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2008 News

• Jonathan P. Dowling has been elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) by the Division of Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics (DAMOP) in recognition of his "major contributions to quantum optics as it pertains to the development of the theory of atomic emission rates and nonlinear switching in photonic crystals, as well as seminal contributions to quantum metrology and imaging, especially the invention of quantu lithography."
• RESEARCH NEWS! -
• The ATIC Collaboration has discovered an excess of electrons in the cosmic rays at 300-800 GeV. This may be the first observation of a nearby source of particle acceleration from an as yet unidentified astrophysical object or it could be a signature of the annihilation of a Kaluza-Klein dark matter particle of mass about 620 GeV. The finding is reported in "An Excess of Cosmic Ray Electrons at Energies of 300-800 GeV" by John Wefel, Greg Guzik, Joachim Isbert et al. in Nature 456, 362 (2008) and is featured in Nature News & Views p. 329 as well as being the subject of a NASA press release and in The Advocate. ATIC was largely constructed at LSU and the excess in the spectrum was discovered in data collected during ATIC's first two Antarctic balloon flights. More information about the ATIC experiment can be found here.
• Kenneth Schafer has been elected as a Fellow of the Optical Society of America.

• In addition to the recent reference to the department's research on the popular TV series "The Big Bang Theory", we have two additional media stars: Juana Moreno has been invited to attend the Nanoscale Science and Engineering Education Workshop November 13th and 14th in Arlington, Virginia. The presentations and discussions can be viewed on live webcast by registering at this web address. Also, an interview with Geoffrey Clayton at the American Association of Variable Star Observers meeting on R Coronae Borealis stars can be viewed at this web address.

• Research News! - D. Uskov and A. R. P. Rau: Geometric phases and Bloch-sphere constructions for SU(N) groups with a complete description of the SU(4) group", Phys. Rev. A 78, 022331 (2008), provides a geometrical view of two-spin quantum systems. The quantum system of a pair of spins (qubits) lies at the heart of quantum computing, quantum cryptography and related areas of current research. This paper develops a geometrical picture for the time evolution of such systems that closely parallels a similar picture, called the Bloch sphere, which has been very influential over the decades for the quantum mechanics of a single spin in magnetic fields. This latter picture of a unit vector rotating on a sphere provides both basic insight into magnetic resonance and guides its applications in chemistry, biology and medical magnetic resonance imaging. Extension to two (or more) spins provides analogous geometrical objects, albeit of higher dimension, including spheres of larger dimension. The quantum evolution is mapped into that of real vectors rotating on such geometrical manifolds.

• Luis Lehner and Gabriela González have been invited to participate in the 11th Annual Japanese-American Kavli Frontiers of Science symposium co-sponsored by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.

• As part of a major expansion of LSU's materials science program, six new faculty have joined the department in the area of condensed matter and materials science: Assoc. Prof. Shane Stadler (experimental condensed matter, with a joint appointment at CAMD) and Asst. Prof. Juana Moreno (theoretical and computational material science, with a joint appointment at CCT) joined the department in August 2008. Both are the recipients of NSF CAREER grants. In January 2009, we will be joined by Prof. Mark Jarrell, also working in computational material science with a joint appointment at CCT. Prof. Jarrell is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and will act as head of the Materials World Focus Area at CCT. His appointment is also associated with the LONI Institute and the Materials Science Multidisciplinary Hiring Initiative. Prof. Ward Plummer, also joining the department in January, is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences and currently Distinguished Professor of Physics and Director of the Tennessee Advanced Materials Laboratory at the University of Tennessee, and Distinguished Scientist at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He is the holder of numerous honors including Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Vacuum Society. He has been awarded the Davisson-Germer Prize of the American Physical Society and the Medard W. Welch Award of the American Vacuum Society. Also joining the department in January and working with Prof. Plummer in experimental materials science are Prof. Jiandi Zhang and Assoc. Prof. Rongying Jin. Prof. Jin has been awarded the Excellent Young Scientist Award from the Chinese Academy of Science and the IBM Corporation Rising Star of Technology Award, and Prof. Zhang is the recipient of an NSF CAREER award.

