UCSD Physics News

Professor Sinha, S.-W. Chen, H. Guo, K. A. Seu, K. Dumesnil, S. Roy authored "Jamming Behavior in a Magnetic System"

One of the most satisfying aspects of condensed matter physics is that a variety of condensed matter systems show universal behavior, i.e. behavior that appears to be common to a wide variety of unrelated systems. A jamming transition occurs when the density of particles becomes large enough and the motion of the particles is restricted by the surrounding particles (think traffic jams!). In this regime, the particles cannot fluctuate freely but move collectively via long range interactions. Examples are colloidal gels or polymer emulsions. Recent work carried out in the Sinha group (S.-W. Chen, H. Guo, K. A. Seu, K. Dumesnil, S. Roy, and S. K. Sinha, Physical Review Letters 110, 217201 (2013) ) using X-ray scattering show that magnetic domains in an antiferromagnet have dynamical behavior very similar to that exhibited by several other jammed systems. The magnetic spins in the rare earth element dysprosium undergo a phase transition from a disordered state to a spiral ordered structure at a temperature of 180 K. When the temperature is slightly above the phase transition temperature, the spins start to form clusters which eventually become magnetic domains below the transition temperature. These domains are head to head with each other and the domain walls form a disordered network, which mimics the jammed state in a soft matter system. As the temperature is further lowered, the sizes of the domains increase and eventually the dynamics are kinetically arrested, as happens when a material becomes a glass.

Abstract: http://prl.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v110/i21/e217201

Passports will take a beating this summer among the county's huge scientific research community.

Scholars from San Diego State University to the University of California San Diego to California State University San Marcos are preparing to travel the globe. They will explore subjects as varied as water quality in Uganda to tuberculosis in Brazil to religious issues in Germany.

We've pulled together a sample of the research, some of which will be explained in greater depth this summer in dispatches sent to U-T San Diego by the scientists.

TOM ROCKWELL, seismologist, San Diego State University, will dig trenches on the Sudetic marginal fault in the Czech Republic in early July. He's examining whether the fault is active and could produce future earthquakes, which may have implications for nuclear power plants in Poland.

BIANCA MOTHE, biologist, Cal State San Marcos, will spend much of the spring and summer in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, studying immune-system responses in patients who are infected with multi-drug and extreme-drug resistant tuberculosis.

DAN CAYAN, research meteorologist, Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, will travel to the Sierra Nevada and the White Mountains in June to explore climate change and variability.

BRIAN KEATING, astrophysicist, UC San Diego, will visit Chile's Atacama Desert in September to study the cosmos from the university's James Ax Observatory, home of the POLARBEAR telescope.

DREW TALLEY, biological oceanographer, University of San Diego, will spend part of June in Bahia San Quintin, Baja California, comparing bivalve populations to historic records from the 1960s

FOREST ROWHER, microbial ecologist, San Diego State, will be diving in the Galapagos, Franz Josef Land (Arctic) and Line Islands in the central Pacific throughout the summer. He will study how human activities increase microbes in the world's oceans.

GENO PAWLAK, mechanical engineer, UC San Diego, will spend part of August and September on the leeward side of Oahu, Hawaii to help improve computerized models that simulate how currents and waves behave when they encounter coral reefs.

MARC MEYERS, materials scientist, UC San Diego, will spend part of August on the Roosevelt River in Brazil trying to obtain the scales of armored catfish, as well as a different fish whose teeth look almost human-like. The goal is to find inspiration for the design of new, better, lighter, tougher and stronger manmade materials.

GEORGE VOURLITIS, ecologist, Cal State San Marcos, will spend part of June and July in Cuiaba, Mato Grosso, Brazil, with undergraduates examining soil fertility and biodiversity in the Brazilian savannah, the country's second-largest and most vulnerable ecosystem.

BETH O'SHEA, geochemist, University of San Diego, will spend part of June at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble, France, studying how arsenic is released from rocks into household well water.

JOHN HAVILAND, linguistic anthropologist, UC San Diego, will spend part of June and July in northeastern Italy analyzing the Rhaeto-Romance language Friulian, and parts of July and August in Chiapas, Mexico, studying a previously unknown sign language in a Tzotzil (Mayan) speaking village.

ANDRE KUNDGEN, mathematician, Cal State San Marcos, will spend June in Copenhagen, Denmark, exploring new directions in the study of graphs on surfaces. He'll work with renowned mathematician Carsten Thomassen.

JULIE JAMESON, biologist, Cal State San Marcos, will visit Manila, Philippines in June to help educators learn better ways to teach science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

ESRA OZYUREK, anthropologist, UC San Diego, will spend July, August and September in Berlin, doing research on Germans who convert to Islam.

PAUL ETZEL, astronomer, San Diego State University, will spent part of the late summer installing the new 50-inch Phillips Claud Telescope on Mt. Laguna. The telescope will greatly improve the university's ability to study deep space.

CAROLYN KURLE, biologist, UC San Diego, will spend the summer working in bays and estuaries in the San Diego area to study how certain pollution from runoff and stream outfalls is becoming incorporated into coastal food webs.

Copyright 2013 The San Diego Union-Tribune, LLC. An MLIM LLC Company. All rights reserved.

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Astronomers have spotted a galaxy that is igniting new stars faster than ever seen before. Measurements from several instruments show that gas in this galaxy is condensing to form stars close to the maximum rate thought possible.

"What is unique about this particular galaxy is that it is forming stars so rapidly with such a tiny supply of gas," said Aleksandar Diamond-Stanic, a fellow at the University of California's Southern California Center for Galaxy Evolution who helped make the discovery. A team of nine astrophysicists recently reported the finding in Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The team of astronomers estimated the amount of gas in the galaxy using the IRAM Plateau de Bure Interferometer, a telescope in the French Alps that detects a light signal associated with hydrogen gas, the fuel of stars. Images from the Hubble Space Telescope show gas concentrated in a zone just a few hundred light years across, yet that gas is condensing and igniting new stars at a rate hundreds of times that of our own Milky Way galaxy.

The distant galaxy, 6 billion light years away, initially popped out of an image captured by a satellite-based NASA instrument called WISE, for Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer. The image revealed infrared light, an indication of star formation, pouring out of the galaxy.

That rate of star formation combined with the estimate of available fuel indicates an efficiency close to the theoretical maximum, called the Eddington limit.

"This galaxy is like a highly tuned sports car, converting gas to stars at the most efficient rate thought to be possible," said Jim Geach, an astrophysicist at McGill University who led the study.

"We've caught it just before it runs out of gas," adds Diamond-Stanic, a member the research group led by Alison Coil, a physics professor at UC San Diego who also co-authored the report. This rate of star birth is so ferocious that most of the galaxy's gas will be gone in just a few tens of millions of years, a brief episode in the course of its evolution.

That's why they think no galaxy quite like this one has ever been seen before. Once star formation abates, the team expects the galaxy to mature into a steadier state: an ordinary reddish, elliptical galaxy.

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Congratulations on your selection as a US Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellow Daniel.

The Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellowship (DOE CSGF) program provides outstanding benefits and opportunities to students pursuing doctoral degrees in fields of study that use high performance computing to solve complex science and engineering problems.

The program fosters a community of bright, energetic and committed Ph.D. students, alumni, DOE laboratory staff and other scientists who share a common desire to impact the nation while advancing their science. Fellowship students represent diverse scientific and engineering disciplines but the common thread is their use of mathematical and computing techniques for their research.

Funded by the Department of Energy's Office of Science and National Nuclear Security Administration, the DOE CSGF trains scientists to meet U.S. workforce needs and helps to create a nationwide interdisciplinary community.

The specific objectives of the DOE CSGF program are:

To help ensure an adequate supply of scientists and engineers appropriately trained to meet national workforce needs, including those of the DOE, in computational sciences.

To make national DOE laboratories available for practical work experiences for fellows ensuring cross-disciplinary experience in highly productive work teams.

To strengthen collaborative ties between the national academic community and DOE laboratories so that the multidisciplinary nature of the fellowship builds the national community of scientists.

To raise the visibility of careers in the computational sciences and to encourage talented students to pursue such careers, thus building the next generation of leaders in computational science.

Read the 2004 article (updated July 2009), Building a Community of Leaders to find out more about why the DOE CSGF program is important to the nation.

Prof. Frank Wuerthwein and his team are helping to define the research agenda for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) by crunching data sets from almost one billion particle collisions.

See link for details.

Professor Oleg Shpyrko has been promoted to the rank of Associate Professor with tenure in the Department of Physics.

The department congratulates him on this important milestone in his career and wishes him continued success in teaching and research in the future.

MEYRIN, Switzerland - Vivek Sharma missed his daughter.

A professor at the University of California, San Diego, Dr. Sharma had to spend months at a time away from home, coordinating a team of physicists at the Large Hadron Collider, here just outside Geneva. But on April 15, 2011, Meera Sharma's 7th birthday, he flew to California for some much-needed family time. "We had a fine birthday, a beautiful day," he recalled.

Then Dr. Sharma was alerted to a blog post. There it was reported that a rival team of physicists had beaten his team to the discovery of the Higgs boson - the long-sought "God particle."

If his rivals were right, it would mean a cascade of Nobel Prizes flowing in the wrong direction and, even more vexingly, that Dr. Sharma and his colleagues had missed one of nature's clues and thus one of its greatest prizes; that the dream of any physicist - to know something that nobody else has ever known - was happening to someone else.

He flew back to Geneva the next day. "My wife was stunned," he recalled.

He would not see them again for months.

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What in the name of Harry Potter is David Smith up to? It's not possible to cloak things the way Harry does in some of his adventures, right? Making something invisible would defy the laws of science.

Well, maybe not.

Smith, who earned a doctorate in physics at the University of California San Diego, is a professor at Duke University, where he's stirring attention with his efforts to cloak things with the use of common materials. Smith doesn't make objects literally disappear. But the materials effectively make small things invisible to microwave energy.

It's trippy research that Smith will discuss on Wednesday, February 27, during a free public lecture at UC San Diego. He'll take to the podium at the Great Hall in the International House at 7 p.m., and explain how cloaking works and explore how it might be used to improve our lives. He gave us a preview of his talk during a recent phone call.

Q: Many people think of Harry Potter's fictional invisibility cloak when the subject of invisibility comes up. Is this the kind of thing you're working on?

A: Harry Potter's magical cloak can seemingly make someone completely invisible to detection, whether they're sitting still or moving around. We're not trying to make people invisible. But we are working on a closely related concept that could help make things like your cellphone and certain electronic systems in automobiles work better and more reliably.

Our experiment involves microwaves, an electromagnetic form of energy. Humans can't see microwaves, but they're there and they can get blocked by objects. For example, if you're sitting in an airport trying to use your cellphone your wireless signal might get blocked by the big column that helps hold up the roof of the terminal. That could disrupt your call, or it could make it hard to do something like call up Netflix on the Internet. We're working on ways to make that column 'invisible' to microwaves. We do that by bending the microwaves around blockages.

Q: How do you do that?

A: We cloak objects with meta-materials. These materials cause the microwaves to go around objects. Think of water flowing in a stream. The water flows around things like rocks. In a similar way, microwaves go around things that would block their movement.

Q: And what are meta-materials?

A: They're basically copper circuits that are placed on things like plastic and Teflon. The copper can be arranged in a pattern that causes microwaves to refract. We want to use meta-materials to cloak things that can become an obstruction. This is becoming increasingly important with things like automobiles because they're taking on more and more electronic systems, from wireless Internet to collision-avoidance sensors. We might be able to cloak the grill on a car to prevent it from blocking the signals that come from the collision-avoidance system.

Q: It sounds like this would have a lot of applications for the military. Does it?

A: Yes. The military uses a lot of antennas and they are putting more and more of them together in smaller spaces. We might be able to cloak one antenna to prevent it from blocking the signal of another.

Read more at http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2013/feb/24/cloak-ucsd-edu/

Talk Details:
http://physics.ucsd.edu/special_event.php

The annual Dashen Memorial Lecture will be taking place on Thursday, February 21, 2013 at 4pm in the Garren Auditorium in the Biomedical Sciences Building. An expanded teatime will take place in the BSB Lobby at 3:30pm on the same day.

Guest Speaker Nima Arkani-Hamed from the Institute for Advanced Study will be giving the lecture on "Fundamental Physics and the LHC: A Progress Report". The abstract of the lecture is below.

ABSTRACT: Last July's discovery of a "Higgs-like" particle at the Large Hadron Collider was a triumph for both experiment and theory in fundamental physics. But the Higgs also introduces major conceptual paradoxes that strongly suggest we are missing essential new physical principles. Chief amongst these is the severe "naturalness" or "fine-tuning" problem, which arises in trying to answer a simple question: why is there a macroscopic universe? It has long been thought that this mystery would be solved by new symmetries or dynamics at the distance scales probed by the LHC. If so, what should we make of the absence of obvious signs of new physics at the LHC so far? Are entirely different kinds of explanations possible? And what should we be looking for from the LHC when it restarts in 2015? In this talk, I will summarize this excitingly confusing state of affairs, and discuss what we can hope to learn by 2020.

Simons Foundation gives $4.3 million in funding for construction and installation of new telescopes to measure universe at its inception.

Where do we come from? What is the universe made of? Will the universe exist only for a finite time or will it last forever? These are just some of the questions that University of California, San Diego physicists are working to answer in the high desert of northern Chile.

Armed with a massive 3.5 meter (11.5 foot) diameter telescope designed to measure space-time fluctuations produced immediately after the Big Bang, the research team will soon be one step closer to understanding the origin of the universe. The Simons Foundation has recently awarded the team a $4.3 million grant to build and install two more telescopes. Together, the three telescopes will be known as the Simons Array.

"The Simons Array will inform our knowledge of the universe in a completely new way," said Brian Keating, associate professor of Physics at UC San Diego's Center for Astrophysics and Space Sciences. Keating will lead the project with Professor Adrian Lee of UC Berkeley.

Fluctuations in space-time, also known as "gravitational waves," are gravitational perturbations that propagate at the speed of light and can penetrate "through" matter, like an x-ray. The gravitational waves are thought to have imprinted the "primordial soup" of matter and photons that later coalesced to become gases, stars and galaxies-all the structures that we now see. The photons left over from the Big Bang will be captured by the telescopes to give scientists a unique view back to the universe's beginning.

The telescopes of the Simons Array-named in recognition of the grant-will focus light onto more than 20,000 detectors, each of which must be cooled nearly to absolute zero. The result will provide an unmatched combination of sensitivity, frequency coverage and sky coverage.

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One year after their arrival at the moon, NASA's twin Grail spacecraft got a grand sendoff into oblivion, climaxing with a well-orchestrated crash onto a crater's rim. The place where they crashed will be named after Sally Ride, America's first woman in space, who passed away this summer.

Ride was in charge of the Grail mission's MoonKam project, which let students from around the world select targets for the probes' cameras. MIT's Maria Zuber, the mission's principal investigator, announced just after today's double whammy that her team received clearance from NASA to name the crash site after Ride.

Read More:

http://cosmiclog.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/12/17/15973659-nasas-grail-probes-crash-on-moon-impact-site-named-after-sally-ride?lite

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-20761903

Professor Sinha and student Yicong Ma are authors of, "Long-range interlayer alignment of intralayer domains in stacked lipid bilayers" which is featured on the magazine cover for the December 2012 edition.

The article can be read here: October 2012 Nature Materials

In October 2012, the AAAS Council elected 701 members as Fellows of AAAS. These individuals will be recognized for their contributions to science and technology at the Fellows Forum to be held on 16 February 2013 during the AAAS Annual Meeting in Boston, Massachusetts. The new Fellows will receive a certificate and a blue and gold rosette as a symbol of their distinguished accomplishments.

Congratulations to Dimiti Basov, Benjamin Grinstein, David Kleinfeld, Aneesh Manohar, Art Wolf.

