Archive for July, 2011

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Dean Calderbank visits CERN

Thursday, July 28th, 2011

The Dean of Natural Sciences, Robert Calderbank, traveled to CERN on July 12 to meet with members of the Duke ATLAS research group. The visit included tours of the ATLAS control room and an assembly laboratory used for the construction of tracking detectors.

Dean Calderbank had an opportunity to learn about the Duke ATLAS research program in meetings with Duke students and senior scientists Andrea Bocci, Prof. Al Goshaw and Guem-Bong Yu. The excitement of working at CERN at the time of expected discoveries from the Large Hadron Collider experiments was evident in Dean Calderbank’s conversation with Duke undergraduate students Alex Cortese, Will DiClemente, Josh Loyal and Zongjin Qian, and Duke graduate students Mia Liu and Chris Pollard. The projects they are working at CERN this summer will be continued during the academic year and eventually used to prepare Ph.D. theses and undergraduate senior theses.

See more photos on Flickr here.

Posted in Faculty News, Graduate Studies News, Over the Summer, Undergraduate News | Comments Off

Graduate Student Zheng publishes paper in Phys. Rev A

Thursday, July 21st, 2011

Prof. Haiyan Gao‘s graduate student, Wangzhi Zheng, has co-published a paper in Physical Review A as a  Rapid Communication.   Physical Review A is a publication on atomic, molecular, and optical physics.  Read the abstract at the Physical Review A website here.  Zheng submitted an introduction to the paper, which we’ve shared below.

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Update from Alum Le Luo

Thursday, July 21st, 2011

Le Luo earned his PhD in 2008 working with Prof. John Thomas.  For the past three years, he has been working with Prof. Chris Monroe in the Joint Quantum Institute (JQI) at the University of Maryland and NIST as a JQI post-doc fellow.  Le Luo is now heading to Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) as an assistant professor.  He says, “I will start an AMO lab there and focus on cold atom physics and quantum information science.”

Posted in Alumni Profiles, From Duke To... | Comments Off

2010-2011 Year in Review Newsletter

Tuesday, July 19th, 2011

The Year in Review Newsletter went out to our email newsletter subscribers today.   Not yet a subscriber?  Sign up directly on this website in the right hand column.  It’s easy!

Click the image above to view the Year in Review Newsletter online.

Also, keep an eye out for our August newsletter, where we’ll welcome incoming students and begin another exciting school year at Duke Physics.

Posted in Research Update | Comments Off

Prof. Gauthier named Richardson Professor of Physics

Monday, July 18th, 2011

Prof. Daniel Gauthier has been named the Robert C. Richardson Professor of Physics. Read the article in Duke Today here. Prof. Gauthier is recognized for his research in experimental condensed matter physics, photonics, quantum optics, and nonlinear dynamics.  The professorship is endowed by an anonymous gift to the university in honor of Dr. Richardson, who obtained his Ph.D. in Physics at Duke in 1966, and is currently the Floyd R. Newman Professor of Physics at Cornell University. See here. Among his many honors, Prof. Richardson was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1996.

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Duke at CERN: Updates from 2010-2011

Sunday, July 17th, 2011

Duke’s community of faculty, graduate students, undergraduates and research scientists have long been active in the experiments at CERN in Geneva.  This archive is by no means comprehensive, but offers a handful of highlights of recent updates from Duke physicists working on (or working with topics related to) the LHC or ATLAS experiments.  Click the link below read the list of news story highlights.

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Dr. Hannah Petersen Appointed as Visiting Assistant Professor

Friday, July 15th, 2011

Dr. Hannah Petersen has recently been appointed to a Visiting Assistant Professor position in the QCD theory group. Her field of expertise is the dynamical description of heavy ion collisions using transport theory to study the properties of hot and dense nuclear matter and the quark gluon plasma. The development and application of a hybrid approach that combine microscopic transport and fluid dynamics constitutes one part of her research. The calculation of characteristic matter properties like the shear viscosity coefficient from a more fundamental approach, in this context the real-time lattice simulation of classical low momentum gluon fields coupled to the hard thermal modes in a so called colored-particle in cell (CPIC) simulation, is one of her new interests. The application of state-of-the-art visulization tools to facilitate new discoveries or highlight new findings complements her research. (more…)

Posted in Faculty News, New Faculty | Comments Off

Prof. Curtarolo Named IOP Fellow

Friday, July 15th, 2011

In March Prof. Stefano Curtarolo, who holds a secondary appointment in Physics, was named a fellow of the Institute of Physics (IOP). You can see his name among the list of other recently elected fellows here.

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Prof. Mueller Organizes Workshop in Paris

Friday, July 15th, 2011

In June, Prof. Berndt Mueller and Prof. Chung-I Tan (Brown University) organized the biennial Workshop on Nonperturbative Quantum Chromodynamics in Paris, France. This year, the scientific highlights at the workshop were first results from the LHC, as well as the application of string theoretical techniques to the calculation of processes involving quarks and gluons. The photo shows the two organizers (left: Mueller, right: Tan) relaxing in the hotel lobby before dinner after a long day of theory talks.

Posted in Faculty News, Over the Summer | Comments Off

Vision For The Future

Friday, July 15th, 2011

Submitted by Prof. and Chair Haiyan Gao

It will be an exciting and challenging way for me to start my 10th year at Duke as the Chair of the Physics department. I am honored and humbled by your trust and support. Duke has been the place where I have spent the longest, continuous time in my life including my birth city and hometown, Shanghai. To me, it is home and the department is my family. It is my good fortune to follow Prof. Dan Gauthier, whose leadership and service to the department have been exemplary, and my privilege to serve the department in my new capacity and I look forward to working with each one of you in the next three years. (more…)

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