• LSU appears on the CBS TV show "The Big Bang Theory"! This undoubtedly a first for LSU! Slightly after the 2:20 mark, a couple can be seen arguing the merits of loop quantum gravity vs string theory. The lady cites two achievements of loop quantum gravity, the calculation of black hole entropy and "minute differences in the speed of light for different colors." The second item refers to a paper by Pullin and Gambini.

• Jorge Pullin has been named to the General Council of the American Physical Society (APS).

• Welcome to Dr. Ray Chastain, who has joined the department as an instructor. Dr. Chastain's expertise is in observational radio astronomy. He comes to LSU from Bucknell University.

• Richard Kurtz has been appointed Associate Dean for Research in the College of Basic Sciences.

• Interim co-directors picked for LSU research center: Jorge Pullin has been named interim co-director, with Stephen Beck of the School of Music, of the Center for Computation and Technology (CCT). Beck and Pullin will jointly lead the center while LSU starts an international search to replace Ed Seidel, who recently accepted a job as the National Science Foundation’s cyber-infrastructure director.

• RESEARCH NEWS ! - By replacing a few percent of iron atoms with manganese in the semiconductor ferrosilicon (FeSi), John DiTusa, former student Ncholu Manyala, and colleagues have demonstrated a possible method for systematically inducing non-Landau Fermi liquid behavior in doped semiconductors. ("Doping a semiconductor to create an unconventional metal", Nature 454, 976, 2008). See also the News and Views article "Materials Science: A metal left spinning", Nature 454, 951 (2008). The effect is apparently due to too few mobile electrons to compensate for the spins of unpaired electrons on the impurity atoms. The behavior can be turned on or off by applying a magnetic field at low temperature. More information.

• Ph.D. student, Jennifer Andrews has been awarded a NASA Graduate Student Researchers Program (GSRP) Fellowship for her thesis research on "A Multi-Wavelength Study of Dust Production in Type II Supernovae." She has also been successful in applying for observing time on the Hubble Space Telescope, Spitzer Space Telescope, and at the Gemini Observatory.

• RESEARCH NEWS ! - Three papers by the theoretical and experimental gravity group have been highlighted by the editorial board of the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity this year: [1] In "Rotating collapse of stellar iron cores in general relativity" (Class. Quantum Grav. 24, S139 2007), B. Zink, E. Schnetter, and colleagues present the results of simulations of the collapse of rotating stellar iron cores, focusing on the gravitational wave emission during the collapse, core bounce, and post-bounce phases. [2] In "Late-time tails in the Kerr spacetime" (Class. Quantum Grav. 25, 072001, 2008), Jorge Pullin and colleagues describe the decay with time of perturbation fields outside a black hole. [3] In "Search for gravitational-wave bursts in LIGO data from the fourth science run" (Class. Quantum Grav. 24, 5343, 2007), the LIGO Science Collaboration (including R. Amin, L. Blackburn, J. Giaime, G. Gonzalez, C. Hanna, W. Johnson, A. Rodriguez, J. Slutsky, and M. Sung at LSU) describe the results of the fourth science run with the LIGO and GEO 600 gravitational wave detectors. With significantly lower noise and greater sensitivity than previous runs, no positive signals from supernova or binary black hole merger events were detected. The theoretical gravity group has made the Classical and Quantum Gravity highlights list every year since the groupt started at LSU in 2001!

• RESEARCH NEWS ! - The binary pulsar system PSR J0737-3039A/B consists of two closely spaced neutron stars in an edge-on configuration such that one pulsar eclipses the other once in every 2.45 hr orbit. The spin of one compact rotating star couples with the orbital angular momentum and the spin of the other, analogous to spin-orbit and spin-spin coupling in an atomic system, providing a test of general relativity in the strong-field regime. The relativistic spin precession of pulsar B has now been measured to be about 4.80/year, R. Breton et al., Science 321, 104, 2008 , in agreement with the prediction of 5.10/yr made by B. Barker and R.F. O'Connell, Phys. Rev. D12, 329 (1975), within an observational uncertainty of 13%. See also R.F. O'Connell , http://arxiv.org/abs/0804.3806 (2008) which reviews both strong and weak-field tests. The terminology spin-orbit and spin-spin in the gravitational context was introduced by R.F. O'Connell, in Experimental Gravitation:Proceedings of Course 56 of the International School of Physics "Enrico Fermi," B. Bertotti, Ed. (Academic Press, New York, 1974), p. 496.

