Physics — ��ϲ��

Secrets Behind Our Universe’s Existence Revealed

Dan Bernardi — Mon, 14 Oct 2024 18:23:37 +0000

Graduate students from the Experimental Neutrino Physics group with ��ϲ��-area high school students who took part in the ��ϲ�� Physics Emerging Research Technologies Summer High School Internship Program in summer 2024.

It takes sophisticated technology to study the behavior of invisible particles like neutrinos and cosmic rays, which pass through our bodies every second before zooming back off into the universe without us even knowing. While they might be tiny, these particles have massive importance, as understanding their interactions could help scientists determine why our universe exists and why all of the “stuff” in the universe, including stars, planets and people, are made out of matter and not antimatter. Faculty and students in the ��group in ��ϲ��’s College of Arts and Sciences (A&S) are part of an international effort to explore the secrets of neutrinos.

So, what’s the buzz about neutrinos? Neutrinos and other invisible particles such as cosmic rays are produced by some of the most extreme events in the cosmos, like the Big Bang nearly 14 billion years ago or when massive stars end their life cycles in a blaze of glory known as supernovae explosions. Neutrinos come in three flavors (electron, muon and tau) and have some mysterious characteristics, such as puzzlingly low masses and the ability to oscillate, or change from one type of neutrino to another. Scientists use cutting-edge particle detectors to study the information embedded in neutrinos and make definitive determinations of neutrino properties.

Physics Professors ��Ի��are working with undergraduate and graduate students, and postdoctoral researchers on everything from detector construction to operation and analysis, both at ��ϲ�� and at larger detection sites like��. Fermilab is one of the few places on Earth where a focused beam of neutrinos can be created and aimed at a detector.

Through Fermilab’s��(DUNE), particle detectors are being constructed one mile underground in a former gold mine in South Dakota right in the path of a neutrino beam originating from Fermilab in Illinois. Once operational, DUNE scientists will be able to study a phenomenon called “neutrino oscillation,” which looks at how the three different flavors of neutrinos that make up the Standard Model (electron, muon and tau) change between types as they travel. These insights could reveal why the universe is dominated by matter and whether a fourth type of neutrino (sterile neutrino) exists, which would go beyond the Standard Model, indicating that there is more to the universe’s fundamental particle makeup than we currently understand.

Prototype Paves the Way

Physics graduate student Tom Murphy (right, in orange hard hat) working on a DUNE prototype. (Photo by Dan Svoboda)

DUNE, currently under construction, will be the most comprehensive neutrino experiment in the world. But before it comes online, scientists have been testing prototype equipment and components in preparation for the final detector installation. Members of ��ϲ��’s Experimental Neutrino Physics group have been part of the��, which recorded its first��. While the final version of the DUNE near detector will feature 35 liquid argon modules, the prototype has four modules arranged in a square and allows scientists to validate the design.

“Our group members who are resident at Fermilab, including postdoctoral researcher Luis Zazueta and graduate student Tom Murphy, have helped with final detector construction, installation and operations,” says Soderberg. “Zazueta was the inaugural “deputy run coordinator” for the 2×2 effort, which is a leadership role important to the operation of the detector. We are anticipating more involvement in the full-size DUNE detector that the 2×2 is a prototype for.”

Exploring the Cosmos on Campus

Physics Ph.D. student Sierra Thomas is another one of the A&S scientists who has been involved in the DUNE collaboration. She is currently setting up the equipment to make observations of cosmic events at ��ϲ�� using the new prototype “pixel” Liquid Argon Time Projection Chamber detector. Located on the third floor of the physics building, this hi-tech device allows researchers to make observations about the universe from the comforts of campus. What’s more, the experiments conducted with this equipment are contributing to the enhancement of larger detectors at Fermilab.

Watch the video below for Sierra’s take on the detector.

A Search for Oscillation

In addition to the DUNE project, Fermilab also hosts the Short-Baseline Neutrino Program, which is a chain of three particle detectors—ICARUS, MicroBooNE and the Short-Baseline Near Detector (SBND). SBND is the near detector for the Short Baseline Neutrino Program and the newest of the three. ICARUS, which started collecting data in 2021, is the far detector. SBND will measure the neutrinos as they were produced in the Fermilab beam and ICARUS will measure the neutrinos after they’ve potentially oscillated. The neutrino interactions collected from these detectors play a critical role in performing searches for neutrino oscillations, which could provide proof of the elusive fourth kind of neutrino.

The Short-Baseline Near Detector and ICARUS are the near and far detectors, respectively, in the Short-Baseline Neutrino Program. (Photo courtesy of Fermilab)

Rohan Rajagopalan standing in the SBND building near the detector.

SBND, the final element that completed Fermilab’s Short-Baseline Neutrino Program, recently reached a key milestone as scientists identified the detector’s��earlier this year. Members of ��ϲ��’s Experimental Neutrino Physics group played integral roles in��constructing and commissioning the detector, whose planning, prototyping and construction took nearly a decade. Current group members Amy Filkins, a postdoctoral researcher, and Rohan Rajagopalan, a graduate student, are currently based at Fermilab and working on SBND, having made major contributions to SBND’s first operations.

Amy Filkins (in yellow hard hat) working on the Short-Baseline Near Detector’s data acquisition rack.

The collaboration will continue operating the detector and analyzing the many millions of neutrino interactions collected for the next several years.

“I’m proud of the work that our team has been undertaking,” says Whittington. “I find the process of building, understanding and operating these experiments very engaging, and I’m excited to see them come to fruition over the next few years.”

Students interested in hands-on, international research and exploring the secrets of neutrinos can learn more by visiting the��group website.

‘A Beautiful, Once-In-a-Lifetime Event’: The Total Solar Eclipse on April 8

John Boccacino — Fri, 29 Mar 2024 20:20:40 +0000

“This eclipse will be a beautiful, once-in-a-lifetime event in the sky that will bring us all together,” says Walter Freeman, an associate teaching professor of physics in the College of Arts and Sciences. (Photo by Angela Ryan)

“Introduction to Astronomy” classes always end the same way they began, with Freeman advising his students that, ultimately, “we look at the stars because they are pretty and they illuminate who we are as humanity.”

That humanity will be on full display at 3:23 p.m. on Monday, April 8, when the University campus community and Central New York will experience a total solar eclipse—a naturally occurring phenomenon when a new moon finds itself precisely between the Earth and the sun—creating nearly 90 seconds of pure darkness during the middle of the afternoon.

The philosophy Freeman instills in class varies greatly from when humanity’s first encounters with solar eclipses, when people believed the sun powered their lives, and the events in the sky were closely associated with religion and mythology. Since the timing of the sun, moon and stars’ motions were documented to both keep time and navigate, anything that led to the sun’s disappearance, even for a few seconds, “served as harbingers of doom and gloom, an omen of terror,” says Freeman, an associate teaching professor of physics in the .

Walter Freeman

Freeman uses stargazing and phenomenon like the upcoming solar eclipse to demonstrate to his students how the advancement of astronomy over time teaches us a valuable lesson on “the development of our capabilities as people,” Freeman says. As scientific advances are made, society has come to comprehend the sheer brilliance on display during a total solar eclipse.

“This will be a beautiful, once-in-a-lifetime event in the sky. Science gives us a means to predict and understand eclipses. But beyond that, physics takes a back seat here. The eclipse isn’t a scientific event as much as it is a human event. Everyone will be able to appreciate what happens in a poetic and artistic way. That will be beautiful, and it will bring us all together,” Freeman says.

Campus community members are invited to participate in this rare occasion—the next total solar eclipse in ��ϲ�� isn’t predicted to happen for another 375 years—through a series of on-campus events.

The Department of Physics, in collaboration with the College of Arts and Sciences, is hosting various on the Quad from 1:30-4 p.m. Physics students will lead assorted make-and-take projects and demonstrations across different locations. Telescopes will be available by Carnegie Library, and guided and eclipse-related presentations are being offered in the Stolkin Auditorium. Be sure to visit the for more helpful information.

Additionally, join the Barnes Center at The Arch and Hendricks Chapel on the Quad from 2:30-4 p.m. for an featuring a sound bathing experience and guided meditation, a viewing of the total solar eclipse, and a celebration of Buddha’s birthday ritual with the Buddhist chaplaincy.

Leading up to the eclipse, Freeman spoke with SU News about what makes this total solar eclipse different, where the optimal viewing areas are for experiencing maximum totality and why people should focus on who they’re watching the eclipse with instead of striving for that perfect social media post.

Remembering Professor Emeritus of Physics Marvin Goldberg

Dan Bernardi — Sun, 10 Mar 2024 17:53:35 +0000

Editor’s Note: The following article was contributed to by Goldberg’s colleagues, including Eric Schiff, Tomasz Skwarnicki and Edward Lipson.

Marvin Goldberg G’65 played a vital role in expanding the Department of Physics.

The (A&S) mourns the passing of Marvin Goldberg G’65, professor emeritus of physics. Remembered for his advocacy of international research collaborations and innovations in science education, Goldberg, who passed away in November, held numerous leadership positions at the University and played a key role in enhancing the student experience and shaping the . Considered a pioneer in experimental particle physics, Goldberg focused his research on exploring the smallest ingredients of matter.

Originally from New York City, Goldberg received a degree in physics from the City College of New York in 1960 and a Ph.D. in physics from ��ϲ�� in 1965. Following a two-year appointment as research associate at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL), Goldberg joined the physics faculty in 1966 as assistant professor and was promoted to full professor in 1974.

For nearly 40 years, Goldberg helped to further the strategic goals of his department, A&S and the University. He was physics department chair from 1982 to 1986 and again from 1989 to 1995, and served on several A&S panels, including the promotions committee, faculty council and admissions committee. He was also a member of various University committees and governing bodies, including the Science Council, Chancellor’s Panel for the Future of the University and the University Senate.

Goldberg’s legacy is still felt today. As physics chair, Goldberg led major efforts to recruit leading researchers to the faculty and steered the physics department through a period of significant growth. Among the faculty he hired were Marina Artuso, Peter Saulson, Tomasz Skwarnicki, Sheldon Stone, Gianfranco Vidali and Richard Vook. Many of these researchers have gone on to contribute significantly to the University’s prominence in gravitational wave astronomy and experimental particle physics research.

The heavy quark research group, once co-directed by Goldberg, has recently contributed to key discoveries of pentaquarks and tetraquarks, and is having a pivotal impact on the major detector component to the Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) experiment at the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland.

Marvin Goldberg

In his research, Goldberg played a leading role in experiments that led to major sub-nuclear particle discoveries. In the late 1960s, he contributed to measuring properties of meson and baryon resonances, which were essential to the formulation of the quark model.

During his time at BNL in the mid-1960s, he participated in experiments concerned with verification of the quark hypothesis formulated in the early 1960s by Murray Gell-Mann (for which he won the 1969 Nobel Prize in Physics). At that time, this was a highly controversial theory proposing that subnuclear particles participating in nuclear interactions, like proton or neutron forming nuclei, were not elementary, but were themselves clumps of even smaller particles called quarks. Goldberg was a spokesperson of the two experimental collaborations at BNL which observed short-lived particles predicted by the quark model, and therefore contributed to the validation of this idea.

In the 1970s, he was involved in the Charm Search Experiment, making fundamental contributions at CERN; and in the years following was a contributor to the CLEO experiment and CLEO III detector development at Cornell University. He and fellow researchers at Cornell investigated particles containing heavier “bottom” quarks, offering an opportunity to look for yet unknown forces in nature that could explain matter-antimatter asymmetry in the universe. The ��ϲ�� group built major subcomponents of the CLEO I, and later of the CLEO II experiments, which operated at Cornell through the late 1990s.

In 1995, Goldberg took a position with the National Science Foundation as a program director for the Elementary Particle Physics division where he served for more than a decade. He helped to strike an agreement between the United States and CERN for a major participation of American particle physicists in experiments at today’s highest energy particle smasher—the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). He was a strong advocate for the need of outreach to a broader society by researchers advancing science frontiers, which led to lasting changes in NSF policies.

Goldberg was a member of several professional organizations, including the American Association of University Professors, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Physical Society (APS). With the APS, Goldberg was elected Fellow, a prestigious honor held by 25 other ��ϲ�� faculty members since its inception in 1921. He also served as a visiting physicist at both CERN and BNL.

Goldberg rounded out his career at the University as vice provost for special initiatives and was granted emeritus status in 2005-06. He was predeceased by his first wife, Arleen, and is survived by his second wife, Tatum Goldberg, and his two sons, Dr. David Goldberg and Dr. Philip Goldberg.

Physics Professor Receives NSF Grant for Work at CERN

News Staff — Thu, 08 Feb 2024 17:49:54 +0000

Marina Artuso

Physics Professor has been awarded a three-year National Science Foundation (NSF) grant for her project, . Her co-principal investigators on the project are professors Steven Blusk, Matthew Rudolph, Rafael Silva Coutinho, Tomasz Skwarnicki and research professor Raymond Mountain.

Endeavoring to answer the universe’s biggest questions can involve working with very exotic—and incredibly tiny—particles. Specifically, in the case of the Large Hadron Collider “b” (LHCb) at the CERN laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland, exotic subatomic particles containing beauty (“b”) quarks.

These quarks are one of six quark flavors that—along with gluons, which bind quarks together—make up the hadrons that Artuso and her team observe in the laboratory. They roamed the universe freely only a very short time immediately after the Big Bang. And the way they behave and interact, what happens when they combine and after they decay, might just hold the answers to how the microworld works—and ultimately how all the matter in our universe came to be.

Professor Artuso has been working with a multinational team at CERN since 2005, and she has been the ��ϲ�� team leader since late 2021. Professors Artuso, Blusk, Rudolph, Silva Coutinho and Skwarnicki lead many complementary research efforts within the LHCb experiment, taking data at one of the four interaction points of the LHC proton-proton collider, a 17-kilometer-circumference tunnel in which proton beams are made to collide: The intense collisions produce concentrated energy that mimics the energy generated when the universe was first created.

They spent several years working to design and construct the Upstream Tracker (UT), a detector created to contribute to a precise imaging of the particle debris that results from these collisions; the current grant is going toward the development of an upgrade to the UT—an even more sensitive detector.

“The phenomena we are trying to discover are unfortunately very elusive,” Artuso says. “We can smash things with higher and higher energy, or become more sensitive, to [access] more data.”

In layman’s terms, the detector to be upgraded, known as the electromagnetic calorimeter, will be improved to be able to differentiate between events that happen all at once, effectively on top of one another. “Like with old cameras when you keep taking pictures,” Artuso explains, “and you have different pictures superimposed on the same piece of film [producing a] blurred image. You can use the time at which the image occurred to try to disentangle the various pictures. [We are trying] to develop detectors which can disentangle the time at which different photons were produced.”

Physics professor Marina Artuso inspects the first half of the detector in LHCb at the CERN Laboratory. (Courtesy of CERN)

It’s a long-term effort; the detectors Artuso and her team are working on now are expected to be installed in the mid-2030s. For this phase of the project, the grant provides funding for two graduate students; there are also opportunities for undergraduates, and this summer they’re hoping to generate some projects suitable for local high school students as well.

“It’s a very important component of [our] educational mission,” Artuso says, “to have [students] working with us. They are exposed to state-of-the-art research in physics … can connect what they are doing in class with what will happen in future, and can see machinery they would interact with if they go to work in the [electronics or semiconductor] industries. These are valuable skills.”

While the full breadth of real-world implications and practicalities of the LHCb research remains to be seen, developing techniques for faster detectors and faster-processing electronics is a goal with countless applications in industry. As one example, “[when you have] faster processing in medical imaging, such as PET scans …you don’t have to [expose patients to] as much radiation.” Advanced detectors are likely be useful in fields from biology to archeology.

Beyond those goals, however, Artuso makes the point that understanding the microworld is also a purely intellectual activity. It’s knowledge for its own sake. The LHCb experiment has so far published 700 papers and many more are in the pipeline —and every step reveals another layer of understanding.

“In the very origin of the universe,” she says, “there was a combination of matter and antimatter—particles which were equal except for their electric charge—and they kept on disappearing into light and reappearing. But now the anti-particles are gone, and mostly we have matter. We don’t really understand how it happened. We are hoping to find some pieces of evidence that will allow us to develop a better theory.”

Shining light on these and other mysteries of the universe is not fast work, she notes, but it pays to be patient.

Story by Laura Wallis��

Tidal Disruption Events and What They Can Reveal About Black Holes and Stars in Distant Galaxies

Dan Bernardi — Thu, 01 Feb 2024 16:24:18 +0000

Artist’s representation of a tidal disruption event (a star being torn apart by a black hole) (Photo courtesy of NASA/CXC/M. Weiss)

Astrophysicists from ��ϲ�� and the University of Leeds have collaborated with high school students in ��ϲ�� to confirm the accuracy of an analytical model that can unlock key information about supermassive black holes and the stars they engulf.

At the center of most large galaxies lives a supermassive black hole (SMBH). The Milky Way has Sagittarius A*, a mostly dormant SMBH whose mass is around 4.3 million times that of the sun. But if you look deeper into the universe, there are vastly larger SMBHs with masses that can reach up to tens of billions of times the mass of our sun.

Black holes grow in mass by gravitationally consuming objects in their near vicinity, including stars. It’s a catastrophic and destructive end for stars unlucky enough to be swallowed by SMBHs, but fortunate for scientists who now have an opportunity to probe otherwise-dormant centers of galaxies.

TDEs Light the Way

As the name implies, black holes do not emit any light of their own, making them very difficult for researchers to observe. But when a star comes sufficiently close to a supermassive black hole, it can be destroyed by the black hole’s immense tidal gravitational field through an interaction that is, effectively, an extreme instance of the Earth’s tidal interaction with the moon. Some of the tidally destroyed material falls into the black hole, creating a very hot, very bright disk of material as it does so. This process, known as a tidal disruption event (TDE), provides a light source that can be viewed with powerful telescopes and analyzed by scientists.

TDEs are relatively rare—predicted to take place roughly once every 10,000 to 100,000 years in a given galaxy. One to two dozen TDEs are typically detected annually, but with the advent of new technology like the , currently under construction in Chile, hundreds are anticipated to be observed in the coming years. These powerful observatories scan the night sky for rising and falling sources of light, and thus “survey” the cosmos for time-changing astronomical phenomena.

Using these surveys, astrophysicists can perform studies of TDEs to estimate the properties of SMBHs and the stars that they destroy. One of the things that researchers try to understand is the mass of both the star and the SMBH. While one analytical model has been used quite often, a new one was recently developed and is now being tested.

The Advent of Analytical Models

The accretion rate—or rate at which a star’s stellar material falls back onto the SMBH during a TDE—reveals important signatures of stars and SMBHs, such as their masses. The most accurate way to calculate this is with a numerical hydrodynamical simulation, which uses a computer to analyze the gas dynamics of the tidally destroyed material from a TDE as it rains onto the black hole. While precise, this technique is expensive and can take weeks to months for researchers to compute one TDE.

In recent decades, physicists have devised analytical models to calculate the accretion rate. These models present an efficient and cost-effective method for understanding the properties of disrupted stars and black holes, but uncertainties remain about the accuracy of their approximations.

A handful of analytical models currently exist, with perhaps the most well-known being the “frozen-in” approximation; this name derives from the fact that the orbital period of the debris that rains onto the black hole is established, or “frozen-in,” at a specific distance from the black hole called the tidal radius.

Proposed in 1982 by Lacy, Townes and Hollenbach, and then expanded upon by Lodato, King and Pringle in 2009, this model suggests that the accretion rate from massive stars peaks on a timescale that can range from one to 10 years depending on the mass of the star. This means that if you’re looking at the night sky, a source could initially brighten, peak, and decline with time over timescales of years.

A New Way Forward

, physics professor in the , and , associate professor of theoretical astrophysics at the University of Leeds, proposed a new model in 2022, simply referred to as the�� model, which determines the peak timescale for TDEs as a function of the properties of the star and the mass of the black hole. From this new model, they recovered TDE peak timescales and accretion rates that agreed with the results of some hydrodynamical simulations, but the broader implications of this model—and also its predictions over a wider range of stellar type, including the mass and age of the star—were not completely elucidated.

To better characterize and understand the predictions of this model in a wider context, a team of researchers from ��ϲ��, led by Ananya Bandopadhyay, a Ph.D. student in the��, conducted a study to analyze the implications of the CN22 model and test it against different types of stars and SMBHs of various masses.

The team’s work has been published in��. In addition to lead author Bandopadhyay, co-authors included Coughlin, Nixon, undergraduate and graduate students from the Department of Physics, and ��ϲ�� City School District (SCSD) students. The SCSD students’ involvement was made possible through the�� (SURPh) program, a six-week paid internship where local high schoolers engage in cutting-edge research alongside University students and faculty studying physics.

SCSD students who took part in the SURPh program served as co-authors on the study. From left to right are Matt Todd (physics graduate student), Eric Coughlin (physics professor), Valentino Indelicato (SURPh participant), Dan Paradiso (physics graduate student), Julia Fancher (physics undergraduate student), Aluel Athian (SURPh participant) and Ananya Bandopadhyay (physics graduate student and lead author)

During the summers of 2022 and 2023, the SCSD students collaborated with ��ϲ�� physicists on computational projects that tested the validity of the CN22 model. They used a stellar evolution code called “Modules for Experiments in Stellar Astrophysics” to study the evolution of stars. Using these profiles, they then compared the accretion rate predictions for a range of stellar masses and ages for the “frozen-in” approximation and the CN22 model. They also performed numerical hydrodynamical simulations of the disruption of a sun-like star by a supermassive black hole, to compare the model predictions to the numerically obtained accretion rate.

Their Findings

According to Bandopadhyay, the team found that the CN22 model was in extremely good agreement with the hydrodynamical simulations. Moreover, and perhaps most profound, was the finding that the peak timescale of the accretion rate in a TDE is very insensitive to the properties (mass and age) of the destroyed star, being ~50 days for a star like our sun destroyed by a black hole with the mass of Sagittarius A*.

Most striking and surprising about this result is that the “frozen-in” model makes a very different prediction. According to the “frozen-in” model, the same TDE would produce an accretion rate that would peak on a timescale of two years, which is in blatant disagreement with the results of hydrodynamical simulations.

“This overturns previously held notions about the way that TDEs work and what types of transients you could possibly produce by totally destroying a star,” says Bandopadhyay. “By confirming the accuracy of the CN22 model, we offer proof that this type of analytical method can greatly speed up the inference of observable properties for the disruption of stars having a range of masses and ages.”

Their study also addresses another previous misconception. By clarifying that complete TDEs cannot exceed month-long timescales, they disprove the earlier belief that they can be used to explain long-duration light curves that peak and decay on multiple-year spans. In addition, Coughlin notes that this paper verifies that peak fallback rate is effectively independent of the mass and age of the disrupted star and is almost entirely determined by the mass of the SMBH, a key indicator that models like CN22 can help researchers constrain masses of SMBHs.

“If you measure the rise time, what you could be directly peering into is actually the property of the supermassive black hole, which is the Holy Grail of TDE physics—being able to use TDEs to say something about the black hole,” says Coughlin.

Acknowledging the paper’s influence on the field, Bandopadhyay was invited by the American Astronomical Society to give a�� of the team’s findings at the society’s 243rd meeting in New Orleans this past January.

Looking to the future, the team says by confirming the accuracy of the CN22 model, this study opens a window for researchers to make observable predictions about TDEs, which can be tested against existing and upcoming detections. Through collaboration and ingenuity, researchers at ��ϲ�� are bringing details about the physics of black holes to light and helping explore areas of the distant universe that were once untraceable.

American Physical Society Honors Professor Alison Patteson

Kerrie Marshall — Wed, 15 Nov 2023 19:56:15 +0000

Alison Patteson (photo by Marilyn Hesler)

, assistant professor of physics in the College of Arts and Sciences, has been recognized by the American Physical Society (APS) with a national prize. Patteson received the 2024 , which recognizes outstanding achievement by a woman physicist in the early years of her career.

