Chemistry and BA in Applied Mathematics from UC Berkeley and his PhD in Physical Chemistry from MIT in 1998. He was a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at UC San Diego and a Yen Fellow at the University of Chicago before joining the UCSB Chemistry faculty in 2001. Dr. Brown is an AP Sloan Research Fellow and was awarded the Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering in 2005.
His research group’s interests lie at the interface between physical chemistry and biophysics and they use a variety of tools spanning the traditional fields of statistical mechanics, hydrodynamics, elasticity theory and quantum mechanics in their research efforts.
Chetan Nayak is a Professor in the Physics Department as well as Senior Researcher in Microsoft Station Q, a UCSB research group working on topological quantum computing. The group combines researchers from math, physics and computer science. He received his BA in Physics from Harvard and his PhD in Physics from Princeton in 1996. He was a post-doctoral fellow at UCSB’s Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics before joining the faculty at UCLA, where he received an AP Sloan Foundation fellowship and an National Science Foundation Early Career award. He joined Station Q in 2005 and the Physics Department in 2007.
His research interests are in the condensed matter physics of strongly-correlated electronic materials, especially high-temperature superconductors and the quantum Hall effect. His current research focuses on the application of topological phases of electrons to quantum computation.
Joan-Emma Shea also holds a joint position with the Departments of Chemistry/Biochemistry and Physics. She received her BSc in Chemistry from McGill University, Canada in 1992 and her PhD in Physical Chemistry from MIT in 1997. She pursued her postdoctoral studies jointly in the department of Computational Biophysics and Chemistry at the Scripps Research Institute and in the department of Physics at UCSD. After a year as an assistant professor of chemistry at the University of Chicago, Dr. Shea joined the Chemistry faculty at UCSB in 2001. Dr. Shea is the recipient of an National Science Foundation CAREER award, an AP Sloan Fellowship and a Packard Fellowship.
Research in the Shea group focuses on developing and applying the techniques of statistical and computational physics to the study of biological problems. Current work involves the investigation of cellular processes such as in-vivo protein folding and protein aggregation.
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