• RESEARCH NEWS ! - The Auger Collaboration (including Jim Matthews, Alexei Dorofeev, Javier Gonzalez at LSU, and Megan McEwan, Roger McNeil, and Rishi Meyhanden formerly in the department) has published evidence for a cutoff at the high end of the cosmic ray spectrum. Auger previously showed that the arrival directions of cosmic rays at energies above 6 x 1019 eV were correlated with the directions of Active Galactic Nuclei -- i.e., that the highest energy cosmic rays are extragalactic in origin. Now, at the same energy, Auger has demonstrated the presence of the predicted GZK cutoff due to the interaction of extragalactic protons with the cosmic microwave background. The scientific article appears in Physical Review Letters 101, 061101 (2008). A commentary by Mike Cherry appears on the APS Physics Viewpoint web site.

• RESEARCH NEWS ! - LSU and Florida State University (FSU) are collaborating to develop the Array for Nuclear Astrophysics Studies with Exotic Nuclei (ANASEN). ANASEN combines three different types of detectors to achieve an efficient and selective instrument for studies of nuclear reactions induced by low intensity beams of exotic nuclei. Solid-state and gaseous detector technologies are being developed with state-of-the-art electronics systems to provide accurate measurements of the energies and trajectories of charged ions over a large angular range. Students at LSU and FSU will develop and test detector elements that will be combined into a completed array and used in experiments with beams of exotic nuclei at the Fox Superconducting Accelerator Laboratory at FSU. ANASEN will allow new direct measurements of nuclear reaction cross sections that are important for understanding stellar explosions like X-ray bursts and the structure of short-lived nuclei. ANASEN will also be a portable instrument that will be moved to the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory at Michigan State University and potentially to other laboratories. LSU and FSU students will have a unique opportunity to conduct leading research in nuclear physics and nuclear astrophysics with ANASEN at major national accelerator facilities. Students will also gain invaluable hands-on experience in forefront instrumentation and techniques that are important for various fields from health care to national security. ANASEN is funded by the by the National Science Foundation's Major Research Instrumentation Program and by LSU and FSU, and led at LSU by Jeff Blackmon.

• John Gibbons, Jr. has been elected Secretary of the American Association of Physicists in Medicine. He is chief of clinical physics at Mary Bird Perkins Cancer Center and adjunct associate professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy.

• RESEARCH NEWS ! - The LIGO collaboration (including the LSU group led by Profs. Joe Giaime, Gabriela González, Bill Hamilton, and Warren Johnson), has presented upper limits on gravitational wave emission from the Crab pulsar, giving an upper limit on gravitational wave emission that beats indirect limits inferred from the spin-down and braking index of the pulsar and the energetics of the nebula. The scientific paper can be found here. A popular writeup can be found here.

• RESEARCH NEWS ! - Titanium dioxide (TiO2) has a number of uses in catalysis, photochemistry, and sensing that are linked to the reducibility of the oxide. Usually, bridging oxygen (Obr) vacancies are assumed to cause the Ti 3d defect state in the TiO2 band gap. Phil Sprunger and colleagues from the Interdisciplinary Nanoscience Center, Department of Physics and Astronomy, and Institute for Storage Ring Facilities at the University of Aarhus in Denmark propose that Ti interstitials in the near-surface region may be largely responsible for the defect state in the band gap. Based on data from high-resolution scanning tunneling microscopy and photoelectron spectroscopy measurements, they argue that these donor-specific sites play a key role in and may dictate the ensuing surface chemistry. Density functional theory calculations support the experimental observations. The scientific paper was published in Science 320, 1755 (2008).

• Spin Helicity Workshop Aims to Bring Together Several Communities of Electron Physicists - "Matthias Eschrig and Gerd Schön of the Universität Karlsruhe and Ilya Vekhter of Louisiana State University are organizing an I2CAM Exploratory Workshop entitled “Spin Helicity and Chirality in Superconductor and Semiconductor Nanostructures” to be held in Karlsruhe, Germany July 13-17.

• The National Science Foundation (NSF) has selected Edward Seidel as its director of the Office of Cyberinfrastructure. This office funds researchers who demonstrate cutting-edge information technology that can lead to breakthroughs in science, engineering and other academic disciplines. Seidel, who is Floating Point Systems Professor in the Departments of Physics and Astronomy and Computer Science and also is Director of the Center for Computation & Technology (CCT), will begin his NSF position September 1, 2008. The full press release can be found here.