Patteson is a member of the�� and leads an institute focus group for mechanics of development and disease. Her research group studies biophysics and soft matter—specifically, how cells navigate and respond to the mechanical nature of their physical environment. She and her team are currently investigating how the structural protein vimentin affects cell migration and are also exploring the physical factors that control the growth of biofilms, which are slimy clusters of microorganisms including bacteria and fungi that can adhere to wet surfaces.

Learn more about��to find new solutions to challenges like SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for COVID-19.

“Ali Patteson is an outstanding researcher, educator and service member in the ��ϲ�� Physics Department,” says , professor and chair of physics. “Not only is her research excellent, but she is also a valuable collaborator within the department and ��ϲ�� community. And, she is a wonderful mentor and departmental contributor. She is truly a model of the teacher-scholar model we hope to all embody in ��ϲ�� physics.”

APS President Robert Rosner cites Patteson’s important research contributions in characterizing the physics of living systems, including demonstrating how mechanics influences the collective behavior of bacteria and how intermediate filaments in a cell’s cytoskeleton impact its mechanics, migration and signaling. “This APS honor embodies a distinguished recognition within the academic community and necessitates adherence to the highest standards of professional conduct and integrity,” says Rosner of the award, named for the 1963 winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics, Maria Goeppert Mayer.

A Year of Achievements

Patteson has garnered several additional grant awards in 2023 recognizing her research. There were two in February including a��2023 Cottrell Scholar award, an honor that ranks her among the country’s best faculty researchers and teachers from the fields of astronomy, chemistry and physics. Currently, only two other New York state universities have more Cottrell-awarded faculty: Columbia and Cornell. Also, Patteson was awarded an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship, honoring U.S. and Canadian researchers who exemplify the next generation of research leadership.

“I’m deeply honored and grateful to receive the Maria Goeppert Mayer Award, which would not have been possible without the support of my students and ��ϲ�� community,” says Patteson.

About the Award

The award is presented to a woman, no later than seven years after she received a Ph.D., each year to recognize scientific achievements that demonstrate her potential as an outstanding physicist. It comes with a monetary prize of $5,000 and travel support to give three lectures in her field of physics and at the meeting of the APS to receive the award. The presentations are attended by students and can have a meaningful impact on their academic and professional trajectory. Patteson will travel to Minneapolis in March 2024 to accept the award and give a presentation.

Originally from Germany (now an area in Poland), born in 1906,��was a physicist and mathematician who proposed the nuclear shell model of the atomic nucleus which explained “why certain numbers of nucleons in the nucleus of an atom cause an atom to be extremely stable.” She was a trailblazer, both in her field and for women in science, as one of only four women to win a Nobel Prize in physics.

Patteson joins , associate professor of physics and William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Physics, who��received this award in 2018, for her research into soft, living matter. Manning and Patteson are the only two ��ϲ�� faculty to receive the annual award since it began in 1986.

Physics Professor Honored by the American Physical Society

Dan Bernardi — Tue, 24 Oct 2023 17:34:40 +0000

Jennifer Schwarz

, professor of physics in the College of Arts and Sciences, has been named a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS). She joins�� to receive the distinction over the 100 years that the award has existed. The fellowship recognizes members who have made advances in physics through original research and publication or who have made significant contributions in the application of physics to science and technology.

The APS honors each of the Fellows with a dedicated citation for their work. Schwarz’s reads:��“For influential contributions to the statistical physics of disordered systems, particularly in the development of models concerning correlated percolation, as well as models related to rigidity transitions in both living and nonliving matter.”

Schwarz is a trailblazer in her research, an inspirational teacher and mentor, and a leader in her commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion. A professor of physics at ��ϲ�� since 2005 and a member of the��, her research examines rigidity and shape transitions in living and nonliving matter as well as the emergent properties of learning in physical networks to make apt comparisons with the more established neural networks. By advancing knowledge of the morphology and mechanics in what is known as disordered systems, this work has implications ranging from understanding how the structure of human-derived brain organoids differs from the structure of chimpanzee-derived brain organoids to how cancer cells move throughout the body to predicting when avalanches in a frictional granular packing will occur.

To date, Schwarz’s body of work includes more than 70 publications/pre-prints and she has served as principal investigator (PI) or co-PI on federally funded grants totaling more than $3 million. She was among a team of researchers awarded an�� in 2021 to explore the use of anti-vimentin antibodies to block cellular uptake of the coronavirus. She was also awarded an Isaac Newton Award for Transformative Ideas During the COVID-19 pandemic from the Department of Defense in 2020 to build multiscale computational models for brain organoids early on in development.

As a longstanding advocate for diversity and inclusion in STEM, Schwarz led an initiative in 2022 establishing ��ϲ�� as a partnership institution of the��. This effort aims to increase the number of physics Ph.D.s awarded to students from traditionally underrepresented groups by creating sustainable transition programs and providing students with research experience, advanced coursework and coaching to prepare them for a graduate school application.

, professor and current department chair of physics, who was named an APS Fellow in 2018, says: “Jen Schwarz is the most collaborative member of the department, having worked with almost the entire soft matter and biophysics group. She is also highly creative and versatile in the theoretical and simulation techniques she applies to problems. Indeed, I feel it is not an overstatement to say she is a genius working on varied topics such as brain form and function, active matter, cells and tissues, and sand piles! In addition to her outstanding research contributions, Jen has also been a leader advocating for social justice and equity in the physics department.”

Along with Schwarz, other recent APS Fellows from ��ϲ�� include Stefan Ballmer, professor of physics (2021), Lisa Manning, William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Physics (2019) and Christian Santangelo, professor of physics (2019).

Learn more about this year’s class of��.

5 NSF Grants Fund ��ϲ�� Researchers’ Work With Cosmic Explorer

Dan Bernardi — Thu, 12 Oct 2023 14:50:04 +0000

University researchers received over $1.5M in NSF funding to study gravitational waves and design next-generation observatories. (NSF LIGO; Sonoma State University; A. Simonnet)

Billions of years ago in a distant galaxy, two black holes collided sparking one of the universe’s most extreme cosmic events. The occurrence was so powerful that it bent the fabric of spacetime, sending out ripples called gravitational waves.

These waves would eventually be detected on Earth by Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) detectors, with ��ϲ�� faculty playing a leading role in that monumental discovery. While members of the University’s Gravitational-Wave Group took a moment to celebrate the incredible feat, they immediately began wondering how they could build a new observatory that would allow them to explore even more of the Universe with gravitational waves.

Enter Cosmic Explorer, a next-generation gravitational-wave observatory being devised by the ��ϲ��Center for Gravitational Wave Astronomy and Astrophysics (CGWAA). Established this fall, CGWAA is a hub for students and faculty at the University to play a principal role in the design and operation of gravitational-wave observatories. Working with scientists from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Pennsylvania State University, California State University, Fullerton, and the University of Florida, the CGWAA team hopes that Cosmic Explorer will be searching the universe by the mid-2030s.

Artist’s impression of Cosmic Explorer. (Eddie Anaya, California State University Fullerton)

To put the capability of Cosmic Explorer in perspective, while Advanced LIGO has made around 100 detections of colliding black holes since 2015, Cosmic Explorer will be able to detect every collision in the visible universe–about 100,000 per year, or one every five minutes. Cosmic Explorer will also see around one million neutron star mergers each year, allowing scientists to understand the nature of nuclear matter and the creation of heavy elements.

Gravitational wave detectors, like Cosmic Explorer, are large-scale interferometers. Interferometry is an extremely sensitive measurement technique that uses mirrors, laser beams and interference (the adding or canceling of combined beams) to measure the displacement of a mirror caused by the ripples from gravitational waves. The advanced detectors help researchers map black holes in the universe, something not previously possible with telescopes since, unlike stars, black holes do not produce light.

Physicists from ��ϲ��, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Pennsylvania State University, California State University, Fullerton, and University of Florida during a proposal-writing workshop at ��ϲ��’s Minnowbrook Conference Center.

In October 2022, Cosmic Explorer project collaborators came together for a proposal-writing workshop at ��ϲ��’s Minnowbrook Conference Center, resulting in over $9M of federal funding to the project. ��ϲ�� is receiving $1.64M of funding over the next three years as part of that NSF commitment.

Among the researchers from the College of Arts and Sciences who recently received funding for their work with Cosmic Explorer are��, professor of physics and founding director of CGWAA; Georgia, assistant professor of physics; Craig, research professor of physics; and ��Ի��, professors in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, whose grant will involve site evaluation for the proposed observatory.

“Without the support of NSF, this important work would not be possible,” says Ballmer. “When we established the Center for Gravitational Wave Astronomy and Astrophysics, the idea was to strengthen ��ϲ��’s status as a pioneer in the field of gravitational wave detection. These awards from the NSF affirm that commitment and will establish the center as a key player in enabling the Cosmic Explorer project to come to fruition.”

To read the full story, .

Physics Department Holds 2nd Annual Paid Internship Program for Aspiring Young Scientists in ��ϲ��

Dan Bernardi — Thu, 24 Aug 2023 17:12:17 +0000

In 20 years, when you ask a group of scientists to recall the moment they decided they wanted to pursue a career in STEM, they might say it happened on the campus of ��ϲ�� in the summer of 2023.

Students from ��ϲ��-area high schools participated in this summer’s ��ϲ�� Research in Physics paid internship program. The students presented their research during a culminating poster session on Aug. 4 in the Physics Building.

Thanks to the ��ϲ�� Research in Physics (SURPh) paid internship program, ��ϲ�� City School District (SCSD) students and recent graduates spent six weeks on campus in labs and in classrooms where they worked alongside faculty to engage in cutting-edge research. Among the topics explored, students took a dive into the world of invisible subatomic particles, known as neutrinos, and probed the inner regions of distant galaxies using computational astrophysics.

SURPh was an idea developed last year by rising senior physics major��, who is also an alum of SCSD. The program provides SCSD students the unique opportunity to work as a paid scientist before entering college, which organizers hope will inspire the young researchers to continue in STEM.

The program is led by��, professor and department chair of physics, and also includes co-organizers Melanie Pelcher, a science teacher at Henninger High School in ��ϲ��, Devon Lamanna ’23, an SCSD alum who majored in economics in the and is now pursuing a master’s in the same subject, and Yudaisy Salomón Sargentón, operations specialist for the Department of Physics.

Now in its second year, SURPh is a collaboration of Arts and Sciences and SCSD and is supported in part by the , , and . The program welcomed 12 new student participants and five that returned from last year’s cohort to serve as near-peer mentors.

Faculty instructors included physics professors , who specializes in computational astrophysics and simulations of black holes and stars; , who focuses on experimental biophysics and bacterial biofilms; , who specializes on experimental biophysics and microtubule self-organization; and and , who specialize in experimental neutrino physics.

Physics professors Denver Whittington (second from left) and Mitch Soderberg (third from right) with the experimental neutrino physics research group.

The program wrapped up with a poster session where students presented their research to their peers, faculty, local high school teachers and families in the University’s physics building.

“It is exciting to see the science these students are able to achieve in just six weeks,” says Ross. “It is even more exciting that so many wanted to return as mentors and to do science with us a second summer. To me, that is the impact—creating the longitudinal pipeline going into the future.”

While one of the major goals of the program is to instill in these students an interest in science, Ross hopes the six weeks on campus serves as a recruiting tool that will bring them back to ��ϲ�� for the next step in their academic journey.

“(At the poster session) one local teacher said that the students from his school are all saying that ��ϲ�� is a top pick for them to go to college, and he wasn’t sure they were thinking about college before,” says Ross. “That is a major win. Any kids who continue their school after this is a win. Any kid who stays with science is a win. If they pick physics, double win. My top-level goal is to have a student do this program, major in physics, decide to stick with it for a Ph.D. and come back to teach for us at ��ϲ��. We are trying to create our own pipeline of diverse talent from the local neighborhoods up.”

Ross says they plan to hold the event again next year and will get started in December with recruiting at local high schools.

From left: Fayetteville-Manlius High School student Anusha Saxena, Institute of Technology at ��ϲ�� Central student Miranda Azemi (center) and Fowler High School Syan Castro present their research posters.

All photos by Yudaisy Salomón Sargentón

A&S Physicists Design Technology Used to Discover New Information About What the Universe Is Made Of

News Staff — Wed, 12 Jul 2023 01:37:43 +0000

Physics graduate student Hangyi Wu gets ready to utilize a vacuum pick-up tool designed by the High-Energy Physics group for one of the delicate operations involved in assembling the instrumented staves.

physicists just launched a new tracking device to research the fundamental forces and particles in the universe. The device, known as the Upstream Tracker, was installed at the renowned European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) laboratory on the Swiss-French border just outside of Geneva, which uses some of the world’s largest and most complex scientific instruments to study fundamental particles.

The Upstream Tracker is part of an ambitious upgrade to the “Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb)” experiment taking data at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, which aims to uncover information about the universe through science known as new physics. New physics is knowledge that enhances the current understanding of how the universe works. The university’s High-Energy Physics group working at LHCb led an international team of collaborators that designed and constructed this detector.

The installation is the culmination of a decade of research and work, led by physics professor��. The project received nearly $7 million in awards from the National Science Foundation, with a majority of the funds going directly to ��ϲ�� research.

The Upstream Tracker will help scientists search for knowledge beyond the “Standard Model” of physics, which is the current best theory about the building blocks of the universe. The Upstream Tracker is a crucial component of the LHCb tracking system, used to reconstruct the positions of the subatomic particles produced in the proton-proton collisions, and is part of a high-speed processor that implements sophisticated algorithms to make real-time decisions about what to record. It’s technology that will empower physicists to make key discoveries about fundamental particles.

While the Standard Model explains a great deal about the physical matter and forces in the universe, there are significant phenomena that it doesn’t explain, says Artuso, like the existence of dark matter and dark energy, which are invisible but account for about 95 percent of the universe, and the reason why the current universe is stable. The LHCb and Upstream Tracker were designed to help physicists solve these big mysteries through new physics.

Graduate students Andy Beiter, Joseph Shupperd and Michael Wilkison perform the final checks on five instrumented staves which are secured in complex shipping structures to safely deliver them to CERN.

Nearly 50 undergraduate students and tens of graduate students contributed to this project over the years and several ��ϲ�� faculty members played key roles, including the late��Sheldon Stone, who served as project deputy, along with physics professor��, who led test beam studies of detector prototypes, associate physics professor��, who led the sensor acquisition, physics professor��, who is leading the software effort to process the detector information. Physics research assistant professor��was a key player in the detector mechanics and oversaw the production of the detector units in the clean rooms built for this project.

“One of the main tenets of my physics work is to solve mysteries about how the universe works through new physics. But, new physics can be very subtle, elusive, and difficult to detect. Nature wants us to work a little harder to find these secrets. The Upstream Tracker is a key component of the upgraded LHCb detector that is poised to observe rare processes between particles that occur below the current sensitivity level,” says Artuso.

For the full Q&A with Artuso and a pair of alumni share their experience on this project and offered insights about what they hope this device will contribute to human knowledge, visit .

Story written by Emily Halnon.

Physics and Mathematics Major Chance Baggett ’24 Named an Astronaut Scholar

Jen Plummer — Fri, 26 May 2023 14:01:46 +0000

Chance Baggett, a rising senior in the studying physics and mathematics and a member of the Renée Crown University Honors Program, has been named a 2023-24 Astronaut Scholar by the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation (ASF).

Founded by the Mercury 7 astronauts, the foundation awards scholarships to students in their junior or senior year who are pursuing a science, technology, engineering or mathematics (STEM) degree with intentions to pursue research or advance their field upon completion of their degrees. Astronaut Scholars are among the best and brightest minds in STEM who show initiative, creativity and excellence in their chosen field.

After graduating from ��ϲ��, Baggett plans to pursue a doctoral degree and research career in the field of physics. His current research, under the mentorship of , focuses on theoretical self-folding origami, an emerging branch of soft matter physics, with a particular focus on the role of elasticity in origami, which helps shed light on how certain physical materials function. Future implications of this work include in the fields of medicine, such as determining how misfolded proteins contribute to diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, and space science, helping researchers engineer unique solutions to solar array deployment.

“I find soft matter physics incredibly exciting because it gives me the opportunity to research systems at a scale I can hold in my hand. Paper-folding, beyond a scientific pursuit, allows me to express my creativity in my work,” says Baggett. In addition to his scientific aptitude and curiosity, he has had a personal interest in paper craft since middle school, when he used specialized software to create 3D models of props found in movies or video games from paper. “That’s one thing that excited me about being nominated for the Astronaut Scholarship—it mentioned the role of creativity and the artistic aspect of science, which is really cool to see.”

The Astronaut Scholarship includes funding of up to $15,000 toward educational expenses, a paid trip to the ASF Innovators Week and Gala in Orlando in August, where Baggett will receive the award, and lifelong mentoring and engagement opportunities with the astronauts, Astronaut Scholar alumni, industry leaders and the ASF.

“Chance’s commitment to a research career, and his pursuit of research opportunities in mathematics and physics since his first year at SU, made him an excellent candidate for the Astronaut Scholarship,” says Jolynn Parker, director of the .�� “We’re delighted this award will support him in the work he aims to do in soft matter physics.”

Studying remotely in his first year at ��ϲ��, Baggett became interested in theoretical particle physics and conducted research with . After taking nuclear physics, he embarked on a research project modeling gamma flux through lead using Geant4 software simulations. This work culminated in an oral presentation at the ��ϲ�� Office of Undergraduate Research and Creative Engagement (SOURCE) Research Festival this past spring, where Baggett illustrated a counterintuitive relationship between particle flux and lead thickness.

For the next phase of his research career, Baggett will continue his exploration of soft matter physics and hopes to pursue study in atomic molecular and optical (AMO) physics at the graduate level. This summer, he received funding to conduct a National Science Foundation REU (research experience for undergraduates) project on theoretical ultracold atomic physics at Washington State University and plans to use the opportunity to explore the critical role that atomic physics plays in nano-scale origami mechanisms.

“I really love physics, and even after four years of studying, it feels like I’m only at the surface,” Baggett says. “I’m still itching to learn more, and there’s so much more to explore, so I’m compelled to keep learning physics for as long as I can.”

“The 2023 Class of Astronaut Scholars is truly exceptional and embodies the passion, dedication and innovation that will propel us into the future of STEM,” says Caroline Schumacher, ASF’s president and CEO. “We are excited to support these outstanding individuals in their endeavors and cannot wait to witness their achievements as the game-changers of tomorrow.”

Created in 1984, ASF awarded its first seven scholarships in honor of its founding members, Scott Carpenter, Gordon Cooper, John Glenn, Virgil “Gus” Grissom, Walter Schirra, Alan Shepard and Deke Slayton. Each founding member sponsored a $1,000 scholarship and began to fundraise to support future scholarships by donating proceeds from their speaking engagements. The incredible efforts of these legends have shaped ASF’s mission to support and reward exceptional college students pursuing degrees in STEM fields. Over the past 39 years, more than $8.3 million has been awarded to nearly 800 students.

As a university partner of the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation, ��ϲ�� can nominate two students for the Astronaut Scholarship each year. Interested students should contact CFSA for information on the nomination process (cfsa@syr.edu; 315.443.2759). More information on the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation can be found on .

‘Fishing’ for Biomarkers

Dan Bernardi — Fri, 14 Apr 2023 13:06:14 +0000

While a popular hobby for many, fishing is also a pastime full of uncertainty. Each time you have something on the line, you can never be completely sure what type of fish you’ve hooked until you pull it out of the water. In a similar way, scientists “fishing” for biomarkers—molecules whose health care applications include signaling for the presence of cancer—in such biofluids as blood can also encounter unpredictability. Finding a specific protein biomarker in a pool of thousands is like trying to catch a particular fish species in the vast ocean.

Luckily, a team of researchers from the (A&S), SUNY Upstate Medical University, Ichor Therapeutics and Clarkson University have devised a tiny, nano-sized sensor capable of detecting protein biomarkers in a sample at single-molecule precision. Fittingly coined as “hook and bait,” a tiny protein binder fuses to a small hole created in the membrane of a cell—known as a nanopore—which allows ionic solution to flow through it. When the sensor recognizes a targeted molecule, the ionic flow changes. This change in flow serves as the signal from the sensor that the biomarker has been found.

“These nanopores are equipped with hooks that pull certain protein biomarkers from a solution,” says��, professor of physics in A&S, who co-authored the study along with postdoctoral researcher��. “By fishing them from the solution quickly and accurately, we can better identify and quantify protein biomarkers that are associated with various hematological malignancies and solid tumors.”

The team’s latest research, published in��, addresses previous challenges that existed in making this technology generalizable. Their new findings formulate a sensor design architecture that can be applied to a broad range of protein targets.

This graphic illustrates three distinct protein binders attached to the same nanopore. Such modular nanostructures form three individual sensors to detect three target proteins. Because only a tiny part of the binder is altered for a target protein, this nanopore is generic for a broad spectrum of targets. (Image courtesy of Mohammad Ahmad)

Combining Innovative Technologies

For the first time, the team coupled nanopore technology with antibody mimetic technology—artificially designed protein scaffolds that bind and interact with a specific biomarker and behave like antibodies. Cells inside the body design their own antibodies which bind to and eliminate unwanted substances. When it comes to therapeutics, scientists engineer small proteins to penetrate cells and stimulate the production of antibodies which target specific pathogens like viruses or bacteria.

“Researchers design the scaffolds using established scaffolds from mother nature and adapt them using evolutionary mutagenesis—where they scan billions of DNA mutations until they find some that interact strongly with a specific protein,” says Movileanu, whose work on the project was supported by a from the National Institutes of Health. “Creating highly specific protein detection technologies will address these demands and also accelerate discoveries of new biomarkers with potential consequences for the progression of pathological conditions.”

Movileanu

According to Movileanu, in addition to working in a clean solution, the sensor is also highly effective in complex biofluids, like blood serum, that contain numerous antibodies.

“Essentially you have a very specific hook that targets a very specific protein,” he says. “Since the signal encodes the exact protein that you are targeting, this technique does not have false positives, making it practical for biomedical diagnostics.”

To validate their findings, the team tested their hypothesis using a blood serum sample. With their technology, they were able to identify and quantify epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR), a protein biomarker in various cancers. In addition, numerous calibrations of the sensors were conducted using other biophysical techniques.

At the Forefront of Diagnosis

While their paper provides a concept prototype, Movileanu says the project paves the way for broad applications. For example, by integrating the sensors into nanofluidic devices, this technology would allow scientists to test for many different biomarkers at once in a specimen, providing a fundamental basis for biomarker detection in complex biofluids.

“The future of medicine won’t rely as much on imaging and biopsies when diagnosing cancers,” says Movileanu. “Instead, researchers will use nano-sensor technology, like what we are developing in our lab, to test blood samples for the presence of various biomarkers associated with different cancers. This research is critical to the future of prognostics, diagnostics and therapeutics.”

3 Faculty Members Collect Top National Awards and Grants

Dan Bernardi — Fri, 24 Mar 2023 20:38:53 +0000

Professors Tripti Bhattacharya, Alison Patteson and Olga Makhlynets (left to right).

A trio of faculty members have received highly competitive national awards in recognition of their commitment to teaching and research excellence. , Thonis Family Professor of Earth and environmental sciences, and��, assistant professor of physics, were named��Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellows, an honor recognizing early-career scholars who represent the most promising scientific researchers working today. In addition, Patteson received a 2023��Cottrell Scholar��award, a national honor that ranks her among the country’s best faculty researchers and teachers from the fields of astronomy, chemistry and physics.

Adding to the significant list of awards, Patteson, Bhattacharya and chemistry professor��have also won National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER grants, the NSF’s most competitive award in support of early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education. Last year,��won CAREER awards, which marked the most for the College in a single year. With several CAREER proposals still pending, A&S could exceed that total in 2023.

“Sloan fellowships, Cottrell Scholar awards and NSF CAREER grants are among the most prestigious distinctions for early career researchers, and we are incredibly fortunate to have winners of each in A&S this year,” says Alan Middleton, A&S associate dean of research and scholarship. “These honors affirm our standing as a premier research institution. I congratulate Tripti, Alison and Olga, and look forward to seeing their future research breakthroughs.”

