Welcome to the Department of Physics and Astronomy

Spotlight:

Professor Emil Wolf Wins OSA/SPIE 2008 Joseph W. Goodman Book Writing Award

073008: Wilson Professor of Optical Physics and Theoretical Physics Emil Wolf has won the 2008 Joseph W. Goodman Book Writing Award presented by the Optical Society of America (OSA) and the International Society for Optical Engineering (SPIE). His winning book is Introduction to the Theory of Coherence and Polarization of Light, which was published in September 2007 by Cambridge University Press.

According to Jose M. Sasian, the Chair of the Award Committee, "The joint Committee from both Societies made the decision based on [the observation that Professor Wolf's book provides] the first truly unified treatment of coherence and polarization, as well as the extremely high potential for the volume to become a widely adopted textbook worldwide."

The Joseph W. Goodman Book Writing Award is funded by J.W. and H.M. Goodman, and recognizes a recent and outstanding book in the field of optics and photonics that has contributed significantly to research, teaching, or the optics and photonics industry. Professor Wolf will be honored at an upcoming OSA or SPIE meeting of his choice. (lhg)

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Additional News

Class of 2008 Graduates with Many Honors

051808: Congratulations to the 2008 graduates of the Department of Physics and Astronomy! In the graduation ceremony held today:

• 15 students earned BS degrees in Physics
• 5 students earned BA degrees in Physics
• 8 students earned BS degrees in Physics and Astronomy
• 1 student earned a BA degree in Physics and Astronomy
• 7 students earned MS degrees in Physics
• 20 students earned MA degrees in Physics
• 18 students earned PhD degrees in Physics
• 3 students earned PhD degrees in Physics and Astronomy.

Bachelor's Degrees

Undergraduates earned several national and international honors, including 3 Goldwater Scholarships and a Fulbright Scholarship.

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Upgrade to the Advanced Lab (PHY 243): Positon Tomography Teaching Laboratory

062508: By far, the course that our undergraduates like the most is the Advanced Lab (PHY 243), which they take in the fall of senior year. This course is a centerpiece of the curriculum leading to a BS in Physics, enabling students to perform sophisticated experiments, where they apply everything they've learned.

Thanks largely to Physics alumnus Dr. Chris Lirakis, a board member of the Donaldson Trust, the Department is adding an interdisciplinary experiment to the Advanced Lab in the emerging frontier of bio-medical physics. Because Dr. Lirakis enjoyed the Advanced Lab during his undergraduate years at the University of Rochester, he has enabled the Department to purchase a high-resolution germanium detector for use in the study of positron tomography. Future upgrades are also in the works.

The Advanced Lab has been heavily focused on optics experiments for years, having been run by quantum optics specialists Chair and Professor Nicholas Bigelow and Assistant Professor John Howell. Professor Frank Wolfs, who is in charge of our undergraduate program, has always wanted to give the Advanced Lab a medical twist because, as he says, "a lot of physics students want to do graduate work in medical applications. This is a burgeoning field." After talking with Dr. Lirakis during Meliora Weekend, Professor Wolfs devised a new experiment, one that focuses on nuclear radiation.

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Benjamin Schmitt Wins Fulbright Award

042508: Benjamin Schmitt (BS, Physics; BA, Mathematics; BA, German) is one of five UR students who recently earned 2008-2009 Fullbright Awards, national scholarships that foster international academic and research collaborations. The Fulbright Awards are among the most prestigious honors in the world, with international collaborations in well over a hundred countries.

Benjamin will spend his Fulbright year in Germany conducting physics research at the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg and pursuing a master's degree in astronomy and astrophysics at Heidelberg University. He is a Renaissance Scholar, recipient of the German Book Award, and member of the Sigma Pi Sigma National Physics Honor Society. He has previously conducted research at UR's Laboratory for Laser Energetics, Cornell's Laboratory for Elementary Particle Physics, and the Max Planck Institute in Heidelberg; Schmitt has also co-authored several scientific papers.

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John K. Golden and Samuel T. Harrold Win 2008 Goldwater Scholarships
032908: University of Rochester Physics sophomore John K. Golden and junior Samuel T. Harrold have been named 2008 Barry M. Goldwater Scholars, one of the most prestigious awards available to undergraduates in this country.

The Goldwater Scholarship, which is endowed by the U.S. Congress to honor the late Sen. Barry M. Goldwater, is designed to provide a continuing source of highly qualified scientists, mathematicians, and engineers by awarding scholarships to college students who intend to pursue careers in these fields.

Sophomore John K. Golden (class of 2010) is earning a BS in Physics and a BA in Mathematics. John is the Social Coordinator and a member of the Society of Physics Students and won the 2007 Iota Book Award. Currently, he is doing research with Profs. Nicholas Bigelow and Sarada Rajeev.	Junior Samuel T. Harrold (class of 2009) is earning a BS in Physics and a BS in Mathematics. He is the Secretary and a member of the Society of Physics Students, and in 2007, he won a Department of Energy National Undergraduate Fellowship in Plasma Physics and Fusion Energy Sciences. Currently, he is doing research with Professor Dan Watson.