• RESEARCH NEWS ! - Matthew Anderson, Luis Lehner, Patrick Motl, David Neilsen, Carlos Palenzuela, and Joel Tohline, together with colleagues from Brigham Young University and Long Island University, recently published a discussion of magnetic field effects on neutron star mergers and the electromagnetic and gravitational wave radiation that results. An article from the Salt Lake Tribune describing the work can be found here. An article about the implications for neutron stars with very high magnetic fields ("magnetars") can be found on the Science Magazine website here. The original paper can be found here. Anderson and Neilsen were recent Postdoctoral Researchers at LSU and are now working at BYU.

• Arlo U. Landolt is a member of the National Research Council's Space Studies Board Committee on Science Opportunities Enabled by NASA's Constellation Systems, NASA's new launch systems being designed to implement the lunar exploration component of the Vision for Space Exploration and the NASA Authorization Act of 2005. The committee's web site can be found here.

• Seven Physics and Astronomy faculty have been named among the 100 outstanding faculty recently recognized by the University as "Rainmakers", faculty whose exceptional productivity distinguishes them as leaders in the University's research and creative enterprise. Congratulations to Gabriela González, Luis Lehner, Jorge Pullin, Brad Schaefer, Ken Schafer, Ed Seidel, and Joel Tohline.

• Boyd Professor Joseph Callaway was honored posthumously as one of four new inductees into the College of Basic Sciences Hall of Distinction.

• Marlan Scully, Adjunct Professor of Physics, has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

• Congratulations to the Physics and Astronomy students honored at the 2008 College of Basic Sciences Choppin Honors Convocation:
  •  Keen-Morris Prize - Nickolas Van Mete
  • Undergraduate Research Award - Stacey Bright and Brad Corso
  • Undergraduate Service Award - Rachel Mannino
  • College Honors - Shawn Wilkinson

• Physics and Astronomy faculty were successful on eight separate Enhancement, Research Competitiveness, and Graduate Fellows awards recently announced by the Louisiana Board of Regents:
  • P. Adams, J. DiTusa, D. Young, "Upgrade of the LSU Helium Liquefier Facility"
  • J. Blackmon, "Development of a Novel Prototype Detector of Low Energy Neutrinos"
  • D. Browne, M. Cherry, G. Gonzalez, B. Schaefer, "Graduate Fellows in Physics and Astronomy"
  • S. Guo (Mech. Eng.), D. Young et al., "A Quantum-Design Physical Property Measurement System (PPMS) for Novel Thermoelectric Material Studies"
  • R. Kurtz, P. Sprunger et al., "Acquisition of a Variable-Temperature SPM for Multidisciplinary Materials Research and Education"
  • J. Madden (Math), M. Cherry et al., "Professional Master's Degree Programs for K-12 STEM Teachers"
  • D. Sheehy, "Superfluidity and Strong Correlations in Ultracold Atomic Gases"
  • M. Cherry, T.G. Guzik, J.G. Stacy et al., "Science Teacher Training Using Astrophysics Research".

• One of the prestigious prizes awarded at the American Physical Society meeting in New Orleans in March 2008, was the Aneesur Rahman Prize to Gary S. Grest of Sandia Laboratories for "his ground-breaking development of computational methods and their applications". Gary received his Ph.D. from our department in 1974 (thesis advisor: A.K. Rajagopal) and was recently elected to the National Academy of Engineering.

• Edward Seidel has been elected to the Board of Trustees of Internet2.

• RESEARCH NEWS ! - John Gibbons, chief of clinical physics at Mary Bird Perkins Cancer Center and an adjunct professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, has helped introduce a new treatment for a rare form of eye cancer, choroidal melanoma, in which low-dose radiation is applied to the affected area in an ingenious way: Radioactive "seeds" about 3 millimeters long are placed inside a solid gold cap, or plaque, that is attached to the eyeball. Approximately two thousand new cases of choroidal melanoma are diagnosed in the United States every year. Gibbons' new treatment procedure is available through a partnership between Mary Bird Perkins Cancer Center and Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center and is described in the March 25, 2008 issue of the Baton Rouge Business Report.