To learn more about these faculty members, their awards and research visit .

A Star’s Unexpected Survival

Dan Bernardi — Tue, 07 Feb 2023 20:17:14 +0000

Hundreds of millions of light-years away in a distant galaxy, a star orbiting a supermassive black hole is being violently ripped apart under the black hole’s immense gravitational pull. As the star is shredded, its remnants are transformed into a stream of debris that rains back down onto the black hole to form a very hot, very bright disk of material swirling around the black hole, called an accretion disc. This phenomenon – where a star is destroyed by a supermassive black hole and fuels a luminous accretion flare – is known as a tidal disruption event (TDE), and it is predicted that TDEs occur roughly once every 10,000 to 100,000 years in a given galaxy.

This illustration shows a glowing stream of material from a star as it is being devoured by a supermassive black hole in a tidal disruption flare. When a star passes within a certain distance of a black hole – close enough to be gravitationally disrupted – the stellar material gets stretched and compressed as it falls into the black hole. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

With luminosities exceeding entire galaxies (i.e., billions of times brighter than our sun) for brief periods of time (months to years), accretion events enable astrophysicists to study supermassive black holes (SMBHs) from cosmological distances, providing a window into the central regions of otherwise-quiescent – or dormant – galaxies. By probing these “strong-gravity’’ events, where Einstein’s general theory of relativity is critical for determining how matter behaves, TDEs yield information about one of the most extreme environments in the universe: the event horizon – the point of no return – of a black hole.

TDEs are usually “once-and-done” because the extreme gravitational field of the SMBH destroys the star, meaning that the SMBH fades back into darkness following the accretion flare. In some instances, however, the high-density core of the star can survive the gravitational interaction with the SMBH, allowing it to orbit the black hole more than once. Researchers call this a repeating partial TDE.

A team of physicists, including lead author Thomas Wevers, Fellow of the European Southern Observatory, and co-authors Eric Coughlin, assistant professor of physics at ��ϲ��, and Dheeraj R. “DJ” Pasham, research scientist at MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, have proposed a model for a repeating partial TDE. Their findings, published in��, describe the capture of the star by a SMBH, the stripping of the material each time the star comes close to the black hole, and the delay between when the material is stripped and when it feeds the black hole again. The team’s work is the first to develop and use a detailed model of a repeating partial TDE to explain the observations, make predictions about the orbital properties of a star in a distant galaxy, and understand the partial tidal disruption process.

To read the full piece, visit .

A Warm Winter Welcome to Newest Arts and Sciences Faculty

Diana Napolitano — Thu, 26 Jan 2023 21:34:00 +0000

Continuing its trajectory of robust faculty hiring in , the College of Arts and Sciences (A&S) announces the following new professors in the humanities and the sciences, whose appointments began in January 2023.

“We are pleased and proud that these new professors are joining our A&S community of top-tier faculty and high-achieving students,” says Interim Dean Lois Agnew. “With their unparalleled subject matter expertise and dedication to teaching, they will be instrumental in helping students gain the flexibility and knowledge needed for success, wherever the future takes them.”

Read more about their research and teaching interests in the profiles below.

African American Studies

Dima

, professor and department chair

Dima is a film specialist interested in sound studies (how cinematic sound generates its own stories and sonic spaces), cultural studies and tracing the genealogy of meaning in African visual texts. While his main interest lies in African Francophone cinema, he has also researched and written about French cinema, film theory, Hitchcock, Tarantino/American auteur cinema and other topics.

“I aim to nurture a relationship built on mutual trust and open communication with my students, through the core teaching philosophy of the liberal arts: close student-teacher interaction, a sense of openness and flexibility, underlining the importance of finding one’s passion and offering students the tools to realize that passion.”

Earth and Environmental Sciences

, assistant professor
(joint appointment in civil and environmental engineering in the College of Engineering and Computer Science)

Mohammed’s research focuses on the hydrology and hydrogeology of environments undergoing rapid changes due to climate change and increased development. He is interested in the movement of water, energy and chemicals through landscapes, and their interacting effects on hydrologic processes such as permafrost thaw, groundwater recharge, seawater intrusion and contaminant transport.

Mohammed (left) and Russell

His research aims to improve understanding of, and ability to predict, hydrological processes in a changing climate and develop management strategies to enhance the resiliency of water and ecosystem resources.

, assistant professor

Russell specializes in seismology. His research uses measurements of ground vibrations from seismic waves to create images of Earth’s interior and illuminate its structure, composition and dynamics. This involves collecting new datasets from unexplored reaches of the globe as well as developing leading-edge computational and analytical tools. He teaches courses in Earth science, earthquake seismology and geophysical imaging and is a member of ��ϲ��’s Energy and Environment Research Cluster.

“Central to my teaching philosophy is a lowering of the divide between teaching and research in order to bring the excitement of research and scientific discovery into the classroom. Development of data-driven lectures are a key component of this effort. By infusing openly available datasets directly into lectures via interactive elements, students can explore complex phenomena and ideas in an approachable way.”

Pettolina

Forensics

, professor of practice

Pettolina is a forensic expert with more than a decade of experience. She has been involved in thousands of cases and has appeared as an expert witness in numerous trials. She has more than 1200 hours of specialized certificate training and is certified as a senior crime scene analyst through the International Association of Identification.

“My teaching philosophy aims to enhance student engagement through an active learning method that cultivates critical thinking and students’ analytical abilities. I aim to bring an open mind, a positive approach and high expectations to my classroom. I encourage my students to review past and current research on national best practices and I expose my students to hands-on approaches to contribute to the body of research. My pedagogical focus is to develop the next leading forensic experts in the field.”

Languages, Literatures and Linguistics

, assistant professor

Singerman is a linguist specializing in the Indigenous languages of the Amazon Basin. Since 2013, he has conducted field research into Tuparí, a Brazilian language spoken by approximately 350-400 people. His research seeks to contextualize Tuparí grammar in the broader landscape of linguistic typology and to investigate areas of Tuparí grammar of interest to linguistic theory. His research synthesizes various strands of linguistic inquiry, including historical linguistics.

Singerman (left) and Surovi

“My goal as a teacher of linguistics is to present material in a way that builds upon my students’ innate knowledge as speakers/signers of natural languages, while also challenging them to recognize the value—cultural, historical, intellectual—of minoritized languages, including Indigenous languages. I provide my students with plenty of opportunities to work directly with data; by doing so, I aim to show them the major empirical phenomena that have motivated the development of linguistic theory.”

, assistant teaching professor and Italian language program coordinator

Surovi specializes in Italian Renaissance literature and culture and has taught both undergraduate and adult learners. She also has extensive experience with college in prison initiatives. Surovi is an active member of several professional associations in Italian and Renaissance studies and has also published a number of book reviews in journals such as Italica, Forum Italicum��Ի��Quaderni d’italianistica.

“My teaching promotes a communicative, multiliteracy approach in the classroom and encourages a welcoming and positive environment that motivates students to move beyond their comfort zone to discover new perspectives through the study of Italian language, literature and culture.”

Physics

, assistant professor

Mansell’s research background is in optics, lasers and instrumentation for interferometric ground-based gravitational-wave detectors. Her Ph.D. research was on squeezed states of light for gravitational-wave detectors and her postdoctoral work was on commissioning the advanced LIGO (laser interferometer gravitational-wave observatory) detectors. She will be building an inclusive research group at ��ϲ�� and setting up a new lab space focused on testing technologies for future gravitational-wave detectors.

Mansell (left) and Nitz

“I hope to share my knowledge and excitement around experimental physics with students. I plan to maintain close ties to the LIGO observatories and hope to send students to the sites to work on gravitational-wave detector hardware. Some of the technical skills integral to gravitational-wave detection include classical and quantum optics, electronics, controls and mechanical design. I also strongly believe in the importance of diverse collaboration.”

, associate professor

Nitz’s research focuses on understanding the Universe with gravitational-wave astronomy and the astrophysics of compact objects. He has contributed to the detection of the first observed binary black hole merger (GW150914) and neutron star merger (GW170817). His interests include the study of neutron stars, black holes and dark matter in addition to high-performance data analysis techniques and the development of next-generation gravitational-wave observatories.

“My hope is to share the excitement of scientific discovery and the wonder present in the Universe around us. Students should see how cutting-edge science is conducted while getting opportunities inside and outside the classroom to explore and work with publicly available astronomy datasets. My goal is for students to cultivate their curiosity in addition to their critical thinking capabilities.”

Annual Wali Lecture Will Honor the Life and Legacy of Physics Professor Kameshwar C. Wali

Dan Bernardi — Tue, 01 Nov 2022 15:52:21 +0000

��ϲ�� will hold the 2022 Kashi and Kameshwar C. Wali Lecture in the Sciences and Humanities on Friday, Nov. 4, to honor the life and legacy of Professor Kameshwar C. Wali, in-person and

Kameshwar C. Wali

The program will begin at 4 p.m. in Hendricks Chapel with the welcome message provided by Karin Ruhlandt, Distinguished Professor of Chemistry in the College of Arts and Sciences (A&S), and a lecture given by Abhay Ashtekar, Eberly Professor at Penn State University, and Dympna Carmel Callaghan, William Safire Professor of Modern Letters and University Professor in A&S. The lecture will be followed by remembrances given by Aharon Davidson, Barbara Lust, George Campbell and Tess Gallagher.

Kameshwar C. Wali was the Steele Professor of Physics Emeritus in the College of Arts and Sciences. He was internationally recognized as a theorist for his research on the symmetry properties of fundamental particles and their interactions, and, as an author. His books include “Cremona Violins: A Physicist’s Quest for the Secrets of Stradivari” (World Scientific, 2010) and “Chandra: A Biography of S. Chandrasekhar” (University of Chicago Press, 1991).

A ��ϲ�� faculty member since 1969, Wali also held positions at Harvard and Northwestern universities, the University of Chicago, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (Israel), Institute des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques (France) and the International Center for Theoretical Physics (Italy). He is a fellow of the American Physical Society, whose India Chapter named him Scientist of the Year, and is a recipient of the Chancellor’s Citation at ��ϲ�� for exceptional academic achievement. He was also one of the founding members of the University Lecture Series.

The Kashi and Kameshwar C. Wali Lecture in the Sciences and Humanities was established by his daughters, Alaka, Achala and Monona as an expression of their admiration and gratitude for their parents’ vision, leadership and dedication to the University and the greater community.

The lecture was inaugurated in 2008 and has been offered annually except for 2020, when it was suspended because of the pandemic. The Wali lecture is put on in partnership with the ��ϲ�� Humanities Center.

Donations in honor of Kameshwar can be made to the Kashi and Kameshwar C. Wali Lecture in the Sciences and Humanities at ��ϲ�� and mailed to the following: Office of Advancement and External Affairs, 640 Skytop Road, 2nd Floor ��ϲ��, New York 13244. Gifts can also be made through an .

Faculty Members Schiff, Yung Recognized by Technology Alliance of CNY

Diane Stirling — Tue, 25 Oct 2022 15:25:50 +0000

Two ��ϲ�� faculty members have been honored for their research sector and teaching work by the ��(�մ��䱷��).

The organization recognized , professor of physics in the , and , associate teaching professor of in the (ECS). Schiff was presented with the organization’s 2022 Lifetime Achievement Award and Yung was recognized as College Educator of the Year. The awards were presented at the group’s recent 22nd annual celebration event.

Eric Schiff

Schiff began teaching at the University in 1981. He has twice chaired the and has led initiatives that more than tripled the number of undergraduates in that major while expanding the department’s sponsored research efforts. While associate dean for the natural sciences and mathematics departments, he oversaw the $110 million Life Sciences Complex construction project and had management responsibility for eight academic departments. He also served for a time as interim executive director for the ��ϲ�� Center of Excellence (��ϲ��CoE) in Environmental and Energy Systems.

Schiff’s research areas include solar cell device physics and semiconductor charge carrier transport. He has co-authored more than 100 research publications with more than 3,000 citations and is a co-inventor on three U.S. patents. He also has been principal investigator for many externally funded projects from such government agencies as the Department of Energy and National Science Foundation, and corporations including United Solar Ovonic LLC, Boeing, First Solar and SRC. He additionally spent research leaves working with Silicon Valley companies, and for three years he was program director for the U.S. government’s Advanced Research Projects Administration–Energy.

Pun To (Doug) Yung

Yung came to the University in 2016 after a six-year teaching career at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. In addition to his current role as an associate teaching professor, he also serves as undergraduate program director for ECS’s program. He advocates a hybrid teaching and learning environment that includes project-based, hands-on work, experiential activities and peer collaboration.

Yung has received a number of educational recognitions. They include a NASA postdoctoral fellowship in 2008 and several awards from the Chinese University of Hong Kong: the vice chancellor’s exemplary teaching award (2012), dean’s exemplary teaching award from the faculty of engineering (2011 and 2012), and outstanding teaching award from the department of electronic engineering (2010, 2011, 2012 and 2013).

His research focuses on the interfacing of microbes with engineering tools on the micro- and nanoscale levels, finding methods to rapidly assess the viability of superbugs and to harness energy from extremophiles using a combination of electrochemical, optical techniques and MEMS devices. Yung also assists with the , which helps undergraduate students learn about design, product development and intellectual property, then create and prototype an original invention and receive feedback from guest evaluators.

He earned dual bachelor’s degrees in electrical engineering and in mathematics and applied sciences in 2003 from the University of California, Los Angeles. He earned a Ph.D. in bioengineering from the California Institute of Technology in 2008.

TACNY was founded in 1903. Its mission is to facilitate community awareness, appreciation and education of technology and to collaborate with like-minded organizations across the region.

Matt Cufari Receives 2022 LeRoy Apker Award from the American Physical Society

Kelly Homan Rodoski — Wed, 19 Oct 2022 15:27:22 +0000

Matt Cufari, a senior physics major in the College of Arts and Sciences, a computer science major in the College of Engineering and Computer Science, a Coronat Scholar and a member of the Renée Crown University Honors Program, has been named the recipient of the 2022 LeRoy Apker Award from the American Physical Society.

The prestigious award, given to just two students per year, recognizes outstanding undergraduate research and is the highest honor awarded to undergraduate physicists in the United States. Cufari is the first ��ϲ�� student to receive the award in its 44-year history.

“Receiving the Apker award is a tremendous honor. I’m incredibly grateful for the encouragement from Professor Coughlin and Professor Ross in pursuing physics at SU and in applying for this award,” says Cufari. “The support and contributions of Professors Coughlin and Ross, and Professor Chris Nixon at the University of Leicester, cannot be overstated.”

Cufari is recognized for verifying the Hills Mechanism as a viable method to generate repeating partial tidal disruption events (TDEs). At ��ϲ��, he studies TDEs under the supervision of , assistant professor of physics in the College of Arts and Sciences.

His work investigates an exciting new field of repeating partial TDEs—where a star is on a bound orbit about a supermassive black hole in a distant galaxy and is repeatedly stripped of its outer envelope through tidal interactions with the black hole. “The mass lost by the star feeds the black hole and generates an ‘accretion flare’ that illuminates the galaxy,” says Coughlin. “The detection of these events—now numbering on the order of tens per year but predicted to be many more in the future as survey science becomes more advanced—yields fundamental insight into the properties of black holes and stars in galactic nuclei.”

Cufari’s work highlights a mechanism for placing the star onto its tightly bound orbit, where the star was originally part of a binary star system and “captured” by the black hole—the Hills Mechanism. In an article in the April 20, 2022, issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters, Cufari used a combination of analytic arguments and numerical simulations to demonstrate that this mechanism can generate repeating partial tidal disruption events and applied it to a specific system, known as ASASSN-14ko. “This work is fundamental and theoretical and promotes a new pathway for creating periodic and energetic outbursts from supermassive black holes,” says Coughlin.

This summer, with undergraduate research grant funding from , Cufari traveled to the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom. There, under the direction of Chris Nixon, associate professor of theoretical astrophysics, he performed simulations of partial TDEs and analyzed the properties of partially disrupted stars.

“Matt Cufari is a superstar student. As with previous Apker winners, we anticipate a long and distinguished career in physics,” says , professor and chair of physics in the College of Arts and Sciences, who nominated Cufari for the award. “We anticipate that Matt will not be the last ��ϲ�� Apker winner, but he is an extraordinary first one.”

Cufari developed a passion for plasma theory and nuclear fusion as a high school student when he began doing research at the University of Rochester Laboratory for Laser Energetics. There, he worked on a project to develop a theoretical framework for images of charged fusion products.

His studies at ��ϲ�� have given him skills in designing physical models of complex systems and solving problems mathematically. “In addition to my work in physics, my coursework in computer science has helped me to understand technologies like reinforcement learning and apply them to my research,” he says.

In his first semester at ��ϲ��, Cufari joined a research project in the quantum information lab of , professor of physics, developing a parameter estimation software for superconducting circuits. Since his sophomore year, Cufari has worked with Coughlin researching theoretical astrophysics.

In May, Cufari was named a 2022-23 Astronaut Scholar by the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation. Earlier this year, he was selected for a 2022 Goldwater Scholarship.

He is a member of the Tau Beta Pi engineering honor society, the American Astronomical Society and the Society of Physics Students. Cufari plans to earn a Ph.D. in physics and pursue a career in astrophysics research.

BioInspired Institute’s First Symposium Provides Continuing Inspiration for Research Cluster Initiative

Diane Stirling — Thu, 13 Oct 2022 16:03:24 +0000

Energy. Excitement. Enthusiasm. Opportunity.

Those words convey the atmosphere evident at last week’s inaugural BioInspired Institute symposium and the sentiments of students, faculty, staff, University leaders and external stakeholders attending the event to describe the research cluster’s efforts of the past three-plus years.

In celebration of academic excellence and institutional collaboration, nearly 140 attendees overflowed the Life Sciences Building atrium, where 57 undergraduate and graduate students and postdoctoral fellows presented posters illustrating their interdisciplinary research projects. The work of institute members spans the fields of life science, engineering, physics and chemistry and is focused in bioengineering and biomedical projects involving smart materials, development and disease, and cell form and function.

As the first in-person conference the institute has been able to host, the event represented the diversity of projects being undertaken by undergraduate and graduate students and postdoctoral researchers, along with faculty from dozens of interdisciplinary research labs. The unique collaboration features initiatives by faculty and students in the College of Arts and Sciences and College of Engineering and Computer Science, and uniquely also includes researchers and centers at neighboring institutions SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry and SUNY Upstate Medical University.

Fifty-seven students presented project posters. (Photo by Angela Ryan)

Setting A ‘High Bar’

Chancellor Kent Syverud expressed enthusiasm at how the institute has intertwined diverse interdisciplinary interests, generated projects bridging two University colleges and forged new working relationships among colleagues at three different academic institutions. He said that the institute’s successful evolution is precisely the type of cooperative effort envisioned when the research cluster was first developed and that the College of Arts and Sciences and College of Engineering and Computer Science have “set a high bar for what a collaborative partnership can achieve.” The institute also “has lived up to many dreams already” in work seeking cures for cancer, bioprinting organs and developing smart mesh that communicates medical information, he said. The BioInpsired team is growing quickly too because Invest ��ϲ�� funding has allowed the hiring of 11 new cluster-dedicated faculty this year, with plans in progress to hire 12 more, Chancellor Syverud said.

Postdoctoral fellow Ashis Sinha presents his lightning talk to the audience. (Photo by Angela Ryan)

Vice Chancellor, Provost and Chief Academic Officer Gretchen Ritter said the institute’s pursuits, path and progress, despite two years of COVID challenges since its 2019 founding, is “on this dynamic trajectory that, for me, is a model for a lot of the work that we want to do at the University more broadly.” Ritter said she is deeply encouraged by the institute’s record of training 120 students and post doctoral fellows, engaging over 60 faculty from three different institutions, and significantly boosting the dollar value of grants received. All of those markers “are evidence of the power of this interdisciplinary approach,” she said.

M. Lisa Manning, director of the institute and William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Physics in the College of Arts and Sciences, enjoyed seeing how the conference facilitated interactions among researchers from various disciplines, allowed visual presentations of the breadth of research underway and generated connections between interdisciplinary collaborators.��“Biochemists find they can better understand neurodegenerative diseases when they think about the involved proteins as a material that self-segregates due to physical interactions,” Manning said. “And biomedical engineers can develop better biomaterials for healing wounds by incorporating new anti-microbial compounds.”

Making Connections

Postdoctoral fellow Ashis Sinha, who came to the institute in 2021 after earning a Ph.D. from Upstate Medical University the year before, presented a poster and a lightning talk on how molecular mechanisms contribute to Rhett syndrome pathology and new therapeutic interventions.��For him, the symposium presented an opportunity to connect with many other researchers. “I work in a neuroscience/biology lab and to learn about the research being undertaken in the physics and biomaterials divisions was intriguing,” Sinha said. “It was also challenging to prepare my presentations with enough detail to convey the challenges of my project and highlight key findings for a non-biology audience. It was a great learning experience.”

Fourth-year doctoral student Jingjing Ji researches behaviors of elastin-like polypeptides and how proteins repel water. (Photo by Diane Stirling)

Another presenter, fourth-year doctoral student Jingjing Ji, said participating in the poster session offered the chance to help her learn to communicate about and understand the relevance and importance of her research. She said she appreciated gaining feedback on her work, which looks at the behaviors of elastin-like polypeptides and how proteins repel water. “I am so glad my modeling work was highly praised by the researchers in the poster session. Now, I am developing an interactive web-based online platform to perform the calculations which will offer a user-friendly interface to the research community.”

Win Thurlow, executive director of ��ϲ��-based biomed industry association MedTech and a BioInspired external advisory board member, said he was impressed by the array of research that is taking place at the institute. “Today has been an exciting day to really witness the depth of the scholarship and to harness the collaborative nature of what’s going on here,” Thurlow said. “It really has the power to be transformative with respect to where we go in the biomed industry and where we go in terms of medical developments. This is exactly the kind of path that we need to take as we look to grow this industry locally, regionally and nationally.”

M. Lisa Manning, institute director, with symposium award winners, from left: Nicole Maurici, Maryam Ramezani, Nghia LeBa Thai, Nicholas Najjar, Amber Ford, Lauren Mayse, Gargi De, Ashis Sinha and Professor of Biology Susan Parks. Not pictured is award winner Mengfei He. (Photo by Angela Ryan.)

Remarkable Energy

Jeremy Steinbacher, the institute’s director of operations, echoed that positive assessment. “The enthusiasm and positive energy at the event was remarkable. We truly got a chance to show��everyone what we have been doing for the last three-plus years in building community and supporting them with programming,” Steinbacher said. “Hopefully, we set a vision for the future and generated even more enthusiasm for continuing to build the institute.”

Awards were presented for poster and presentation talks. The top poster award went to Maryam Ramezani (biomedical and chemical engineering). Lauren Mayse (biomedical and chemical engineering and physics) was awarded second place; third place went to Nicole Maurici (SUNY Upstate Medical University); and Amber Ford (chemistry) received an honorable mention. ��Nicholas Najjar (chemistry) was named as the researcher whose project has the best chance of commercialization. His work involves promising therapeutic substances that may help alleviate nausea, emesis and anorexia in patients undergoing chemotherapy. Nghia LeBa Thai (biomedical and chemical engineering) won the Stevenson Biomaterials Award, with Gargi De (civil and environmental engineering) winning second place. Two awards were presented for lightning-talks to Mengfei He (physics) and Ashis Sinha (biology).

NSF, Department of Energy Grants Enable Physicists to Continue Cutting-Edge Research in Neutrino Discovery

Dan Bernardi — Sun, 18 Sep 2022 20:38:54 +0000

You may not know it, but every second 100 billion extremely tiny, invisible subatomic particles called neutrinos pass through every square centimeter of your hand. Physicist says the reason you didn’t notice is because they rarely interact with matter, so most of those neutrinos moving through your palm, and the entire Earth, come and go without a trace before zooming back off into the universe.