Imagine yourself at a magic show. The magician brings out a tiger and coaxes it into a large, colorful box on the stage. He closes the lid, says a few mysterious words and then - poof - opens the side panel, revealing the inside of the box to be empty. The tiger is gone. Cue applause.

We know, of course, that tigers are not apt to vanish into thin air; we know that such magic tricks are more trick than magic. But how is it possible that our eyes can be deceived so easily?

The answer has much to do with the way our sense of sight works. As we look around a room, our eyes detect the light that bounces off nearby people or objects, and our brains interpret the images formed from the patterns of light received. We can even figure out what material something is made of based on the way it reflects and transmits light: metal is opaque and typically very reflective; plastic, which is more dull and often translucent, absorbs some of the light and reflects the rest in all directions. Our brains, then, turn these signals from reflections into breathtakingly complex pictures of the world around us. And it all happens faster than the blink of an eye. Indeed, after every blink of an eye.

Such lightning-fast cognitions are possible partly because the brain makes certain automatic assumptions: it figures that light has traveled in a straight line from the object to our eyes. Remarkably, in that built-in assumption is the recipe for a bit of magic that humans (and mythical humans) have sought, from the time of Plato to the age of Harry Potter: invisibility.

The trick involves the ability to bend and distort light as it travels through space - in other words, to make it do what the brain assumes it won't. In some ways, it's the same sleight of hand that the magician uses with the tiger. He uses a mirror angled in such a way that when we think we're looking into an empty box, we're actually seeing the reflection from the bottom of the box and assuming it's the back. Since we don't expect that the light reaching our eyes has swerved, making a 90-degree turn along the way, our eyes "tell" us the tiger has vanished. (In reality, he's hiding comfortably in the box.)

Now we've found a way to one-up this neat trick with science: changing the trajectory of light without using mirrors. We do it with the science of materials - designing a "cloak" that can make light curve around an object, and then emerge just as if it had passed in a straight line through space. (Think of it like water flowing past a rock in a stream.)

The phenomenon is indeed supernatural. That's because nature doesn't appear to offer any materials that can accomplish this feat. The reason is that light has both electric and magnetic components - and to make it swerve around an object, one has to redirect both of these very different components and have them sync up immediately after the detour. That's impossible to do with metals, fabrics or any other traditional materials.

But research findings over the past decade have shown us how to develop artificially structured "metamaterials" - in which tiny electrical circuits serve as the building blocks in much the same way that atoms and molecules provide the structure of natural substances. By changing the geometry and other parameters of those circuits, we can give these materials properties beyond what nature offers, letting us simultaneously manipulate both the electric and magnetic aspects of light in striking harmony.

This year, with one such metamaterial, we built the world's first invisibility cloak capable of managing both components of light.

There is a catch, admittedly. Our cloak works only on microwaves, not on visible light. And humans don't "see" microwaves in the first place, making the idea of invisibility seem, well, a little extraneous.

Still, even if we mortals don't see them, many essential devices do. Nearly every time you walk through security at an airport, your body is scanned with microwaves. Also, your cellphone, iPad and other devices make a similar kind of virtual eye contact with one another. So, even in the microwave realm, cloaking can potentially be used to remove obstacles from the paths of direct microwave communications (or hide things we don't want detected).

More important, microwaves are part of the same electromagnetic spectrum as visible light. In principle, if cloaks can be made to work at microwave frequencies, they might one day be made to work at visible wavelengths.

This will be far more difficult: the wavelengths of visible light are more than 10,000 times smaller than those of microwaves, meaning that the corresponding metamaterials would have to be equally reduced in size.

What excites scientists and Harry Potter fans alike, though, is that our microwave cloak proves there's no theoretical limitation that would prevent someone from building a visible-light cloak.

There are some tricky technological barriers to work out. But in this case, at least, not seeing is believing.

David R. Smith is a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Duke University, where Nathan Landy is a graduate student.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/18/opinion/sunday/a-real-life-invisibility-cloak.html?_r=0

Fierce galactic winds powered by an intense burst of star formation may blow gas right out of massive galaxies, shutting down their ability to make new stars.

Sifting through images and data from three telescopes, a team of astronomers found 29 objects with outflowing winds measuring up to 2,500 kilometers per second, an order of magnitude faster than most observed galactic winds.

"They're nearly blowing themselves apart," said Aleksandar Diamond-Stanic, a fellow at the University of California's Southern California Center for Galaxy Evolution, who led the study. "Most galactic winds are more like fountains; the outflowing gas will fall back onto the galaxies. With the high-velocity winds we've observed the outflowing gas will escape the galaxy and never return." Diamond-Stanic and colleagues published their findings in Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The galaxies they observed are a few billion light years away with outflowing winds of 500 to 2,500 kilometers per second. Initially they thought the winds might be coming from quasars, but a closer look revealed these winds emanate from entire galaxies.

Young, bright and compact, these massive galaxies are in the midst of or just completing a period of star formation as intense as anyone has ever observed.

"These galactic-scale crazy-fast winds are probably driven by the really massive stars exploding and pushing out the gas around them," said Alison Coil, professor in UC San Diego's Center for Astrophysics and Space Sciences and a co-author of the paper. "There's just such a high density of those stars it's like all these bombs went off near each other at the same time. Each bomb evacuates the area around it, then the next can push gas out further until they're evacuating gas on the scale of the whole galaxy."

Galaxies with winds this fast are also quite rare, opening up the question of whether these are unusual events or part of a common phase in the evolution of massive galaxies that is seldom observed because it is so brief.

Astrophysicists still lack an explanation for how and why starmaking ends. Theorists who model the evolution of galaxies often invoke supermassive black holes called active galactic nuclei, which can also generate savage winds, to explain how gas needed to form stars can be depleted.

These new observations demonstrate that black holes may not be neccesary to account for how these kinds galaxies run out of gas. "The winds seem to be powered by the starburst," Diamond-Stanic said. "The central supermassive black hole is apparently just a spectator for these massive stellar fireworks."

ScienceDaily (Aug. 20, 2012) -- Sparse halos of neutrinos within the hearts of exploding stars exert a previously unrecognized influence on the physics of the explosion and may alter which elements can be forged by these violent events.

Read full story.

Physicists have observed a new particle that so far matches the signature they expect from the long-sought Higgs boson. But they have not yet collected enough information about the new particle to confirm that it really is the one they seek.

Read full story.

Snaking cables and racks of computer processors with winking blue lights fill a room in University of California, San Diego's Mayer Hall. It's a powerful resource, made more so through links to a network of more than 80 similar centers distributed across the country.

Read full story.

With a beam of infrared light, scientists have sent ripples of electrons along the surface of graphene and demonstrated that they can control the length and height of these oscillations, called plasmons, using a simple electrical circuit.

This is the first time anyone has observed plasmons on graphene, sheets of carbon just one atom thick with a host of intriguing physical properties, and an important step toward using plasmons to process and transmit information in spaces too tight to use light.

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Physicists have trapped and cooled exotic particles called excitons so effectively that they condensed and cohered to form a giant matter wave.

This feat will allow scientists to better study the physical properties of excitons, which exist only fleetingly yet offer promising applications as diverse as efficient harvesting of solar energy and ultrafast computing.

"The realization of the exciton condensate in a trap opens the opportunity to study this interesting state. Traps allow control of the condensate, providing a new way to study fundamental properties of light and matter," said Leonid Butov, professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego. A paper reporting his team's success was recently published in the scientific journal Nano Letters.

Excitons are composite particles made up of an electron and a "hole" left by a missing electron in a semiconductor. Created by light, these coupled pairs exist in nature. The formation and dynamics of excitons play a critical role in photosynthesis, for example.

Like other matter, excitons have a dual nature of both particle and wave, in a quantum mechanical view. The waves are usually unsynchronized, but when particles are cooled enough to condense, their waves synchronize and combine to form a giant matter wave, a state that others have observed for atoms.

Scientists can easily create excitons by shining light on a semiconductor, but in order for the excitons to condense they must be chilled before they recombine.

The key to the team's success was to separate the electrons far enough from their holes so that excitons could last long enough for the scientists to cool them into a condensate. They accomplished this by creating structures called "coupled quantum wells" that separate electrons from holes in different layers of alloys made of gallium, arsenic and aluminum.

Then they set an electrostatic trap made by a diamond-shaped electrode and chilled their special semiconducting material in an optical dilution refrigerator to as cold as 50 milli-Kelvin, just a fraction of a degree above absolute zero.

A laser focused on the surface of the material created excitons, which began to accumulate at the bottom of the trap as they cooled. Below 1 Kelvin, the entire cloud of excitons cohered to form a single matter wave, a signature of a state called a Bose-Einstein condensate.

Other scientists have seen whole atoms do this when confined in a trap and cooled, but this is the first time that scientists have seen subatomic particles form coherent matter waves in a trap.

Varying the size and depth of the trap will alter the coherent exciton state, providing this team, and others, the opportunity to study the properties of light and mater in a new way.

This most recent discovery stems from an ongoing collaboration between Leonid Butov's research group in UC San Diego's Division of Physical Sciences, including Alexander High, Jason Leonard and Mikas Remeika, and Micah Hanson and Arthur Gossard in UC Santa Barbara's Materials Department. The Army Research Office and the National Science Foundation funded the experiments, and the Department of Energy supported the development of spectroscopy in the optical dilution refrigerator, the technique used to observe the exciton condensate in a trap.

An interdisciplinary team of scientists at UC San Diego composed of physicists, biologists, chemists, bioengineers and psychologists has received a five-year, $7 million grant from the U.S. Department of Defense to investigate the dynamic principles of collective brain activity.

The innovative research effort, which is being funded by the Office of Naval Research under the Defense Department's MultiUniversity Research Initiative, or MURI, will also involve scientists at UC Berkeley and the University of Chicago.

The team plans to conduct basic research on how collective action in the brain learns, modulates and produces coherent functional neural activity for coordinated behavior of complex systems.

"This research will tie together theoretical ideas, hardware implementation of structural models and experimental investigations of human and animal behavior to develop a quantitative understanding and a predictive language for discussing complex physical and biological systems," said Henry Abarbanel, a physics professor at UC San Diego who is heading the collaboration.

The grant will pay for the costs of new laboratory facilities at UC San Diego and the University Chicago, create powerful parallel computing capabilities for the three universities involved and employ 10 or more postdoctoral research fellows. Key UC San Diego researchers participating in the effort are Katja Lindenberg, professor of chemistry and biochemistry; Tim Gentner, associate professor of psychology; Gert Cauwenberghs, professor of bioengineering; Misha Rabinovich, research physicist in the BioCircuits Institute; and Terry Sejnowski, professor of biology.

This is the fourth MURI award led by Abarbanel. The first focused on theory and experiment in complex fluid flows and was funded by the Defense Advanced Research and Projects Agency from 1988 to 1993. The second investigated chaotic communications strategies from 1998 to 2003 under sponsorship by the Army Research Office. The third developed advanced chemical sensing methodologies using animal olfactory dynamics and was funded by the Office of Naval Research from 2007 to 2012.

Professor Olga Dudko and Professor Alison Coil have been promoted to the rank of Associate Professor with tenure in the Department of Physics. Dr. Michael Anderson has been promoted to Lecturer with Security of Employment (LSOE). The department congratulates them on this important milestone in their careers and wish them continued success in teaching and research in the future.

UCSD physics graduate Student Jonathan Kaufman was recently awarded the Antarctica Service Medal of the United States of America, authorized by Congress in recognition of his contributions to exploration and scientific achievement under the U.S. Antarctic Program. Jonathan Kaufman, working under Prof. Brian Keating, recently completed his third season at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station in Antarctica working on the BICEP2 telescope--currently leading the search for evidence of the inflationary expansion of the early universe, believed to have occurred in the fractions of a second immediately after the Big Bang.

Physicists at the University of California, San Diego have discovered patterns which underlie the properties of a new state of matter. In a paper published in the March 29 issue of the journal Nature, the scientists describe the emergence of "spontaneous coherence," "spin textures" and "phase singularities" when excitons–the bound pairs of electrons and holes that determine the optical properties of semiconductors and enable them to function as novel optoelectronic devices–are cooled to near absolute zero. This cooling leads to the spontaneous production of a new coherent state of matter which the physicists were finally able to measure in great detail in their basement laboratory at UC San Diego at a temperature of only one-tenth of a degree above absolute zero. The discovery of the phenomena that underlie the formation of spontaneous coherence of excitons is certain to produce a better scientific understanding of this new state of matter. It will also add new insights into the quirky quantum properties of matter and, in time, lead to the development of novel computing devices and other commercial applications in the field of optoelectronics where understanding of basic properties of light and matter is needed. Read more at UCSD News Center

Read more at www.physicsorg.com

Read more at www.rdmag.com

We are proud to announce that we got "first light/microwave" today with the POLARBEAR telescope in the Atacama Desert in Chile. We saw the planets Venus and Jupiter, not in the visible portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, but with microwave/radio "vision".

Doesn't look too exciting at first glance but it's the start of big things for the project and team!

It's an amazing place to be... very much like being an astronaut on Mars due to the high altitude (17,000') and the terrain. To complete the astronaut analogy most of us need to be on supplemental oxygen most of the time, which makes manual labor quite hard. But it sure beats the alternative!

More pictures of POLARBEAR may be located on Flickr, and more detailed information about POLARBEAR may be found at the Huan Tran Telescope web page.

Thanks to the whole collaboration and especially to the UCSD team (Darcy Barron, Dave Boettger, Frederick Matsuda, Nathan Miller, Stephanie Moyerman, Dr. Nathan Stebor, Praween Siritanasak) for all of their hard work and dedication!

Physicists announced today that they may have caught glimpses of the Higgs boson, but the signals they see are not yet robust enough to meet the stringent requirements they have set for announcing an official discovery
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UC San Diego physicist Olga Dudko and her colleagues at the University of Cambridge resolve a central discrepancy between theory and experiment regarding how molecules fold in response to applied forces.

Single-molecule force spectroscopy, which measures how a molecule responds to mechanical forces pulling it apart, is an important tool in the study of biomolecules and other polymers. Experiments have shown that for weak forces molecules end up in two or more states, depending on the amount of stretching, which researchers attribute to how molecules fold and unfold. However, they have found it difficult to close in on a theoretical explanation. One recent study maintains that these experiments monitor a barrierless process, rather than one where the barrier is known to exist. It concluded that what the experiments are actually observing is merely the collapse of the molecules, and not folding per se.

In their paper in Physical Review Letters, Olga Dudko at the University of California, San Diego, and co-workers appear to resolve this gap in our understanding of this fundamental mechanism in biomolecular interactions. From molecular simulation studies of molecular energy surfaces ("energy landscapes"), they find that there is indeed a barrier to folding, and it is this barrier that is probed by the experiments. It is just that the barrier appeared to be absent-hidden, as it were-in the earlier theoretical work, partly because of the method chosen to project a complicated, multidimensional folding scenario onto a single dimension (the "reaction coordinate"). A more robust choice of a folding coordinate ends up revealing the barrier.

This resolution of a central discrepancy between theory and observations in the important field of molecular-particularly protein-folding should bring about a collective sigh of relief among many biological physicists and physical chemists. - Sami Mitra, Physical Review Letters, American Physical Society

Link to the online publication: http://prl.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v107/i20/e208301

Supermassive black holes millions to billions times the mass of our Sun lie at the heart of most, maybe all large galaxies. Some of these power brilliantly luminous, rapidly growing objects called active galactic nuclei that gather and condense enormous quantities of dust, gas and stars.

Because astronomers had seen these objects primarily in the oldest, most massive galaxies that glow with the red light of aging stars, many thought active galactic nuclei might help to bring an end to the formation of new stars, though the evidence was always circumstantial.