• RESEARCH NEWS ! - Ken Schafer and colleagues from Lund and Amsterdam have demonstrated that a train of attosecond UV pulses phase locked to an infrared field can be used to control the ionization of helium atoms with extremely rapid precision. Their work is highlighted in a Nature Photonics Research Highlights article. In a separate article, Schafer and his collaborators demonstrate the use of a train of ultrafast infrared laser pulses to produce images of electron motion on sub-femtosecond timescales. The "electron stroboscope" enables "unprecedented control of electron dynamics" and is expected to lead to detailed, precise studies of electron-atom interactions. A Physical Review Focus article describes the electron stroboscope.

• Congratulations to Dana Browne, who will receive the 2008 Basic Sciences Tiger Athletic Foundation President's Award at the University's Distinguished Faculty Award Reception at Lod Cook Alumni Center May 6 at 4:00 p.m.

• Congratulations to Bob O'Connell and Ravi Rau, who were honored as "Outstanding Referees" by the American Physical Society at its recent March meeting. This recognition was awarded to referees who "have been truly exceptional in their contributions to the physics community by their hard work and careful attention to the peer review process." The complete list of awardees can be found at http://publish.aps.org/OutstandingReferees.

• The Wired Campus - Education-technology news from around the web - Universities Win $9-Million to Create High-Speed Computing Tools

2007 News

• RESEARCH NEWS ! - LIGO Sheds Light on Cosmic Event - The non-detection of gamma ray burst GRB070201 by LIGO indicated that this event was not caused by the merger of two neutron stars or black holes, contrary to the expectations for a short-duration gamma ray burst observed in a nearby galaxy. The scientific article can be found here.

• RESEARCH NEWS ! - LSU Faculty are involved in two of the top 10 physics stories of the year   according to the list published by the American Institute of Physics. LSU faculty are involved in the MiniBooNE experiment and the Auger experiment. MiniBoone (which involves Professor William Metcalf and his research group) recently showed evidence that appears to rule out a fourth generation of neutrinos. Previous measurements of neutrino oscillations had provided tentative evidence for a family of "sterile" neutrinos; MiniBooNE has ruled that out, leaving only the standard three neutrino families associated with the electron, muon, and tau particles. Auger, the world's largest cosmic ray telescope, involves Professor James Matthews; Auger has provided the first direct evidence that the highest energy cosmic rays are produced by active galactic nuclei powered by massive black holes at the cores of galaxies.

• Diola Bagayoko, Professor of Physics at Southern University and Adjunct Professor at LSU, along with the Timbuktu Academy he founded and currently directs, received the 2007 Benjamin Banneker Legacy Award for their work and excellent results in grade school education (K-8th grade). The award ceremony took place on November 7, 2007 in Washington, D.C. Dr. William (Bill) Cosby presented the award to Dr. Bagayoko. The Benjamin Banneker Legacy Awards are made by the Benjamin Banneker Institute for Science and Technology in Washington. More information on the K-16 systemic mentoring and research participation programs of the Timbuktu Academy, click the link above. Congratulations to Diola and the Timbuktu Academy.

• Gabriela González has been appointed Chair of the committee that will select the winner of the GWIC thesis prize. GWIC is the Gravitational Wave International Committee, a sub-committee of the IUPAP, International Union of Pure and Applied Physics. The committee selects the winner based on the best thesis in gravitational wave research worldwide.

• Edward Seidel has been elected as fellow of the American Physical Society by the Division of Computational Physics (DCOMP).
  Luis Lehner has been elected to the "40 under 40" by the Baton Rouge Business Report.

• Gabriela González has been named a Fellow of the American Physical Society in recognition of "her experimental contributions to the field of gravitational wave detection, her leadership in the analysis of LIGO data for gravitational wave signals, and for her skill in communicating the excitement of physics to students and the public."

• LSU and Southern Receive Awards: Board of Regents provides matching funds to stimulate research in Louisiana.  Winning proposal - "Multi-Wavelength and Multi-Messenger Observations in Conjunction with the Gamma Ray Large Area Space Telescope, or GLAST, Satellite Mission," submitted by Michael Cherry, with J. Gregory Stacy, Rob Hynes, Jim Matthews and Ali Fazely (Southern).