A&S physicists Mitch Soderberg, left, and Denver Whittington have been awarded grants from the National Science Foundation and Department of Energy to fund their neutrino research.

Neutrinos are produced by nuclear reactions and radioactive decay from sources all around us, including the sun, the atmosphere, nuclear reactors and particle accelerators.

“We know neutrinos and their antimatter versions, antineutrinos, would have been around in the early universe, and we want to know if subtle differences in the way they interact could have led to matter coming to be dominant over antimatter in the universe,” says Soderberg, professor and associate chair of physics in the College of Arts and Sciences (A&S).

Nearly 14 billion years ago a tiny, dense, fiery region of space expanded and cooled to become the universe we know today, an event known as the Big Bang. The Big Bang should have created equal amounts of matter and antimatter, which are particles identical in almost every way except for their electrical charge. If that happened, the particles of matter and antimatter would have annihilated one another resulting in a universe containing nothing but leftover energy. Instead, a tiny portion of matter—about one particle per billion—managed to survive.

Understanding how neutrinos—one of the most fundamental, abundant and lightest subatomic particles with mass—interact may be the key to determining why our universe exists. By studying those interactions, ��ϲ�� researchers hope to understand the answers to really big questions, such as why all of the “stuff” in the universe, including stars, planets and people, are made out of matter and not antimatter.

Enhancing Neutrino Detection

In collaboration with physicists around the world, Soderberg and members of his research group have played a key role in historic neutrino discoveries, including a groundbreaking study last year confirming (the states there are three kinds of neutrinos—no more, no less).

Now, Soderberg will serve as principal investigator along with physics Professor on two new grants: one from the and another from the (DOE) to study neutrinos and enhance future detection technology. Their DOE grant is part of the federal government’s $78 million investment funding 58 research projects that will spur new discoveries in high energy physics.

Physicists analyze neutrinos using detectors such as MicroBooNE, a 170-ton experiment at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Illinois. These detectors use cutting-edge technology to record 3D images of neutrino events. Inside Liquid Argon Time Projection Chambers (LArTPC), liquid argon serves as both the neutrinos’ target and the medium that transports the picture of the interaction to custom sensors and electronics that record the data.

“You get beautiful images of the aftermath of a neutrino smacking into an argon atom, which we use as the basis to reconstruct all the details of the interaction and learn about the properties of the instigating neutrino,” Soderberg says.

The support from the NSF and DOE will allow Soderberg and Whittington’s group members to collaborate on neutrino experiments at , which is one of the few places on Earth where a focused beam of neutrinos can be created and aimed at a detector.

A group of researchers from ��ϲ�� are currently at Fermilab working directly on experiments with another team on the ��ϲ�� campus performing analysis and laboratory work.

Whittington, whose neutrino research is also supported by an , will use this round of NSF funding for his ongoing work with an experiment called “.” That project, which includes more than 260 scientists and engineers from 49 institutions in eight countries, is working to capture precision measurements on the behavior of neutrinos by sending a neutrino beam from Fermilab to a location in Minnesota.

“NOvA has already made world-leading measurements and is poised to make the first inroads into neutrino mysteries such as the fundamental differences between neutrinos and antineutrinos, which the (DUNE) will ultimately investigate with next-generation precision,” says Whittington.

The research and development from these grants will play a crucial role in the DUNE project, which is expected to feature multiple LArTPCs each the size of the Physics Building, says Soderberg.

The flagship international experiment hosted by Fermilab already has more than 1,000 researchers, . DUNE will be located 1 mile underground in a former gold mine in South Dakota right in the path of a neutrino beam originating from Fermilab in Illinois. By sending neutrinos from Fermilab 800 miles (1,300 km) through the earth to detectors at the mile-deep Sanford Underground Research Facility, researchers will be able to make definitive determinations of neutrino properties, giving researchers insights into the workings of these fundamental particles.

According to Whittington, the funding will support their investigation of DUNE’s sensitivity to astrophysical neutrino sources like core-collapse supernovae, which are violent explosions that result from the rapid collapse of a star at the end of its life, giving birth to neutron stars and black holes.

“Should one occur in our half of the galaxy while the detectors are operating, collecting data on neutrinos from such an event would shed light onto the processes happening during neutron star and black hole formation,” says Whittington.

Sparking Student Discovery

Through the educational component of these grants, graduate and undergraduate students will work on everything from detector construction and operation at Fermilab and ��ϲ��, to the final data analysis and software development.

“Neutrino experiments at Fermilab tend to operate 24/7 for years at a time, and our group members will take turns with collaborators from around the globe in monitoring the experiments, which nowadays we can do here at ��ϲ�� even if the experiment is in Chicago,” says Soderberg. The team will also create an exhibition about particle physics to be displayed at the Museum of Science and Technology in downtown ��ϲ��.

In addition, the coming year will also usher in a new era of discovery at ��ϲ��, as campus will now be home to a prototype “pixel” LArTPC detector, developed by colleagues at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of Bern. Faculty and students will use the sophisticated detector to study cosmic rays, which like neutrinos, constantly pass through Earth going largely unnoticed. While harmless to humans or any other life on the planet, researchers have been unable to locate the source of these mysterious atom fragments that constantly rain down on the planet.

Students interested in engaging in hands-on, international research and exploring the secrets of neutrinos can learn more by visiting the group website.

Physicist Awarded NSF Grant to Continue Gravitational Wave Detector Research

Renée Gearhart Levy — Sun, 18 Sep 2022 20:11:29 +0000

In March 2023, the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) is set to begin its fourth yearlong observational period. Scientists on site in Hanford, Washington, and Livingston, Louisiana, have spent the last two years on hardware and software upgrades to increase the sensitivity of the detectors, making them capable of sensing “fainter” gravitational waves to detect more events than ever before.

Stefan Ballmer

At the same time, members of the Advanced LIGO team are continuously working on refinements for future observation periods years ahead. , professor of physics in the College of Arts and Sciences, was a member of the team that helped design and build the LIGO detectors.

To continue that work, Ballmer was recently awarded a $555,000 to develop technology for sensing optical cavity mismatches and actuators for suspensions for the next generation detector, a renewal of funding for detector technology for gravitational-wave astrophysics.

The award also provides support for Ballmer’s doctoral students, including Elenna Capote, who is currently on site in Hanford, helping tune the detector alignment and control systems to make sure the detector performs as designed.

“These detectors are complicated machines with thousands of control loops keeping four main mirrors and an additional 30 suspended mirrors aligned and controlled in length to keep the light resonant,” Ballmer says. “Every time you make a change, it really becomes a new detector that has to be re-tuned.”

How LIGO Works

LIGO uses a pair of giant laser detectors called interferometers, located 1,900 miles apart in Hanford, Washington, and Livingston, Louisiana. Each detector contains two 2.5-mile-long vacuum arms—tubes that run perpendicular to one another. A powerful laser beam is split into two and sent down the arms. Mirrors at the end reflect the light back to where the laser beam was split. Since the arms are the same length, the light should take exactly the same time to travel to the mirror at the end of each tunnel and back. But if a gravitational wave passes through Earth, it changes the distance between the mirrors, causing the light beams to return at different times.

By comparing both beams, LIGO is able to measure the stretching of spacetime caused by gravitational waves, a seminal observation first made in 2015 with the first physical confirmation of a gravitational wave generated by two colliding black holes, nearly 1.3 billion light years away.

According to Ballmer, the higher the laser power in the 2.5-mile-long arms, the more accurately scientists can determine the motion of the arm. But the amount of laser power that can be used is currently limited by imperfections in the detectors’ optical system. “The optical phase front of the laser coming back from the detector can get distorted by thermal effects in the mirrors,” he says.

Innovating LIGO

Physics graduate students Elenna Capote (front) and Varun Srivastava (back) working on site at LIGO Hanford in Washington state.

Ballmer is working on a diagnostic camera that records thermal distortions in the detector, allowing scientists to determine their cause and effect. While a prototype camera was developed under a previous award, “this continued support is for deploying that camera and miniaturizing it, making it easier to use on the site,” he says.

The award also supports collaborative research with scientists at MIT to redesign the test mass suspensions for the current detectors to use heavier masses. “Random arrival photons push the test masses around, so the heavier the test masses are, the less they move when they get randomly hit by a photon,” Ballmer explains. “Going to heavier test masses is a way to increase low frequency sensitivity.”

Previous research has focused on new coatings for the mirrors. Under the current grant, Ballmer is also exploring research and development to integrate these coatings on the detector. “The new coatings have much lower thermal noise, but do not work with some auxiliary laser frequencies in the detector. Changing the mirror coatings thus requires other changes in the detector, and so the R&D that’s going under this award is to prototype the new detector systems compatible with the new types of coatings,” he says.

In addition to being used to upgrade the LIGO detectors in its fifth or sixth observation cycle, Ballmer says these developments can be used as a baseline for the next generation of detectors.

Ballmer was a principal investigator on the Cosmic Horizon Explorer Study, a project planning for the third generation of detectors, which will have 10 times the sensitivity of Advanced LIGO. The Cosmic Explorer will push the detection range of black hole and neutron star mergers out into cosmic distances. “We will actually see mergers happening from the very first stars that formed in the universe,” he says.

The 100-page study will inform next steps in NSF funding decisions on the project, which Ballmer says will likely focus on the site proposal and development of the conceptual design for the detector. “We’ve all just seen these beautiful images from the James Webb telescope showing the furthest and earliest galaxies of lights. So, with the Cosmic Explorer, if there are black hole mergers in those early galaxies, we would see them,” he says.

About Stefan W. Ballmer

Ballmer joined ��ϲ�� in 2010. Leading up to his contributions to LIGO’s Nobel Prize-winning work, he received an NSF CAREER Award in 2013 to support detector technology in the era of gravitational wave astrophysics, providing $860,000 of research funding over five years.

In October 2021, Ballmer was named a (APS), for his critical role in the design and commissioning of the Advanced LIGO detectors and the scientific interpretation of their observations, leadership in the development of third-generation gravitational-wave detectors and mentoring of the next generation of gravitational-wave experimenters.

A native of Switzerland, Ballmer has held a visiting associate professor position at the University of Tokyo; a postdoctoral fellowship at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan; and a Robert A. Millikan Fellowship at Caltech. He earned a Ph.D. from MIT and a master’s degree from ETH Zurich in Switzerland. An aviation enthusiast, Ballmer enjoys flying in his spare time, is an instrument flight instructor and holds a commercial pilot license.

A&S Physicists Part of NSF PAARE Grant to Diversify Astrophysics

Renée Gearhart Levy — Wed, 07 Sep 2022 14:25:07 +0000

Through a National Science Foundation (PAARE) grant of more than $1 million, ��ϲ�� will help create a new research and education program intended to diversify the field of gravitational-wave astrophysics, specifically to increase the number of Hispanic/Latinx students to the field.

A&S physicists Stefan W. Ballmer and Georgia Mansell are part of an NSF-funded project to help diversify the field of gravitational-wave astrophysics.

The program builds on an existing collaboration between California State University Fullerton (CSUF), a primarily undergraduate Hispanic-serving institution, and ��ϲ��. The existing PAARE program has supported eight graduate students from traditionally underrepresented backgrounds to graduate with a Ph.D. in physics from ��ϲ��. The new award expands the existing CSUF-��ϲ�� program to two additional Ph.D.-granting partners: Northwestern University and Washington State University.

This program will provide a clear pathway for CSUF students to enter doctoral programs at these three partner universities, including financial and academic support as they transition. The program intends to provide students with a long-term road map for their STEM careers and ensure that admitted students complete the Ph.D. degree and facilitate their becoming leaders in gravitational-wave astrophysics by providing sustained mentoring and actively fostering partnership opportunities.

CSUF is the lead institution on the grant. Principal investigators at ��ϲ�� are , professor of physics, and , assistant research professor of physics, both integrally involved with the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), which provided the first direct observation of gravitational waves in 2015.

“Diversifying the astrophysics community is critically important, enabling a new crop of gravitational wave physicists and enriching the field,” says Mansell. “I’m proud to be involved in the PAARE grant, grateful to be part of a team that puts in the work when it comes to DEI, and happy that the NSF is investing in this initiative.”

Ballmer expects the first graduate students to begin graduate study at ��ϲ�� through the partnership in 2023. “The program will provide a pathway and dedicated support for students all the way to their doctoral degree,” he says.

Ballmer was a member of the team that helped design and build the Advanced LIGO and has NSF funding to continue to develop upgrades. He is also principal investigator on the Cosmic Horizon Explorer Study, planning for the next generation of detectors.

Mansell joined ��ϲ�� in January 2021 and is currently working at the LIGO site in Hanford, Washington, preparing the detector for its upcoming observational run next year. She will be on campus to establish her own lab in spring 2023.

“I am excited to be involved because I’ve worked with some of the current PAARE students who have come to the site through the LIGO collaboration’s fellows program,” says Mansell. “I am hoping future PAARE students will come and work in my lab at SU, once it’s set up.”

Duncan Brown Takes on a New Mission as Vice President for Research (Q&A)

Diane Stirling — Wed, 17 Aug 2022 18:55:46 +0000

Vice President for Research Duncan Brown. Photo by Marilyn Hesler

As the new vice president for research, Duncan Brown steps into a role in which he will orchestrate, support and enable the research, scholarship and creative activities that are central to the mission of the University. He notes that these activities form the ideas that society needs now and in the future.

“It is a critical moment to bring our research and scholarship to bear on both local and global challenges. We need the humanities, public communications and creative arts to help address the problems society is facing,” he says. “We need the fields of science and engineering to address the environmental challenges we’re facing. We need people in the social sciences to address an aging population and food production and distribution. We need people from policy and law to address the policies and legal underpinnings of the technologies we are creating and the framework of society. And at ��ϲ�� we can bring together experts in these and other areas to address society’s greater challenges.”

Brown’s role is to lead the and its component units. That includes providing support to the University’s centers and institutes; advocating for advancements in infrastructure to support the University’s broad range of basic and applied research and creative activities; and empowering our faculty in their scholarly excellence.

Operationally, he helps to support over $100 million in external funding and supervises the work of the , , , and the (SOURCE). He reports to Vice Chancellor, Provost and Chief Academic Officer .

An internationally recognized leader in gravitational-wave astronomy and astrophysics, Brown joined the University in 2007 as an assistant professor in the in the College of Arts and Sciences. Since 2015, he has served as the , a role that he will continue to fill as an active researcher while serving as vice president for research.

In this Q&A, Brown provides insight into his vision for the Office of Research and how he intends to support faculty, students and staff to strengthen and grow research activities across the University community.

Accomplished Physicist Duncan Brown Appointed ��ϲ��’s Next Vice President for Research

News Staff — Fri, 10 Jun 2022 14:31:16 +0000

Gretchen Ritter, vice chancellor, provost and chief academic officer, today announced Duncan Brown, the Charles Brightman Endowed Professor of Physics and an accomplished physicist, has been appointed ��ϲ��’s next vice president for research. Brown’s appointment, which was approved by the Executive Committee of the Board of Trustees, is effective Aug. 15, 2022.

Duncan Brown

“Duncan’s career here at ��ϲ�� is truly a model of leadership, scholarship, innovation, academic excellence and mentorship,” says Ritter. “He has all the professional experience and personal qualities necessary to lead the research, scholarship and creative enterprise and secure our position as a world-class research university. Duncan is well respected among his peers, both on campus and at some of the world’s most preeminent institutions. Duncan is uniquely suited to support ��ϲ��’s faculty scholars in their efforts to pursue and secure external funding that advances their research, scholarship and creative work.”

In his new role, Brown will report directly to Provost Ritter; oversee $100 million in extramural funding across the natural sciences, engineering, education, social sciences and law; support and empower ��ϲ��’s internationally recognized creative and scholarly excellence from artists, architects, directors and writers; and advance centers and institutes that lead the world in fields, including in the humanities, aging studies, autonomous systems policy, disability studies, environmental and energy systems, biological and smart materials, national security, veterans and military families, and quantum computing. Brown will also lead the Office of Research and its component units, including the Office of Sponsored Programs, the Office of Research Integrity and Protections, the Office of Technology Transfer and the ��ϲ�� Office of Undergraduate Research and Creative Engagement (SOURCE). Together, these departments serve as the backbone of ��ϲ��’s research, scholarship and creative support enterprise.

“The role of the vice president for research is to advance all areas of the University’s research, scholarship and creative work,” says Brown. “We have extraordinary faculty, staff and students at ��ϲ��, and we attract gifted students from around the globe who want to expand knowledge through innovation, creativity and discovery. Our vibrant intellectual environment across a wide range of disciplines allows us to recruit world-class scholars. I am excited to help everyone in the University community secure the resources that they need to pursue their research, scholarship and artistic endeavors. Together, we can sustain and build upon our Carnegie R1 designation, reach new heights as a premier research university, and change our community and our world for the better.”

Brown is widely respected by faculty and staff across the University. He chairs the Senate Research Committee; played an integral role in the Cluster Hire Review Working Group, created by Provost Ritter last year; and was a leader in creating the University’s Research Computing group. He was the faculty representative to the University Board of Trustees (2017-19) and serves as a proposal reviewer for funding agencies around the world. Brown has been actively involved in national searches for academic leaders. In fact, he was the chair of the search committee appointed to find the next vice president of research.

“We are fortunate to have an internal leader of Duncan’s caliber to take our research enterprise to the next level,” says Ritter. “I look forward to working with him in his new role and have great confidence in his ability to inspire, empower and support our talented scholars.”

Brown earned a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, was a post-doctoral scholar at Caltech and came to ��ϲ�� in 2007. He is an internationally recognized leader in gravitational-wave astronomy and astrophysics, and was integral to the discovery of gravitational waves by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO). A Fellow of the American Physical Society and a Research Corporation for Science Advancement Cottrell Scholar, he has taught large and small courses at both the graduate and undergraduate levels, including the popular undergraduate course “Introduction to Astronomy,” and established a National Science Foundation-funded program that provides pathways for students from underrepresented groups to pursue a Ph.D. in physics at the University. In the last five years, Brown has co-authored over 50 publications. He has played an integral part in securing more than $15 million in external funding over his 15-year career at ��ϲ��.

Ritter thanked Ramesh Raina, professor and former chair of the department of biology, for serving as interim vice president for research since January 2020.

“Ramesh took on the interim leadership role just as the pandemic gripped our nation. He engineered a remarkable recovery of our research enterprise after the pandemic. As a result, this year will be one of the most productive years on record for ��ϲ��. That’s thanks in large part to Ramesh Raina’s vision, operational prowess and careful stewardship,” says Ritter. “Additionally, he played an integral role in managing the University’s COVID response strategy. He was a key member of the public health team and was responsible for launching and maintaining our effective internal surveillance testing program. I thank him for his leadership and service.”

Ritter also credited Raina for increasing professional development for research faculty and students and effectively deploying the CUSE grant, postdoctoral scholar grant and small equipment grant programs. Raina also led the execution of the faculty hiring strategy for the 2020-21 and 2021-22 academic years. He is co-director of the interdisciplinary major in biotechnology and a member of the core faculty of the Renée Crown University Honors Program.

AFRL-��ϲ�� Consider Quantum Research Pairing, Student Opportunities for Future Collaborations

Diane Stirling — Mon, 06 Jun 2022 19:27:05 +0000

More than 30 ��ϲ�� faculty and leaders and representatives from the convened on campus on May 6 to ideate around future collaboration opportunities. These include combined research initiatives in and quantum computing technology.

This latest meeting follows the March renewal of an Educational Partnership Agreement between the AFRL and ��ϲ�� that provides a unique opportunity for research and development in a number of diverse technical areas.

“The renewal of ��ϲ��’s partnership with AFRL in March and our recent brainstorming session are major steps forward for both parties,” says , vice chancellor, provost and chief academic officer. “Our students will have increased academic, research and internship opportunities and faculty will enjoy access to new scientific collaborators and to AFRL’s world-class lab facilities. Both ��ϲ�� and the AFRL, and indeed the U.S., will benefit from the work of more dedicated scholars focusing on quantum computing inquiry and technology development as well as the AFRL’s other core focus areas.”

The representatives discussed current projects both parties have underway then generated ideas on how to jointly expand their explorations. Ideas included ways to develop new laboratory and academic partner collaborations and to create new undergraduate and graduate student research opportunities.

“Having the ability to work with more great scientific minds, to access the lab’s unique capacities and to align with its worldwide reach is a tremendous opportunity for ��ϲ��,” says J. Michael Haynie, vice chancellor for strategic initiatives and innovation. “We look forward to ongoing productive findings and exceptional research potential for students and faculty as they immerse in cutting-edge thinking, experiments and applications taking shape in quantum information science and the lab’s core competencies of cyber science and technology, processing and exploitation, connectivity and dissemination and autonomy, command and control decision support.”

The AFRL Information Directorate, located in Rome, New York, is the Air Force’s and nation’s premier research organization for command, control, communications, computers, and intelligence and cyber technologies.��It has been for the U.S. Air Force and U.S. Space Force. The lab leads an international alliance of government, academic and industry researchers to accelerate development of quantum technologies. It has received significant government funding to expand its global network of quantum information science collaborators in those sectors, with goals to speed deployment of quantum technologies and develop the workforce needed to meet emerging national security challenges.

Five leaders from the AFRL attended: Michael Hayduk, deputy director, Information Directorate; Don Telesca, chief of the Quantum Information Sciences and Technology Branch; and Laura Wessing, Kathy-Anne Soderberg and Matt LaHaye, principal research scientists.

In addition to Ritter and Haynie, two dozen others represented ��ϲ��, including Interim Vice President for Research Ramesh Raina; College of Engineering and Computer Science Dean J. Cole Smith; College of Arts and Sciences Dean Karin Ruhlandt; Dean of the Graduate School Peter Vanable; and Chris Johnson, associate provost for academic affairs and professor of civil and environmental engineering.

Also present were associate deans of research in the Colleges of Arts and Sciences, College of Engineering and Computer Science, and School of Information Studies, and 13 University faculty members from the departments of physics, information science, and electrical engineering and computer science. Staff members from ��ϲ��’s offices of Community Engagement, Government Relations, Foundation Relations and Research participated as well.

Matt Cufari Named as a 2022-23 Astronaut Scholar

Kelly Homan Rodoski — Wed, 25 May 2022 12:53:14 +0000

Matt Cufari, a senior physics major in the College of Arts and Sciences (A&S), a computer science major in the College of Engineering and Computer Science, a Coronat Scholar and a member of the Renée Crown University Honors Program, has been named 2022-23 Astronaut Scholar by the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation (ASF).

Founded by the Mercury 7 astronauts, the foundation awards scholarships to students in their junior or senior year who are pursuing studies in science, technology, engineering or mathematics and who plan to pursue research or advance their field upon completion of their final degree. Nominees are selected based on their exemplary academic performance, ingenuity and unique aptitude for research.

In addition to funding for educational expenses of up to $15,000, the scholarship includes the opportunity for scholars to represent their institutions and present their research at the Scholar Technical Conference; professional mentoring for one year by scholarship alumni, a C-suite executive or an astronaut; the opportunity to participate in a professional development program and foundation events; and membership in the Astronaut Scholar Honor Society.

Cufari will receive the award during the ASF Innovators Week and Gala held Aug. 24-28 in Orlando, Florida.��

“I’m very honored to be named an Astronaut Scholar. I’m grateful for the help I’ve received from my mentors here at ��ϲ�� and in Rochester; they have guided and supported me in my scientific endeavors, and I would not have had the opportunity to apply for and receive this award without their help,” says Cufari. “I’m also thankful for the Center for Fellowship and Scholarship Advising (CFSA) staff’s encouragement and assistance in applying for the Astronaut Scholarship.”

The Astronaut Scholarship is the latest nationally competitive scholarship Cufari has received. Earlier this year, he was selected for a 2022 Goldwater Scholarship.

“Matt’s extraordinary research profile, and presentation and publication record, made him an outstanding nominee for the Astronaut Scholarship,” says Jolynn Parker, director of the CFSA. “We’re thrilled that this award will support him in the important work he aims to do in astrophysics.”