That idea has now been overturned by a new survey of the sky that found active galactic nuclei in all kinds and sizes of galaxies, including young, blue, star-making factories.

“The misconception was simply due to observational biases in the data,” said Alison Coil, assistant professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego and an author of the new report, which will be published in The Astrophysical Journal.

“Before this study, people found active galactic nuclei predominantly at the centers of the most massive galaxies, which are also the oldest and are making no new stars,” said James Aird, a postdoc at the University of California, San Diego’s Center for Astrophysics and Space Sciences, who led the study.

Black holes, such as those at the centers of active galactic nuclei, can’t be observed directly as not even light escapes their gravitational field. But as material swirls toward the event horizon, before it’s sucked into the void, it releases intense radiation across the electromagnetic spectrum, including visible light. Of these, X-rays are often the brightest as they can penetrate the dust and gas that sometimes obscures other wavelengths.

“When we take into account variations in the strength of the X-ray signal, which can be relatively weak even from extremely fast-growing black holes, we find them over a whole range of galaxies,” Aird said

He searched the sky for X-rays from active galactic nuclei using two orbiting telescopes, the XMM-Newton and the Chandra X-ray Observatory, and compared those signals to a large-scale survey of about 100,000 galaxies that mapped their colors and distances.

Coil led that survey, called PRIMUS, along with colleagues now at New York University and the Harvard College Observatory. Using the twin Magellan telescopes at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile, they detected the faint light of faraway galaxies.

They measured both the color of each galaxy and how much the spectrum of that light had shifted as the galaxies receded in our expanding universe – an estimate of their distance from Earth. Because distances in space reach back in time, they’ve captured nearly two-thirds of the history of the universe in particular segments of the sky.

Galaxies can be distinguished by the color of their light. Younger galaxies glow with the bluish light of young stars. As starmaking ceases, and stars burn through their fuel, the color of their light shifts toward red.

In a sample of about 25,000 of the galaxies from the PRIMUS survey, Aird found 264 X-ray signals emanating from galaxies of every kind: massive and smaller, old elliptical red galaxies and younger blue spirals. They’re everywhere.

So as suspects in the quenching of star formation, active galactic nuclei have been exonerated. And because the astronomers saw similar signals stretching far back into time, they conclude that the physical processes that trigger and fuel active galactic nuclei haven’t changed much in the last half of the universe’s existence.

Yet starmaking has ceased in many galaxies, probably when they ran out of gas, though it’s not clear how that happens. The interstellar gas could all be used up, turned into stars, but Coil studies another possibility: fierce galactic winds that have been seen blowing gas and dust from so-called starburst galaxies.

The source of those winds, and their influence on the evolution of galaxies, is one of Coil’s main areas of current investigation.

Alison Coil is an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellow. The National Science Foundation and NASA provided funding for the PRIMUS survey.

Many living things have stripes, but the developmental processes that create these and other patterns are complex and difficult to untangle.

Now a team of scientists has designed a simple genetic circuit that creates a striped pattern that they can control by tweaking a single gene.

With multiple starting points, bacteria guided by a simple genetic circuit can create intricate patterns.
"The essential components can be buried in a complex physiological context," said Terence Hwa, a professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego, and one of the leaders of the study published October 14 in Science. "Natural systems make all kinds of wonderful patterns, but the problem is you never know what's really controlling it."

With genes taken from one species of bacterium and inserted into another, Hwa and colleagues from the University of Hong Kong assembled a genetic loop from two linked modules that senses how crowded a group of cells has become and responds by controlling their movements.

One of the modules secretes a chemical signal called acyl-homoserine lactone (AHL). As the bacterial colony grows, AHL floods the accumulating cells, causing them to tumble in place rather than swim. Stuck in the agar of their dish, they pile up.

Because AHL doesn't diffuse very far, a few cells escape and swim away to begin the process again.

Left to grow overnight, the cells create a target-like pattern of concentric rings of crowded and dispersed bacterial cells. By tweaking just one gene that limits how fast and far cells can swim, the researchers were able to control the number of rings the bacteria made. They can also manipulate the pattern by modifying how long AHL lasts before it degrades.

A colony of bacteria with a "synthetic" genetic circuit develops a pattern of strips over 24 hours.
Although individual bacteria are single cells, as colonies they can act like a multicellular organism, sending and receiving signals to coordinate the growth and other functions of the colony. That means fundamental rules that govern the development of these patterns could well apply to critical steps in the development of other organisms.

To uncover these fundamental rules, Hwa and colleagues characterized the performance of their synthetic genetic circuit in two ways.

First, they precisely measured both the activity of individual genes in the circuit throughout the tumble-and-swim cycle. Then they derived a mathematical equation that describes the probability of cells flipping between swim and tumble motions.

Additional equations describe other aspects of the system, such as the dynamics of the synthesis, diffusion and deactivation of one of the cell-to-cell chemical signal AHL.

This three-pronged approach of "wet-lab" experiments, precise measurements of the results, and mathematical modeling of the system, characterize the emerging discipline of quantitative biology, Hwa said. "This is a prototype, a model of the kind of biology we want to do."

Alexander Schafgans has been named the Outstanding Graduate/Professional Student for the ways he has enriched the UC San Diego community. The initiative, leadership, talent, and pride that have characterized his time at UC San Diego are noteworthy and a key part of what makes student life at the university vital.

In the fourth year of the Outstanding Graduate/Professional Student Award, eighteen nominations were submitted by students, faculty, and alumni who felt it was important to acknowledge the most talented and gifted graduate/professional students at UC San Diego. With the high quantity of outstanding nominations the awards committee had tremendous difficulty selecting one graduate recipient. However, it was noted that Alexander's stewardship, leadership, and scholarship will continue to make a mark on campus life for future generations of students after graduation.

Vice Chancellor of Student Affairs, Penny Rue comments in her letter to Alexander, "My experience working with students shows that the chance to make a difference is the primary reason you give of yourself, and for that I thank you. Your work on the undergraduate scholarship council is a forecast of what I know will be lifelong involvement at UC San Diego. In addition to receiving this award, you will also receive $1,000 and a lifetime membership to the UC San Diego Alumni Association."

The Outstanding Graduate/Professional Student Award will be presented at the 20 I 1 All Campus Graduation Celebration on Friday, June 10 at 7:00 p.m. on RIMAC field.

The UC San Diego Science and Engineering Library received 44 amazing images. "We were impressed by the variety, creativity and the scientific story behind each of the entries!"

All of the images will be displayed in the S&E Library beginning Friday, May 27, and continuing through the summer. Please stop by and take a look. They will also be posted on the S&E Flickr page next week.

And the winners are...

Faculty/Staff Category
1st place - Tadel Matevz, Physics
2nd place - Adam Burgasser, Physics
3rd place - David Rideout, Mathematics


Student Category
1st place - Rick Wagner, Physics
2nd place - Christopher Doran, ECE
3rd place - Kim Wright, MAE
Honorable Mention - Alireza Kargar, ECE

ChaOss Begets Order I. (1st place - Tadel Matevz, Physics)

The image shows a Z-boson decaying into electron-positron pair inside the Compact Muon Selenoid (CMS) detector at CERN, European Organization for Nuclear Research in Geneva, Switzerland. The event was produced as a result of lead-lead ion collisions at the Large Hadron Collider and is in fact one of the first events in the world where Z-boson production was observed in heavy-ion collisions. The two opposite, dominant red towers show energy depositions of the electron and positron in the electro-magnetic calorimeter of CMS while other smaller red and blue towers represent the energy deposited by remaining low-energy particles in the electro-magnetic (red) and hadronic (blue) calorimeters of CMS.

Stellar Orbits Dragonfly (2nd place - Adam Burgasser, Physics)

Everything in the Universe moves. Moons, planets, stars, even whole galaxies careen through the cosmos, carrying us along. These motions tell us about the origins of celestial objects, how they have evolved, and the medium of matter, dark matter and dark energy they move through.

In my research, I study our nearest brown dwarf neighbors - very low-mass, low-temperature stars they are a "mere" 10-50 light-years away. These stars orbit our galactic system - the Milky Way Galaxy - along many paths that reveal their diverse ages and origins. The image shows the orbital paths of 200 such brown dwarfs based on data collected from the Two Micron All Sky Survey and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, projected to show radial and vertical motions. Some of the orbits are clustered, indicating stellar groups that orbit around the Milky Way together; others are very wide, indicating old stars that are just passing through the Solar Neighborhood.

Professor Adam Burgasser and Professor Congjun Wu have been promoted to the rank of Associate Professor with tenure in the Department of Physics. The department congratulates them on this important milestone in their careers and wish them continued success in teaching and research in the future.

This year's Physics Department's recipients of the Ma and Malmberg awards are Charles Neill and Samuel Stanwyck. The selection committee, consisting of Professors Fred Driscoll and Clifford Surko, after considerable debate and assessing the students academic achievements selected Sam to receive the John Holmes Malmberg award and Charles to receive the Shang Keng Ma award.

Ivan Schuller, PhD, Physics, 1976: "Schuller's work on artificial metallic superlattices ultimately led to the discovery and application of the phenomena of "giant magentoresistance" in metallic-ferromagnetic conductors, which is the basis of the 'read heads' in modern computer drives"

The assembly of UCSD's telescope will commence shortly now that formal approval from the Chilean government for deployment in Chile's Atacama desert has been received. The telescope is part of the POLARBEAR project seeking to detect evidence for the inflationary epoch of the Big Bang.

Please click on the following link for more information:
http://sandiegouniontribune.ca.newsmemory.com/publink.php?shareid=1b98a071b

Once regarded as the stuff of science fiction, antimatter--the mirror image of the ordinary matter in our observable universe--is now the focus of laboratory studies around the world. While physicists routinely produce antimatter with radioisotopes and particle colliders, cooling these antiparticles and containing them for any length of time is another story. Once antimatter comes into contact with ordinary matter it "annihilates"--or disappears in a flash of gamma radiation. Clifford Surko, a professor of physics at UC San Diego who is constructing what he hopes will be the world's largest antimatter container, said physicists have recently developed new methods to make special states of antimatter in which they can create large clouds of antiparticles, compress them and make specially tailored beams for a variety of uses. He described the progress made in this area, including his own efforts, at the annual meeting in Washington, DC, of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

His talk, "Taming Dirac's Particle," led off the session entitled "Through the Looking Glass: Recent Adventures in Antimatter," at 1:30 pm on February 18. Surko said that since "positrons"--the anti-electrons predicted by English physicist Paul Dirac some 80 years ago-- disappear in a burst of gamma rays whenever they come in contact with ordinary matter, accumulating and storing these antimatter particles is no small feat. But over the past few years, he added, researchers have developed new techniques to store billions of positrons for hours or more and cool them to low temperatures in order to slow their movements so they can be studied. Surko said physicists are now able to slow positrons from radioactive sources to low energy and accumulate and store them for days in specially designed "bottles" that have magnetic and electric fields as walls rather than matter. They have also developed methods to cool them to temperatures as low as that of liquid helium and to compress them to high densities. "One can then carefully push them out of the bottle in a thin stream, a beam, much like squeezing a tube of toothpaste," said Surko, adding that there are a variety of uses for such positrons.

A familiar positron technique that does not use this new technology is the PET scan, also known as Positron Emission Tomography, which is now used routinely to study human metabolic processes and help design new drugs. In the new methods being developed by physicists, beams of positrons will be used in other ways. "These beams provide new ways to study how antiparticles interact or react with ordinary matter," said Surko. "They are very useful, for example, in understanding the properties of material surfaces." Surko and his collaborators at UC San Diego are studying how positrons bind to ordinary matter, such as atoms and molecules. "While these complexes only last a billionth of a second or so," he said, "the 'stickiness' of the positron is an important facet of the chemistry of matter and antimatter." Surko and his colleagues are building the world's largest trap for low-energy positrons in his laboratory at UC San Diego, capable of storing more than a trillion antimatter particles at one time. "We are now working to accumulate trillions of positrons or more in a novel 'multi-cell' trap--an array of magnetic bottles akin to a hotel with many rooms, with each room containing tens of billions of antiparticles," he said.

"These developments are enabling many new studies of nature. Examples include the formation and study of antihydrogen, the antimatter counterpart of hydrogen; the investigation of electron-positron plasmas, similar to those believed to be present at the magnetic poles of neutron stars, using a device now being developed at Columbia University; and the creation of much larger bursts of positrons which could eventually enable the creation of an annihilation gamma ray laser." "An exciting long-term goal of the work is the creation of portable traps for antimatter," added Surko. "This would increase greatly the ability to use and exploit antiparticles in our matter world in situations where radioisotope- or accelerator-based positron sources are inconvenient to arrange." Professor Surko's work is funded by the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Energy and the Defense Threat Reduction Agency.

UCSD-TV is pleased to announce that Professor Sharma's talk "Hunting the Higgs" will premiere Wednesday, February 23 at 8:00 pm.

The link below includes all scheduled air dates/times, as well as different options to view the program online once it's uploaded to the site just prior to the premiere date. This will include embeddable Flash video and audio and video podcasts.

What Gives Particles Mass? Searching for the Higgs

A team led by Bernie Jackson, using the Solar Mass Ejection Imager the team developed, has traced the waxing and waning light of exploding stars more closely than ever before and seen patterns that aren't yet accounted for in our current understanding of how these eruptions occur. Rebekah Hounsell, a graduate student at Liverpool John Moores University in Britain, made the measurements while visiting UCSD.

More information can be found here.

Einstein, the Moon and the Long Lost Soviet Reflector

One of the greatest successes of the former Soviet space program was a lunar rover called Lunokhod 1 Russian for "moonwalker." Landing on the moon on November 17, 1970 with a laser reflector, it wandered around the moon's surface for 11 months then mysteriously disappeared -- until last spring.

On April 22, nearly 40 years after Lunokhod 1 disappeared, a team headed by Tom Murphy found the reflector and pinpointed its distance from earth to within one centimeter.

The discovery came as part of a long-term project Murphy heads to send pulses of laser light to the moon from a telescope in New Mexico. The purpose, which he will describe in his talk, is to look for deviations of Einstein's theory of general relativity by measuring the shape of the lunar orbit to within the accuracy of one millimeter, or about the thickness of a paperclip.

The talk is free and the public welcome. Light refreshments will be served afterwards. If you have questions, please contact physcievents@ucsd.edu.

It is with great pleasure that we announce the following recipients of the 2010 Physical Sciences Dean's Undergraduate Awards for Excellence.
Zachary Geiger, Sarah Elizabeth Logsdon, Andrew Jordan McLeod, Charles Neil and Sam Stanwyck

Following a successful "first-light" four-month observing run, UCSD's POLARBEAR experiment on the Huan Tran Telescope at the James Ax Observatory located in the Inyo National Forest near Bishop, CA, is moving to its permanent location in the Atacama Desert, Chile.

POLARBEAR is a collaboration between UC San Diego,
UC Berkeley, University of Colorado, McGill University, Imperial College, the Japanese High Energy Research Organization, and the University of Paris.
Polarbear's goal is to detect the gravitational waves produced during the era of inflation, shortly after the Big Bang by observing unique patterns of polarization of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation. These gravitational waves would be a telltale sign that inflation indeed took place. Additionally, measurement of the small angular scale polarization patterns have the capability to constrain the properties of Dark Matter and the mass of the neutrinos.

POLARBEAR's receiver is able to detect the polarization of the CMB radiation through an array of over 1200 superconducting transition edge sensor bolometers cooled to 0.25 degrees Kelvin to reduce noise. Many months of observations must be combined to improve the signal to noise enough to observe the desired signals. Atmospheric water vapor is the enemy of ground-based
microwave background measurements, hence the move to one of the driest sites on earth: the Atacama Desert, Chile where at an altitude of 16,500 feet, water vapor is greatly reduced.

