News & Events
Professor Al Mathieson passed away at his home in Amherst on May 2, at the age of 94. Matty graduated from Columbia University in 1939, and served in the Marine Corps in WWII. He came to Amherst to teach physics to the returning GI’s who were attending college under the GI bill. From the late 1960s to 1978, he acted as Department Business Manager, and later worked for the Department Head and for the School of Natural Sciences and Mathematics (NSM). Matty retired in 1990, and witnessed many changes during his long tenure on our campus.
Results from a search for mini black hole production at the LHC have been submitted to Physical Review B. Data from the ATLAS detector were used by graduate student German Colon and Prof. Carlo Dallapiccola to set new limits on this exotic process.
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T.J. Blackburn successfully defended his thesis "Quantum Corrections to the Gravitational Scattering of Massless Particles" on May 5. His work was advised by Prof. Barry Holstein.
Professor Lori Goldner won an Armstrong Fund for Science Award, a grant intended "to encourage transformative research that introduces new ways of thinking about pressing scientific or technical challenges". The award will fund Goldner's experiments to observe individual protein molecules. The technique, unique to her laboratory, traps molecules in tiny water droplets dispersed in oil so that they can be observed by a sensitive fluorescence microscope. ...read more
The Physics Department held its annual student awards luncheon on May 2, 2012. Departmental awards were presented to graduate and undergraduate students for teaching, outreach and academic excellence. ...see more
More News & Events
We are deeply saddened by the loss of our long-time friend and colleague Richard Letendre, who passed away at his home in Ware on Sunday, April 22nd, 2012.
Dick was a tool maker and a machinist with our department since 1987. In 1996 he moved to the machine shop in LGRT, where he started a long and fruitful collaboration with nuclear and particle experimentalists and worked on many detectors that saw use in experiments at Bates Linear Accelerator, SLAC, and Jefferson Lab. Dick was fascinated
by the science being conducted, and he always had useful suggestions about the best way to design and construct experimental apparatus.
Many generations of undergraduate and graduate students
learned important and useful lessons from Dick; he will be greatly missed by all of us.
Thanks to the leading efforts of Professor Jennifer Ross, the Physics Department was awarded a Mellon Mutual Mentoring Grant to enhance physics teaching excellence at UMass. The Physics Department educates over 4,000 students per year from general education to advanced graduate courses. With a challenging and diverse subject matter, each physics course presents individual challenges for our instructors to help the different student populations master and succeed with physics. The Mellon Mutual Mentoring Grant will enable physics instructors to work on solutions to these challenges and improve teaching at all levels.
The "Weather and our Atmosphere" general-education physics course, taught by Heath Hatch and grad TA Benjamin Ett, along with Dominique Cambou, Jiansheng Feng and Don Blair, successfully launched and retrieved a weather balloon instrument platform of their own design, using inexpensive, open-source hardware to make detailed environmental measurements. According to on-board instrumentation, the balloon reached an altitude of approximately 80,000 feet before it was collected 80 miles away in Bedford, MA. Watch a video of the trip.
Professor Paul Chaikin of New York University will deliver an undergraduate colloquium titled "Self-replication without Life" in the 5-College series What's New in Physics. His talk will be at 7PM in Lederle 1033 on Tuesday April 24th, with a reception to follow
Read more ...Two of our juniors are among this year's William F. Field Alumni Scholars, in recognition of their academic achievements. ... more.
Jamie Budynkiewicz (Astronomy & Phyiscs) has worked with Laura Cadonati on the LIGO experiment looking for signatures of gravitational waves; she now works on infrared astronomy in Alex Pope's group.
Mark Lodato (Physics & Astronomy) works with Andrea Pocar on laboratory R&D for the EXO experiment searching for neutrinoless double beta decay.
A center to fully operate the EXO-200 experiment remotely was inaugurated on April 6 on the third floor of the UMass LGR tower. Three other similar facilities are operated by the EXO collaboration at Stanford (California), Bern (Switzerland) and Sudbury (Canada). Andrea Pocar and Krishna Kumar lead the UMass-EXO group. ... picture.
UMass professors Boris Svistunov and Nikolai Prokof'ev and alumni of their group have solved an intractable 50-year-old problem: how to simulate strongly interacting fermionic quantum systems for accurate predictions of their properties. The proposed method is based on sampling the series of Feynman diagrams by Monte Carlo technique. Their results, and an experimental verification, are published in Nature Physics.
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UMass postdoc James Hanna and Professor Christian Santangelo, along with colleagues in the Polymer Science Department, have developed a method to program 2D polymer films to buckle into nearly arbitrary 3D shapes. A polymer film is patterned with an array of dots whose size determines the degree a region of the gel will swell in response to a temperature change.
Their research appears in the March 9th issue of Science magazine and is featured in a Perspective. ...more
Benny Davidovitch has been awarded the prestigious CAREER grant by the National Science Foundation in support of his theoretical research on the development of complex shapes in thin elastic films. The CAREER award is NSF's primary vehicle in "support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research and excellent education". The grant also funds outreach activity via a summer workshop titled "Patterns around us." Congratulations, Benny. 
Professor Edward Chang passed away at his home in Amherst on Friday, Feb 15th 2012. Ed Chang was a theoretical atomic physicist whose research was in the area of electron-molecule collisions and in infra-red solar spectroscopy. Within the department, his active advising and recruiting efforts during his tenure as undergraduate program director brought a large increase in enrollment in the Physics major. Ed went on to assume the position of Associate Dean for Undergraduate Advising in the College. After his retirement in 2007, his involvement with the department continued via prizes he had instituted for freshman and transfer students in the physics major, and most recently through an endowment he established for undergraduate research.
The recently published measurement by Borexino
(including professors Laura Cadonati and Andrea Pocar) of the rare neutrinos produced in the pep nuclear fusion reactions inside the Sun was highlighted with a Synopsis on the APS Physics website. ...moreCongratulations to our most recent PhDs! Good luck to Luis, Sasha, Jing and Amaresh in their future careers.
Jing Hua, defended his Ph.D. thesis on "Phase Transitions in Polyelectrolyte Systems", advised by Prof. M. Muthukumar of the Polymer Science department.
Luis Mercado has worked on "Probing Novel Properties of Nucleons and Nuclei via Parity-Violating Scattering" advised by Prof. Krishna Kumar.
Alexander Eliseev studied the "Theory of interacting polyelectrolytes under confinement" with Prof. M, Muthukumar of the Polymer Science department.
Amaresh Datta's thesis was titled "Understanding Hard Interactions in QCD and the Search for the Gluon Spin Contribution to the Spin of the Proton", and was carried out with Prof. Dave Kawall
The PREX experiment housed in Hall A at Jefferson Lab in Virginia (including faculty Krishna Kumar, postdocs Juliette Mammei and Seamus Riordan and graduate students Luis Mercado, Jon Wexler and Sereres Johnston)
has measured the neutron skin of a heavy nucleus for the first time using the parity-violating elastic scattering of polarized electrons. The radius of the neutron shell of Pb-208 is found to be about 6% larger than that the proton, with the difference between the two of 0.33 fm.
This result, to appear in Phys. Rev. Lett. (arXiv:1201.2568), provides insight into nuclear symmetry energy, nuclear equations of state, and into the size and cooling processes of neutron stars.
Graduate student Tulin Varol and Professor Stephane Willocq have led an update to the search for contact interactions in the dilepton channel at the LHC. The results will appear in Physical Review X and were presented by Tulin in the “Implications of LHC results for TeV-scale physics” workshop at CERN last month. ...more