A member of Tau Beta Pi, Cufari plans to earn a Ph.D. in physics and pursue a career in astrophysics research. His research interests are in drawing connections between laboratory plasmas and astrophysical plasmas to better understand phenomena like tidal disruption events and accretion disk formation.

“I’m interested in the dynamics of highly energetic phenomena that don’t readily occur in our solar system, like accretion onto black holes, the tidal disruption of stars and supernovae,” Cufari says. “These phenomena are exciting, luminous and abundant in the universe. Studying these phenomena is necessary to improve our understanding of the behavior of matter in exotic states and the physical processes which drive those behaviors.”

Cufari developed a passion for plasma theory and nuclear fusion as a high school student when he began doing research at the University of Rochester Laboratory for Laser Energetics (LLE). There, he worked on a project to develop a theoretical framework for images of charged fusion products.

In his first semester at ��ϲ��, Cufari joined a research project in the quantum information lab of Britton Plourde, professor of physics, developing a parameter estimation software for superconducting circuits. Since his sophomore year, Cufari has worked with Eric Coughlin, assistant professor of physics, researching theoretical astrophysics.

Cufari’s first project with Professor Coughlin, on eccentric tidal disruption events, culminated in a paper which was accepted for publication in the Astrophysics Journal. He presented his results to the broader community of astrophysicists this month at the conference of the High Energy Astrophysics Division of the American Astronomical Society.

Cufari and Coughlin are currently investigating chaotic three-body interactions between a supermassive black hole and a binary star system through a National Science Foundation REU. They recently had an article accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal Letters that explains how to reproduce the periodic nuclear transient ASASSN-14ko using these encounters. Cufari was also recently awarded a ��ϲ�� undergraduate research grant (via The SOURCE) to fund his research this summer.

As a university partner of the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation, ��ϲ�� can nominate two students for the Astronaut Scholarship each year. Interested students should contact the CFSA for information on the nomination process (cfsa@syr.edu; 315.443.2759). More information on the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation can be found on .

Black Hole Image Shows Einstein Was Right, Once Again

Daryl Lovell — Thu, 12 May 2022 18:32:45 +0000

Today a team of astronomers announced they successfully captured the first direct image of the black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy.

Duncan Brown

is the Charles Brightman Endowed Professor of Physics at ��ϲ��’s College of Arts and Sciences. Brown was a member of the physics team that detected gravitational waves by LIGO. Brown provided comments when the first supermassive black hole was captured back in 2019. He provides fresh comments below that can be quoted directly. He is available for interviews.

��Brown says:

“Taking a picture of the black hole at the center of our galaxy is an incredible achievement. It shows that Einstein was right, once again.”

“The image shows hot gas swirling around the black hole at the heart of our galaxy. The gas is moving almost as fast as the speed of light. Capturing the image is an amazing feat for the Event Horizon Telescope team.”

To request interviews or get more information:

Daryl Lovell
Associate Director of Media Relations
Division of Communications

M��315.380.0206
dalovell@syr.edu |

The Nancy Cantor Warehouse, 350 W. Fayette St., 4^th Fl., ��ϲ��, NY 13202
news.syr.edu |

��ϲ��

Investing in the Bedrock of Discovery: New Endowed Professorship in Quantum Science

News Staff — Wed, 11 May 2022 21:09:35 +0000

Kathy Walters ’73 and her husband, Stan ’72, can look back over 50 years and easily track the impact ��ϲ�� had on their lives, but their newest gift to their alma mater looks far into the future, for generations to come. “We are investing in the people who do the research that will lead to discoveries that make our world a better place, even decades from now,” says Walters. “Great professors are generation-creators. They impact students and society over decades, even beyond their own lifetimes.”

Kathy Walters

The new gift establishes the Kathy and Stan Walters Endowed Professorship for Quantum Science, creating a new faculty position in the physics department of the College of Arts and Sciences, and promoting research and teaching in quantum science. Because the gift is part of the , the University amplifies the power of their philanthropy.

The $2.25 million investment will help the University recruit and retain the most creative and innovative faculty. “We’re depending on universities to be the bedrock of discovery,” says . “That requires faculty who can think uniquely and do meaningful research that can pave the way to a better future for us all.”

“Kathy and Stan have been exceedingly generous over the years, always focusing their gifts on initiatives that will enhance academic excellence and the student experience,” says Chancellor Kent Syverud. “An endowed professorship directly impacts our ability to attract the most talented scholars, researchers and teachers and opens up more opportunities for scholarship and research among faculty and students.”

Walters, who graduated with a B.S. in mathematics and went on to the Wharton School for an MBA, says she was schooled as an economist, trained to appreciate both the short-term and long-term impacts of consumer behavior, along with business and financial decisions. “The study of mathematics was where I came to understand that if you could frame out how to think about something in a very broad way, you could start to discover new concepts,” says Walters. That’s why, a few years ago, the Walters provided a $1 million gift to support a think tank called the at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs and the research of Len Lopoo, Paul Volcker Chair in Behavioral Economics and professor of public administration and international affairs.

The students in the X Lab learn how to use data and behavioral science to shape human behavior and solve societal problems, helping governments and nonprofits operate more efficiently and improve service delivery.

“Kathy and Stan’s support for Maxwell and their critical investment in the Maxwell X Lab have been an absolute game changer for the study of behavioral economics at SU and being able to work with public sector agencies and nonprofit organizations that would not be able to afford the type of research and program evaluation that can improve their mission and operational effectiveness,” says Maxwell Dean David M. Van Slyke. This work is bringing national recognition to ��ϲ�� and its faculty. “This is exactly what Kathy told me she wanted—philanthropic support, which would support academic excellence and experiential learning that would not only benefit Maxwell, but ��ϲ�� as well.”

The newest gift of an endowed professorship in quantum science is intended to do the same.

“The Walters’ gift will help us recruit more world class researchers and teachers who inspire our students to ask the big questions and seek solutions to life’s biggest problems,” says Jennifer Ross, chair and professor of physics. “The impact of great faculty is immeasurable in the life trajectory of inquisitive students.”

Duncan Brown, Charles Brightman Professor of Physics in the College of Arts and Sciences, whose own research in gravitational wave astronomy is recognized internationally, believes that investments in faculty excellence will help the University build upon its R1 status and become a premier research university, among the finest in the nation. “If you are a student coming to ��ϲ��, you know you’ll be able to work with professors doing world-changing fundamental research and discovery.”

“Young people who have a chance to do research, to test theories and start to build them out—these are the people we need 10 to 20 years before something happens that redefines how we do things,” says Walters.

Brown points out that the field of quantum science has its roots in academic research in the early 1900s. “The technologies required to make an iPhone work, from the screen to the chip inside, are based on rules that were written down 100 years ago by people who had no conception that a device like this could exist. Gifts like this one from the Walters target areas that can revolutionize society.”

Though Kathy Walters is now retired after a long career in business and Stan Walters is now retired after a long career in professional football, both remain fully engaged in helping ��ϲ�� students pursue their dreams and build new futures for themselves and the world around them.

“Every gift ultimately contributes to the student experience and to the development of future citizens,” says Walters. “To invest in the bedrock of discovery is to desire to make a better world.”

About ��ϲ��

��ϲ�� is a private research university that advances knowledge across disciplines to drive breakthrough discoveries and breakout leadership. Our collection of 13 schools and colleges with over 200 customizable majors closes the gap between education and action, so students can take on the world. In and beyond the classroom, we connect people, perspectives and practices to solve interconnected challenges with interdisciplinary approaches. Together, we’re a powerful community that moves ideas,individuals and impact beyond what’s possible.

About Forever Orange: The Campaign for ��ϲ��

Orange isn’t just our color. It’s our promise to leave the world better than we found it. Forever Orange: The Campaign for ��ϲ�� is poised to do just that. Fueled by 150 years of fearless firsts, together we can enhance academic excellence, transform the student experience and expand unique opportunities for learning and growth. Forever Orange endeavors to raise $1.5 billion in philanthropic support, inspire 125,000 individual donors to participate in the campaign, and actively engage one in five alumni in the life of the University. Now is the time to show the world what Orange can do. Visit to learn more.

(Bio)Sensing Protein Interactions

Dan Bernardi — Tue, 22 Mar 2022 20:25:11 +0000

Cartoon of a biological nanopore-based sensor (gray), which detects WDR5 (red) one molecule at a time. The detection signal (bottom) shows a cartoon of what the raw sensor signal looks like. (Courtesy: Lauren Mayse)

The job of a protein hub inside the nucleus of a cell is similar to a chef in a kitchen. Both need to manage multiple tasks efficiently for a successful outcome. For the chef, if they spend too much time chopping vegetables and neglect the main course cooking on the stove, the result is a burnt dish. Similarly, if the protein hub spends too much time interacting with one protein and is not given a break to accomplish its other important tasks, it can lead to disease states such as cancer.

Researchers in the College of Arts and Sciences’ have been studying a protein hub, called WDR5, which is responsible for many important functions within the nucleus. WDR5 has recently been heavily investigated because it is a promising target for anti-cancer drugs. But until now, not much has been known about how WDR5 interacts transiently with other proteins inside the cell because the necessary technology to study WDR5 did not exist. Using a highly sensitive engineered biosensor, researchers have uncovered new information on how WDR5 connects and disconnects with other molecules.

The collaborative project was funded through a four-year,��(R01) from the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS), awarded to��, professor of physics, in 2018. The culminating results of the team’s work have been published in the leading journal��. The research team also includes Lauren Ashley Mayse and Ali Imran, both graduate students in Movileanu’s lab, as well as other researchers at SUNY Upstate Medical University, Ichor Therapeutics and the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

How It Works

The goal of the team’s study was to create an ultra-sensitive device capable of detecting and quantifying WDR5. They designed, developed and validated a nanopore-based biosensor, which creates a tiny hole (nanopore) in a synthetic membrane and can identify proteins in solution at single-molecule precision.

The biosensor’s channel-like base creates a small hole in the synthetic membrane and allows ionic solution to flow through it. When the sensor recognizes a specific molecule, in this case WDR5, the ionic flow changes. This change in flow serves as the signal from the sensor that the targeted protein has been found.

“The idea behind this concept was to design nanopores that are equipped with hooks that pull certain proteins from a solution,” says Movileanu, who is also a member of the��. “By being able to fish them from a solution one at a time, we can better understand how these proteins function.”

A Tool for Detection

The team revealed new details about the conditions under which WDR5 starts and stops talking to other proteins, which is known as protein association and dissociation. This will allow researchers to better understand how these multitasking molecules carry out their various responsibilities.

“Proteins need to talk to each other for brief periods,” says Movileanu. “In the majority of cancers, you have a situation where at least one protein sits on another protein or talks to another protein for much longer than needed. Many biotechnology companies want to develop drugs that perturb those interactions.”

Mayse shares that their study uncovered new information about WDR5’s unique interface, where a peptide must wiggle into its deep and donut shaped cavity. Their discovery will help researchers develop more effective drugs to target WDR5. “We found that our sensor can recognize WDR5 with a weak connection, a medial connection and a strong connection to a peptide,” she says. “This shows that a potential drug must be able to prevent all three different ways a peptide can associate with WDR5.”

Biosensors like the one developed in Movileanu’s lab could one day lead to more accurate and efficient methods of scanning chemicals in the body, providing an opportunity for doctors to detect diseases much earlier than what is attainable today.

“In many diseases, there are markers, chemicals in our body that change quite a bit in a noticeable way when diseases, such as cancer, start to develop,” says Movileanu. “By integrating these sensors into nanofluidic devices that are scalable, we are not too far from being able to scan many markers from a sample of blood.”

Wishing On a Star – Webb Telescope Could Detect Ancient Clusters

Lily Datz — Wed, 01 Dec 2021 15:17:44 +0000

Eric Coughlin

Launching this month, the James Webb Space Telescope will be one of the most revolutionary space exploration technology tools in modern history. Scientists plans to use the powerful telescope to study planets and other bodies in our solar system to learn more about their origin and evolution.

is an assistant professor of physics at ��ϲ��’s College of Arts and Sciences.

Coughlin says:

“The Webb telescope will simultaneously probe the physical evolution of planets within our solar system, the atmospheres of planets in other stellar systems (i.e., exoplanets, and the possibility of life on them), and some of the earliest stars and galaxies to form in the universe, which is an extraordinary breadth of astrophysical areas to explore with a single mission.

“I am especially excited about the possibility of detecting the very first stars, or perhaps clusters of them, known as population III stars. They are thought to be metal-deficient and extremely massive, but for which detailed models are uncertain. Webb will also reveal details about the formation processes of galaxies, and whether proto-galaxies evolve through ‘direct collapse’ or a series of mergers.

“The James Webb Space Telescope will be revolutionary on many distinct fronts.”

To request interviews or get more information please contact Daryl Lovell, media relations manager, at 315.380.0206 or dalovell@syr.edu

Government Agency Features A&S Physicist’s Pentaquark Research

Dan Bernardi — Sun, 21 Nov 2021 23:12:00 +0000

The National Science Foundation’s (NSF’s) 2020 Mathematical and Physical Sciences Directorate (MPS) bi-annual brochure highlighted research by Tomasz Skwarnicki, professor of physics in the College of Arts and Sciences (A&S), and a team of his collaborators. The brochure featured the group’s discovery of new details on the sub-structure of the pentaquark.

Tomasz Skwarnicki

Every two years, the NSF publishes an MPS brochure that describes each of their five divisions, which include astronomical sciences, chemistry, materials research, mathematical sciences and physics.

While initially slated for release in 2020, the latest edition is being circulated now due to delays caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

MPS funds about $1.4 billion in research each year with the Division of Physics spending about $290 million. Only two research highlights from each division are featured in the brochure, making this a notable accomplishment for Skwarnicki and the A&S physics department.

In 2019, Skwarnicki was part of a team that uncovered new information about a class of particles called pentaquarks. Quarks are sub-atomic particles that combine to form the atoms that make up matter.

A pentaquark is a particle containing five quarks. Skwarnicki and his international collaborators, operating the Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) experiment at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN located near Geneva in Switzerland, determined that rather than being composed of five quarks bonded tightly, pentaquarks are instead composed of two smaller structures with one containing three quarks and its partner the other two.

Illustration of the possible layout of the quarks in a pentaquark particle. This image was featured in the 2020 Mathematical and Physical Sciences Directorate (MPS) bi-annual brochure. (Courtesy: Daniel Dominguez/CERN)

“To be selected one of the two most significant results in the last two years over such a large scope of research funded by NSF speaks to the importance of these results, also reflected in the large number of citations in follow-up physics papers published in physics journals and attention of popular science media,” says Skwarnicki. “These results truly advanced our understanding of structures existing at the smallest scale humans are able to probe.”

Skwarnicki’s results were cited in 370 physics journals and he was quoted in articles by , and .

Skwarnicki’s work is featured on page 22 of the .

Physicist Stefan Ballmer Named APS Fellow

Dan Bernardi — Tue, 26 Oct 2021 12:57:23 +0000

Stefan Ballmer

Stefan W. Ballmer, professor of physics in the College of Arts and Sciences, has been named a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS). He joins�� to receive the distinction during the 100 years the award has existed. The fellowship recognizes members who have made advances in physics through original research and publication, or who have made significant contributions in the application of physics to science and technology.

The APS honors each of their fellows with a dedicated citation for their work. Ballmer’s citation reads, “For a critical role in the design and commissioning of the Advanced LIGO detectors and the scientific interpretation of their observations, for leadership in the development of third-generation gravitational-wave detectors, and mentoring of the next generation of gravitational-wave experimenters.”

Ballmer has been a professor at the University since 2010 and his research interests span experimental gravitational-wave physics and gravitational-wave detector technology. In 2015, Ballmer led a team of University physicists, along with APS Fellows Duncan Brown, Charles Brightman Endowed Professor of Physics, and Peter Saulson, professor emeritus of physics, who were instrumental in making the . This crowning achievement in gravitational-wave astronomy opened a new window onto the cosmos and confirmed a major prediction of Albert Einstein’s 1915 general theory of relativity. Those detections of the after effects of a collision of two black holes were made by the�� (Advanced LIGO), which Ballmer helped to design and build.

Since then, through grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Ballmer and his students have been working to improve the detection capabilities of Advanced LIGO. The team has been researching and designing and new laser wavefront control sensors and actuators. Ballmer was also a principal investigator on the NSF’s Horizon Study for , a U.S. next-generation gravitational-wave detector concept capable of observing colliding black holes, and merging neutron stars across the entire universe and cosmic time. Graduate students of Ballmer’s research group are also on site at the observatories right now, preparing the detectors for the next observation run.

Along with Ballmer, other recent APS fellows from ��ϲ�� include Lisa Manning, William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Physics and founding director of the , and Christian Santangelo, professor of physics, who each earned the honor in 2019. Jennifer Ross, professor and current department chair of physics, was named an APS Fellow in 2018.

A&S Physicists Develop One of the First Models Capturing Dynamics of Confined Cell Movement

Dan Bernardi — Wed, 20 Oct 2021 23:55:18 +0000

The process of normal cell division in the human body is quite simple: start dividing in response to a signal, such as a wound, and stop when enough cells have been produced and the skin is healed. But cancerous cells ignore the stop signs. They grow and spread rapidly, proliferating even in cramped locations.

The protein vimentin (green) helps protect a cell’s nucleus and DNA during migration. (Image courtesy of Maxx Swoger)

Similar to navigating through a large crowd of people, moving through dense tissue is no easy task. Any normal cell would die during the process, but many cancerous cells have a cage-like protein that helps them protect their nucleus and DNA. That protein, called vimentin, is often expressed in intermediate filaments (one of the three structural elements of the cell) during cell movement. And now, College of Arts and Sciences’ researchers are finding out more about this protein, which could eventually help with cancer treatment or wound healing.

In the past, the role of vimentin remained largely unclear, but researchers in the college have developed one of the first models that captures the dynamics of confined cell motility and shows how vimentin helps protect the cell’s nucleus during migration. The team, which includes lead author , a graduate student in physics; , assistant professor of physics; and , professor of physics, recently had their results published in the New Journal of Physics. Their model sheds light on the function of a protein that is a major player in cancer growth, and their results could one day help researchers determine better ways to stop the spread of cancer.

Cell migration is a fundamental process that contributes to building and maintaining tissue. During wound healing and cancer metastasis, two instances when cells are known to be on the move, they depend on the skeleton of the cell, known as the cytoskeleton, for protection and to generate force. The cytoskeleton is made up of a network of proteins, and one in particular—vimentin—is often present when cells decide that they want to travel.

“When a cell is stationary, it is known that the vimentin protein expression is very minimal,” says Gupta. “Conversely, when the cells become migratory, expression of this protein increases.”

In Patteson’s lab, researchers have been recreating what a cell goes through as it migrates to observe how vimentin plays into the process. By squeezing cells with and without vimentin through narrow microchannels on collagen gels, they mimic in 3D the way cells navigate through small pores in real tissue. In their observations they found that the presence of vimentin in the cytoskeleton was crucial for the survival of cells moving through 3D space, something that researchers were previously unable to detect using traditional two-dimensional experiments on glass or plastic.

Using Patteson’s experimental results, Gupta and Schwarz developed a model that captures the effects of the vimentin protein on the cell’s cytoskeleton and the nucleus. That model enables the team to regulate the forces that the cell generates and the stiffness of the nucleus, providing visual proof of Patteson’s lab experiments.

“Without vimentin, we found that the cells are very soft and the nucleus becomes deformed as it moves,” says Gupta. “In the simulation with vimentin, the cell is much more resistant to deformation and the inside of the nucleus and its DNA is protected.”

By understanding vimentin’s role in protecting cancerous cells as they spread through the body, Patteson says their research could help pinpoint drugs that could slow its growth.

“In theory treating cancer with drugs that target vimentin could be an option,” says Patteson. “By targeting vimentin, the cell will not be able to go from one place to another efficiently, stopping the spread of cancer in its tracks.”

The team says another possible application could be with wound healing, where drugs that stimulate vimentin expression could be administered to speed up the movement of cells to the wound area, essentially accelerating the tissue restoration process.

Read the team’s .

Funding that contributed to their work includes a National Science Foundation-Division of Materials Research grant and an Isaac Newton award from the Department of Defense belonging to Schwarz; a National Institutes of Health Maximizing Investigator’s Research award belonging to Patteson; a ��ϲ�� graduate fellowship awarded to Gupta; and a ��ϲ�� CUSE grant and ��ϲ�� BioInspired grant awarded to Patteson and Schwarz.

Arts and Sciences Physicist Part of a 5-University Team Programming Biological Cells to Design Futuristic Materials

Dan Bernardi — Tue, 05 Oct 2021 20:02:29 +0000

Jennifer Ross

Jennifer Ross, professor and department chair of physics in the College of Arts and Sciences (A&S), is among a team of researchers that was recently awarded a $1.8 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to design and create next-generation materials inspired and empowered by biological cells.

The project, led by Rae Robertson-Anderson, chair and professor of physics and biophysics at the University of San Diego, also includes physicists, biologists and engineers from the University of California Santa Barbara, the University of Chicago and Rochester Institute of Technology. Its goal is to create self-directed, programmable and reconfigurable materials—using biological building blocks including proteins and cells—that are capable of producing force and motion. This research could pave the way for future materials applications ranging from self-healing bridges and self-propulsive materials to programmable micro-robotics, wound healing and dynamic prosthetics.

According to Ross, the team’s work is inspired by biological materials that have the ability to heal, form and reform, and respond to their environment. But where inherently soft biological materials degrade easily, the group’s proposed hybrid composite material—a mix of synthetic and biological parts—would produce a durable system that can autonomously cycle. An example could be a road made of a material that could release molecules and self-repair each night.

But how do you get a synthetic material to mimic biological activities like healing? The short answer is bacteria. Ross explains that these materials will be actuated by microorganisms, like bacteria, that go through circadian cycles that should allow the material to change over time. Similar to the cycle of the sun rising and setting each day, bacteria will work on a programmable schedule without human intervention and activate materials to stiffen, compress, soften and re-expand.

Ross’s contribution involves an essential mechanical part of the material they are engineering called the cytoskeleton. The cytoskeleton is the protein-based skeleton of the cell that helps it maintain shape and provides mechanical support, enabling it to carry out functions like division and movement.

Ross explains that the cytoskeleton, which is made of a network of protein filaments, is an ideal system for these materials because they are rigid and flexible, providing mechanical stiffness. She will work with another team member to embed bacteria into the cytoskeleton that can excrete molecules that degrade or build back the filaments on a schedule.

Ross says the team is hopeful that this novel research will ultimately lead to the creation of fully synthetic materials that can mimic biological activities.

“I am always in the pursuit of better materials to help make our world more sustainable,” says Ross. “This research is very cutting-edge because there are currently no composite biological and synthetic materials of this type that are robust and responsive. This is a great complement to what other A&S faculty are doing in the sustainability space and I’m proud to be part of it.”

The four-year grant will also allow for undergraduates at each university to gain hands-on research experiences, mentoring and professional development opportunities. At the end of the project, the team will have built the framework for their materials design concept, including a small prototype, that can help others to advance futuristic materials to accomplish the many processes that living systems already perform seamlessly, such as healing and regulating themselves.

Funding for the project begins on Oct. 1. Read more about .

Note: Portions of this article have been adapted from a .

What to Watch: Total Solar Eclipse, Stargazing on the Solstice

Daryl Lovell — Wed, 09 Dec 2020 14:52:49 +0000

Walter Freeman, Associate Teaching Professor

associate teaching professor in the Physics Department at ��ϲ��’s College of Arts and Sciences, answers three questions about upcoming astronomy events this month.

Q: What can you tell us about the upcoming total solar eclipse?

A: The upcoming solar eclipse will be in South America, but nature will treat us in New York to a total solar eclipse on April 8, 2024. Buffalo, Rochester, and Watertown will be near the center of the moon’s shadow and will get around three and a half minutes of totality; ��ϲ��, near the edge of the path of totality, will get one and a half. So, while the South American eclipse will be out of our reach, in three and a half years we will get our own. I will certainly be out there watching it!