The POLARBEAR team has begun decommissioning the temporary observatory in the Inyo mountains which will be reassembled in Atacama for observations starting in early 2011.

Polarbear team members from UC San Diego are David Boettger, George Fuller, Brian Keating, Nathan Miller, Hans Paar, and Ian Schanning.

Physics professor David Kleinfeld will receive a $2.5 million Director's Pioneer Award from the National Institutes of Health for his work on the control of blood flow in the brain. Kleinfeld and his colleagues will use emerging genetic and optical tools to determine how chemical signals from brain cells control the distribution of blood, a vital and limited resource in the brain. The work bears on all aspects of brain function, Kleinfeld said, including the resilience of cognitive processes to damage caused by vascular trauma or disease. The grants are designed to support individual scientists of exceptional creativity who propose pioneering – and possibly transforming approaches – to major challenges in biomedical and behavioral research and contributions to science.

This year's Physics Department's recipients of the Ma and Malmberg awards are Arielle L. Yablonovitch and Adrian F. Caudillo. The selection committee, consisting of Professors Fred Driscoll, Hans Paar, and Clifford Surko, after considerable debate and assessing the students academic achievements selected Arielle to receive the John Holmes Malmberg award and Adrian to receive the Shang Keng Ma award.

Vitali Shapiro, a plasma physicist who made numerous important contributions into the theoretical studies of laboratory, geophysical and astrophysical plasmas, died June 28 at the age of 73 at his home in San Diego. He was a professor emeritus at the Physics Department, University of California, San Diego.
Shapiro's scientific career began in late 50-s at the Physical-Technical Institute in Kharkov, Ukraine. During his Kharkov years, he authored and co-authored many scientific research papers which became classics in the physics of beam-plasma interactions and quasi-linear theory of plasma instabilities, in particular the anisotropic velocity distribution instability. He earned his Ph.D. from the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in the former Soviet Union in 1963, and a subsequent D.Sc. from the USSR's Institute for Nuclear Physics in Novosibirsk in 1967.
In 1976, Shapiro moved to the Space Research Institute of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Moscow, where he was elected head of the Laboratory for Fundamental Plasma Studies. His scientific interests expanded towards studies of strong Langmuir turbulence including the wave collapse phenomena, the physics of magnetosphere and solar wind, collisionless shocks, cometary plasmas and astrophysical phenomena. He will also be remembered as a great teacher being a Professor of Space Physics at the Moscow Physical-Technical Institute.
Shapiro joined the UCSD faculty in 1994, with joint appointments in the Jacobs School and the Department of Physics. In 1992-94, he was a Research Physicist at the University of California's system-wide California Space Institute. Among his many honors and awards is the USSR State Prize in Physics for his contributions to the theory of nonlinear dynamics of the completely ionized plasma (1987). He was a Fellow of the American Physical Society, and served as an Associate Editor of the Journal of Geophysical Research.
A private funeral service was held on June 30. Condolences may be sent to the family at: 3760 Millikin Avenue, San Diego, CA 92122.

Peter Wolynes, professor of chemistry and biochemistry and of physics and senior scientist with the Center for Theoretical Biological Physics, has been awarded a 2010 Einstein Professorship by the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
As an Einstein Professor, Wolynes will visit academy institutes in several Chinese cities in July as part of a program to strengthen cooperation and exchange between leading scientists in China and other countries. His visit will culminate in two lectures at the Changchun Institute of Applied Chemistry in Changchun, Jilin, spanning the breadth of his current research interests. Wolynes will talk about his recent advances in protein folding studies in one presentation and discuss the glass transition in the other.
The academy awards 20 Einstein Professorships each year to distinguished international scientists working at the frontier of any scientific discipline.

UCSD physics Professor Oleg Shpyrko has received an NSF Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) Grant. The CAREER Program offers the National Science Foundation's most prestigious awards in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research within the context of the mission of their organizations. This Faculty Early Career Award will support research aiming to investigate the relationship between dynamical, mechanical, and structural properties of nanoscale-thick films, using synchrotron x-ray surface scattering probes at both the existing and the next generation light sources. Understanding the fundamental relationship between structure and function of materials such as biological membranes, self-assembled monolayers and thin polymer films at the nanoscale is crucial for many disciplines ranging from condensed matter and chemistry to biology, engineering and nanotechnology. More information on Prof. Shpyrko's research is available at http://oleg.ucsd.edu.

A team of physicists led by a professor at UC San Diego has pinpointed the location of a long lost light reflector left on the lunar surface by the Soviet Union nearly 40 years ago that many scientists had unsuccessfully searched for and never expected would be found.

The French-built laser reflector was sent aboard the unmanned Luna 17 mission, which landed on the moon November 17, 1970, releasing a robotic rover that roamed the lunar surface and carried the missing laser reflector. The Soviet lander and its rover, called Lunokhod 1, were last heard from on September 14, 1971.

"No one had seen the reflector since 1971," said Tom Murphy, an associate professor of physics at UCSD. He heads a team of scientists engaged in a long-term effort to look for deviations of Einstein's theory of general relativity by measuring the shape of the lunar orbit to within an accuracy of one millimeter, or about the thickness of a paperclip. This is accomplished by timing the reflections of pulses of laser light from reflectors left on the moon by Apollo astronauts and turning the timing measurement into a distance.

"We routinely use the three hardy reflectors placed on the moon by the Apollo 11, 14 and 15 missions," said Murphy, "and occasionally the Soviet-landed Lunokhod 2 reflector--though it does not work well enough to use when illuminated by sunlight. But we yearned to find Lunokhod 1."

Three reflectors are required to lock down the orientation of the moon. A fourth adds information about tidal distortion of the moon, and a fifth enhances that information.

"Lunokhod 1, by virtue of its location, would provide the best leverage for understanding the liquid lunar core, and for producing an accurate estimate of the position of the center of the moon--which is of paramount importance in mapping out the orbit and putting Einstein's gravity to a test," said Murphy.

Murphy said his team had occasionally looked for the Lunokhod 1 reflector over the last two years, but faced tall odds against finding it until recently. The breakthrough came last month when the high-resolution camera on NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, or LRO, obtained images of the landing site. The camera team, led by Mark Robinson at Arizona State University, identified the rover as a sunlit speck on the image--miles from where Murphy and his team had been searching. (see:http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/LRO/multimedia/lroimages/lroc-20100318.html ) But until now the existence of the reflector or its precise location was unknown.

"It turns out we were searching around a position miles from the rover," said Murphy. "We could only search one football-field-sized region at a time. The recent images from LRO, together with laser altimetry of the surface, provided coordinates within 100 meters, and then we were in business and only had to wait for time on the telescope in good observing conditions."

On April 22, his team sent pulses of laser light from the 3.5 meter telescope at the Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico, zeroing in on the target coordinates provided by the LRO images. Murphy, together with Russet McMillan of the Apache Point Observatory in Sunspot, NM, and UCSD physics graduate student Eric Michelsen found the long lost Lunokhod 1 reflector and pinpointed its distance from earth to within one centimeter. They then made a second observation less than 30 minutes later that allowed the team to triangulate the reflector's latitude and longitude on the moon, in other words its exact spot on the moon, to within 10 meters--"not bad for a half-hour's work," said Murphy. In the coming months, he estimates it will be possible to establish the reflector's coordinates to better than one-centimeter precision.

The return signal from the reflector was measured by Murphy's team as a collection of individual particles, or photons, of laser light.

"We quickly verified the signal to be real and found it to be surprisingly bright: at least five times brighter than the other Soviet reflector, on the Lunokhod 2 rover, to which we routinely send laser pulses," Murphy said. "The best signal we've seen from Lunokhod 2 in several years of effort is 750 return photons, but we got about 2,000 photons from Lunokhod 1 on our first try. It's got a lot to say after almost 40 years of silence."

The discovery of the Soviet reflector came as a surprise, because scientists had actively searched for it for nearly four decades without success. Many scientists had speculated that the Lunokhod 1 rover might have fallen into a crater or parked badly, with its reflector not facing the earth, which would have prevented it from being located by laser pulses.

"Not only now do we know that Lunokhod 1 is there, we also know that it is parked perfectly so that its reflector faces earth," said Murphy. "In fact, the signal is so surprisingly strong that the rover could not be in anything but a level parking spot with its last commanded roll on the lunar surface deliberately oriented toward the earth."

Murphy and his colleagues found in a study they published this month that lunar dust may be obscuring the reflectors on the moon. see: Moon Dust His team found that the laser light they bounce off reflectors on the moon is fainter than expected and dims even more whenever the moon is full.

"Near full moon, the strength of the returning light decreases by a factor of ten," he adds. "We need to understand what is causing this if we are contemplating putting additional scientific equipment on the moon. Finding the Lunokhod 1 reflector will add important clues to this study."

Murphy's project, dubbed APOLLO (the Apache Point Observatory Lunar Laser-ranging Operation), is supported by the National Science Foundation and NASA, and includes scientists at the University of Washington, Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Humboldt State University and the Apache Point Observatory.

Can graphene--a newly discovered form of pure carbon that may one day replace the silicon in computers, televisions, mobile phones and other common electronic devices--be made to bend, twist and roll?
Physicists at UC San Diego and Boston University think so. In a paper published in the journal Physical Review B, the scientists say the propensity of graphene--a single layer of carbon atoms arranged in a honeycomb lattice-- to stick to itself and form carbon "nanoscrolls" could be controlled electrostatically to form a myriad of new devices.
Unlike carbon nanotubes--cylindrical molecules of pure carbon with novel properties that have become the focus of much of the attention of new application in electronics and materials development--carbon nanoscrolls retain open edges and have no caps. "As a result, nanoscrolls can change their shape and their inner and outer diameters, while nanotubes cannot," said Michael Fogler, an associate professor of physics at UCSD and the first author of the paper.
Working with Antonio Castro Neto, a physics professor at Boston University, and Francisco Guinea of the Institute of Materials Science in Madrid, the scientists proposed the construction of a device in which the electronic properties of graphene are used to roll and unroll the nanoscroll.
"The device we envision is a graphene nanoscroll that can be charged by current from a nearby electrode," said Fogler. "The more charged it becomes, the more the mutual electrostatic repulsion of electrons inside the scroll causes it to unwrap. So, the voltage on the electrode can control the diameter and the number of coils in the scroll."
"We show in this paper that the electrostatic control of nanoscrolls is very much feasible. The required voltages are in the practical range. Since graphene is so light, the wrapping and unwrapping would occur on a time scale of one-trillionth of a second. So, not only the degree of scrolling can be controlled, these nano-electromechanical devices will also be ultra-fast."
Fogler said such nanoscrolls could have a wide range of applications, such as actuators whose operation resembles the blinking of one's eyes, valves in lab-on-a-chip devices and even a form of electronic paper. Previously, other scientists attempted to build scroll "machines" using thin plastic films but they were either too rigid or too frail to work well. In contrast, nanoscrolls made of graphene, which is mechanically stronger than any other material known to man, would be robust, yet remain ultra-light and ultra-flexible. They would also conduct electricity more than a thousand times better than silicon.
Fogler said that the ideas to use electrical properties of graphene to modify its structure, or vice versa, are still quite new, and so the proposed devices may require some time to develop. In the near term, scientists hope that graphene, which is an optically transparent conductor of electricity, could be used to replace current liquid crystal displays that employ thin metal-oxide films based on indium, a rare metal that is becoming increasingly expensive and likely to be in short supply within a decade.
An advance copy of the journal article appeared online this week at:
http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevB.81.161408
The study was funded by grants from the National Science Foundation and U.S. Department of Energy.

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More than two dozen UC San Diego physicists and technicians began their long-awaited quest last week in a research facility below the Swiss-French border to find a hypothetical subatomic particle that they hope will allow them to finally tie together the fundamental forces and particles in nature into one grand theory.
With cheers, applause and toasts of champagne, hundreds of physicists at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research near Geneva, successfully collided beams of protons, moving in opposite directions at close to the speed of light, with an energy greater than has ever been produced before on Earth.
From the millions of subatomic particle collisions in this newly constructed collider, known as the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, the scientists hope to generate tiny fireballs of pure energy, from which new particles never before seen on Earth emerge. That should provide them with clues to improve on and go beyond their basic theory of nature--what they call the Standard Model.
"It's taken us 25 years to build," Vivek Sharma, a physics professor at UCSD now working at CERN, said of the LHC in a news conference last week that was reported in newspapers, magazines and broadcasts worldwide. "This is what it's for. Finally the baby is delivered. Now it has to grow."
The LHC is the world's largest scientific experiment, involving an estimated 10,000 individuals from 60 countries, including more than 1,700 scientists and engineers from 95 U.S. universities and laboratories. It will attempt to reproduce, on a miniature scale, some of the same conditions that occurred during the first fractions of a second after the Big Bang, when our universe is thought to have come into being some 14 billion years ago.
The main object or particle of the LHC's search is the Higgs boson, hypothesized by physicists to have been created in the Big Bang's fireball and to imbue particles with mass. It has never been detected by any of the world's previously built colliders. And it is thought to exist at energy levels that only the LHC can reach.
"Finding the Higgs Boson will be a marathon challenge, not an easy sprint," said Sharma, who will be living at CERN during the next few years to direct and coordinate the Higgs boson search for several hundred physicists at more than 38 countries and 183 institutes worldwide. "But we have set the traps with considerable thought and are confident that we will find it in not too distant future. The thrill of the chase is overwhelming and it will energize us through the course leading to its discovery."
Sharma and 27 other UCSD physicists and technicians have been shuttling between La Jolla and CERN during their sabbaticals and teaching breaks, for more than a decade now, to make sure that when the LHC is properly operating, data can be collected from one of the European collider's two big particle detectors--the Compact Muon Solenoid, or CMS. "The CMS detector is 21 meters long, 16 meters in diameter and weighs around the same as 30 jumbo jets or 2,500 African elephants," said Sharma "And though it is the size of a small cathedral, it contains detectors more precise than Swiss watches."
Because of the huge volume of data expected from this experiment, the UCSD team has designed and built the largest data acquisition system in the world to analyze the more than 100,000 collisions per second that will be generated when beams of protons circulating at nearly the speed of light in opposite directions around the 27-kilometer LHC ring are brought together in violent collisions.
"When the two proton beams collide, they will generate, within a tiny volume, temperatures a billion times hotter than in the heart of our Sun," said Sharma.
Sharma said the detector itself is capable of operating like a 100 megapixel digital camera taking 40 million photos a second. And the 15 million gigabytes of data expected to be generated each year by the CMS experiment will produce the equivalent of 20 million CDs of data that will require the computing power of about 100,000 of the fastest PC computers. While all of this hardware had been checked and rechecked, the situation was still tense last week, Sharma said, when the LHC's first three attempts at colliding beams failed in the early morning hours because of niggling hardware issues in the big collider. But these were quickly fixed, and when the collider started to collide protons at a rapid fire rate, some 60 times a second, Sharma said he and the other UCSD scientists felt a sense of relief and exhilaration for the discoveries that are sure to come in the near future.
"My heart stopped when the first event was splashed on the screen," he said. "The joy of watching CMS quickly and seamlessly take in all the LHC collisions and produce beautifully reconstructed events of proton-on-proton collisions is hard to communicate. LHC and CMS worked in tandem, like a dream machine."
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Two scientists from UC San Diego have been elected to the governing council of the National Academy of Sciences, the nation's preeminent organization of scientists, which advises Congress and the U.S. government on matters of science and technology.
They are former UC San Diego Chancellor and University of California President Robert C. Dynes, now a professor of physics at UCSD, and Susan S. Taylor, a professor in UCSD's Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry and Department of Pharmacology, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator.
The two UCSD scientists were among four members of the National Academy of Sciences elected this week to three-year terms on its governing council. Their terms begin on July 1.
Larry Squire, a professor of psychiatry at UC San Diego, currently serves on the academy's governing council, which means three of the 12 members of the governing council are now from UC San Diego, a remarkable achievement for any research institution.