• Kenneth Hogstrom has been named a Fellow of the American Society for Therapeutic Radiology and Oncology in recognition of his long service to the society and his contributions to the field of radiation oncology.

 

• RESEARCH NEWS ! - The Auger experiment has announced the first correlation of ultra-high energy (1020 eV) cosmic ray arrival directions with extragalactic sources. Based on a sample of data taken between 2004 and 2007, Auger sees evidence for their highest energy events coming from the directions of nearby active galactic nuclei. The scientific article appears in Science.

 

 

• RESEARCH NEWS ! - The ATIC cosmic ray balloon experiment is featured on LSU's home page as part of LSU's Antarctic research program. ATIC is preparing for its third flight to measure the composition and energy spectrum of high energy cosmic ray nuclei and electrons. Details and the latest news regarding the current flight campaign can be found here.

• RESEARCH NEWS ! - At the 209th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle, Washington, astronomers announced findings of unusually high levels of the oxygen isotope 18O in two extremely rare types of stars. This breakthrough has led astronomers to believe that the origin of these odd stars could be the merging of white dwarf stars, the burnt-out remnants of normal stars like the Sun. Read the entire article in our Fall 2007 departmental newsletter. For more information, The Gemini Observatory website press release can be found here. The Gemini press release recorded more hits (more than 50,000) in the first three months after its release than any previous Gemini press release.

 

• RESEARCH NEWS ! - "The Pierre Auger Observatory: Measuring the Highest Energy Cosmic Rays" - In July 2007, the initial Auger results were presented at the 30th International Cosmic Ray Conference in Mexico. The data indicated a clear cutoff in the spectrum near 1020 eV, a result known as the "GZK cutoff" and expected due to interactions of high energy cosmic ray protons with the cosmic microwave background. The Auger Collaboration consists of over 200 scientists from more than 20 countries. The group participating from LSU is led by Prof. James Matthews and includes Prof. Roger McNeil, postdocs Alexei Dorofeev and Javier Gonzalez, graduate student Megan McEwen, and undergraduate students Rachel Mannino and Brittan Farmers. Prof. Matthews has been a part of the project since it was first conceived in 1992. More information about Auger can be found by visiting Nature.com, Science Magazine, or the Auger Observatory website. Read the entire article in our Fall 2007 departmental newsletter. Links to additional news articles about the Auger discovery can be found at Google News (search for "Auger cosmic rays").

• RESEARCH NEWS ! - "The Relativistic Turducken Approach to Stuffing a Black Hole" - Erik Schnetter, Manuel Tiglio, and Peter Diener from LSU's Physics and Astronomy Department and the Center for Computation and Technology, working together with colleagues from the Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolas de Hidalgo in Mexico, North Carolina State University, the University of Southampton in Britain, and the Albert Einstein Institute in Germany, have shown how to stuff a black hole. The result is that their "turducken" approach to stuffing a back hole may lead to useful methods of simulating the behavior of real black holes irrespective of many of the unobservable details of how the interior stuffing is arranged. A preprint of the paper can be found on the web. More information can be found in the article in our Fall 2007 departmental newsletter.

• RESEARCH NEWS ! - "Medical Physics is a fundamental science concerned with improving people's lives," said Dr. Polad Shikhaliev, who joined the LSU faculty in January, 2007 as an Assistant Professor in its joint Medical Physics Program with Mary Bird Perkins Cancer Center. "Medical Physics has a direct impact on people's health, helping cure breast cancer. As a medical physicist, I conduct research with detector technology to find cancer earlier". Dr. Shikhaliev's current research is focused on developing a new breast CT system that will allow detecting breast cancer at its very early stages. Breast CT, as proposed by Dr. Shikhaliev, should be able to detect breast lesions as small as 2-3 mm, compared to 10mm, which is often the case in current mammography x-rays. He also expects his research to acquire the CT scan with less radiation dose to the breast than current low-risk mammography techniques and with no pain or discomfort. Read the entire article in our Fall 2007 departmental newsletter.