Q: What is the upcoming “Christmas star” event and why is it significant?

A: The near-conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn, oddly enough, is a result of the same sort of coincidence. In an eclipse, the Earth, sun, and moon are all aligned, so that the moon’s shadow falls on the Earth. In this planetary conjunction the Earth, Saturn, and Jupiter will be very nearly aligned so that Jupiter and Saturn appear near each other in the sky. These events happen as often as they do because almost all of the objects in the solar system – the planets, the sun, and the moon – orbit on the same plane.

Every night, Jupiter and Saturn are appearing closer and closer in the night sky as their orbits and ours carry us closer to alignment. They are not really that close; even at conjunction, they are separated by around five times the distance from the Earth to the sun, many hundreds of millions of miles. They will be closest to each other on December 21, but we will have only a short window to observe them. This is because as we move in our orbit, the sun is closer to being lined up with these planets. On December 21, the sun will set around 4:30. After that, it is a race – the sky must get dark enough to see Jupiter and Saturn before they set as well, around 6:45.

Q: What will people be able to see, and will they need special equipment?

A: To see the conjunction most easily, find a spot with a clear view of the southwestern horizon, free of city lights; Jupiter and Saturn will likely stand out from the twilight glow starting around 5:00 or 5:15. With binoculars, a telescope, or a telephoto lens of 500mm focal length or more, you may also be able to see the four largest moons of Jupiter. Four hundred years ago, Galileo saw these moons with the first astronomical telescope and, over a period of days, saw them orbiting Jupiter. This was one of the crucial observations that led him to conclude that the sun was at the center of the solar system, and in many ways marks the beginning of modern science.

December 21 is also the winter solstice. It’s completely an accident that these events are happening on the same day; the solstices relate to the tilt of Earth’s axis, which is independent of the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn. There’s no better way to celebrate the longest night of the year than watching the stars. So if you’re planning a night of stargazing on the solstice, start off by admiring the largest planets before they set!

To request interviews or get more information:

Daryl Lovell
Media Relations Manager
Division of Marketing and Communications

T��315.443.1184 ��M��315.380.0206
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The Nancy Cantor Warehouse, 350 W. Fayette St., 2^nd Fl., ��ϲ��, NY 13202
|

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Late Alumna Helped Advance Satellite Technology, Understanding of the Sun, Women in Science

Brandon Dyer — Thu, 19 Nov 2020 13:00:46 +0000

Astrophysicist Joan Feynman G’58 was a pioneer in solar physics. Her work helped explain the cycles of sunspots, and her insights on high-energy particles helped shape satellite technology. Feynman died on July 22 at 93.

Joan Feynman. Photo Credit: NASA

Feynman’s work accurately described the functions of solar activity and its affects on the Earth’s atmosphere. While working at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 1985, Feynman proved that solar particles penetrating Earth’s magnetosphere led to auroras. Her insights contributed to the design of spacecraft and satellites that can operate longer despite being exposed to high energy particles.

Her love of science began at age 5. “I discovered science at home,” Feynman said in 2019. “My brother showed me all kinds of neat things.” Feynman’s older brother woke up Feynman in the middle of the night at one point and brought her to a nearby golf course to observe an aurora, a huge green light that moved across the sky. “That was the first aurora I ever saw,” said Feynman. She said she had a close bond with her brother as kids.

Her older brother was Richard Feynman, who would also go onto become a scientist and Nobel laureate. Richard’s research also helped link the faulty o-rings that led to the Challenger shuttle explosion in 1986. Feynman was wary of competing with her brother. In her essays “A Passion for Science: Stories of Discovery and Invention” (2013), she explained their agreement. “I said, ‘Look, I don’t want us to compete, so let’s divide up physics between us,’” she wrote. “‘I’ll take auroras and you take the rest of the universe.’ And he said, OK!”�� Richard died in 1988.

Feynman completed an undergraduate degree at Oberlin College in 1948 and later earned a doctorate in physics from ��ϲ�� in 1958. In 2000, she was awarded NASA’s Exceptional Scientific Medal for “pioneering contribution to the study of solar causes of geomagnetic and climate disturbances.”

The Aurora Borealis is seen in the night sky over Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in 2012. The appearance of U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) visual information does not imply or constitute DoD endorsement.

Feynman’s work helped scientists better understand how the sun’s particles impact objects as they move through interstellar space. The constant flow of energy from the sun’s atmosphere, known as the solar wind, can adversely effect systems on ships and satellites without proper planning, said Feynman. “In the early days they had to over design everything and not get as much information as they would now,” she said. Her work is still the foundational basis for spacecraft design. Feynman’s observations,combined with other researchers about solar weather, now allow reasonable predictions to be made about the environment spacecraft operate in. The process took observing solar activity for long enough to determine what could come next, even in the chaotic environment of a star.�� “It involved an enormous amount of data and the analysis of it.”

Feynman said becoming a scientist was driven by the desire to raise a family independently. As a teenager, she decided to pursue roles that were outside the accepted roles women at the time, like secretarial work or teaching grammar school. “So that, besides it’s much more fun, is why I went into science.” Feynman described science as a game. “What you do is watch something in nature. It’s all around here, it’s a million things to watch,” she said. “And then you notice something. And you think, ‘why is that?’”

Feynman said growing up, she was often made to feel she was in the wrong place as a woman in science. She said she was pleased at two women winning Nobel prizes in science (Donna Strickland in physics and Frances Arnold in chemistry) in 2019. “Now it is no longer in the wrong place,” she said.

A&S Associate Dean, Physics Chair Answers Common Fall Foliage Questions

Daryl Lovell — Thu, 10 Sep 2020 20:26:45 +0000

With the start of autumn coming up on Sept. 22, the leaves are beginning to turn colors, exposing beautiful bright foliage for leaf peepers to enjoy over the next several weeks.

is professor and chair of physics and the Associate Dean of Research and Scholarship at ��ϲ��’s College of Arts & Sciences.

Prof. Middleton answers common questions related to the changing colors of leaves in the autumn and is available for interviews.

——————-

From a general science and physics perspective, what is behind the color changes that we are able to see in leaves?

Professor Middleton: “We see dramatic changes in fall leaves because of both the vibrant chemicals used by the tree to feed itself and our sensitive color vision. Most animals see only one or two types of color, while most humans see three bands of color: red, green, and blue. The sunlight that falls onto a leaf is strong in all three bands of color. In the summer, leaves have a lot of chlorophyll, a chemical that efficiently uses the energy from the blue light and red light to craft sugars to feed the tree. The green light that is not used by the chlorophyll bounces off of the leaves and reaches our eye, making the leaves look green.

“In the fall, as the tree becomes dormant, the chlorophyll goes away. What hangs around for a while are chemicals (carotenoids) that assist the chlorophyll. These chemicals absorb blue light. Then both green light and red light bounce off of the leaf. In our human vision, when red and green light combine, we perceive the color yellow, the color complementary to blue. Sometimes in the fall, the trees make an extra dose of chemicals (anthocyanins) in the fall that absorb green light. Then only red light is reflected from the leaf and our human vision tells us “that leaf is red”. Note that this whole story is for human eyes: Dogs see only two bands of color, while some other animals see ultraviolet light, so they all would perceive the changing leaves differently. Later, when these brilliant chemicals all fade from the fallen leaves, the leaves turn brown.”

Is there anything that people can do or use to give their leaf-peeping a different perspective?

Professor Middleton: “If you have a phone app that can filter colors (like Snapseed) turn on a red filter to make a black and white photo. Or you can look through a red piece of plastic. Using either method, you will see the red leaves pop out brightly against a dark sky. (This also depends on our red/green/blue human vision and the chemistry in the leaves.)

From a more personal standpoint, what do you enjoy about the fall color changes?

Professor Middleton: “Where I grew up, we had evergreen trees. I love our fall colors that remind me of when I moved here and walked my children to school with brilliant yellow, orange, and red leaves against a blue sky on chilly days. And I remember us picking up the leaves and looking at them, where you can see on a single leaf a map of the changes, with red on the edge, the last bit of green showing the chlorophyll along the veins of the leaf, and yellow in between.”

To request interviews or get more information:

Daryl Lovell
Media Relations Manager
Division of Marketing and Communications

M��315.380.0206
dalovell@syr.edu |

The Nancy Cantor Warehouse, 350 W. Fayette St., 2^nd Fl., ��ϲ��, NY 13202
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“Mystery Object Blurs Line between Neutron Stars and Black Holes.”

Lily Datz — Tue, 30 Jun 2020 16:31:48 +0000

Duncan Brown, the Charles Brightman Professor of Physics in the College of Arts and Sciences, was quoted by Scientific American for the article “” Professor Brown, an expert on gravitation waves, says that this mystery object is potentially a “new piece of astrophysical understanding of the universe.”

Physics Department Works to Improve Gravitational Wave Detection

Dan Bernardi — Thu, 06 Feb 2020 17:16:48 +0000

Artist rendering of the collision of two neutron stars. Researchers at SU are working to improve Advanced LIGO’s ability to record gravitational waves from such events. (Credit: NSF/LIGO/Sonoma State University/Aurore Simonnet)

Albert Einstein first predicted the presence of gravitational waves in 1916 in his general theory of relativity. Fast forward 99 years to 2015, when researchers obtained the first physical confirmation of a gravitational wave generated by two colliding black holes, nearly 1.3 billion light years away. This discovery, possibly one of humanity’s greatest scientific achievements, was made possible by the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) (Advanced LIGO).

The Advanced LIGO uses mirrors to help detect gravitational waves caused by the merging of black holes and neutron stars, but the faint signal can be masked by temperature fluctuations on the mirrors’ surface. Finding better reflective coatings for the mirrors could prevent these fluctuations, improving LIGO’s ability to measure gravitational waves.

This is where physics faculty in the College of Arts and Sciences (A&S) come in. Thanks to a grant from the NSF, the physics department will play a key role in developing better gravitational wave detectors. The award specifically funds the purchase and construction of a “cryogenic elastic loss measurement apparatus,” which will test how mirrors with different coatings react to a wide range of temperatures. Leading the project are A&S physics Professor , along with Steve Penn, co-principal investigator and associate professor at Hobart and William Smith Colleges.

Ballmer and his students will test coated glass sample disks from room temperature to 10 degrees above absolute zero using a device called a cryostat. The cryostat was purchased from the ��ϲ��-based company , whose founder, William E. Gifford, was a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at ��ϲ�� from 1961 to 1978. The results will help show which glass coatings can improve LIGO’s wave detection. This research is part of LIGO’s Centers for Coatings Research (CCR), a collaboration funded specifically to find better coatings for gravitational-wave interferometers.

Ballmer says, “This apparatus will allow ��ϲ�� to play a much bigger role in finding and validating the coatings needed to upgrade Advanced LIGO and other future gravitational-wave detectors.”

Detecting and analyzing the information carried by gravitational waves has allowed researchers to observe the universe in a way never before possible, providing astronomers and other scientists with their first glimpses of previously unseen phenomena like colliding black holes, merging neutron stars and exploding stars. Through research being done by faculty and students in the Department of Physics, that view into the unseen will become even clearer.

Massive Asteroid Passing Earth Is ‘Time Machine’ From Early Solar System

Daryl Lovell — Thu, 07 Nov 2019 19:51:39 +0000

NASA has discovered an asteroid as large as 2,000-feet that is barreling towards Earth, but is not expected to make an impact. NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies has identified the asteroid as 481394 (2006 SF6). It’s likely to be closest to our planet on Nov. 20 just after 7 p.m. EST.

is an assistant teaching professor in the physics department at ��ϲ��’s College of Arts and Sciences. He says asteroids like the one passing Earth soon remind us of how the planets were born and shaped, and remind us that the solar system is still evolving.

Professor Freeman answers three questions about the asteroid event later on this month.

What are asteroids made of?

“These asteroids are mostly debris left over from the early solar system. They are time machines, of a sort. In the first hundred million years of its life, most of the material in the early Solar System accumulated into the growing planets, as smaller pieces of material collided with them. But not all of them found their way into the planets; some are still around, like this one. These asteroids remind us how the planets were born and shaped — and remind us that, four and a half billion years later, the solar system is still slowly changing.

How do scientists calculate which ones pose a danger of potential impact on Earth, and which do not?

“In thinking about the danger that these things might pose to us, the first issue is that space is big and mostly empty, and compared to the scale of the solar system, Earth does not present a very big target. For every 500,000 objects that pass as close as this asteroid to us, only one of them will actually hit Earth. This asteroid��is large enough to cause significant damage if it hits Earth, however. NASA tracks ‘potentially hazardous objects’ like this one that are large enough to cause significant damage and that have orbits that take them close to us, and uses computers to calculate their motions to determine how close they might actually come to Earth in the future. Smaller asteroids do occasionally strike Earth and cause damage, but the risk that these visitors from space pose to us is tiny compared to the risk from the natural processes of our planet like earthquakes and hurricanes, and even tinier compared to the risk that human activity poses to our own safety through things like air pollution and climate change.”

What else is there to know about how asteroids like this one are formed and where they came from in our solar system?

“The solar system formed from a cloud of gas and dust that collapsed under its own gravity. Most of the matter fell into the center and was compressed more and more tightly by its own weight, until the immense pressure ignited nuclear fusion at its core — this is the Sun. A small fraction of the matter was left, and collected into small pieces over time. At first this happened because of static electricity; as they got bigger, gravity took over.

“Most of these pieces accumulated into ever larger chunks — the largest becoming the familiar major planets. But not all of them did. Some of the primordial ones are still out there, and astronomers refer to them as ‘minor planets.’ Some of them have also survived collisions and are broken-off bits of larger objects. Most of these are in the ‘asteroid belt’ between Mars and Jupiter, but there are others whose orbits bring them near Earth.

“We understand the motions of objects in the solar system very well. Newton’s laws of motion, combined with a computer, allow us to calculate how these objects will move in the future with very high precision. NASA JPL has a very nice animation of their orbits at this .”

To request interviews or get more information:

Daryl Lovell
Media Relations Manager
Division of Marketing and Communications

T��315.443.1184 ��M��315.380.0206
dalovell@syr.edu |

The Nancy Cantor Warehouse, 350 W. Fayette St., 4th Fl., ��ϲ��, NY 13202
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Physics Department Earns Honors; Embodies ��ϲ��’s Research Prowess

Renée K. Gadoua — Fri, 11 Oct 2019 18:13:03 +0000

Lisa Manning

Two ��ϲ�� physicists have been named fellows of the American Physical Society (APS), the latest professional recognition highlighting the increasing visibility of the department’s faculty and research.��, professor of physics and founding director of the��, and��, professor of physics, earned the honor, given to just half of 1 percent of the professional organization’s membership. In addition,��, professor of physics, was named an APS Fellow last year.��.

“The string of recent honors and accomplishments reinforces both ��ϲ��’s status as an R1 university and the caliber of the department,” says Alan Middleton, associate dean of research and scholarship in the College of Arts and Sciences. “As a member of the physics department myself, I know how outstanding it is to have two members of an institution named APS Fellows in one year,” says Middleton, a 2010 APS Fellow. “Our physics faculty are some of the most accomplished in the discipline.”

Manning’s APS citation notes her work in microscopic theory of flow and rigidity in disordered and biological materials. Her current research includes investigating when materials like glass will fail. “This is an honor typically received later in your career,” she says. “It’s exciting and humbling.”

Christian Santangelo

Santangelo’s citation notes his work using geometry and topology to understand the elasticity of soft materials. Recent work focuses on designing materials that can be controlled by conditions such as heat and creating tiny self-folding structures. “As a theoretical physicist, the extent to which people pay attention to my work is really all I have to gauge its impact,” he says. “To me, this means that maybe I have advanced the field a little.”

Manning has earned several more awards recently. In early October, she received the Emerging Leader Award from the University of California at Santa Barbara, where she earned a Ph.D. in physics in 2008.

That award came on the heels of a trip to Beijing, where she delivered a plenary talk at the 2019 International Workshop on Glass Physics, hosted by the Institute of Theoretical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Her Sept. 27 talk addressed her research on predicting when materials will fail.

Manning also co-chaired the highly selective, international Gordon Research Conference on Soft Condensed Matter Physics in August 2019 at Colby-Sawyer College in New London, New Hampshire. To attend, conference guests must apply and be accepted. In 2021, Manning will chair the event, and in 2023 Ross will be chair.

Jennifer Ross

The recent recognitions reflect “the success of the research we have going on at the BioInspired Institute,” Manning says of the center that supports research by life sciences, engineering, physics and chemistry faculty. Ross and Santangelo are research directors of teams working on two of the institute’s three focus areas: development and disease and smart materials.

“These are real signs that we are right on the cutting edge with some of the best in the world in this area,” Manning says. “We want to take areas where we are world-class and build upon them.”

Other ��ϲ�� physicists continue to draw accolades as well for groundbreaking research. Recent highlights include:

��was awarded two National Institutes of Health grants to study protein-protein interactions.
��have determined a way that matter and antimatter behave differently.
, professor of physics, uncovered new information about a class of pentaquarks.

Chinese Moon Rover, Yutu-2, Discovers ‘Gel-like’ Substance

Hailey Womer — Mon, 07 Oct 2019 18:01:21 +0000

, assistant teaching professor of physics in the College of Arts and Sciences, was quoted in the Earth Sky article “” Freeman commented on the “gel-like” substance found in a crater on the moon, connecting the potential substance to meteor impacts.��

Black Moon Event Bridges Fiction, Mythology and Science

Daryl Lovell — Wed, 31 Jul 2019 14:10:20 +0000

For those looking up at the sky tonight in North America, you may notice something missing – the moon! That’s because July 31 marks a lunar event called the “black moon” which is the second new moon that happens in one calendar month. A new moon is the phase of the moon where it’s invisible, with the lit portion of the moon facing away from us.

is an assistant teaching professor in the physics department at ��ϲ��’s College of Arts and Sciences. He says astronomy events like the black moon captures people’s attention because it is a kind of bridge between two of the greatest accomplishments of humanity: fiction and mythology, and science

Professor Freeman answers five questions about the July 31 “black moon:”

What is a “black moon” and can you explain the science behind it?

“A ‘black moon’ is just a second new moon that happens in one calendar month. This is no different than any other new moon from the perspective of science. When the Moon is on the same side of Earth as the Sun, then the face of the Moon that gets sunlight is pointed away from us, and we can’t see it; the face of the Moon that’s pointed toward us is in shadow, so we can’t see it. This is a ‘new moon’, and it happens once every 29.5 days. Our months are a little bit longer than this, so sometimes we get two of these per calendar month. This happens because the designers of the Gregorian calendar that we use wanted every year to be the same length, and have “stretched” the months to be a little bit longer than 29.5 days so that twelve months add up exactly to one year. So, if a new moon happens near the beginning of a calendar month, then the next one will happen before it’s over. There’s no science here; it’s just an artifact of how we keep time.”

How does it differ from other lunar events, such as a super wolf blood moon?

“A ‘blood moon’ is actually something astronomically interesting: a lunar eclipse, where the Earth’s shadow falls on the Moon. The term ‘blood moon’ comes from the fact that red light from the Sun leaks around the edges of the Earth even during a lunar eclipse.”

How do you see it?

“There’s nothing to see! A new moon is the phase of the Moon where it’s invisible since the lit part is facing away from us.

“However, the fact that you��can’t��see the Moon allows you to see the stars, planets, and the Milky Way better. When the Moon is above the horizon, the moonlight drowns out all but the brightest stars and planets. When the Moon is close to new, it’s also mostly below the horizon during the night. So this time of the month, where the Moon is nearly new, is a great time to go observe all the��other��stuff in the night sky.

“In particular, we have a very good view of Jupiter right now in the southern sky, visible after dark. If you look at Jupiter with binoculars, a small telescope, or a large telephoto lens, you can see Jupiter’s four largest moons; these are the same ones that Galileo saw four hundred years ago that convinced him that the Sun, not the Earth, was at the center of the solar system.”

Is this type of lunar event rare?

“A new moon happens every 29.5 days, so — astronomically speaking — this is a pretty common occurrence! Two new moons will happen in one month whenever the first new moon falls in the first day and a half of a 31-day month; this will happen every year or two.”

Why do you think these types of lunar events capture the attention of so many people?

“Astronomical events capture the attention of people because we’ve always told stories and made myths about the things in the night sky. The bright red planet is named after blood-red Mars, the god of war. We named the beautiful planet visible in the morning and evening after Venus, the Roman goddess of beauty. Now we know more, of course: Mars is reddish because its surface contains rust, and Venus is actually a sulfurous hellscape hot enough to melt lead thanks to a runaway greenhouse effect. But knowing what the planets and stars really are, and how they work, doesn’t mean that we can’t also think of the myths.

“So, I think astronomy captures people’s attention because it is a kind of bridge between two of the greatest accomplishments of humanity: fiction and mythology, and science.”

��

To request interviews or get more information:

Daryl Lovell
Media Relations Manager
Division of Marketing and Communications

T��315.443.1184 ��M��315.380.0206
dalovell@syr.edu |

The Nancy Cantor Warehouse, 350 W. Fayette St., 2^nd Fl., ��ϲ��, NY 13202
news.syr.edu |

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Northern Lights In Rare Spots This Week – This Is Why

Daryl Lovell — Thu, 16 May 2019 15:33:16 +0000

Those looking up at the sky in northern U.S. states and most of Canada may catch a glimpse of the northern lights this week.

Sam Sampere is a physics lab manager at ��ϲ��’s College of Arts and Sciences. Below, he breaks down some of the science behind aurora borealis and talks about the best places to catch a view.

Sampere says:

“Earth is one of the few planets surrounded by a magnetic field and has an atmosphere. You need the two things to create the northern lights, which we have here on Earth.

“In order to create northern or southern lights, you need a source of charged particles, and that source is the sun. The sun is always spewing out particles. The number that the sun spews out is not all that great, but sometimes the sun has little explosions and those charged particles are aimed directly at the Earth. That’s what happened a few days ago.

“Charged particles don’t go straight, they bend around and they curve. At the poles of the Earth, the magnetic fields are the strongest. It’s actually the strongest at the North Pole. You’ll see the greatest number of particles at the North and South Poles because the magnetic fields are the strongest at those locations.

“If you want to see the lights this week, look northwards, and stand in a dark location. City lights might obscure this, so go out in the country and find some dark skies.”

To request interviews or get more information:

Daryl Lovell
Media Relations Manager
Division of Marketing and Communications

T��315.443.1184 ��M��315.380.0206
dalovell@syr.edu |

The Nancy Cantor Warehouse, 350 W. Fayette St., 2^nd Fl., ��ϲ��, NY 13202
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LIGO Livingston Detector Catches Binary Neutron Star Merger, Says Physics Professor

Daryl Lovell — Thu, 25 Apr 2019 17:19:32 +0000

Today, the and VIRGO detector captured another binary neutron star merger

is an associate professor of physics at ��ϲ��’s College of Arts and Sciences. Below, he answers four key questions about the LIGO/VIRGO detection, and what it means for the greater world of physics.

Q: What is most significant about these findings?

Ballmer: “What we are really looking forward to is to get a stronger signal from the collision phase of the two neutron stars. That will tell us how nuclear matter behaves under these extreme conditions.

“This event was a little too far away for that. But it gives us a much better handle on the rate of such collisions. The upshot: if we just observe a little longer we will get the strong signal we are hoping for.”

—————-

Q: Can you break down what a binary neutron star merger is?

Ballmer: “A neutron star is an atomic nucleus the size of a city, but with the mass of a sun. We are observing the collision of two of these monsters at about half the speed of light.

“Since neutron stars still are made of matter (unlike black holes), we do expect to be able to see them optically as well, as was the case with GW170817, the first binary neutron star merger observed by LIGO.”

——————
Q: For someone not familiar with the physics world, why is this exciting?