A group lead by Prof Patrick Diamond was recently awarded a 5 year, $2million per year grant to establish a Fusion Theory Institute at the National Fusion Research Institute (NFRI) in Daejeon, Korea. Diamond will become Director of the new Institute,which is located nearby the new, superconducting KSTAR tokamak, one of the two most advanced magnetic confinement experimental facilities in the world.

The new institute will focus on problems in plasma turbulence,transport and confinement optimization. While close collaboration with the KSTAR program is anticipated,the institute will be interdisciplinary and will also address problems in nonlinear dynamics and plasma astrophysics. Diamond will spend a significant amount of time in Daejeon,and plans to build strong collaborations between NFRI and UCSD, especially with the new DOE Center for Momentum Transport and Flow Organization (CMTFO) that Prof George Tynan (MAE) and he lead.

The new institute was awarded as an outcome of a competition involving all areas of science and technology under the auspices of Korea's WCI Program.

Geoffrey Burbidge, a renowned British astrophysicist and astronomer at the University of California, San Diego who made contributions to our understanding of how elements are formed in stars as well as modern cosmology and radio galaxies, died on January 26 at the Scripps Memorial Hospital in La Jolla after a long illness. He was 84. Burbidge's towering stature in the field was reflected by his position as editor-in-chief of the Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics for 30 years, his directorship of the Kitt Peak National Observatory in Tucson and his numerous prizes from astronomical societies around the world. In 2005, he and his wife Margaret, both of whom were founding members of UC San Diego's Department of Physics, were awarded the British Royal Astronomical Society Gold Medal, the society's highest honor, for their contributions to astronomy during more than half a century.

The two astronomers, who both worked actively until recent years at the university's Center for Astrophysics and Space Sciences, coming to campus each day and publishing papers, are best known for their work in the mid-1950s describing how stars synthesize nearly all the chemical elements in the universe, from carbon and iron to lead and uranium. That work was summarized in a seminal paper on stellar nucleosynthesis published in 1957 with two other legendary scientists- British astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle and American physicist William Fowler. Two years later, the two Burbidges received the American Astronomical Society's highest honor for young astronomers, the Warner Prize. "This was without question one of the most important papers of all time in astrophysics," said Mark Thiemens, dean of the Division of Physical Sciences at UCSD. "I've read it many times. Geoff was one of the most noteworthy astrophysicists of the past 50 years."

"This paper laid the foundation for an entirely new kind of synthesis of astronomical observations with frontier nuclear and particle science, paving the way for much of modern astrophysics and cosmology," said George Fuller, a nuclear astrophysicist and the director of the Center for Astrophysics and Space Sciences, or CASS. Burbidge pioneered the development of several sub-disciplines in astrophysics.

"He is famous for his work on radio galaxies in which he was the first to determine the enormous energies involved," said Art Wolfe, an astrophysicist at UCSD and former director of CASS. "This work ultimately led astrophysicists to consider gravitation as the energy source for these objects as well as for quasars. Much of the Burbidges' work revolved around the nature of quasars and active galactic nuclei. During the 1960s the Burbidges were virtually alone in their efforts to measure the masses of galaxies from their rotation speeds."

"Geoff Burbidge also was the first to show that the helium in the universe could not have come from stellar nucleosynthesis alone," said Fuller. According to close colleagues, all of his work had a profound influence on the development of modern astrophysics and cosmology. On the Big Bang theory, he was a contrarian. He, with Fred Hoyle and others, argued controversially for a quasi-steady state cosmology in which quasars are new matter ejected from energetic galaxies in a cyclic universe. In this view, bright quasars are nearby objects in spite of their high redshifts. He maintained this position right up to his last paper, published shortly before his death, in which he presented statistical evidence that bright quasars are strongly overabundant nearby active spiral galaxies.

Burbidge was born on September 24, 1925 in Chipping Norton, England and received his bachelor's degree from the University of Bristol and his doctorate in theoretical physics from University College in London. From 1950 until his arrival at UC San Diego in 1962, he held research and teaching positions at the University of London, Harvard, Cambridge, Chicago, Caltech and the Mt. Wilson and Palomar Observatories. He served as a professor of physics at UC San Diego from 1963 until 2002, except for the period from 1978 to 1984, during which he served as director of the Kitt Peak National Observatory.

In addition to the Warner Prize and the Royal Astronomical Society's Gold Medal, Burbidge received the Catherine Wolfe Bruce Gold Medal in 1999 from the Astronomical Society of the Pacific and was its president from 1974 to 1976. He also won the Jansky Prize of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in 1985, the National Academy of Sciences Award for Scientific Reviewing in 2007 and served for many years as the scientific editor of The Astrophysical Journal. He was an elected fellow of the Royal Society, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, American Physical Society and University College, London.

Geoffrey Burbidge is survived by his wife, Margaret of La Jolla; his daughter Sarah of San Francisco; and his grandson, Connor Loeven. In lieu of flowers, the family wishes that donations be made to the San Diego Humane Society, 5500 Gaines Street, San Diego, CA 92110
There will be a memorial tribute for Geoffrey Burbidge at 11:00 am on Sunday April 18 at the Scripps Seaside Forum, which is just south of the Scripps Pier in La Jolla. The address is 8610 Kennel Way (formerly Discovery Way) La Jolla, CA 92037. Adjacent parking will be available. Doors will open at 10:15 a.m. A reception will follow on the lawn in front of the Forum, overlooking the sea.
For more information please call 858-534-6626.
Website for directions:
http://sio.ucsd.edu/About/Venue_Rentals/Scripps_Forum/

Scientists studying how bacteria under stress collectively weigh and initiate different survival strategies say they have gained new insights into how humans make strategic decisions that affect their health, wealth and the fate of others in society.

Their study, published this week in the early online edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, was accomplished when the scientists applied the mathematical techniques used in physics to describe the complex interplay of genes and proteins that colonies of bacteria rely upon to initiate different survival strategies during times of environmental stress. Using the mathematical tools of theoretical physics and chemistry to describe complex biological systems is becoming more commonplace in the emerging field of theoretical biological physics.

The authors of the new study are theoretical physicists and chemists at the University of California, San Diego's Center for Theoretical Biological Physics, the nation's center for this activity funded by the National Science Foundation, and Tel Aviv University in Israel. They say that how genes are turned on and off in bacteria living under conditions of stress not only shed light on how complex biological systems interact, but provide insights for economists and political scientists applying mathematical models to describe complex human decision making. Continued...

Physicists at UC San Diego have successfully created speedy integrated circuits with particles called "excitons" that operate at commercially cold temperatures, bringing the possibility of a new type of extremely fast computer based on excitons closer to reality.
Their discovery, detailed this week in the advance online issue of the journal Nature Photonics, follows the team's demonstration last summer of an integrated circuit"an assembly of transistors that is the building block for all electronic devices"capable of working at 1.5 degrees Kelvin above absolute zero. That temperature, equivalent to minus 457 degrees Fahrenheit, is not only less than the average temperature of deep space, but achievable only in special research laboratories.
Now the scientists report that they have succeeded in building an integrated circuit that operates at 125 degrees Kelvin, a temperature that while still a chilly minus 234 degrees Fahrenheit, can be easily attained commercially with liquid nitrogen, a substance that costs about as much per liter as gasoline.

"Our goal is to create efficient devices based on excitons that are operational at room temperature and can replace electronic devices where a high interconnection speed is important," said Leonid Butov, a professor of physics at UCSD, who headed the research team. "We're still in an early stage of development. Our team has only recently demonstrated the proof of principle for a transistor based on excitons and research is in progress."
Excitons are pairs of negatively charged electrons and positively charged "holes" that can be created by light in a semiconductor such as gallium arsenide. When the electron and hole recombine, the exciton decays and releases its energy as a flash of light.
The fact that excitons can be converted into light makes excitonic devices faster and more efficient than conventional electronic devices with optical interfaces, which use electrons for computation and must then convert them to light for use in communications devices.
"Our transistors process signals using excitons, which like electrons can be controlled with electrical voltages, but unlike electrons transform into photons at the output of the circuit," Butov said. " This direct coupling of excitons to photons allows us to link computation and communication."
Other members of the team involved in the discovery were physicists Gabriele Grosso, Joe Graves, Aaron Hammack and Alex High at UC San Diego, and materials scientists Micah Hanson and Arthur Gossard at UC Santa Barbara.
Their research was supported by the Army Research Office, the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation.

Pat Diamond and George Tynan (MAE) were awarded a Department of Energy Plasma Science Center in a recent competition held by the Office of Fusion Energy Sciences, Dept of Energy. Tynan (PI) and Diamond (lead Co-PI) will lead the new Center for Momentum Transport and Flow Organization, which will study momentum transport, flows, rotation and turbulence in tokamaks, basic laboratory experiments, and astrophysical objects such as the solar tachocline and accretion disks.
The interdisciplinary Center will involve researchers at UCSD, UCI, UCSC, Univ Wisconsin, Courant Institute (NYU), and the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab. The new center will work synergistically with Diamond's existing SciDAC Center for Turbulent Transport in Burning Plasmas. The total funding of the new CMTFO will be approximately $6.7 million over 5 years.

Members of the Institute for Pure and Applied Physical Sciences are major contributors to 3 out of 22 Multidisciplinary University Research Initiatives (MURI's) awarded by the Department of Defense nation wide.
The MURI titled "Search for New Superconductors for Energy and Power Applications" funded at a level of $ 7M, directed by Prof. I. K. Schuller, will search for new superconductors for a variety of applications. The photograph shows the type of equipment that Prof. Schuller's team will be using for the discovery of new superconductors. Prof. M. B. Maple is one of the principal investigators in the MURI titled "Broad Based Search for New and Practical Superconductors."
Prof. L. J. Sham is a principal investigator in a MURI titled "Quantum Optical Circuits of Hybrid Quantum Memories." These MURI initiatives are all dedicated to interdisciplinary work in which researchers from many disciplines including physics, chemistry, materials science and engineering are jointly tackling important problems for the nation. The Physical Sciences Division at UCSD is a strong supporter of this type of interdisciplinary research which also provides the facilities and research funds to support young pre and post doctoral researchers.

The Physics Department Memorial Lecture series was organized in memory of Professor Norman M. Kroll, a pioneer in quantum physics and a founding member of the UCSD Physics Department. During his forty year career at UCSD, Professor Kroll made brilliant contributions to research in quantum electrodynamics, atomic physics, particle physics, free electron lasers and subatomic particle accelerators.
This lecture is generously supported by financial contributions from the Kroll family and friends, the Department of Physics, and the Institute of Physics & Applied Physical Sciences.
4:00 P.M.
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Basic Science Building, Garren Auditorium
3:30 P.M. Reception - Basic Science Building Courtyard
About the Speaker
Professor Paul L. McEuen is a leading expert in carbon nanotubes and applications of nanoelectronics in chemistry and biology. His research explores the science and technology of nanostructures, particularly carbon-based systems such as nanotubes and graphene, novel fabrication techniques at the nanometer scale, scanned probe microscopy of nanostructures, and the assembly and measurement of chemical and biological nanostructures.
Dr. McEuen is currently the Goldwin Smith Professor of Physics at Cornell University, which he joined in January 2001. From 1992 to 2000, he was a principal investigator at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where he received the LBNL Outstanding Performance Award in 1997. In 2001, Dr. McEuen was awarded the Agilent Technologies Europhysics Prize for his pioneering research in carbon nanotubes.

Several crates containing what will be one of the most powerful radio telescopes in the world are now en route from Bergamo, Italy to the Port of Long Beach. Its ultimate destination is the Atacama Desert in Chile, one of the driest places on earth, and one of the best for astronomical observations.
The telescope will be fully functional in about a year. And when that time comes University of California, San Diego cosmologist Brian Keating and his colleagues will have the inside track in the race to become the first to discover what happened in the first billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a second after the universe was formed.
If Keating's group, which includes UCSD's Hans Paar, and researchers from UC Berkeley, as well as some from Canada, France and Japan, was to achieve this insight into what he calls the "embryonic universe," they would not only be able to more precisely explain the origin of the universe, but also its future. Their reputations would be cemented in annals of astrophysics, and they'd be in the running for a Nobel Prize.
With the telescope, dubbed POLARBEAR (short for Polarization of Background Radiation), the scientists are trying to detect primordial gravitational waves. The existence of these waves would support the theory of inflation, which holds that right after the Big Bang, there was an incredibly rapid and violent expansion of the universe.
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Thirty-three assistant professors at the University of California, San Diego have been named recipients of the 2009-2010 Hellman Faculty Fellows Awards to support their research and creative activities.
The award program was established at UC San Diego through the generosity of Chris and Warren Hellman to provide financial support and encouragement to young faculty and enhance their progress toward tenure. "Due to the outstanding caliber of the proposals submitted, the selection process was quite a challenge this year," said Paul W. Drake, senior vice chancellor, Academic Affairs. "
Forty-two proposals were submitted by Arts & Humanities and Social Sciences faculty, of which 21 were selected for funding. Twelve proposals were selected for funding out of 24 submitted by the Biological Sciences, Physical Sciences and Engineering Divisions. Given the current economic climate, both selection committees chose to partially fund a number of these proposals in an effort to stretch the funds to assist a greater number of promising young faculty," Drake said.
Recipients of the Physical & Biological Sciences and Engineering awards include Ery Arias-Castro and Jiawang Nie, mathematics; Jennifer Cha and Liangfang Zhang, nanoengineering; Alison Coil, Olga Dudko and Oleg Shpyrko, physics; Joshua Figueroa and Michael Tauber, chemistry and biochemistry; Colin Jamora and Emily Troemel, cell and developmental biology; and Gert Lanckriet, electrical and computer engineering. Arts & Humanities and Social Sciences awardees were Syed Ali, economics; Ivano Caponigro, linguistics; Robert Castro, theatre and dance; Dennis Childs, Amelia Glaser, Anna Springer and Luis Martin-Cabrera, literature; Nitin Govil and John McMurria, communication; Adria Imada, Sara Kaplan and K. Wayne Yang, ethnic studies; Nancy Kwak and Patrick Patterson, history; Lei Liang, music; April Linton, sociology; Edmund Malesky, IR/PS; Sebastian Saiegh, political science; Clinton Tolley and Christian Wuthrich, philosophy, and Alison Wishard Guerra, education studies.

Jose Nelson Onuchic, professor of physics and co-director of the Center for Theoretical Biological Physics was named Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
The American Academy of Arts & Sciences honors the country's leaders in scholarship, business, the arts and public affairs. New members will be formally welcomed into the Academy at an Induction Ceremony in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on October 10, 2009.
Founded in 1780, the Academy annually elects individuals who have made preeminent contributions to their disciplines and to society at large. The 2009 class of scholars, scientists, artists, civic, corporate and philanthropic leaders elected as fellows of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences includes 210 new Fellows and 19 new Foreign Honorary Members from 28 states and 11 countries.
Jose Nelson Onuchic has since 2002 co-directed the Center for Theoretical Biological Physics, which encompasses a broad spectrum of research and training activities at the forefront of the interface between biology and physics. This interdisciplinary approach--carried out jointly by physicists, chemists, mathematicians and biologists--has provided biologists with a better understanding of the underlying mechanisms governing complex biological systems. Onuchic's research centers on theoretical and computational methods for molecular biophysics and chemical reactions in condensed matter with a special focus on protein folding and electron transfer in biological systems. Onuchic received his bachelor's degrees in both physics and electrical engineering from the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil and his Ph.D. in chemistry from the California Institute of Technology. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

Graduate students Laura Tucker and Andrew Meyertholen have been selected as 2009 Summer Graduate Teaching Fellows. This program provides the opportunity for advanced graduate students to participate in a mentored teaching experience as they prepare for and teach a summer session course. They were selected based on their outstanding performance as TAs and their interest in pedagogical issues. Prof. Michael Anderson will serve as their faculty mentor. Congratulations, Laura and Andrew!

