The March-April 2013 edition of the Duke Physics E-Newsletter is now online. Read it here or by clicking on the image below.
Do you have news to share? Please write to us with your stories and images.
March-April 2013 E-Newsletter Now Online
April 24th, 2013Postdoc Esterline Published in PRL
April 19th, 2013
James Esterline, a research associate at TUNL, recently published the results of his thesis work (“Analyzing Power Ay(q) of n-3He Elastic Scattering between 1.60 and 5.54 MeV”) in PRL together with thesis advisor Prof. Werner Tornow and two collaborating theoreticians from the University of Lisbon. This work involved the tandem accelerator at TUNL. You can read the article online here.
Grad Students Li and Zheng Win Chinese Government Award
April 17th, 2013
l-r: Li, Zheng
Physics graduate students Baolei Li and Huaixiu Zheng have been selected as two of the four Duke students to win the Chinese Government Award for Outstanding Self-Financed Students Abroad by China Scholarship Council (CSC). This award was founded by the Chinese government in 2003 with the purpose of rewarding the academic excellence of self-financed Chinese students studying overseas. Only those with outstanding performance in their PhD studies are considered by the award selection panel and no more than 500 talented young people are granted the award each year all over the world.
Baolei Li, who just got his degree in physics, did his Ph.D. thesis work under the supervision of Prof. Warren S. Warren, and Huaixiu Zheng is a graduate student working with Prof. Harold Baranger and will finish his degree this summer.
Here is a website (Chinese) showing all of the 489 awardees this year all over the world and here is the website listing the 25 awardees covered by Chinese Embassy in DC.
Last year, we also had two winners of this award from our department, Chenglin Cao and Wangzhi Zheng. Click here to read that story.
Looking Back at the First 50 Years of TUNL
April 15th, 2013
This cartoon about the funding of TUNL appeared in the November 28, 1965, Durham Morning Herald. | Courtesy of The Herald-Sun.
Banner headlines—in one-inch tall type—shouted “Duke to Get Nuclear Lab” and “$2.5 Million Nuclear Lab to be Established at Duke.” The date was November 23, 1965, and the occasion was the funding of the Triangle University Nuclear Laboratory (TUNL) by the federal Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). The news was so big that an editorial cartoon in the Durham Morning Herald showed two farmers discussing the equipment that would be in the new lab.
Duke professor Henry Newson had succeeded—on his third try—in securing funding for a 15-MeV tandem Van de Graaff accelerator and a 15-MeV cyclotron. In 1963 and 1964, Newson had submitted similar proposals to AEC from Duke alone, neither of which were funded. Read the rest of this entry »
68 Duke Presentations at the APS March Meeting
April 12th, 2013Duke University was well represented at the annual APS March Meeting this year: 60 contributed presentations plus 8 invited talks. The APS bills the March Meeting as “the largest physics meeting in the world, focusing on research from industry, universities, and major labs.” Using the “affiliation” search function, here is a webpage with a list of all of our papers. You can see that a wide variety of work from several departments at Duke is represented. In particular, the invited talks were:
Prof. Patrick Charbonneau: Session M42.00001 “High-dimensional surprises neat the glass and the jamming transitions”
Postdoctoral Associate Joshua Dijksman: Session Z2.00004 “Dilatancy and Diffusion in Sheared Granular Materials”
Prof. Henry Everitt: Session C23.00001 “Highly Efficient Defect Emission from ZnO:Zn and ZnO:S Powders”
Prof. Gleb Finkelstein: Session Y1.00003 “Observation of Majorana-like Behavior at the Quantum Critical Point in a Resonant Level Coupled to a Dissipative Environment”
Prof. Martin Fischer of the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences: Session U11.00001 “Optical pump-probe microscopy for biomedicine and art conservation”
Prof. Robert Jackson of the Nicholas School at Duke: Session F9.00003 “Environmental Dimensions of Shale Gas Extraction and Stray Gas Migration”
Prof. Gabriel Lopez of Duke Biomedical Engineering: Session Y34.00001 “Acoustic Microfluidics for Bioanalytical Application”
Prof. Benjamin Yellen of Duke Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science: Session N10.00002 “Binary Colloidal Superlattices Assembled by Magnetic Fields”
Prof. Kotwal Appointed Physics Advisor of US ATLAS
April 10th, 2013
Prof. Ashutosh Kotwal has been appointed the Physics Advisor of the US contingent on the ATLAS Experiment at the Large Hadron Collider. In this role he will be providing leadership on physics issues to US collaborators on ATLAS, numbering about 500 scientists and students from 44 institutions. One of the priorities is preparations for physics analysis of the new data starting 2014-15, to be collected at the substantially higher energy of 13 TeV compared to 8 TeV in 2012. Prof. Kotwal is also leading physics studies to motivate an upgrade of the LHC accelerator and detectors to collect ten times more data starting in 2022.
Grad Student Zheng Published in PRL
April 9th, 2013
Graduate student Huaixiu Zheng recently published a paper in PRL titled “Persistent Quantum Beats and Long-Distance Entanglement from Waveguide-Mediated Interactions,” together with his advisor Prof. Harold Baranger. This is their second paper in PRL on the topic of waveguide-QED, which explores the interaction between local quantum objects—qubits—and light confined in a one-dimensional waveguide.
The key question addressed is how two distant qubits talk to each other via a common waveguide-bus. Zheng developed a novel numerical Green function method, which for the first time enables access to the non-Markovian regime in 1D waveguide-QED systems (where one has to take into account memory effects in the waveguide). Surprisingly, even when the two qubits are far apart, they are strongly entangled and can generate strongly-correlated photons inside the waveguide. This originates from the special 1D nature of the waveguide. The long-distance entanglement demonstrated in this work makes 1D waveguide-QED systems promising candidates for scalable quantum networking.
For details, you can read the PRL article online here.
Grad Student Callan to Become Teaching Associate Professor of Physics at Colorado School of Mines
March 25th, 2013
Graduate student Kristine Callan recently accepted a position as a Teaching Associate Professor of Physics at Colorado School of Mines in Golden, Colorado. The Physics Department at CSM graduates about 70 Engineering Physics majors each year. The department is also active in Physics Education Research and was recently selected as one of four 2013 recipients of the “Improving Undergraduate Physics Education Award”. Kristine is looking forward to starting her new position this August.
Prof. Kruse Hosts LHC Outreach Event
March 19th, 2013
Prof. Mark Kruse, with graduate students David Bjergaard and Kevin Finelli, hosted an LHC Outreach event on March 16. It was well attended and DukeToday writer Ashley Yeager wrote an article “Local high-schoolers analyze real LHC data at Duke.” You can read it online here.
Prof. Tornow Joins Kavli IPMU in Tokyo
March 15th, 2013
In recognition of his ongoing contributions to the KamLAND and KamLAND-Zen experiments in the Kamioka mine in Japan, Prof. Emeritus Werner Tornow has been named affiliate senior scientist of the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (Kavli IPMU). Profs. Kate Scholberg and Christopher Walter also have appointments with the Kavli IPMU through their work on the Super-Kamiokande experiment.