Ballmer: “On a weekly basis we are now observing some of the most violent events in the universe, literally storms in space and time, shredding the remnants of stars. Black holes and neutron stars are no longer exotic hypothetical objects they once were, but the bread and butter of everyday science.

“This is also why the LIGO and Virgo collaborations now put out alerts as quickly as possible, in the hope that other astronomers can make complementary observations.

“In fact, you can download an app that alerts you within minutes whenever we see something interesting.” Link: ��

—————–

Q: How does this tie in or connect with (if at all) with the first black hole image that was released just a short while ago?

Ballmer: “Since the latest run (O3) started we have observed 3 black hole mergers, and this neutron star merger. That brings the total observed in all runs to 13 black hole mergers and 2 neutron star mergers.

“It is amazing that what was considered to be impossible just three and a half years ago – and was worth the 2017 Nobel prize – is now happening weekly.”

To request interviews or get more information:

Daryl Lovell
Media Relations Manager
Division of Marketing and Communications

T��315.443.1184 ��M��315.380.0206
dalovell@syr.edu |

The Nancy Cantor Warehouse, 350 W. Fayette St., 2^nd Fl., ��ϲ��, NY 13202
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Swimming in a Sea of Neutrinos: Ph.D. Candidate Avinay Bhat Discusses His Research Into the Universe’s Smallest, Most Elusive Particles

Rob Enslin — Thu, 11 Apr 2019 20:30:03 +0000

Avinay Bhat

Ph.D. candidate Avinay Bhat studies neutrinos—tiny, elusive particles that hold clues about the origin of the Universe. As a member of the (HEP) research group, he also builds components for a major experiment at Fermilab, a U.S. Department of Energy physics lab near Chicago.

“The components are for the Short-Baseline Near Detector [SBND], one of three particle detectors in Fermilab’s Short-Baseline [SBN] Program,” says Bhat, who has worked at Fermilab since November.

SBN focuses on neutrino oscillation, the process by which neutrinos change types, or flavors, as��they hurtle through space and matter close to the speed of light.

Neutrinos come in three flavors, but SBN is��searching for evidence of a fourth, known as the sterile neutrino. “Proving its existence would change the way we look at elementary physics,” says Bhat, adding that sterile neutrinos do not emit light or energy.

The College of Arts and Sciences recently spoke with Bhat about his innovative work in the Department of Physics.

I’m told that massive stars do not go gently into that good night—that they explode in a supernova, whose energy is carried away by a burst of neutrinos.
These��explosions are called core-collapse supernovae, which give birth to neutron stars and black holes. I study neutrinos from these events.

Interesting.��
Due to their low energies, supernova neutrino interactions are difficult to reconstruct in MicroBooNE, where I do physics analysis….“MicroBooNE” is short for “Micro Booster Neutrino Experiment,” a multinational project in which hundreds of scientists study neutrino interactions.

Say more about core-collapse.
The core of a giant collapsing star is incredibly dense. When energy from a star’s nuclear reaction cannot hold its mass, gravity causes the outer layers of the star to fall inward. Thus, the core experiences a collapse.

During the collapse, almost 99 percent of the star’s binding energy is released in the form of neutrinos, which travel in all flavors and in all directions.

Fermilab, outside of Chicago (Photo courtesy of Reidar Hahn/Fermilab)

And you detect these neutrinos in MicroBooNE—
The neutrinos arrive in MicroBooNE before the light [from the core-collapse supernova] reaches telescopes on Earth. Therefore, we can tell astronomers where to point their telescopes in the sky, in time to observe a supernova explosion.

What else do you do at Fermilab?
In addition to MicroBooNE physics analysis, I do SBND hardware installation. Both projects fall under the realm of experimental neutrino physics.

Would you elaborate?
Because neutrinos have no charge and very little mass, they rarely interact with other particles. In fact, most of them pass through Earth undetected.

Neutrinos occasionally collide with atoms. When that happens, we study their interactions to learn more about the properties of neutrinos and their role in the Universe.

With SBND, [postdoc] Pip Hamilton and I have been working on the APA wiring effort.

For those keeping score, an APA [anode plane assembly] is a large, rectangular frame on a liquid-argon particular detector. Each APA contains nearly 15 miles of delicate wire, which records signals created by neutrino collisions.
Right. Pip and I spent most of last year at the Wright Lab [at Yale] doing wiring. In November, we finished our second APA and shipped it to Fermilab.

Have you always liked detector design and development?
While I was working on my master’s degree, I was involved with a semester-long project at INO [the India-Based Neutrino Observatory]. It was there I learned about basic neutrino physics and particle detection, using various detectors. For these reasons, I chose to focus on neutrinos at ��ϲ��.

Posdoc Pip Hamilton (foreground) and Bhat work on part of an anode plane assembly, or APA, at Yale University.

What else should we know about neutrinos?
After photons, they are the most abundant particles in the Universe. We, in fact, swim in a sea of neutrinos.

Not long ago, the Standard Model [a theory describing how particles and forces relate to one another] determined that neutrinos were massless. Now we know that they not only have mass, but also change “flavor” from one type of neutrino to another. Neutrinos have a tendency not to interact with matter.

What’s your goal with this research?
To answer some big questions. I want to know what role neutrinos play in supernova explosions….Can supernova neutrinos help verify the existing neutrino oscillation and core collapse models? What can they tell us about neutrino mass hierarchy?

Do you foresee any applications?
Our knowledge of neutrinos is small, so the immediate focus is on basic research. As with most basic research, we have no idea where we will end up.

An analogy is the discovery of the electron in 1897. Back then, nobody knew that the flow of electrons created electricity—knowledge that has changed the course of history. Likewise, neutrino detectors currently monitor nuclear proliferation activity. As we learn more [about neutrinos], the possible applications in science and technology are far-reaching.

How do you like working with Associate Professor Mitch Soderberg?
His involvement with multiple neutrino experiments has enabled me to get much-needed experience in both hardware installation and physics analysis. Mitch is supportive and understanding, and his expertise has contributed greatly to my growth as a doctoral student. We’re already thinking about postdoc interviews.

Black Hole Image Is ‘Real-Life Counterpart’ To What Science Fiction Movies Have Imagined

Daryl Lovell — Wed, 10 Apr 2019 15:10:17 +0000

Today astronomers announced they have successfully captured the first direct visual evidence of a supermassive black hole and its shadow.

is the Charles Brightman Endowed Professor of Physics at ��ϲ��’s College of Arts and Sciences. Brown was a member of the physics team that detected gravitational waves by LIGO.

Brown says:

“For years, science fiction movies have imagined what black holes look like. The picture taken by the Event Horizon Telescope shows us what they really look like.

“The glow around the black hole is from light bent by the black hole’s gravity.

“This is the real-life counterpart to the black hole Gargantua from the movie Interstellar.”

To request interviews or get more information:

Daryl Lovell
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Physicists Reveal Why Matter Dominates the Universe

Rob Enslin — Wed, 27 Mar 2019 20:36:52 +0000

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland is the world’s biggest, most powerful particle accelerator.

��ϲ��’s Sheldon Stone helps discover matter-antimatter asymmetry in charmed quarks

Physicists in the College of Arts and Sciences (A&S) have confirmed that matter and antimatter decay differently for elementary particles containing charmed quarks.

Distinguished Professor says the findings are a first, although matter-antimatter asymmetry has been observed before in particles with strange quarks or beauty quarks.

Quarks are elementary particles that are the building blocks of matter.

Stone and members of the college’s (HEP) research group have measured, for the first time and with 99.999-percent certainty, a difference in the way��D⁰ mesons and anti-D⁰ mesons transform into more stable byproducts.

Mesons are subatomic particles composed of one quark and one antiquark, bound together by strong interactions.

“There have been many attempts to measure matter-antimatter asymmetry, but, until now, no one has succeeded,” says Stone, who collaborates on the Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) experiment at the CERN laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland. “It’s a milestone in antimatter research.”

The findings may also indicate new physics beyond the Standard Model, which describes how fundamental particles interact with one another. “’til then, we need to await theoretical attempts to explain the observation in less esoteric means,” he adds.

Every particle of matter has a corresponding antiparticle, identical in every way, but with an opposite charge. Precision studies of hydrogen and antihydrogen atoms, for example, reveal similarities to beyond the billionth decimal place.

Sheldon Stone

When matter and antimatter particles come into contact, they annihilate each other in a burst of energy—similar to what happened in the Big Bang, some 14 billion years ago. “That’s why there is so little naturally occurring antimatter in the Universe around us,” says Stone, a fellow of the American Physical Society, which has awarded him this year’s W.K.H. Panofsky Prize in Experimental Particle Physics.

The question on Stone’s mind involves the equal-but-opposite nature of matter and antimatter. “If the same amount of matter and antimatter exploded into existence at the birth of the Universe, there should have been nothing left behind but pure energy. Obviously, that didn’t happen,” he says in a whiff of understatement.

Thus, Stone and his LHCb colleagues have been searching for subtle differences in matter and antimatter to understand why matter is so prevalent.

The answer may lie at CERN, where scientists create antimatter by smashing protons together in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s biggest, most powerful particular accelerator. The more energy the LHC produces, the more massive are the particles—and antiparticles—formed during collision.

It is in the debris of these collisions that scientists such as Ivan Polyakov, a postdoc in ��ϲ��’s HEP group, hunt for particle ingredients.

“We don’t see antimatter in our world, so we have to artificially produce it,” he says. “The data from these collisions enables us to map the decay and transformation of unstable particles into more stable byproducts.”

HEP is renowned for its pioneering research into quarks, of which there are six types, or flavors. Scientists usually talk about them in pairs: up/down, charmed/strange and top/bottom. Each pair has a corresponding mass and fractional electronic charge.

In addition to the beauty quark (the “b” in “LHCb”), HEP is interested in the charmed quark. Despite its relatively high mass, a charmed quark lives a fleeting existence before decaying into something more stable.

Recently, HEP studied two versions of the same particle. One version contained a charmed quark and an antimatter version of an up quark, called the anti-up quark. The other version had an anti-charm quark and an up quark.

Using LHC data, they identified both versions of the particle, well into the tens of millions, and counted the number of times each particle decayed into new byproducts.

“The ratio of the two possible outcomes should have been identical for both sets of particles, but we found that the ratios differed by about a tenth of a percent,” Stone says. “This proves that charmed matter and antimatter particles are not totally interchangeable.”

Adds Polyakov, “Particles might look the same on the outside, but they behave differently on the inside. That is the puzzle of antimatter.”

The idea that matter and antimatter behave differently is not new. Previous studies of particles with strange quarks and bottom quarks have confirmed as such. What makes this study unique, Stone concludes, is that it is the first time anyone has witnessed particles with charmed quarks being asymmetrical: “It’s one for the history books.”

HEP’s work is supported by the National Science Foundation.

Food Truck for the Physics Mind Comes to Campus March 28

Keith Kobland — Wed, 27 Mar 2019 13:48:01 +0000

What’s billed as the “food truck for the physics mind” will be coming to campus Thursday, March 28. A 44-foot trailer, filled with a variety of physics apparatus, will be pulling up to campus, and students, faculty and staff invited to climb on board, starting at 9:30 a.m. The truck will be located between the Dome and Heroy.

The trailer, which is owned by lab equipment company TeachSpin, features a variety of demonstrations and experiments involving particle physics, magnetic torque, and the interaction of laser light with atoms, among others.�� The event is sponsored by the Physics Department.

Turning Student Research into Reality

Rob Enslin — Tue, 22 Jan 2019 18:00:51 +0000

Avinash “Avi” Thakur

Avinash “Avi” Thakur, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Physics in the College of Arts and Sciences (A&S), recently made headlines with his role in the development of a novel class of nanomaterials that could possibly improve cancer detection.

The announcement—courtesy of a paper he co-authored with physics professor Liviu Movileanu in (Springer Nature, 2018)—probed the real-time measurement of protein interactions at the single molecular level, using a genetically modified hole, or nanopore. The online version quickly became the journal’s top-ranked article, marking the culmination of a six-year student-mentor relationship.

“This paper is the result of an amazing journey with many obstacles and detours,” says Movileanu citing Thakur’s drive and persistence. “Avi is an inspiration to other graduate students, as well as talented undergraduates pursuing careers in fundamental science and medical biotechnology.”

The Indian-born student is unmoved by the praise, saying A&S—and Movileanu’s lab, specifically—affords him opportunities to design his own projects and experiments.

“I came here because I wanted to grow as an independent researcher,” says Thakur, who expects to earn a Ph.D. in May. “By working with other departments on campus—including biology, chemistry, and biomedical and biochemical engineering—I have helped design something that could potentially transform into a technology. This work may benefit drug discovery [in medicine, biotechnology and pharmacology] and protein-based diagnostics.”

A&S recently caught up with Thakur—whose expertise combines protein engineering, design and application—to discuss his time in A&S.

Your background includes biochemistry and biotechnology. How did it prepare you for ��ϲ��?
With my training in biotechnology, I learned about next-generation applications of protein engineering in various fields, including diagnostics and therapeutics. With biochemistry, I learned the tools and techniques that would help me develop, design and validate new protein engineering approaches.

Such as nanobiosensors?
Yes. I design and develop barrel-like sensors that are 100,000 times thinner than a human hair. These sensors detect proteins and transduce [convert] that detection into an electrical current as an output.

We think our sensors have a role in existing flow cells and microfluidic devices, enabling high-throughput drug screening against protein targets of interest.

So that I understand correctly—you create a hole in a biological membrane, through which you shoot an electric current. When a protein goes in or near the hole, the current’s intensity changes, enabling you to identify the protein’s properties and identity, right?
Indeed. Our sensor is capable of detecting and quantifying proteins in a clinical sample-like condition, such as blood serum, with great accuracy.

PPIs [protein-protein interactions] occur everywhere in the body, but are hard to detect with existing methods because they last only a millisecond. Our real-time techniques may help diagnose disease in which a protein is a biomarker [a measurable indicator of a disease state].

Liviu must be an inspiring mentor.
I like his positive approach to problem solving. He has taught me not to get too disappointed with failure or setbacks. The physics department also is pretty chill. The people are friendly.

What are your short-term plans?
I will defend my thesis in February. Afterward, I want to do postdoctoral training to enhance my skills as an independent research scientist. Post-training, I would like to be a research group leader in industry or academia.

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever gotten?
Believe in yourself, your friends, your family and your work. When you do that, great things happen.

Stargazers Can Appreciate Astronomical Rarity Sunday

News Staff — Fri, 18 Jan 2019 16:43:33 +0000

Look to the sky on the evening of Sunday, Jan. 20, and you’ll be in for a rare treat.

A total lunar eclipse will be well visible to stargazers as the Earth’s shadow crosses in front of the moon. This month’s total eclipse will be the last one visible from the United States until 2022.

Walter Freeman, an assistant teaching professor in the physics department in the College of Arts and Sciences, answers five questions about the upcoming astronomical event.

Q: What should those in the viewing area of the Jan. 20-21 total lunar eclipse expect to see?

A: Viewers will see a normal full moon at first starting at around 10:35 p.m. Eastern time. At that time, the Earth’s shadow will begin to pass in front of the moon, blocking almost all of the sun’s light from reaching it.

Walter Freeman

Observers will see the moon appear to be progressively “swallowed up” starting from the lower left. This process will end at 11:40 p.m., when the Earth’s shadow covers the whole of the moon’s surface; this is the beginning of “totality.” This will last until around 12:40 a.m., when the motion of the Earth’s shadow will carry it past the moon, and the moon will gradually again be lit by the sun. At 1:45 a.m., the moon will be fully visible again.

Q: How often does this sort of eclipse happen?

A: There is a little less than one total lunar eclipse per year on average. A lunar eclipse can only happen during a full moon, when the moon is on the opposite side of the Earth from the sun. But the moon’s orbit is tilted a little bit compared to the Earth’s, so usually when the moon is full, the Earth’s shadow passes a little bit above or a little bit below it. This is why we don’t have a lunar eclipse every month.

Q: What’s the difference between a total lunar eclipse and a “blood moon”…or are they the same thing?

A: The moon won’t be completely invisible during the period of totality, when the Earth’s shadow completely covers it! A little bit of sunlight is refracted by the Earth’s atmosphere and reaches the moon, bending around the edges of the Earth. This small amount of red light still illuminates the moon enough for us to see it. Instead of being bright and white, the moon will be very dim and red, 10,000 or so times dimmer than usual; people call this a “blood moon.”

Since the moon doesn’t shine on its own, but only reflects the sun’s light, any lunar eclipse happens when the Earth is exactly between the sun and the moon.

Q: Is there anything that those on the ground should be aware of when they’re looking up at a total lunar eclipse?

A: There are no precautions you need to take when observing a lunar eclipse, since the moon is never bright enough to hurt our eyes like the sun is. A blood moon is one of the few opportunities we have to see both the moon and the stars in the sky at the same time, since the moon is usually too bright.

Q: When will the next one happen that can be viewed from ��ϲ��?

A: Partial solar eclipses (where the Earth’s shadow doesn’t completely cover the moon, and only takes a bite out of the side of it) are more common. But the next total solar eclipse visible from ��ϲ�� will be near midnight on the night of May 15-16, 2022.

Annual Wali Lecture to Address U.S. Nuclear Weapons Policy Nov. 29

Rob Enslin — Tue, 13 Nov 2018 17:57:28 +0000

Frank N. von Hippel

The growing dangers of the current arms race is the subject of the next Kameshwar C. Wali Lecture in the Sciences and Humanities, hosted by the ��ϲ�� Humanities Center in the College of Arts and Sciences (A&S).

, a Princeton professor and former science adviser to President Clinton, will discuss on Thursday, Nov. 29, at 4 p.m. in Shemin Auditorium in the Shaffer Art Building. The event is free and open to the public.

The Department of Physics sponsors the annual Wali Lecture, with support from the Humanities Center and the Wali Lecture fund. American Sign Language (ASL) interpretation and Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) will be provided. To request accommodations, contact��Yudaisy Salomón Sargentón at��phyadmin@syr.edu��or 315.443.5960 by Monday, Nov. 19. For more information about the event, contact Simon Catterall, professor and associate chair of physics, at smcatter@syr.edu or 315.443.5978.

A professor emeritus of public and international affairs in Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School, von Hippel is a national authority on nuclear arms control and proliferation, energy, and science and technology.

In the Nov. 29 event, he will address the United States’ two separate, but related, nuclear arms races with Russia and China, along with recent developments in the “rogue states” of North Korea and Iran.

“Frank von Hippel is a seasoned policy veteran—a scientist who has written extensively about nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament initiatives, the future of nuclear energy and improved automobile fuel economy. He understands the full import of science literacy on society,” Catterall says.

A former assistant director of national security in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, von Hippel will examine the “perverse dynamics” underlying the current nuclear arms race and discuss ways to mitigate the situation.

He says that although there are similarities in the U.S. political climates of today and 40 years ago, one marked difference persists. “The effect of the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Movement has worn off,” says von Hippel, referring to the 1980s campaign that put political pressure on the United States and Russia to stop testing, producing and deploying nuclear weapons. “The effectiveness of the activist-citizen, teaming up with up scientists to educate Congress, as was the case during the Freeze movement, must be recounted.”

Von Hippel’s lecture also will consider the advantages of implementing a U.S.-led no-first-use policy (i.e., resorting to such weapons only in response to a nuclear attack); restoring limits on ballistic missile defenses; putting a cap on China’s arms buildup; and banning plutonium separation and uranium enrichment, processes vital to the development of nuclear warheads.

“A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought,” says the senior research physicist at Princeton, where he founded and co-directed the Program on Science and Global Security (SGS) from 1974 to 2006.

Upon stepping down from leadership of SGS, von Hippel founded the International Panel on Fission Materials, co-chairing the organization until 2015.

Kameshwar C. Wali

He is a recipient of the American Physical Society (APS)’s Leo Szilard Lectureship Award and Joseph A. Burton Forum Award (the latter for his co-authorship of the book “Advice and Dissent: Scientists in the Political Arena”), the George F. Kennan Distinguished Peace Leadership Award and The MacArthur Fellowship. Von Hippel earned a Ph.D. in theoretical physics at Oxford University.

Entering its second decade, the Wali Lecture series bears the name of the world-renowned theorist who turned 91 last month. A member of ��ϲ��’s physics department since 1969, Wali studies the fundamental constituents of matter and their interactions. Such work, he says, has applications in biology, chemistry, materials science and computer science.

The Steele Professor emeritus also is a prolific author, as evidenced by his two books, “Cremona Violins: A Physicist’s Quest for the Secrets of Stradivari” (World Scientific, 2010) and “Chandra: A Biography of S. Chandrasekhar” (The University of Chicago Press, 1991), and dozens of chapters, essays and papers.

Wali is a fellow of APS, whose India Chapter named him Scientist of the Year, and a recipient of the Chancellor’s Citation at ��ϲ�� for exceptional academic achievement.

Physicist to Probe ‘Deep Connections’ Between Life on Earth and Interstellar Space

Rob Enslin — Thu, 11 Oct 2018 13:06:37 +0000

Professor Carl Rosenzweig will present ‘Stars ‘R’ Us’ at Wells College, benefiting Friends of Southern Cayuga Planetarium

Carl Rosenzweig

The old cliché that humans are made of stardust underscores an upcoming program by an astrophysicist in the College of Arts and Sciences.

, professor of physics, will discuss “Stars ‘R’ Us” on Sunday, Oct. 28, at noon in MacMillan Hall at Wells College, 170 Main St., Aurora. The event, which benefits the , explores the deep connections between life on Earth and interstellar space.

Tickets are $35 and include lunch, a Q&A session and a tour of the nearby Southern Cayuga Planetarium and Observatory. Attendees may purchase tickets at the door (while supplies last) or��send a check in advance, payable to “Friends of the Southern Cayuga Planetarium,” to P.O. Box 186, Aurora NY 13026.��For more information, contact Mike Dempsey at 315.685.7163.

“We are delighted to present Professor Rosenzweig, who has spent more than 40 years at ��ϲ�� pushing the boundaries of theoretical particle physics and cosmology,” says Dempsey, a retired science teacher who is president of the Friends of the Southern Cayuga Planetarium. “Beginning with the Big Bang nearly 14 billion years ago, his presentation will trace how the elements of the universe found their way into the solar system and eventually into us.”

Scientists agree that while there are 118 elements in the periodic table, dozens of them are in the human body and are crucial to life itself.This scenario runs counter to when the universe was minutes old and the only elements in existence were hydrogen and helium.��“Where did the other elements come from? How did they get into us?” Dempsey asks.

Although people and stars share about 97 percent of the same kinds of atoms, the proportions of elements among them differ. Studies show that people are 65 percent oxygen by mass, whereas oxygen makes up less than 1 percent of the elements in space.

“We really are stardust,” claims Rosenzweig, who has held research positions at the University of California, Berkeley; the University of Pittsburgh; and the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. “I will consider how stars manufactured all these elements, including the building blocks of life [carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur], and how the most violent events in the universe released these elements to interstellar space.”

Rosenzweig is a member of ��ϲ��’s , which studies the fundamental forces and particles in the universe.

After spending most of his career exploring the properties of��quarks and gluons (fundamental particles in protons and neutrons), he recently has turned his attention to the very early universe.“Over the past decade, observational and theoretical cosmology has provided us with a new and surprising description of the evolution of the universe. This data has highlighted existing issues, while raising new questions about the microphysical processes behind these macroscopic phenomena,” says Rosenzweig, alluding to such infinitesimals as quantum mechanics and string theory.

The author or co-author of dozens of original research articles, Rosenzweig is a proponent of science literacy. He has taught introductory physics and astronomy to thousands of undergraduates, in addition to inspiring hundreds of gifted high school seniors through , whose physics curricula he has directed since 2010.

“I am honored to support the Friends of the Southern Cayuga Planetarium,” says the renowned theoretician, who earned a Ph.D. in physics from Harvard University. “I hope to appeal to scientists and nonscientists alike.”

The Friends of the Southern Cayuga Planetarium is a nonprofit organization raising money to restore and reopen the 50-year-old, Sputnik-era planetarium, which conjoins a 14-year-old NASA-funded observatory. Both facilities closed doors in 2014.

