PhD student Abe Clark in the Behringer Lab
During this past summer, five students, including a Duke undergraduate and four students from local high schools, worked in the Behringer Lab in the Department of Physics at Duke. Each student had an independent project, and was teamed with either Duke post-doc, Joshua Dijksman, or Duke Ph.D. student, Abe Clark.
Colton Brown, a Duke Physics major, worked with Abe Clark on several projects. He helped assemble a novel gas-fluidization stage that will allow experiments on special granular particles that are effectively gravity-free. In fact, this apparatus was designed and built by Siyuan Sun, at the time, a Duke Physics undergraduate, and now Harvard graduate student. Colton then helped Abe with a novel granular impact experiment that allows us to probe what happens if a heavy object, like a meteorite, strikes the surface of the earth. And, before leaving, he put together a different apparatus that was used by one of the high school students to study how friction might affect a phenomena in granular materials known as jamming. (more…)
Prof. Nicolas Buchler won the National Institutes of Health New Innovator Award “based on his innovative approach to study how individual cells can “learn” patterns from their environment.” Read the full article in Duke Today here.
Prof. Haiyan Gao, the new chair of Duke Physics, is working on several fronts to encourage collaboration among physicists in American and China—particularly among physicists who study hadrons, particles that interact through the strong force. The time is ripe because students and young scientists in China are jumping at the chance to do research in the United States, and scientific funding agencies in China—whose budgets are growing—are eager to support international collaboration in physics. Just this year, the National Science Foundation of China awarded two grants to support research being done at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility in Virginia by Gao and a team of 130 collaborators from 40 institutions and 8 countries—including China.
A paper describing some of that research was published in Physical Review Letters August 10, 2011. Xin Qian, who earned his PhD at Duke last year, is the lead author on the paper, which reports the results of an experiment exploring the three-dimensional motion of quarks inside a neutron. Qian is currently a Millikan Fellow at the California Institute of Technology. He is also the winner of the 2011 Jefferson Lab Thesis Prize. Gao, who was Qian’s advisor at Duke, is also one of the authors of the paper.
In the past six months, four former students or post-docs of Prof. Robert Behringer have received tenure or other honors. They are as follows:
Also, some slightly older news, Behringer’s former post-doc Brian Utter received tenure from James Madison about a year ago, former post-doc Lou Kondic is now full prof in math at NJIT, and former student Mark Shattuck is tenured at City College. Former post-doc Jie Zhang just received three outstanding offers from universities in China, and he will return in January.
Prof. Richard Palmer has shared his photos from the annual Duke Physics picnic that took place on Sunday, August 28th. See all the photos on our Flickr site here.
Prof. Harold Baranger is delighted to announce that his student and fourth year graduate student Huaixiu Zheng has won a prestigious Duke award: the John T. Chambers Scholar award of the Fitzpatrick Institute for Photonics (FIP) which is part of the Pratt School of Engineering.
Huaixiu’s main work here at Duke is on a new area of quantum optics and condensed matter physics called “waveguide quantum-electrodynamics” (waveguide QED). The idea is to have photons (or some other kind of bosons) which are confined in one dimension in a waveguide interact strongly with a quantum two-level system. This gives rise to many-body bound state effects which then cause a variety of interesting and potentially useful nonlinear quantum optics effects (“photon blockade” is one example). A wide variety of experimental systems are potentially available for observing these effects: a metallic nanowire coupled to a quantum dot, cold atoms trapped in a hollow fiber, a photonic nanowire with an embedded quantum dot, and a 1D superconducting transmission line coupled to a flux qubit. Huaixiu’s work in this area is done in collaboration with Prof. Baranger and Prof. Daniel Gauthier.
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Prof. Harold Baranger has taken a visiting position called a “Chaire d’Excellence” at the Nanosciences Foundation in Grenoble France in order to develop a collaboration with Grenoble researchers on the topic “Correlations and Transport Far from Equilibrium at the Nanoscale.” The position is for 3 years (June 1, 2011 to May 31, 2014) and involves spending 3 months per year in Grenoble. In addition, there is funding for a postdoc and for visits both ways–Grenoble researchers to Duke and Baranger’s Duke students to Grenoble.
Baranger went this summer for his first visit to Grenoble as part of this appointment (June and July). Here is a photo of the city:
On June 6 students, postdocs and faculty members worked together to coordinate an outreach event for female high school students called “Physics for Females.” Several Duke students, postdocs, staff, and professors volunteered to help with the event. The students were able to go on lab tours, hear a talk about special relativity and particle physics by Prof. Kate Scholberg, and play with physics toys and demos. The group hopes to hold a similar event next year.
The event team included the following Duke Physics people:
Kristine Callan
Albert Chang
Abe Clark
Seth Cohen
Joshua Dijksman
Someyah Farhadi
Prof. Henry Greenside
Hannah Guilbert
Fritz Kretzschmar
Jeff LaCosse (Durham School of the Arts)
George Laskaris
Prof. Hannah Petersen
Prof. Ronen Plesser
Bonnie Schmittberger
Prof. Kate Scholberg
David Stein (Outreach coordinator for Duke)
Patrick Wallace
Yingyi Zhang
Rena Zhu
View pictures by David Stein here.
Photo Credit: The Particle Zoo
Duke’s Research blog has posted an article about the ATLAS Zprime boson and Graviton search by Prof. Ashutosh Kotwal‘s team. The team recently submitted their paper on their findings to Physical Review Letters. You can read the article “Z-prime search may hurdle Higgs hunt” by Ashley Yeager here.