Graduate student Matt Krems (left) and post-doctoral associate Yoni Dubi (right) who work in the group of Prof. Di Ventra have won the "Kennedy Reed Award for Best Theoretical Research" (Matt) and the "Charles Kittel Award for Best Theoretical Research" (Yoni) of the American Physical Society at its California section meeting this past October. Matt has presented his recent work on fast DNA sequencing using transverse transport and in particular the effect of dephasing on the different properties of the four DNA bases. This work (funded by NIH) pertains to the quest for fast and cheap sequencing technologies with far-reaching consequences on society. Yoni won for his research (funded by DOE) on energy transport at the nanoscale and the conditions of validity of Fourier's law of heat conduction. This study is fundamental in advancing our understanding of how energy is carried in nanoscale systems and thus in our ability to build better devices for energy generation, storage and conversion."

The Department of Physics is proud to announce the 2008 recipients in Physics: Aris Alexandradinata, Kathryn Chapin, Alex Freznel, Brennan Pursley and Thomas Tran. The Division of Physical Sciences established the Dean's Undergraduate Award for Excellence in 2004 to recognize undergraduate students who have demonstrated academic excellence and promise as researchers in the Division of Physical Sciences. Congratulations to this year's award recipients!

Using a powerful radio telescope to peer into the early universe, a team of California astronomers has obtained the first direct measurement of a nascent galaxy's magnetic field as it appeared 6.5 billion years ago.
Astronomers believe the magnetic fields within our own Milky Way and other nearby galaxies--which control the rate of star formation and the dynamics of interstellar gas--arose from a slow "dynamo effect." In this process, slowly rotating galaxies are thought to have generated magnetic fields that grew very gradually as they evolved over 5 billion to 10 billion years to their current levels.
But in the October 2 issue of Nature, the astronomers report that the magnetic field they measured in this distant "protogalaxy" is at least 10 times greater than the average value in the Milky Way.
"This was a complete surprise," said Arthur Wolfe, a professor of physics at UC San Diego's Center for Astrophysics and Space Sciences who headed the team. "The magnetic field we measured is at least an order of magnitude larger than the average value of the magnetic field detected in our own galaxy."
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UC San Diego physics professor Frank Wuerthwein never thought his work as a particle physicist would be front page news. But when the world's largest particle collider turned on its beam of protons near Geneva on September 10, Wuerthwein began receiving text messages from people he hardly knew congratulating him on the accomplishment.
"I have never in my life seen my field attract so much attention," he said with amazement on his way to the airport for his 20-hour flight to Geneva.
Wuerthwein is one of 24 UCSD physicists involved in the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, which this month begins the long-awaited quest to find the Higgs boson, a hypothetical particle that physicists hope will allow them to finally tie together the fundamental forces and particles in nature into one grand theory. It is the world's largest experiment, 15 years in the making and involving an estimated 10,000 individuals from 60 countries, including more than 1,700 scientists and engineers from 94 U.S. universities and laboratories.
Since 1994, UCSD physicists have been shuttling between La Jolla and Geneva during their sabbaticals and teaching breaks to work on one of the European collider's two big particle detectors--the Compact Muon Solenoid, or CMS. Make that a gigantic particle detector.
"The CMS detector is 15 meters in diameter and weighs around the same as 30 jumbo jets or 2,500 African elephants," said Vivek Sharma, a professor of physics who participated in the LHC's historic grand opening. "And though it is the size of a cathedral, it contains detectors as precise as Swiss watches."
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The National Science Foundation has announced it will provide $11 million over the next five years to continue the operation at UC San Diego of the world's leading center in the emerging field of theoretical biological physics.
The award was made to a group of physicists, chemists and mathematicians in UCSD's Division of Physical Sciences, in collaboration with a theoretical neuroscience group at the nearby Salk Institute for Biological Sciences. Using theoretical machinery from quantum mechanics and statistical mechanics, researchers at the center are demonstrating how physics can help scientists understand the complexity of biological systems, from proteins and DNA to cells and genetic networks to organisms and diseases.
The Center for Theoretical Biological Physics is one of nine NSF Physics Frontier Centers designed to foster aggressive and forward-looking research with the potential to lead to fundamental advances in physics.
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This summer the Physics Department again hosted the Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program. Nearly 20 students spend two months in research laboratories under the guidance of faculty and staff. They were selected out of hundreds of applicants.
The students attended a weekly seminar in which they were exposed to all research areas in our Department. One such seminar was on the Physics of Sailing offered by Hans Paar. The seminar had a laboratory component that took place on the San Diego Bay and the Pacific Ocean. The photo shows some of the students in action.
The REU program is sponsored by the National Science Foundation with Dmitri Basov PI and Hans Paar co-PI. The support from faculty and staff was greatly appreciated by all concerned.

This year's Physics Department's recipients of the Ma and Malmberg awards are Alex Dooraghi, Agnieszka Cieplak, and Brice Dorman. The selection committee consisting of Professors Fred Driscoll, Hans Paar, and Paolo Padoan considered an unusually large number of deserving students and made the selection only after considerable debate.
The committee selected two students to share the Malmberg Award, Alex Dooraghi and Agnieszka Cieplak, while Brice Dorman is the recipient of the Ma Award. Each of the students will receive a certificate and cash award of $750.
All three students have very high grades in their studies and have worked very hard to achieve this honor. Brice and Alex have only A+ and A grades in the Physics major courses while Agnieszka has excelled in experimental astrophysics.

UCSD Physicists R. C. Dynes, Benjamin Grinstein, Jorge Hirsch, Herbert Levine, Ivan K. Schuller and L. J. Sham have been designated "Outstanding Referees" by The American Physical Society.
This is the first year of this very selective award, and only 534 out of our 42,000 active referees have been chosen. In subsequent years, they intend to add about 130 more each year to the list of "Outstanding Referees." The awardees chosen are truly exceptional in their contributions to the physics community by their hard work and careful attention to the peer review process. These faculty members are to be congratulated.
The complete list of 534 awardees and other information about the award can be found at http://publish.aps.org/OutstandingReferees. The APS wishes to thank these awardees, for their exceptional work as anonymous referees in service to the international physics community.

Professor Frank Wuerthwein and his group contributed to one of the American Institute of Physics' "top 10" physics results for 2007.
They provided two of the four measurements mentioned in number 7 on the list:
- First observation of WZ production (published in Physical Review Letters
- First measurement of ZZ production at a hadron collider (submitted to Physical Review Letters). Given that the Tevatron involves about 1500 physicists across two competing experiments from many countries worldwide, it is remarkable that a group of 6 people from UCSD were responsible for 50% of the recognized results while the other two measurements were completed by small armies of people from both experiments.

The two postdocs and one graduate student who were the primary drivers of this work have all obtained prestigous appointments:

- Mark Neubauer joined the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as an Assistant Professor last summer.
- Elliot Lipeles is joining the University of Pennsylvania as an Assistant Professor in July 2008; and
- Shih-Chien Hsu has accepted a Chamberlain Fellowship at UC Berkeley, starting May 2008.

Two other UCSD students (Matt Norman, a 5th year Physics graduate student, and Rami Vanguri, an undergraduate Physics major) also participated in the research described above.

Professor Wuerthwein's group is now pushing out a number of other measurements, including the world's most sensitive Higgs search (Physical Review Letters in preparation). The group operates such that Rami, their undergraduate student, has the opportunity to contribute meaningfully to three papers, one of which was the WZ observation. For the two papers still in preparation, Rami is the primary author. Similarly, Matt has another paper in preparation for which he is the primary author, and there is one more paper in preparation for which Matt and Elliot are the primary authors.

The listings can be found at: http://www.aip.org/pnu/2007/split/850-1.html

Graduate education programs in UC San Diego's Division of Physical Sciences continued to receive top national rankings by U.S. News and World Report, according to the magazine's most recent survey released March 27, 2008.
The survey ranked discrete mathematics and combinations at UCSD 4th in the nation, plasma physics 7th, biochemistry 9th, condensed matter physics 10th, geometry and topology 15th, physics 16th , chemistry 20th and mathematics 24th.
The rankings are based on expert opinion about program quality and statistical indicators that measure the quality of a school's faculty, research, and students. The data come from surveys of more than 1,200 programs and some 14,000 academics and professionals that were conducted in fall 2007.
Information on how the magazine ranked other programs at UC San Diego can be obtained at: http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/newsrel/general/03-08UCSDReceiveHighRanks.asp#

This year's Physics Department's recipients of the Ma and Malmberg awards are Alex Frenzel, Ilya Valmianski and Aris Alexandradinata. The selection committee consisting of Professors Fred Driscoll, Hans Paar, and Cliff Surko selected the top three students on the recommendations of faculty and staff. The committee selected two students to share the Ma Award, Ilya Valmianski and Aris Alexandradinata, while Alex Frenzel is the recipient of the Malmberg Prize. Each of the students will receive a certificate and cash award of $750. All three students have exceptional academic records and have worked very hard to achieve this honor. The students will go on to graduate programs in Physics and show great promise for successful careers. From left: Professor Hans Paar, Alex Frenzel, Aris Alexandradinata, Ilya Valmianski

La Jolla Village News, December 2007 - A POLARBEAR will soon reside in the Inyo Mountains, thanks to a couple of UCSD astrophysicists. Physics professor Hans Paar and assistant professor Brian Keating are building what they call a POLARBEAR telescope to measure gravitational waves generated at the beginning of the universe.

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The National Institute of General Medical Sciences of the National Institutes of Health has awarded a five year, $5.5 million Program Project Grant to a UCSD consortium to study chemotaxis--the directed movement of cells up a chemical gradient--in the social amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum. Chemotaxis is a key component in a multitude of biological processes, including neuronal patterning, wound healing, embryogenesis and angiogenesis--the formation of blood vessels.
The overall aim of the project is to quantitatively study three distinct and sequential stages of chemotaxis using an approach that integrates novel experiments and mathematical modeling. These stages include the initial directional sensing process during which several key signaling components localize subcellularly, cell polarity which leads to clearly distinguishable fronts, backs and sides of a cell and motility which includes actual cell movement.
Experiments performed as part of the project will rely heavily on the use of microfluidic devices, which consist of tiny canals on a microchip. Microfluidic devices will provide precise control over the chemoattractant stimulus--the chemicals that attract cells. The goal of the research is to better understand chemotaxis of eukaryotic cells. Advances in this field will benefit diagnosis and treatment of medical problems involving cell migration.
The consortium consists of two theoretical physicists (Wouter-Jan Rappel, the PI of the grant, and Herbert Levine), two biologists (Richard A. Firtel and William F. Loomis) and Alex Groisman, a microfluidics expert in the physics department.
The grant also includes a subcontract to a microfluidics group at Cornell University (Carl Franck and Eberhard Bodenschatz).

The Department of Physics is proud to announce the 2007 recipients in Physics: Alex Dooraghi, Brice Dorman, Adrian Fontanilla, Shaun Gordon and Ilya Valmianski. The Division of Physical Sciences established the Dean's Undergraduate Award for Excellence in 2004 to recognize undergraduate students who have demonstrated academic excellence and promise as researchers in the Division of Physical Sciences. Congratulations to this year's award recipients!

Thanks to two visionary donors, $1 million in gifts to the University of California, San Diego, has initiated the construction of a telescope that may--for the first time--enable physicists to measure "gravitational waves" from the Big Bang, giving unique insight into the condition of the universe at its inception. The groundbreaking project places UC San Diego at the forefront of the emerging field of observational particle-astrophysics.
"The implications of the research derived from this telescope will be unique and far-reaching," said Hans Paar, a UC San Diego professor of physics working on the project. "Our findings will capture the birth of the universe, providing a deeper understanding of one of the most compelling questions in all of science: How did our universe begin?"
After learning about the historic initiative and an initial $400,000 contribution from the James B. Ax Family Foundation to support the project, an anonymous donor gave UC San Diego's Divison of Physical Sciences the remaining $600,000 to advance the new research endeavor. Together, the two donations provide the funding needed to begin construction of the telescope for the project, dubbed "POLARBEAR" for Polarization of Background Radiation. Scientists from UC San Diego, UC Berkeley, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of Colorado are collaborating on the project, along with several researchers from universities in Canada, Britain and France. The telescope will initially be located at a University of California research facility in the Inyo Mountains, east of the Sierra Nevada Mountain Range near Bishop, California.
The telescope will allow scientists to probe a previously unexplored epoch of the universe, according to Brian Keating, an assistant professor of physics at UCSD and leading collaborator on the project. "The POLARBEAR project is a daring one," added Paar. "We are pushing the limits of what is possible and that is how progress is made."
For more information, please visit the POLARBEAR Telescope website: http://physics.ucsd.edu/~bkeating/polarbear.htm.
Media Contact: Jade Berggren, 858-822-5309

Discovery May Pave the Way for a New Class of Diabetes Drugs

A multidisciplinary team led by researchers at the University of California, San Diego has determined the structure of a protein found in cells that shows potential as a target for the development of new drugs to treat diabetes.
The structural determination effort was led by Mark Paddock in the Department of Physics and Patricia Jennings in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry.
Full Article: http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/newsrel/science/08-07MitoNEETSS-.asp
Media Contact: Sherry Seethaler, (858) 534-4656

Physical chemists from the University of California, San Diego and the University of Illinois, Urbana have determined the minimum amount of light energy required to control chemical reactions and move molecules.
The study, published August 6 in the on-line edition of the journal Physical Review Letters, extended Ulam's conjecture to the level of quantum objects. Ulam's conjecture, proposed in 1956 by American mathematician Stanislaw Ulam, is routinely used to guide spacecraft through the solar system by exploiting gravity. The researchers say that their calculations will make it possible to more precisely steer molecules using photons-or particles-of light.
"Ulam's conjecture was devised for objects large enough to be governed by Newtonian dynamics," explained Peter Wolynes, a professor in UCSD's department of chemistry and biochemistry and department of physics. "But, by contrast, the behavior of electrons in atoms and molecules is explained by quantum mechanics. Therefore, in our computations we used a wave function, which describes a quantum state, to determine the least amount of light energy needed to nudge molecules from one state to another."
A minimal series of energy expenditures can be used to transfer an object from one point to another more quickly than by spontaneous motion, according to Ulam's conjecture, because of certain characteristics of chaotic motion. To move spacecraft, that energy can come from the gravitational pull of celestial bodies.
"The idea is that a complex system like our solar system has lots of planets, moons, and asteroids that can fling spacecraft gravitationally anywhere you want," said Martin Gruebele, who is a professor of chemistry and physics and biophysics, and the director of the center for biophysics and computational biology at Illinois. "Rather than powering a rocket on a brute force, direct route, you can shoot your spacecraft near some moon, and let the moon do most of the work."
Researchers already use light to guide molecules, just as gravity is used to steer spacecraft in the solar system. For example, they use laser tweezers to trap and probe particles, including individual atoms. However, there was previously no way, other than trial and error, to know how much light energy was needed to move a molecule from one state to the next, or to determine how the amount of light energy needed changed as the complexity of the molecules changed.
Wolynes and Gruebele described all the possible states of a quantum mechanical system, and identified which states are closest to one another. They also determined the limits on how efficiently and quickly photons can push a quantum mechanical system from an initial state to a target state. They say that the quantum mechanical analog of Ulam's conjecture that they have created will expand the controllability and flexibility of quantum mechanical objects.
"We can wait for the best possible moment to use the least amount of energy," Gruebele said. "What we have is a fast and accurate method for computing the most efficient way of steering a quantum system between two specified states."
The study was funded by the National Science Foundation.
Additional information at: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, College of Engineering

Again this year Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) students took the "Physics of Sailing" course given by Prof. Hans Paar. The course consisted of a lecture and a laboratory component, the latter in a Catalina 42 sailboat on the San Diego Bay and the Pacific Ocean. The photo shows the ten participating REU students, they all passed the course with flying colors.
The Physics Department's REU program is funded with a Grant by the NSF with Dmitri Basov and Hans Paar as co-PIs and Patti Hey as chief administrator (thanks Patti). The students are embedded in research groups within the Physics Department where they learn first-hand about research in an academic setting.