“We’re more than halfway toward our fundraising goals for being restored and upgraded for the next generation. This event is vital to our efforts,” Dempsey adds.

2018 Nobel Prize Sends Message That ‘Excellence in Physics Isn’t Gendered’

Daryl Lovell — Tue, 02 Oct 2018 19:49:59 +0000

The 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to three scientists from the U.S., France and Canada for their achievements in the field of laser physics. Physicist Donna Strickland of Canada is included in that group, and is the first woman in decades to win the prize.

is an associate professor in the Physics Department at ��ϲ��’s College of Arts and Sciences. Prof. Manning says the prize winners’ laser physics work has paved the way for her own research, and credits Donna Strickland’s win for sending a message to all students that excellence in physics isn’t gendered.

Dr. Manning says:

“This is a really exciting day for physicists everywhere.��Dr. Strickland’s work on chirped pulse amplification in lasers is important, and I am glad to see that the Nobel Prize committee gave her credit, as she performed the research as a graduate student working with a senior male doctoral advisor.

“Recognizing the contributions of scientists at all career stages, not just senior professors, is an important way to combat gender discrimination in the sciences.�� I am so excited to see a woman win the physics Nobel again after more than 50 years — as it sends a great message to students of all genders that excellence in physics isn’t gendered.

“I’m also really excited about the award to Dr. Ashkin, as optical tweezers helped to pave the way for understanding how mechanical forces shape cells and tissues, which is the focus of my own (theoretical and computational) research.”

To request interviews or get more information:

Daryl Lovell
Media Relations Manager
Division of Marketing and Communications

T��315.443.1184 ��M��315.380.0206
dalovell@syr.edu |

820 Comstock Avenue, Suite 308, ��ϲ��, NY 13244
news.syr.edu |

��ϲ��

Physicist’s Discovery Recasts ‘Lifetime Hierarchy’ of Subatomic Particles

Rob Enslin — Mon, 01 Oct 2018 19:40:36 +0000

Steven Blusk

Researchers in the College of Arts and Sciences have determined that the lifetime of the so-called charmed omega—part of a family of subatomic particles called baryons—is nearly four times longer than previously thought.

In an article in (American Physical Society, 2018), , professor of physics,��explains that the new measurement is based on proton-proton collision data from the at the physics laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland.

Blusk and his colleagues found that after analyzing collision data from nearly a thousand charmed-omega decays, the particle’s lifetime is 268 femtoseconds. A femtosecond is a millionth of a billionth of a second, or 0.000000000000001 seconds.

“Theoretical predictions about the lifetimes of exotic particles often favor a particular order,” says Blusk, the article’s lead author. “Theories predict that the charmed-omega baryon likely has the lowest lifetime of the bunch. But predictions are made to be tested, right?”

A proton-proton collision detected by LHCb earlier this year. (Image: CERN)

That the lifetime of the charmed omega is not as short as scientists thought it was “substantially jumbles” the lifetime hierarchy of multiple particles. “It also suggests that corrections need to be made to our theoretical predictions,” Blusk adds.

Scientists agree that everything in the universe comes from two groups of elementary particles: quarks and leptons. Unlike leptons, which are solitary in nature (e.g., electrons), quarks combine to form composite particles called hadrons.There are different kinds of hadrons, the most common of which are mesons (containing two quarks) and baryons (with three quarks). These quarks come in six species, or flavors, and have unusual names: up, down, strange, charm, beauty and top.Blusk studies beauty and charmed quarks, which are hundreds of times more massive than their up and down counterparts. It is for this reason that both are considered “heavy.”

“Heavy quarks rapidly change into up and down quarks through particle decay, in which they go from a higher mass state to a lower one,” Blusk continues. “By producing and studying heavy quarks in abundance in high-energy collisions [using particle accelerators], we gain insight into the fundamental forces of nature.”

Enter ��ϲ��’s , of which Blusk is a member. He and his HEP colleagues split time between ��ϲ��—where they design, build and test detection hardware—and CERN, where they carry out experiments.

It is at the Large Hadron Collider—the biggest, most powerful particle accelerator in the world—that beams of protons are hurled at one another, close to the speed of light. Blusk and other scientists from around the world comb the ensuing debris for clues to new or yet-to-be-detected forces in the universe.

Blusk says the detritus enables him to not only analyze particle decays, but also measure the lifetimes of charmed mesons and baryons. “It is one example of the many types of measurements that are performed at CERN,” he says.

Such data also helps scientists test models of quantum chromodynamics (QCD), a theory describing the atomic nucleus and particles within it.��QCD focuses on quarks and gluons, which are the building blocks of protons and neutrons, which, in turn, form atoms.

The theory also explains how gluons hold quarks together.

“All this information helps us seek a deeper, more complete theory of the universe,” Blusk says.

The lifetime of the charmed omega was last measured nearly two decades ago, but involved much smaller data samples.��The average of the values measured by those experiments was approximately 69 femtoseconds—four times lower than Blusk’s value.

None of the measurements, including his, contradicts the range of theoretical estimates of the charmed omega’s lifetime, which spans from 60 to 520 femtoseconds.

Blusk says that, because of the discrepancy, additional measurements need to be made.��Moreover, theoreticians are beginning to take a closer look at their QCD calculations and predictions.

“It is quite rare and exciting to find such a long-accepted measurement challenged by a new one. We look forward to this result spurring more precise QCD calculations of various quantities, which, in turn, will improve the theoretical predictions for the lifetimes of charmed baryons,” Blusk adds.

��ϲ�� Professor Named to Science News’ SN 10: Scientists to Watch

News Staff — Thu, 27 Sep 2018 21:27:22 +0000

Lisa Manning (Photo by Amy Manley)

, associate professor of physics in the College of Arts and Sciences, is included in . For the fourth year, Science News is spotlighting 10 early- and mid-career scientists on their way to widespread acclaim for tackling the big questions facing science and society.

Manning, 38, describes cells’ behavior in terms of the mechanical forces they exert on one another. Her approach has led to a new understanding of a whole host of biological processes that involve cells on the move, including embryonic development, wound healing and even asthma and cancer.

“Forces at the cellular scale are important for properties of tissues,” says physicist Jean Carlson of the University of California, Santa Barbara, who was Manning’s graduate adviser. “Lisa has been a real leader in thinking that way.”

Each scientist included in the SN 10 was nominated by a Nobel laureate or recently elected member of the National Academy of Sciences. All are age 40 or under and were selected by Science News staff for their potential to shape the science of the future.

Manning’s incredible story is available online at��.

“Each year, I am more and more impressed by the scientists who are selected to this prestigious list,” says Maya Ajmera, president and CEO of the Society for Science & the Public and publisher of Science News. “These scientists are making an enormous impact. I congratulate all the members of the SN 10 class of 2018.”

Nancy Shute, editor in chief of Science News, adds, “It’s not surprising that members of the SN 10 class of 2018 are looking to other disciplines to find solutions to some of our world’s grandest challenges. Today’s best scientists understand that they need to think beyond boundaries and what has been done before. There’s a fearlessness and drive that made these researchers stand out.”

A New Way to Count Qubits

Rob Enslin — Mon, 24 Sep 2018 18:48:26 +0000

Physicist Britton Plourde part of interinstitutional team revolutionizing quantum computing

Researchers at ��ϲ��, working with collaborators at the University of Wisconsin (UW)-Madison, have developed a new technique for measuring the state of quantum bits, or qubits, in a quantum computer.

Their findings are the subject of an article in magazine (American Association for the Advancement of Science, 2018), which elaborates on the experimental efforts involved with creating such a technique.

Britton Plourde in his lab at ��ϲ��.

The Plourde Group—led by , professor of physics in the College of Arts and Sciences (A&S)—specializes in the fabrication of superconducting devices and their measurement at low temperatures.

Much of their work involves qubits, which are systems that follow the strange laws of quantum mechanics. These laws enable qubits to exist in superpositions of their two states (zero and one), in contrast to digital bits in conventional computers that exist in a single state.

Plourde says that superposition, when combined with entanglement (“another counterintuitive aspect of quantum mechanics”), leads to the possibility of quantum algorithms with myriad applications.

“These algorithms can tackle certain problems that are impossible to solve on today’s most powerful supercomputers,” he explains. “Potential areas impacted by quantum information processing include pharmaceutical development, materials science and cryptography.”

Intensive, ongoing industrial-scale efforts by teams at and have recently led to quantum processors with approximately 50 qubits. These qubits consist of superconducting microwave circuits cooled to temperatures near absolute zero.

Building a quantum computer powerful enough to tackle important problems, however, will require at least several hundreds of qubits—likely many more, Plourde says.

The current state-of-the-art approach to measuring qubits involves low-noise cryogenic amplifiers and substantial room-temperature microwave hardware and electronics, all of which are difficult to scale up to significantly larger qubit arrays. The approach outlined in Science takes a different tack.

“We focus on detecting microwave photons,” says Plourde, also editor in chief of IEEE Transactions on Applied Superconductivity (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers). “Our approach replaces the need for a cryogenic amplifier and could be extended, in a straightforward way, toward eliminating much of the required room-temperature hardware, as well.”

Plourde says the technique co-developed at SU and UW-Madison could eventually allow for scaling to quantum processors with millions of qubits. This process is the subject of a previous article by Plourde and his collaborators in (IOP Publishing, 2018).

An A&S faculty member since 2005, Plourde is a recipient of the IBM Faculty Award and the National Science Foundation’s CAREER Award. He earned a Ph.D. in physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and completed a postdoctoral research fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley.

Physicist Awarded $1.2 Million NIH Grant to Enhance Protein Detection

Rob Enslin — Tue, 11 Sep 2018 20:54:31 +0000

Professor Liviu Movileanu develops biosensors to identify proteins in leukemia, cancer

Liviu Movileanu

A physicist in the College of Arts and Sciences is using a major grant from the (NIH) to support ongoing research into protein detection.

, professor of physics, is the recipient of a four-year, $1.2 million Research Project Grant (R01) from NIH’s�� (NIGMS). The award supports the development of highly sensitive biosensors to identify proteins in aggressive lymphocytic leukemia and various cancers.

The project involves researchers from ��ϲ�� and SUNY Upstate Medical University, the latter of whom are led by , associate professor of biochemistry and molecular biology.

“Our mission is to design, create and optimize novel biophysical tools that detect tiny amounts of biological molecules,” says Movileanu, a member of the Biophysics and Biomaterials research group in the Department of Physics. “We will devise protein-based detectors that benefit molecular biomedical diagnostics.”

Biomedical diagnostics is a rapidly evolving field involving the screening, detection, diagnosis, prognosis and monitoring of disease at various stages of development.

This work involves physics measurements, device engineering principles and other biophysical approaches that enable scientists to observe mechanistic processes at the single-molecule level.

Movileanu credits the Human Genome Project for providing new ways to identify proteins that play critical regulatory roles in cells. Studying how and why proteins interact with one another is part of a burgeoning area called interactomics.

“This work impacts our fundamental understanding of disease cause and its progression,” says Movileanu, who came to ��ϲ�� in 2004, after a postdoctoral stint at Texas A&M University. “If we know how individual parts of a cell function, we can then figure out why a cell deviates from normal functionality toward a tumor-like, oncogenic state.”

A 3-D illustration of cancer cells (Courtesy of Design_Cells/Shutterstock.com)

Movileanu uses nanopore technology to identify and validate proteins. This involves sending an electric current across an artificially engineered hole in a cell membrane called a nanopore. When individual proteins move near or through a nanopore, the current changes in intensity.

“A nanopore is a robust, proteinaceous scaffold that can be modified at an atomic level and integrated into scalable electrical devices,” says Movileanu, an experimentalist who earned a Ph.D. from the University of Bucharest (Romania).

Looking ahead, his team plans to tether specific protein receptors to nanopores in complex biofluid samples, such as blood, a cell lysate or a biopsy. Movileanu is excited about this work because each protein receptor-protein target interaction produces a unique electrical signal.

Moreover, the biological data gleaned from a single sample can be immense. “Nanostructures permit us to observe complex biochemical events in a quantitative manner, leading to a solid assessment about a particular sample,” he adds.

Movileanu applauds NIH’s commitment to new biomedical technologies, enabling doctors to identify diseases quicker, more accurately and more affordably than before.

“This could be the start of a new generation of research and diagnostic tools, exploring the molecular basis of recognition events in a sensitive, specific and quantitative fashion—something heretofore impossible with traditional spectroscopic and calorimetric measurements,” he continues.

NIGMS is the principal medical research agency of the U.S. government. One of NIH’s 27 centers and institutes, NIGMS supports basic research into biological processes and lays the foundation for advances in disease diagnosis, treatment and prevention. NIGMS-funded scientists investigate how living systems work at a range of levels, from molecules and cells to tissues and organs, in research organisms, humans and populations.

Lifetime Expectancy May be Longer Than What We Expected

Essence Britt — Sat, 08 Sep 2018 21:02:36 +0000

, professor of physics in the College of Arts and Sciences, was quoted in the Physics World story “.”

Blusk and others have taken the time to remeasure the charmed baryon. The researchers found that lifetime is actually four times longer compared to the average previous measurements. Finding the discrepancies between the two measurements can lead to��better theoretical understanding of quark structure and interaction say the researchers.

Blusk says it is unclear where the discrepancy comes from, or which experiments are correct. He adds, “I’d rather not speculate. It’s very hard to go back to a paper from 20 years ago and try to figure out if they did anything wrong.”

The newly found measurement “should really get people thinking about how to make the theory more precise,” says Blusk.

Blusk recommends where theorists need to start, he says that theorists need to figure out the magnitude of a phenomenon called Pauli interference, which affects the lifetime.

Blusk says that the LHCb collaboration plans to re-measure the lifetime, based on Ω_c⁰��particles directly produced in proton collisions. Although the signals from these particles will have about 40 times more noise, the measurement has different systematic biases and this could lead to a better understanding of what the actual lifetime is.

��ϲ�� Awarded $3.7 Million for Particle Physics Research

Rob Enslin — Wed, 15 Aug 2018 18:54:51 +0000

From left: Tomasz Skwarnicki, Sheldon Stone, Marina Artuso and Steven Blusk

Physicists in the College of Arts and Sciences are closer to understanding what happened after the Big Bang nearly 14 billion years ago, thanks to a grant from the (NSF).

The High-Energy Physics (HEP) Group in the College of Arts and Sciences (A&S) is the recipient of a three-year, $3.7 million NSF award, supporting ongoing research into the fundamental forces and particles in the universe. The group’s project centers on the physics of heavy quarks.

Whereas light quarks make up protons and neutrons in the nucleus of an atom, heavy quarks form other nuclei and mesons (i.e., particles with two quarks). Heavy quarks are produced in the at the laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland.

Integral to HEP’s work is the Standard Model, a theory describing all matter and forces, except for gravity, in the universe.

“The Standard Model is the starting point for investigations into the building blocks of matter,” says Sheldon Stone, Distinguished Professor of Physics and the project’s principal investigator (PI). “We know that an atom is made up of electrons, which swarm around the nucleus. The nucleus, in turn, contains protons and neutrons, each containing at least three quarks, sometimes more. It is within this microscopic framework that we go from the Standard Model to the realm of ‘new physics.’”

Matthew Rudolph

The project’s co-PIs are professors Steven Blusk, Marina Artuso, Matthew Rudolph and Tomasz Skwarnicki. Together with two research professors and a handful of graduate and undergraduate students in A&S, they spearhead one of the nation’s top scientific and hardware programs in particle physics.

According to Stone, the grant will support ongoing physics data analysis at LHCb, as well as the construction and testing of a new tracking device called the Upstream Tracker (UT), located in the experiment’s particle detector.

“LHCb is composed of about 10 different sub-detectors. The UT will significantly enhance the capabilities of this system, above and beyond what it currently does,” he says, adding that the UT will be finished in 2020.

Several times a year, select members of HEP travel to CERN to participate directly in the LHCb experiment. The laboratory is home to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s largest, most powerful particle accelerator. Scientists use the LHC to recreate the Big Bang—the first millionth of a second of existence, in which all space, matter and energy in the universe, contained in a point the size of an atom, began to cool and expand.

“The LHC hurls beams of protons at one another at almost the speed of light. The higher the energy, the greater the impact,” says Stone, a Fellow of the American Physical Society. “We examine the debris from these collisions to learn more about the very early universe.”

Unlike other equations, such as Einstein’s elegantly succinct E = mc2, the Standard Model is long and convoluted—rows of equations that seem to make little sense to the uninitiated. In actuality, the theory successfully describes three of the four fundamental forces in the universe: electromagnetism, as well as the weak and strong nuclear forces.

The model, however, is not without challenges. “It says nothing about dark energy and dark matter, which are invisible and make up 96 percent of the universe, and completely leaves out gravity, the weakest of the four fundamental forces,” Stone says. “As a result, we have to look beyond the Standard Model to understand what the universe is made of and how it has come to be.”

Enter HEP, known for its pioneering work with quarks—fundamental constituents of matter that combine to form composite particles called hadrons. Since 2014, the group has turned the field on its ear with discoveries of various hadrons, including two rare pentaquarks (a particle with four quarks and one antiquark), a tetraquark (two quarks and two antiquarks) and two never-before-seen baryons (three quarks).

A unifying characteristic of these discoveries is the presence of a bottom quark, known as a “beauty quark,” or “b quark”—hence the “b” in “LHCb.”

“For every particle, there is a corresponding antiparticle, identical in every way but with an opposite charge,” Stone explains. “When matter and antimatter come into contact, they annihilate one another in a burst of energy. … Theoretically, the Big Bang should have created equal amounts of matter and antimatter. So why is there more matter than antimatter in the universe?”

The answer likely resides at CERN, where the LHC produces different types of quarks. (There are six varieties, or flavors, in all.) Artificially recreating the Big Bang is one thing; sifting through cosmic debris for evidence of heavy particles is another—something requiring sophisticated detectors. “We catch the b quarks when they decay into something else,” Stone says.

Working with colleagues at MIT and the universities of Maryland and Cincinnati, members of HEP are replacing LHCb’s current tracker with the UT. The new device will consist of four ultra-thin, silicon detector planes that produce data “read” by custom-built integrated circuits.

Artuso, who oversees the UT Project with physicists from Poland, Italy and Switzerland, says the hardware will increase the amount of data that LHCb can handle by factors of five to 10. “Improved luminosity will permit more accurate measurements of fundamental particles, and will enable observations of rare processes that occur below the current sensitivity level,” she adds.

As with most NSF grant awards, this one involves public education and outreach. Witness HEP’s involvement with QuarkNet, a research-based teacher professional development program, co-sponsored by the Department of Energy. At ��ϲ��, QuarkNet takes the form of workshops, lectures and online resources, benefitting high school physics students and teachers.

As one senior physicist puts it: “��ϲ�� is among the most productive and prestigious collider groups in the country. Their record in the physics of heavy quarks is a brand that is well regarded and prominent.”

Says another, “The PIs are clear intellectual leaders in physics research.”

Physics — ���ϲ�����

Secrets Behind Our Universe’s Existence Revealed

Prototype Paves the Way

Exploring the Cosmos on Campus

A Search for Oscillation

‘A Beautiful, Once-In-a-Lifetime Event’: The Total Solar Eclipse on April 8

Remembering Professor Emeritus of Physics Marvin Goldberg

Physics Professor Receives NSF Grant for Work at CERN

Tidal Disruption Events and What They Can Reveal About Black Holes and Stars in Distant Galaxies

TDEs Light the Way

The Advent of Analytical Models

A New Way Forward

Their Findings

American Physical Society Honors Professor Alison Patteson

A Year of Achievements

About the Award

Physics Professor Honored by the American Physical Society

5 NSF Grants Fund ���ϲ����� Researchers’ Work With Cosmic Explorer

Physics Department Holds 2nd Annual Paid Internship Program for Aspiring Young Scientists in ���ϲ�����

A&S Physicists Design Technology Used to Discover New Information About What the Universe Is Made Of

Physics and Mathematics Major Chance Baggett ’24 Named an Astronaut Scholar

‘Fishing’ for Biomarkers

Combining Innovative Technologies

At the Forefront of Diagnosis

3 Faculty Members Collect Top National Awards and Grants

A Star’s Unexpected Survival

A Warm Winter Welcome to Newest Arts and Sciences Faculty

African American Studies

, professor and department chair

Earth and Environmental Sciences

, assistant professor (joint appointment in civil and environmental engineering in the College of Engineering and Computer Science)

, assistant professor

Forensics

, professor of practice

Languages, Literatures and Linguistics

, assistant professor

, assistant teaching professor and Italian language program coordinator

Physics

, assistant professor

, associate professor

Annual Wali Lecture Will Honor the Life and Legacy of Physics Professor Kameshwar C. Wali

Faculty Members Schiff, Yung Recognized by Technology Alliance of CNY

Matt Cufari Receives 2022 LeRoy Apker Award from the American Physical Society

BioInspired Institute’s First Symposium Provides Continuing Inspiration for Research Cluster Initiative

Setting A ‘High Bar’

Making Connections

Remarkable Energy

NSF, Department of Energy Grants Enable Physicists to Continue Cutting-Edge Research in Neutrino Discovery

Enhancing Neutrino Detection

Sparking Student Discovery

Physicist Awarded NSF Grant to Continue Gravitational Wave Detector Research

How LIGO Works

Innovating LIGO

About Stefan W. Ballmer

A&S Physicists Part of NSF PAARE Grant to Diversify Astrophysics

Duncan Brown Takes on a New Mission as Vice President for Research (Q&A)

Accomplished Physicist Duncan Brown Appointed ���ϲ�����’s Next Vice President for Research

AFRL-���ϲ����� Consider Quantum Research Pairing, Student Opportunities for Future Collaborations

Matt Cufari Named as a 2022-23 Astronaut Scholar

Black Hole Image Shows Einstein Was Right, Once Again

Investing in the Bedrock of Discovery: New Endowed Professorship in Quantum Science

(Bio)Sensing Protein Interactions

How It Works

A Tool for Detection

Wishing On a Star – Webb Telescope Could Detect Ancient Clusters

Government Agency Features A&S Physicist’s Pentaquark Research

Physicist Stefan Ballmer Named APS Fellow

A&S Physicists Develop One of the First Models Capturing Dynamics of Confined Cell Movement

Arts and Sciences Physicist Part of a 5-University Team Programming Biological Cells to Design Futuristic Materials

What to Watch: Total Solar Eclipse, Stargazing on the Solstice

Late Alumna Helped Advance Satellite Technology, Understanding of the Sun, Women in Science

A&S Associate Dean, Physics Chair Answers Common Fall Foliage Questions

“Mystery Object Blurs Line between Neutron Stars and Black Holes.”

Physics Department Works to Improve Gravitational Wave Detection

Massive Asteroid Passing Earth Is ‘Time Machine’ From Early Solar System

Physics Department Earns Honors; Embodies ���ϲ�����’s Research Prowess

Chinese Moon Rover, Yutu-2, Discovers ‘Gel-like’ Substance

Black Moon Event Bridges Fiction, Mythology and Science

Northern Lights In Rare Spots This Week – This Is Why

LIGO Livingston Detector Catches Binary Neutron Star Merger, Says Physics Professor

Physics — ��ϲ��

5 NSF Grants Fund ��ϲ�� Researchers’ Work With Cosmic Explorer

Physics Department Holds 2nd Annual Paid Internship Program for Aspiring Young Scientists in ��ϲ��

, assistant professor
(joint appointment in civil and environmental engineering in the College of Engineering and Computer Science)

Accomplished Physicist Duncan Brown Appointed ��ϲ��’s Next Vice President for Research

AFRL-��ϲ�� Consider Quantum Research Pairing, Student Opportunities for Future Collaborations

Physics Department Earns Honors; Embodies ��ϲ��’s Research Prowess

��ϲ�� Professor Named to Science News’ SN 10: Scientists to Watch

��ϲ�� Awarded $3.7 Million for Particle Physics Research