During the commencement weekend, the physics department hosted a luncheon on Saturday, May 14 in honor of Prof. Lisa Randall, a renowned particle theorist, who received an honorary degree from Duke on Sunday, May 15. Dr. Randall also made a few remarks at the joint Physics and Mathematics diploma ceremony on Sunday following the commencement.
Below is a picture showing are Prof. Randall with Duke Physics Profs. Scholberg and Gao.
More photos can be viewed on Flickr here.
The 2011 National Nuclear Physics Summer School (NNPSS) is hosted by the Triangle Universities Nuclear Laboratory (TUNL) and held on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The School will run for two weeks from June 20 – July 1, 2011.
The NNPSS provides broad coverage of the research topics at the frontier of nuclear physics. The School program is designed to give graduate students and postdocs an opportunity to gain a broad perspective of the field and to help foster a community of young scientists across areas of specialization in the field. The School gives young physicists opportunities to interact with and learn from leaders in the field.
There are 62 participants (graduate students and postdocs) registered for the School this year. The attendees are from 32 different US universities and one national laboratory and include five participants from foreign institutions.
Physics students, postdocs and faculty in the Triangle Area are welcome to attend the lectures and seminars. Information about the School can be found here.
The T2K experiment reports indications of electron neutrino appearance!
Read more on Prof. Chris Walter’s website here.
Read the official T2K press release here and the Duke Today story here.
Full list of Duke T2K people:
Faculty:
Kate Scholberg
Chris Walter
Postdoc:
Roger Wendell
Grad Students:
Josh Albert
Taritree Wongjirad
New postdocs starting now:
Alex Himmel
Tarek Akiri
Prof. Ashutosh Kotwal has recently been elected to serve as the Chair of the Nominating Committee for the Division of Particles and Fields of the American Physical Society. Prof. Kotwal writes, “This committee serves as the Search Committee within the Division of particles and fields, to discuss potential candidates for all the other official positions in the division. My role as chair will be to conduct the search for the other officers of the Division and generate a short list of candidates. I will present this short list to the entire community of particle physicists, who will then vote to elect the other officers.” Earlier this year Kotwal was named the co-leader on a research group at the ATLAS experiment at CERN.
Prof. Kotwal, who has been heavily involved in the prominent high energy physics experiments around the globe, also recently co-published a paper in the journal, Physical Letters B. The paper, which focuses on data from the ATLAS experiment at CERN, is called, “Search for high mass dilepton resonances in pp collisions at √s = 7 TeV with the ATLAS experiment,” and was published in May.
Professor Kotwal also recently published a paper in Physical Review Letters in April. Read more about it here.
The 2011 Daphne Chang Memorial Award for the best undergraduate research conducted in the 2010/2011 academic year was awarded to graduating senior Siuyan Sun for his research into the Z’ Boson in the Dimuon Decay Channel at the ATLAS experiment. Siuyan’s faculty advisor is Prof. Ashutosh Kotwal.
Find more information on Daphne Chang and the Daphne Chang Memorial award here.
Prof. Calvin Howell was highlighted in the newsletter Waves and Packets: A Joint Publication of the African Physical Society, the National Society of Black Physicists, and the South African Institute of Physics in an article entitled “NSBP member Calvin Howell leads project applying nuclear physics to safe ports.” Read it online here.
On Sunday, May 15, the Physics Department held a ceremony to recognize the 2011 Physics undergraduate and graduate student graduates. Congratulations to all our graduates!
Left to right: Craig White, Heather Hill, Zach Corse, Cameron Bloomer, Kevin Driscoll, Michael Bern, Ashely Jones, Siyuan Sun, Eugene Park, and Angela Cai
Left to right: Nasser Demir, Prof. Robert Palmer and Adam Sokolow
More photos from the event may be viewed on Flickr here.