Elected to the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina in recognition of his scientific achievements and "personal standing."

Founded in 1652, the Leopoldina is the "world's oldest academy involved in the natural sciences that has been permanently in existence." The number of members is limited to 1,000 total in 28 subject sections. Wolynes will belong to the subsection of Theoretical Physics.

Wolynes has developed the leading theory of how proteins fold, which has led to computer algorithms that allow one to predict the three-dimensional structure of a protein from its amino acid sequence. His work on the theory of energy landscapes has also impacted condensed matter physics, notably illuminating the nature of glasses and liquids.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) Theory Initiative, a U.S.-based consortium of theoretical physicists aiming to stimulate and cultivate new young talent in anticipation of the opening of the Large Hadron Collider, awarded the 2007 LHC Theory Graduate Fellowship to Randy Kelley.
Randy Kelley is a third year graduate student in the physics department at UCSD. His current research, with his thesis advisor Professor Aneesh Manohar, is on the production of W and Z Bosons at the LHC using soft collinear effective theories.
Randy Kelley is well known in the UCSD community for his brilliant teaching of the undergraduates. He obtained his B.S. in physics from the University of Virginia and before joining UCSD, he was a Lieutenant in the US Navy where he served as a nuclear engineering officer onboard the USS John C Stennis.
Funded by the National Science Foundation, the $40,000 fellowship award provides young theorists selected in a national competition with funds to underwrite the costs of their research, including travel and computing needs.
"The goal of these fellowships is to stimulate the work of theoretical physicists who will help interpret the treasure trove of data that will emerge from the Large Hadron Collider" said Jonathan Bagger, a leader of the LHC Theory Initiative. "Our initiative will help the high-energy physics community take full advantage of the LHC."
The Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the European laboratory for particle physics in Geneva, Switzerland, is expected to begin operation late this year. With its unprecedented energy and luminosity, the LHC promises to revolutionize particle physics and our understanding of the universe. It is expected to create new forms of matter as scientists search for the elusive Higgs boson and a host of new particles, as well as help answer some of the most fundamental questions of physics. For more information on the LHC Theory Initiative visit http://www.lhc-ti.org

Prof. Malvin A. Ruderman, the Centennial Professor of Physics and of Applied Physics at Columbia University, will speak on Pulsars: Expected Evolution, Observations, and Speculations. This public event will be held at 4:00 pm on Thursday, May 3 in Garren Auditorium, located in the Basic Science Building on the UC San Diego campus.

Prof. Ruderman is a distinguished theoretical astrophysicist who pioneered the science of neutron stars and pulsars; he has also contributed to elementary particle physics and to understanding of the earth's atmosphere. He has worked intensively on problems associated with collapsed objects in astrophysics, especially neutron stars. Recent work has focused on how neutron stars convert so much of their initial spin-energy into beams of high energy radiation. Prof. Ruderman received his PhD. from Cal Tech in 1951. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1972 and to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 1974.

Talk Abstract: Forty years after the discovery of the first pulsars important questions still remain about the structure and dynamics of these strongly magnetized, rapidly spinning neutron stars. Expected properties and observable phenomena will be presented for a "standard model" of them. It assumes a near solar mass core of superfluid neutrons, superconducting protons and very relativistic degenerate electrons, all enclosed by a thin solid metal crust. The model describes a distinctive evolution of neutron star magnetic fields during prolonged stellar spin-down (or spin-up) and, associated with it, two families of sudden jumps in the star's spin-down torque and spin-rate. Model expectations are consistent with observations. However, understanding other kinds of observations, commonly interpreted as evidence for very long period neutron star precession, and also presumed thermal x-ray emission from the stellar surface, raise problems for this standard model. Other interpretations of these observations will be suggested.

The Physics Department Memorial Lecture series was organized in memory of Prof. Norman M. Kroll, a pioneer in quantum physics and a founding member of the UCSD Physics department. During his forty year career at UCSD, Prof. Kroll made brilliant contributions to research in quantum electrodynamics, atomic physics, particle physics, free electron lasers and subatomic particle accelerators.

This lecture is generously supported by financial contributions from the Kroll family and friends, the Department of Physics, and the Institute of Physics & Applied Physical Sciences. The event is free and open to the public.

Link to faculty website at Physics department, Columbia Universtiy

Professor M. Brian Maple was awarded the title of Honorary Professor of the W. Trzebiatowski Institute of Low Temperature and Structure Research, Polish Academy of Sciences, Wroclaw, Poland. The Honorary Professorship was conferred at the Institute during the International Conference on f-Elements that was held in Wroclaw, September 20 - 25, 2006. Professor Maple is the 10th person, and first American, to be awarded an Honorary Professorship of the Institute since this honor was first bestowed in 1994. The conferment of the Honorary Professorship was conducted in Latin and included the presentation of a certificate and a medal. Following the Conferment Ceremony, Professor Maple gave a lecture entitled "Novel types of superconductivity in f-electron materials."

The Institute of Low Temperature and Structure Research was established in 1966 and is named after Professor W. Trzebiatowski, who played a key role in the establishment of the Institute, served as its first Director, and later became the President of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Professor Trzebiatowski is known for the discovery in 1952 of ferromagnetism in uranium hydride UH3. This came as a great surprise since metallic uranium was known to be completely nonmagnetic and, at that time, ferromagnetic ordering had only been found in metals and alloys of the iron group, as well as in gadolinium, one of the rare earth metals.

Professor Maple has collaborated with researchers at the W. Trzebiatowski Institute since 1976 and coauthored eight joint papers. His most recent projects with the Institute concern the nonmagnetic Kondo effect in actinides and the physics of strongly correlated electron behavior in lanthanide and actinide filled skutterudite arsenide compounds.

See full article here: http://physicalsciences.ucsd.edu/news_events/news_archives/2007_Archive/07.26.02.maple.poland.htm

UCSD Physicist George Feher, who uncovered the basic mechanisms for how plants and bacteria use photosynthesis to convert light into chemical energy, has been awarded the prestigious 2007 Wolf Prize in Chemistry. Israel's Wolf Foundation, which promotes "science and art for the benefit of mankind," announced the award today.

George Feher, a research professor at UCSD, will share the $100,000 prize with Ada Yonath of Israel's Weizmann Institute of Science" for ingenious structural discoveries of the ribosomal machinery of peptide-bond formation and the light-driven primary processes in photosynthesis." The award will be presented to the two scientists by the President of Israel at a formal ceremony at the Knesset, or parliament, in Jerusalem, on May 13.

Full Story

"On Dec. 6, 2006, Sally K. Ride, America's first female astronaut and UCSD physics professor, was recognized for her NASA accomplishments and efforts to encourage girls to nurture their childhood love of math and science. She is one of 13 inductees for the inaugural California Hall of Fame ceremony at the California Museum for History, Women & the Arts in Sacramento. For the full story, click on the following link." http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/metro/20061206-9999-7m6ride.html

Members of the UCSD Experimental Particle Physics Group, including graduate and undergraduate students (Mark Neubauer, Shih-Chieh Hsu, Elliot Lipeles, Frank Wurthwein and Rami Vanguri) made the first observation of WZ production warranting a "Result of the Week" at Fermilab National Laboratory.

http://www.fnal.gov/pub/today/archive_2006/today06-11-16.html

From the Article:

"The mediators of the weak interaction, the massive W and Z gauge bosons, are readily produced at the Tevatron and have been studied extensively by the CDF and DZero experiments. But producing pairs of heavy gauge bosons is far more rare. While one W boson is produced in every 3 million Tevatron collisions, and one Z boson in every 10 million, WZ pairs are produced only once per 20 billion events. Facing these odds, it is no wonder that WZ has never been observed--that is, until now. The elusive WZ has finally been netted at CDF. We found it by searching for WZ production in its most easily observable signature, where 3 charged leptons are produced along with missing energy from a neutrino. CDF observed 16 of these signatures, and about 13 of them are expected to be WZ events. If WZ production was not actually happening in the Tevatron, the probability of getting this result would only be 2 in a billion. This indicates that our results are significant; and we have, in fact, observed WZ production. Finding the WZ pair is important because it teaches us about how gauge bosons interact with each other, and it confirms Standard Model predictions. Observing such a rare process at CDF also represents an important experimental milestone in our pursuit of the Higgs particle and new physics at the Tevatron. We look forward to a bright future as we continue to collect data from Run II!"

Four undergraduate physics majors have won Dean's Excellence Awards this year. They are Xinyi Lin, Andre Gomez, Rikiya Yoshida, and Morgan Brown. Each awardee will receive a cheque for $1000 at a ceremony this Friday, Oct. 27, 1:30-3PM, on the NSB Front Plaza.

The Department of Physics is pleased to announce the winners of this year's Ma and Malmberg awards, our department's awards to the top undergraduate physics majors.
This years Ma award goes to Ethan Brown and the Malmberg award goes to Matthew Bibee. In addition to stellar GPAs, Ethan had 5 A+ grades in upper division physics courses and Matthew had 6, truly outstanding records. Both will be going to graduate school this September, and have bright futures ahead of them. Ethan will be working on his PH.D. in physics at UCLA, and Matthew will be at Stanford in the Applied Physics Ph.D. program.
Congratulations and best wishes to Ethan and Matthew!

Kevin A. McCarthy, a senior who has worked hard to maintain a high standard of academic excellence in his classwork with a double major in Physics (BS) and Electrical Engineering (BS) at UCSD, has been named recipient of the 2006 Selma and Robert Silagi Award for undergraduate excellence in science by the Division of Physical Sciences at UCSD. An award luncheon held on June 1, 2006 at the UCSD Faculty Club honored McCarthy where he was presented with a $5,000 award by Dean Mark H. Thiemens on behalf of Laura J. Silagi from Venice, California. Laura Silagi, one of the surviving children of Selma and Robert Silagi, attended the luncheon.

UCSD physics Professor Brian Keating has received an NSF Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) Grant. Prof. Keating received the award for his proposal to measure the polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) from the U.S. Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station over the next five years. The polarization of the CMB has the potential to constrain models of the very early universe including the period of cosmological inflation which is hypothesized to have produced a relict background of gravitational waves. To study the imprint of these gravitational waves on the CMB, Prof. Keating and his Caltech, JPL, UC-Berkeley and European collaborators developed a novel astronomical observatory called the Robinson Gravitational Wave Background Telescope/BICEP. This telescope uses 98 polarization sensitive bolometers operating at 0.25 Kelvin to measure fluctuations in the CMB to a precision of 100 nanoKelvin. Prof. Keating and UCSD graduate student Evan Bierman deployed BICEP to the South Pole in December 2005 and plan to operate the observatory and analyze its data over the next five years. More information on Prof. Keating's research is available at: http://physics.ucsd.edu/~bkeating

A team led by Physicist Massimiliano Di Ventra at the University of California, San Diego has shown the feasibility of a fast, inexpensive technique to sequence DNA as it passes through tiny pores. The advance brings personalized, genome-based medicine closer to reality.

Full Article

Construction of the long-awaited Mayer Hall Addition is finally underway: the site has been fenced off, the contractor is on-site, and demolition started on January 30, 2006. The addition will house 45,000 assignable square feet of office, research laboratory, and teaching laboratory space, distributed over 5 floors. Construction of the addition is expected to last approximately 22 months (i.e., until October 2008); a further 14 months will be spent on the subsequent renovation of portions of the existing building. See site for more information:

Mayer Hall Addition Web Site

David R. Smith, a physicist formerly at the University of California, San Diego, has been awarded the European Union's Descartes Prize for Excellence in Scientific Research for developing at UCSD a new class of composite materials with unusual physical properties that scientists theorized might be possible, but had never before been able to produce in nature.

Complete story at http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/newsrel/science/mcdescartes.asp

The National Academy of Sciences today elected a biology professor and a physics professor at the University of California, San Diego to membership in the prestigious academy, one of the highest honors bestowed on U.S. scientists and engineers. M. Brian Maple, Bernd T. Matthias professor of physics and director of UCSD's Institute for Pure and Applied Physical Sciences, and Charles S. Zuker, a professor of biology and of neurosciences at UCSD, were among the 72 new members and 18 foreign associates from 13 countries elected to the academy this morning in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research.

Their election brings the number of current faculty members at UCSD who are members of the National Academy of Sciences to 71, ranking the university seventh in the nation in the number of academy members. The National Academy of Sciences, established by Congress in 1863, serves as an official adviser to the federal government on matters of science and technology.

Mark Thiemens, Dean of UCSD's Division of Physical Sciences, and Eduardo Macagno, Dean of UCSD's Division of Biological Sciences, noted that The election of Professor Maple and Professor Zuker to the academy today is a testament to their scientific achievements and underscores the intellectual vitality of UCSD's two science divisions.

It's often said that Roger Revelle built this university from the top down by recruiting members of the National Academy of Sciences to UCSD. But much of our scientific talent, as demonstrated by the election today, resides in the faculty who have developed and established themselves at UCSD, added the two deans.

Maple received his doctorate in physics from UCSD in 1969, working under the renowned UCSD physicist Bernd Matthias, and was named Distinguished Alumnus of the Year at UCSD in 1987. An expert on high-temperature superconductors materials that lose all resistance to electricity at commercially attainable, cold temperatures he presided over the celebrated high-temperature superconductivity session, dubbed the Woodstock of Physics, during the American Physical Society's March meeting in 1987. His research interests also include magnetism, low-temperature physics, high-pressure physics and surface science. Maple has been on the faculty at UCSD since 1973.

Zuker, a 46-year-old neurobiologist, was born in Chile and moved to the U.S. to obtain his doctorate in molecular biology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Zuker is also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and has been on the faculty at UCSD since 1987. Recently elected to the Academy of Arts and Sciences, Zuker and his colleagues in his laboratory employ a combined molecular, genetic, and physiological approach to investigate the biology of sensory transduction mechanisms in photoreceptors, mechanoreceptors and taste receptors.

Attribution: Kim McDonaldhttp://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/newsrel/science/mcnas.asp

Professors Margaret Burbidge and Sally Ride were named to Smithsonian Magazine's "35 Innovators of Our Time" in the November 2005 issue. The article marks the 35th anniversary of the magazine by "...revisiting scientists, artists and scholars who've enriched the magazine and our lives."

Article Summary
Margaret Burbidge By Marcia Bartusiak
Sally Ride By K.C. Cole

Kenneth Burch, UCSD Physics student, has been chosen for a GMAG Outstanding Dissertation in Magnetism Award for 2006. The award consists of a cash prize, certificate and invited talk in an appropriate session at the 2006 March meeting in Baltimore.

More information can be found at: http://www.aps.org/units/gmag/

Each year the Physics Department and its faculty host a number of undergraduates in its Research Experience for Undergraduates program. The students are selected from approximately 450 applicants. The program is funded by an NSF Grant (with Dmitri Basov and Hans Paar co-PIs).

Besides working hard in the labs and attending seminars and workshops, the students also take the Physics of Sailing course. The course consists of a classroom lecture and a laboratory component that takes place on the San Diego Bay in a 42' Catalina sailboat. The photograph shows the students, Charmaine Samahin and her husband Randy, and the instructor (Hans Paar).

The Department of Physics is pleased to announce the winners of this year's Ma and Malmberg awards, our department's awards to the top undergraduate physics majors.

