Prof. Calvin Howell will chair the committee to search for a new dean of the Graduate School at Duke. Read the article “Howell to Chair Committee Searching for New Graduate School Dean” on Duke Today’s website here. This new chair will succeed the late Jo Rae Wright. Read a tribute to Wright in the Chronicle of Higher Education here.
Howell to Chair Search Committee for New Grad School Dean
January 26th, 2012Hastings’ Paper Featured Widely
January 24th, 2012
Prof. Matthew Hastings had a paper published in Science this month. You can read “Universal Signatures of Fractionalized Quantum Critical Points” online here.
Hastings was also featured in a Duke Today articles “Electron’s Negativity Cut in Half by Supercomputer” as well as the front page of The Chronicle.
Kotwal’s Thesis Famous
January 19th, 2012
Prof. Ashutosh Kotwal‘s PhD thesis on “Proton and deuteron structure functions in muon scattering at 470-GeV” is now a “famous paper” according to citation count. Read it here.
Undergrads Receive Silver Medal
January 17th, 2012An undergraduate team of three students, Zongjin Qian, Peter Zhu, and Josh Loyal won a silver medal in the “University Physics Competition,” which is described here.
Prof. Behringer Featured in Nature and Duke Today
January 12th, 2012Theoretical Physics Research on RENCI Site
January 10th, 2012Research done by the Theoretical Nuclear and Particle Physics group is currently being featured on the homepage of RENCI, the Rennaissance Computing Institute at UNC. The story contains some nice videos which have been created in collaboration with visualization specialists at UNC. Read the article “Modeling the perfect fluid” here.
1/13/12 Update: A version of this news article has appeared on the International Science Grid This Week (ISGTW) site. You can read it here.
T2K Oscillation Results Chosen in the Top 10 Physics Breakthroughs of 2011
January 4th, 2012The electron neutrino appearance results from the Tokai-to-Kamioka experiment reported in June have been selected as one of the top 10 breakthroughs in physics by Physics World magazine. Read the story here.
Physics Graduate Students Win Duke Fellowships
December 17th, 2011Every year the graduate school uses various types of endowments to give out fellowships to outstanding graduate students. These fellowships are both merit and need based. This year four graduate students from the physics department were nominated by the Director of Graduate Studies (DGS) based on requests from the faculty and students. Three students (Meg Shea, Kyle Kalutkawiecz and Chris Varghese) were nominated for summer fellowships that provides funds to cover tuition and a major part of the stipend during the summer of 2012.
Meg will work with Prof. Al Goshaw on puzzles in particle physics related to the LHC, Kyle will work with Prof. Ronen Plesser on aspects of mirror symmetries in string theory, and Chris Varghese will work with Prof. Rick Durrett of the mathematics department on questions related to complex networks.
Another fifth year student (Yang Yang) was nominated for the Katherine Goodman Stern fellowship which provides students in their final year of dissertation research an annual stipend, as well as tuition, health, and recreation fees. Yang works with Prof. Henry Everitt (an Adjunct Professor of our department) and Prof. April Brown (Professor in the Pratt School of Engineering) on plasmonic nanoparticles, a very important branch of nanoscience with many applications.
The DGS, Prof. Shailesh Chandrasekharan, received information on December 9th, that all four nominations were successful. Congratulations to all the students and their advisors.
KamLAND-Zen Started Zero-Neutrino Double-Beta Decay Search
December 15th, 2011
KamLAND Zen balloon
Submitted by Prof. Werner Tornow
After discovering reactor neutrino oscillations, determining the heat produced by radioactive decays in the interior of the Earth, determining the extraterrestrial high-energy anti-neutrino flux on Earth, and studying solar neutrinos with the KamLAND detector, on October 12, 2011 a subgroup of the original Japanese-US KamLAND collaboration commenced its search for the zero-neutrino double-beta decay of 136Xe. For this purpose, a 3.4 m diameter nylon balloon filled with about 400 kg of 136Xe absorbed in scintillator fluid and viewed by about 2000 phototubes was immersed in September into the original 1 kilo-ton KamLAND liquid scintillator detector (see Figure).
Discovering zero-neutrino double-beta decay would allow the determination of the electron neutrino mass (known to be below about 300 meV) and would prove whether neutrinos are Dirac particles or Majorana particles, i.e., whether they are identical to their anti-particles. Read the rest of this entry »
Duke-JLab Plant Instrumentation R&D featured on DOE Pulse
December 13th, 2011TUNL’s instrumentation development work done in collaboration with the detector group at Jefferson Laboratory was recently featured in the DOE Pulse. The DOE Pulse is an online newsletter that highlights science and technology at DOE National Laboratories. You can read the story online here.