• Joel Tohline has been elected as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Each year the Council elects members whose "efforts on behalf of the advancement of science or its applications are scientifically or socially distinguished." Dr. Tohline is being honored for his " . . . contributions in the astrophysical application of numerical hydrodynamics, in particular to star formation, galactic dynamics, and compact objects, and for contributions to the development of computational astrophysics in Louisiana."
  - - posted October 24, 2007

• Ravi Rau has been elected Vice-Chair of the American Physical Society (APS) Topical Group on Few-Body Problems.
  - - posted October 16, 2007

• Joel Tohline has been invited to serve a 3-year term on the National Science Foundation's Directorate of Math & Physical Sciences Advisory Committee (MPSAC). The MPSAC is the only official advisory body to the Divisions within the Math and Physical Sciences Directorate, and the Directorate relies on the AC for both high level advice and connection to the community. More information on the MPSAC can be found here.
  - - posted October 9, 2007

• Luis Lehner has been appointed to the Selection Committee of the Nicholas Metropolis Prize of the American Physical Society. The prize is awarded every year for the best dissertation in computational physics. Lehner was the first recipient of the prize in 1999.

• Profs. Jerry Draayer and Jorge Pullin have been appointed to the editorial board of Research Letters in Physics, an open access journal.
  - - posted September 18, 2007

• The conference Profs. Rodolfo Gambini (University of the Republic, Uruguay) and Jorge Pullin are organizing in Uruguay in October has been decleared "of national interest" by the government in Uruguay. Signatures at the bottom of the document are those of the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Education, and the President of the Republic.
  - - posted September 11, 2007

• Luis Lehner will be one of the participants in the invitation-only workshop "Enabling Science Discoveries through Visual Exploration", organized by the National Science Foundation in Washington, D.C. on September 27-28, 2007.
  - - posted September 10, 2007

• Two papers by Physics and Astronomy Professors Manuel Tiglio and Peter Diener with Research Associate, Eric Schnetter, and by former LSU graduate student and PhD graduate Gioel Calabrese (currently in England) have been chosen among the highlights of 2006/2007 by the Editorial Board of the Journal "Classical and Quantum Gravity", published by the Institute of Physics of the UK. Papers published by members of the LSU Relativity Group have made the highlights list for the last six years.
  The proceedings of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific conference series entitled "The Future of Photometric, Spectrophotometric and Polarimetric Standardization" that took place in Blankenberge, Belgium was dedicated to Arlo U. Landolt in recognition of his life work of setting standars in photometry.

• RESEARCH NEWS ! - John DiTusa and a group of international colleagues have discovered an unusual magnetic material that has major implications in Quantum Physics. Their findings were published online July 26, 2007 by Science in an article entitled "Mesoscopic Phase Coherence in a Quantum Spin Fluid."

• Jonathan Dowling was elected Fellow of the Optical Society of America.

• Jorge Pullin has been named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). In addition, he also has been elected corresponding member of the Mexican Academy of Sciences (Academia Mexicana de Ciencias), a non-profit organization comprising over 1,800 distinguished Mexican scientists.

• Faculty Awards
  Jerry Draayer - Distinguished Research Master by the LSU Council on Research
  Richard Kurtz - LSU Distinguished Faculty Award
  Michael Cherry - LSU Alumni Association Faculty Excellence Award
  Juhan Frank - Tiger Athletic Foundation President's Award
  Jonathan Dowling has been appointed to the Oak Ridge Associated Universities National Security Experts Team.
  - - posted August 28, 2007

• LSU Professor Receives Award for Work with International Neutrino Experiment Thomas Kutter has received an Outstanding Junior Investivator Award from the Department of Energy for his work on the large-scale T2K neutrino oscillation project in Japan in hopes of solving neutrino mysteries. - - posted August 22, 2007

• Dr. Polad Shikhaliev has just received a $389K NIH grant beginning June 1, 2007 entitled "In-vivo intravascular autoradiography with storage phosphor detector". - - posted August 7, 2007

• Prof. Bradley Schaefer has just won a share of the 2007 Gruber Cosmology Prize as a particiapant in the discovery that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating, not decelerating as expected. By measuring the brightnesses of a large number of very distant supernovae, two competing teams -- the Supernova Cosmology Project and the High-z Supernova Search team -- simultaneously determined that the expansion of our Universe is accelerating, a surprising result since confirmed by several independent methods. The conclusion is that approximately 70% of the mass/energy of our Universe is due to a previously unknown 'force' now called 'Dark Energy'. The $500,000 prize money will be shared amongst the co-authors of the original papers, with the award ceremony being held on 7 September 2007 at Trinity College in Cambridge. Past winners of the Gruber Cosmology Prize are John Mather and the COBE team, Martin Rees, Vera Rubin, and Allan Sandage. The Gruber Award is described in more detail here.  - - posted August 7, 2007

• Profs. Jonathan Dowling (PI) and Hwang Lee (Co-PI), have just received a $600K grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA) Strategic Technology Office (STO) Quantum Sensors Program (QSP).