This years Ma award goes to Kyle Armour. Kyle is graduating with a GPA of ... ok, university regulations prohibit me from telling you. Let's just say its within epsilon of 4.0, where epsilon is a small number. Also, he garnered 10 A+ grades in physics courses! He has already done significant research in particle physics in Jim Branson's group, and is heading to graduate school at U. Washington where he intends to continue working in particle theory.

The Malmberg award goes to Tyson Kim. Tyson has distinguished himself in our biophysics program, and is the lead author on an applied physics letter (along with David Kleinfeld and Alex Groisman) that is soon to appear. Tyson has not yet decided between biophysics/MD-PhD programs at Harvard, U. San Francisco and UCSD. (We hope he chooses to stay in San Diego!)

Congratulations and best wishes to Tyson and Kyle!

Attribution: Dan Dubin - Vice Chair for Undergraduate Education

Chris Schroeder was selected in national competitions for the Computational Science Graduate Fellowship of the Department of Energy and the Graduate Research Fellowship of the National Science Foundation.

Both programs recognize and support outstanding graduate students in the relevant science, technology, and mathematics disciplines. Fellows are expected to become experts who can contribute significantly to research, teaching, and innovations in science and engineering. The CSGF recipients receive payments of all tuition and required fees for up to 4 years of study, a yearly stipend, matching funds for a computer workstation, a yearly academic allowance, and yearly conferences. Among the requirements and benefits are a plan of study which includes course work in Applied Mathematics, Science and Computer Science, and a practicum at a national DOE laboratory. NSF fellows receive tuition, fees, a yearly stipend for up to 3 years of study, with no requirement beyond annual reporting.

 

 

 

 

 

Five faculty members at the University of California, San Diego have been named fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the academy has announced. The five are among 196 new fellows and 17 new foreign honorary members in the academy's 225th class.

The new fellows from UCSD are Jack Keil Wolf, professor of electrical and computer engineering at the Jacobs School of Engineering; Ajit P. Varki, professor of medicine and cellular and molecular medicine; Linda Preiss Rothschild and M. Salah Baouendi, professors of mathematics; and Michael L. Norman, professor of physics.

They join 76 current AAAS fellows on the UCSD faculty.

It gives me great pleasure to welcome these outstanding leaders in their fields, said Academy President Patricia Meyer Spacks. Fellows are selected through a highly competitive process that recognizes individuals who have made preeminent contributions to their disciplines and to society at large.

Fellows and members are nominated and elected by current members, comprising scholars and practitioners from mathematics, physics, biological sciences, humanities and the arts, public affairs and business. The academy will welcome this years fellows and honorary members at its annual induction ceremony on October 8 in Cambridge, Mass.

Full Article

Prof. David Gross, recipient of the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics will speak on The Future of Physics in the inaugural lecture of the Physics Department Memorial Lecture series. This event will be held at 4:00 pm on Thursday, April 21 at the Liebow Auditorium in Basic Science Building.

This annual lecture series organized in the memory of Prof. Norman M. Kroll, a brilliant pioneer in Quantum physics and a founding member of the UCSD Physics department. During his forty year career at the UCSD, Professor Kroll made brilliant contributions to research in quantum electrodynamics, atomic physics, particle physics, free electron lasers and subatomic particle accelerators. He served as the chair of the physics department from 1963 to 1965 and from 1983 to 1988. A short description of Prof. Kroll's life is at http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/newsrel/science/mckroll.asp

This lecture series is generously supported by the financial contributions from the friends and family of Prof. Norman Kroll. The event is free and open to the public. Parking is $3.

David J. Gross is Director of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics (KITP) and the first incumbent of the Frederick W. Gluck Chair in Theoretical Physics at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Professor Gross was awarded the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics for solving, in 1973, the last great remaining problem of what has since come to be called the Standard Model of the quantum mechanical picture of reality and discovered along with his co-recipients how the nucleus of atoms works. This lecture is also a part of the worldwide celebration of 2005 as the year of physics.

Prof. David Gross

http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/thisweek/2005/apr/04_18_kroll.asp

The Physics department, in particular the Particle Physics group, is hosting the CKM2005 international workshop on "CP Violation and The Unitarity Triangle". More than 200 experts on the topic of matter-antimatter asymmetry from Asia, Europe and North America are attending this workshop which was inaugurated by Chancellor Fox on Tuesday. The workshop is being held at the Price center between March 15-18. The workshop details can be found at http://ckm2005.ucsd.edu/ A short summary of this workshop in layperson's terms is at http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/thisweek/2005/mar/03_14_antimatter.asp The plenary sessions of this workshop, held each morning, may be of interest to members of the physics department, particularly the graduate students. Admission is free for all affiliated with UCSD and we invite you to attend this workshop. We thank Chancellor Fox and Dean Theimens' office for their enthusiastic support and sponsorship of this workshop.

The last missing piece of scientists' fundamental model of particle physics is running out of places to hide. That piece, an elementary particle called the Higgs boson that is thought to give all matter mass, has evaded detection so far. But physicists working at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva, Switzerland, including a contingent of more than two dozen scientists from the University of California, San Diego, have ruled out most of the range of masses the Higgs could have, leaving just a narrow span where the elusive particle might be found. "If it exists, it has to be there. And if it's not there, it will be known to be science fiction by December," Vivek Sharma, a physics professor at UC San Diego told ScienceNOW. Sharma coordinates the international team searching for Higgs boson with the CMS detector, one of two large instruments deployed in the search. The other is called ATLAS. By speeding protons around a 27 kilometer ring at nearly the speed of light, then smashing them together, scientists fleetingly recreate conditions that prevailed when the universe began. In those moments the Higgs boson, if it exists, should pop into being and then quickly decay into other more familiar and recognizable particles, which CMS and ATLAS are poised to detect. In just five months of the LHC running, the two teams have eliminated -- at a 95 percent confidence level -- most of the range of possible masses the Higgs could have, Sharma reported at the biannual Lepton-Photon conference held recently in Mumbai. "The Higgs, if it exists, is now trapped between 114 and 145 GeV (Giga-electron volts, a measure of mass)," he said. A Higgs boson within that range would decay in predictable ways. The scientists have observed the kinds of sprays of particles they would expect to see from a Higgs boson, but not often enough to say the events aren't mere statistical fluctuations of well known background processes. A definitive interpretation will require more data, which the LHC is starting to deliver. Now back in operation after a pause that has allowed the team to ramp up the rate of collisions, the machine should deliver twice as much data as has accumulated so far by the end of October. "We are now entering a very exciting phase in the hunt for the Higgs boson," Sharma said. "If the Higgs boson exists between 114-145 GeV, we should start seeing statistically significant excesses over estimated backgrounds, and if it does not then we hope to rule it out over the entire mass range. One way or the other we are poised for a major discovery, likely by the end of this year."

World's leading Biological Physicists will gather from around the world for the International Conference on Biological Physics (ICBP2011) that will take place in La Jolla, California, June 19-24, 2011. The 7th ICBP meeting, a triennial IUPAP conference, comes at a time when biological physics is taking its place as a compelling frontier of research with rapidly growing interest in physical sciences departments worldwide.

The conference has a spectacular list of speakers including several Nobel laureates. The closing lecture will be given by the Secretary of Energy Steven Chu. ICBP2011 Local Organizing Committee includes CTBP and Physics Department faculty members Olga Dudko, Herbert Levine, Jose Onuchic and Christopher Smith.

More information is available at the conference website http:// icbp2011.ucsd.edu

The Physics Department continues to drive the local San Diego economy through innovation. The latest example is NeurAccel, a La Jolla based start-up company that was founded by former Project Scientist Quoc Nguyen. NeurAccel offers a unique in vivo testing service for the efficacy of new pharmaceutical agents. The underlying technology was developed by Nguyen and then MD/PhD student Lee Schroeder in Prof. David Kleinfeld's laboratory* and is licensed to NeurAccel by UCSD. The continued advancement of this technology within the Department is funded by a grant from the National Institute of Drug Abuse to Kleinfeld and his colleague Prof. Paul Slesinger at the Salk Institute.

*An in vivo biosensor for neurotransmitter release and in situ receptor activity. Q.-T. Nguyen*, L. F. Schroeder*, M. Mank, A. Muller, P. W. Taylor, O. Griesbeck and D. Kleinfeld, Nature Neuroscience (2010) 13:127-132.

Union Tribune Article: http://web.signonsandiego.com/news/2011/sep/05/window-into-the-brain/?ap

Physicists at UC San Diego have developed a new kind of X-ray microscope that can penetrate deep within materials like Superman's fabled X-ray vision and see minute details at the scale of a single nanometer, or one billionth of a meter.

But that is not all. What’s unusual about this new, nanoscale, X-ray microscope is that the images are not produced by a lens, but by means of a powerful computer program.

The scientists report in a paper published in this week’s early online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that this computer program, or algorithm, is able to convert the diffraction patterns produced by the X-rays bouncing off the nanoscale structures into resolvable images.

“The mathematics behind this is somewhat complicated,” said Oleg Shpyrko, an assistant professor of physics at UC San Diego who headed the research team. “But what we did is to show that for the first time that we can image magnetic domains with nanometer precision. In other words, we can see magnetic structure at the nanoscale level without using any lenses.”

Magnetic domains appear like the repeating swirls of fingerprint ridges. As the spaces between the domains get smaller, computer engineers can store more data.. Credit: UC San Diego

One immediate application of this lens-less X-ray microscope is the development of smaller, data storage devices for computers that can hold more memory.

“This will aid research in hard disk drives where the magnetic bits of data on the surface of the disk are currently only 15 nanometers in size,” said Eric Fullerton, a co-author of the paper and director of UC San Diego’s Center for Magnetic Recording Research. “This new ability to directly image the bits will be invaluable as we push to store even more data in the future.”

The development should be also immediately applicable to other areas of nanoscience and nanotechnology.

“To advance nanoscience and nanotechnology, we have to be able to understand how materials behave at the nanoscale,” said Shpyrko. “We want to be able to make materials in a controlled fashion to build magnetic devices for data storage or, in biology or chemistry, to be able to manipulate matter at nanoscale. And in order to do that we have to be able to see at nanoscale. This technique allows you to do that. It allows you to look into materials with X-rays and see details at the nanoscale.”

“Because there is no lens in the way, putting a bulky magnet around the sample or adding equipment to change the sample environment in some other way during the measurement is much easier with this method than if we had to use a lens,” Shpyrko added.

Ashish Tripathi, a graduate student in Shpyrko’s lab, developed the algorithm that served as the X-ray microscope’s lens. It worked, in principle, somewhat like the computer program that sharpened the Hubble Space Telescope’s initially blurred images, which was caused by a spherical aberration in the telescope’s mirror before the telescope was repaired in space. A similar concept is employed by astronomers working in ground-based telescopes who use adaptive optics, movable mirrors controlled by computers, to take out the distortions in their images from the twinkling star light moving through the atmosphere.

But the technique Tripathi developed was entirely new. “There was a lot of simulation involved in the development; it was a lot of work,” said Shpyrko.

To test their microscope’s ability to penetrate and resolve details at the nanoscale, the physicists made a layered film composed of the elements gadolinium and iron. Such films are now being studied in the information technology industry to develop higher capacity, smaller, and faster computer memory and disk drives.

“Both are magnetic materials and if you combine them in a structure it turns out they spontaneously form nanoscale magnetic domains,” Shpyrko. “They actually self assemble into magnetic stripes.”

Under the X-ray microscope, the layered gadolinium and iron film looks something like baklava dessert that crinkles up magnetically to form a series of magnetic domains, which appear like the repeating swirls of the ridges in fingerprints. Being able to resolve those domains at the nanoscale for the first time is critically important for computer engineers seeking to cram more data into smaller and smaller hard drives.

As materials are made with smaller and smaller magnetic domains, or thinner and thinner fingerprint patterns, more data can be stored in a smaller space within a material. “The way we’re able to do that is to shrink the size of the magnetic bits,” Shpyrko said.

The technique should find many other uses outside computer engineering as well.

“By tuning the X-ray energy, we can also use the technique to look at different elements within materials, which is very important in chemistry,” he added. “In biology, it can be used to image viruses, cells and different kinds of tissues with a spatial resolution that is better than resolution available using visible light.”

The scientists used the Advanced Photon Source, the most brilliant source of coherent X-rays in the Western Hemisphere, at the University of Chicago’s Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago to conduct their research project, which was funded by the U.S. Department of Energy. In addition to Tripathi, Shpyrko and Fullerton, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at UC San Diego, other co-authors of the paper include UC San Diego physics graduate students Jyoti Mohanty, Sebastian Dietze and Erik Shipton as well as physicists Ian McNulty and SangSoo Kim at Argonne National Laboratory.

 

Media Contact: Kim McDonald (858) 534-7572, kmcdonald@ucsd.edu

Comment: Oleg Shpyrko (858) 534-3066, oshpyrko@ucsd.edu

We regret to inform you that our colleague Norman Kroll passed away on Sunday, August 8, 2004. One of UCSD's founding faculty, Norman was a member of the Department of Physics and one of its most distinquished emeriti. He was a brilliant theoretical physicist with deep physical insight and broad scientific interests.

He took an active interest in the Physics Department and served as Department Chair for two terms (1963-66 and 1983-1989). We will miss Norman's keen intellect and wise counsel. The Department will keep you informed of the wishes of Norman's family regarding his memorial.

Prof. Kroll was born in 1922 and was appointed professor in 1962.

Pictures from Norman's 80th Birthday Celebration are available at: Norman Kroll 80th Birthday Celebration

The National Academy of Sciences today elected a biology professor and a physics professor at the University of California, San Diego to membership in the prestigious academy, one of the highest honors bestowed on U.S. scientists and engineers.

M. Brian Maple, Bernd T. Matthias professor of physics and director of UCSD's Institute for Pure and Applied Physical Sciences, and Charles S. Zuker, a professor of biology and of neurosciences at UCSD, were among the 72 new members and 18 foreign associates from 13 countries elected to the academy this morning in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research.

Their election brings the number of current faculty members at UCSD who are members of the National Academy of Sciences to 71, ranking the university seventh in the nation in the number of academy members. The National Academy of Sciences, established by Congress in 1863, serves as an official adviser to the federal government on matters of science and technology.

Mark Thiemens, Dean of UCSD's Division of Physical Sciences, and Eduardo Macagno, Dean of UCSD's Division of Biological Sciences, noted that The election of Professor Maple and Professor Zuker to the academy today is a testament to their scientific achievements and underscores the intellectual vitality of UCSD's two science divisions.

It's often said that Roger Revelle built this university from the top down by recruiting members of the National Academy of Sciences to UCSD. But much of our scientific talent, as demonstrated by the election today, resides in the faculty who have developed and established themselves at UCSD, added the two deans.

Maple received his doctorate in physics from UCSD in 1969, working under the renowned UCSD physicist Bernd Matthias, and was named Distinguished Alumnus of the Year at UCSD in 1987. An expert on high-temperature superconductors materials that lose all resistance to electricity at commercially attainable, cold temperatures he presided over the celebrated high-temperature superconductivity session, dubbed the Woodstock of Physics, during the American Physical Society's March meeting in 1987. His research interests also include magnetism, low-temperature physics, high-pressure physics and surface science. Maple has been on the faculty at UCSD since 1973.

Zuker, a 46-year-old neurobiologist, was born in Chile and moved to the U.S. to obtain his doctorate in molecular biology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Zuker is also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and has been on the faculty at UCSD since 1987. Recently elected to the Academy of Arts and Sciences, Zuker and his colleagues in his laboratory employ a combined molecular, genetic, and physiological approach to investigate the biology of sensory transduction mechanisms in photoreceptors, mechanoreceptors and taste receptors.

Attribution: Kim McDonaldhttp://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/newsrel/science/mcnas.asp