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Slowing and Stopping Images
020608: Associate Professor John Howell reported in January of 2007 that his group showed how to slow images down to "300 times lower than the speed of light" and preserve the amplitude and phase of the image. He also stated that, "we're working on systems that slow images down to 10 million times lower than the speed of light." Howell and his Quantum Optics team of Ryan Camacho, Curtis Broadbent, and Irfan Ali Khan used a technique known as slow light. When close to a narrow resonance feature, the group velocity of the light can be very slow. His team used naturally-occurring resonances in a cesium vapor to precisely slow images and delayed them for about 10 nanoseconds while retaining their properties.

Now the group (above from left to right: Ryan Camacho, Praveen VudyaSetu, and John Howell) has stopped images in a hot gas of Rubidium atoms for about 10 microseconds and is working toward a goal of a millisecond (Phys. Rev. Lett. 100, 123903). The new process changes the light field into an atomic excitation, then reads out that atomic excitation and converts it back into a light field. This differs from the method used in January of 2007, in which the light propagated slowly through a dilute vapor. In the stored light technique, the light field is interconverted into a coherence in the atoms and then read out at a later time. Remarkably, the storage process remains robust even given the diffusion of the rapidly moving atoms.

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Finally, the 'Planet' in Planetary Nebulae?
Astronomers at the University of Rochester, home to one of the world’s largest groups of planetary nebulae specialists, have announced that low-mass stars and possibly even super-Jupiter-sized planets may be responsible for creating some of the most breathtaking objects in the sky.

The news is ironic because the name "planetary" nebula has always been a misnomer. When these objects were discovered 300 years ago, astronomers couldn't tell what they were and named them for their resemblance to the planet Uranus. But as early as the mid-19th century, astronomers realized these objects are really great clouds of dust emitted by dying stars.

Now, Rochester researchers have found that planets or low-mass stars orbiting these aged stars may indeed be pivotal to the creation of the nebulae's fantastic appearance.

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Nobelist Steven Weinberg Praises Professor Carl Hagen and Collaborators for Higgs Boson Theory
030308: In October 2007, Nobel Prize Winner Steven Weinberg reminded a new generation of physicists about the crucial contribution regarding the Higgs boson theory made by Professor Carl Hagen of the University of Rochester and his collaborators. Weinberg's comments were part of his invited presentation at a conference celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of John Bardeen, Leon Cooper, and J. Robert Schrieffer's (BCS) theory of superconductivity.

The method suggested by Professor Hagen and others gives mass to vector bosons and is an essential ingredient in the unified electroweak theory for which Sheldon Lee Glashow, Abdus Salam, and Weinberg shared the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics. In their acceptance speeches, they all gave equal prominence to the contributions of three independent teams who had predicted the existence of the Higgs boson, as it is now commonly called.

Three independently formulated papers describing the theoretical mechanism appeared in Volume 13 of Physical Review Letters in 1964. They were by Gerald Guralnik, Carl Hagen, and Tom Kibble; by Peter Higgs; and by Francois Englert and Robert Brout. All three papers were written from different perspectives, and each made a distinct contribution.

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Building Super-Amplifiers in Nano-Electric Systems using Strange Weak Values
020508: In a recent Physical Review Letters (PRL 100, 026804) article, Assistant Professor Andrew Jordan and third-year PhD student Nathan Williams describe how to implement one of the most bizarre predictions in quantum mechanics: a strange weak value in a nano-electric system. For a quantum system, their proposed method could provide an electrical current that exceeds the current supplied by the analogous classical system by factors of hundreds or thousands; that is, their device could boost a nano-amp to one amp or even to ten amps. This new method could also be used to determine whether an experimental system is a quantum mechanical device.

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Embryonic Solar System Assembly Seen for the First Time
082907: Using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, a team of astronomers led by Professor Dan M. Watson of the University of Rochester has observed the onset of planetary-system formation, a process nobody has seen until now. The group's exciting first look at the creation of an embryonic solar system yields many new insights about the physics and chemistry of evolving astronomical objects.

Publishing their results in the August 30, 2007 issue of Nature, the researchers note that the Spitzer Space Telescope enabled them to see water, in the form of ice, "raining" from a cloud enveloping the infant star NGC 1333-IRAS 4B approximately 1,000 light years away from Earth. The ice is vaporizing as it lands supersonically on a dense, dusty disk surrounding the baby star, a long-sought phenomenon called a disk-accretion shock. In time, planets will form within the dusty disk.

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Kevin Short (BS, Physics, 1985) Wins Grammy Award
022708: It's not often that a physicist wins a Grammy award. But Kevin Short, who earned his BS in Physics along with a BA in Geological Sciences from the University of Rochester in 1985, scored a Grammy on February 10, 2008. Kevin is currently a professor of mathematics at the University of New Hampshire and won his Grammy for being the master engineer on a team that restored a 1949 wire recording of a Woody Guthrie concert. He attended the ceremony, and with his wife Michelle, represented science in a lavish concert hall adorned with the singing stars of today.

During his undergraduate days at the University of Rochester, Kevin was elected to the 1984 College Division Academic All-American Baseball Team. In December of the same year, he won a Marshall Scholarship and came close to winning a Rhodes Scholarship. He later earned his PhD at Imperial College in London for research into general relativity and mathematical physics.

Until he won his Grammy Award, Kevin was most famous for discovering Chaotic Compression Technology, which uses mathematical chaos theory along with signal processing to analyze audio, video, and image data. His technology is used whenever someone downloads ring tones and songs to a cell phone.