  The objective of QSP is to develop pratical sensors operating outside of a controlled laboratory environment that exploit non-classical photon states to surpass classical sensor resolution. The Phase I grant has a duration of 18 months, and could lead to additional phase grants. Co-investigators include scientists from the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Raytheon Corporation, and MathSense Analytics, all well as collaborators from the University of Calgary and the University of Toronto.

• Former LSU Physics undergraduate, Barrett Deris, has received an NSF Graduate Fellowship. Deris is currently a graduate student at Univ. of California-San Diego.

• LSU Physics & Astronomy graduate student, Enrique Pazos, won the prize for the best graduate student presentation at the 3rd Gulf Coast Gravity Conference held at the University of Alabama-Huntsville.

• The SPIRES bibliographical service at Stanford University has compiled a list of the most cited articles of all time to appear in the GR-QC preprint repository. This repository contains almost all papers in gravitation starting in 1992. Jorge Pullin's paper with Dr. Rodolfo Gambini, "Nonstandard Optics in Quantum Space-time", cited 240 times, is the 21st most cited paper ever in the repository.
  - - posted February 2, 2007

• LSU Professor Hosts "Ask the Astronomer" Event Observatory - Topic will be antimatter, but all space related questions welcomed.
  - - posted January 26, 2007

• Jorge Pullin has been elected corresponding member of the National Academy of Science of Argentina.
  - - posted January 24, 2007

• LSU Professor Named LIGO Head - Joseph A. Giaime, Associate Professor of Physics and Astronomy at LSU, was recently named head of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory, or LIGO, based in Livingston, LA.
  - - posted January 10, 2007

2006 News

• LSU Medical Physics Program Gain Full Accreditation - Partnership with Mary Bird Perkins provides research in cancer treatment.
  - - posted December 22, 2006
• Gerard Milburn, Adjunct Professor of Physics at LSU was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS).
  - - posted December 1, 2006
• Endowed Chair Supports Cancer Research Through LSU and Mary Bird Perkins Cancer Center Partnership - Dr. Charles M. Smith Chair of Medical Physics Established
  - - posted November 20, 2006
• The American Institute of Physics (AIP) and the IEEE-Computer Society have appointed Professor Joel Tohline as an editor of the Visualizations department for their technical magazine Computing in Science and Engineering. The constituent readerships that CiSE serves include scientists and engineers from many disciplines as well as applied mathematicians and computer professionals, whose collaboration drives the cutting edge of computational science and education.
  - - posted November 20, 2006
• Sudbury Neutrino Observatory Team Wins First John C. Polanyi Prize - LSU researchers among those honored
  - - posted November 16, 2006
• Professor Philip Adams has been selected as a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS). His citation reads, "For his major contributions to the understanding of high field superconductivity and two dimensional electron localization." Election to Fellowship in the American Physical Society (APS) is limited to no more than one half of one percent of the membership.
  - - posted November 16, 2006
• Professor Jorge Pullin was elected as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
  - - posted November 16, 2006
• LSU Physics Department Racks up Prestigious Awards
  - - posted October 31, 2006
• Professor Jorge Pullin has been elected as a Corresponding Member of the Mexican Academy of Sciences.
  - - posted October 19, 2006
• Professor Jerry P. Draayer has been awarded the 2006 SESAPS Francis G. Slack Award. This award is made by the Southeastern Section of the American Physics Society.
  - - posted October 16, 2006
• Physics Faculty receive major awards -
  • Gabriela González, Edward Bouchet Award of the American Physical Society (APS);
  • Edward Seidel, Sidney Fernbach Award of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE);
  • Rainer Weiss, Einstein Prize of the American Physical Society (APS)
  - - posted October 9, 2006
• LSU students participate in NASA's HASP balloon experiment.
  - - posted September 21, 2006
• The paper "Multi-block simulations in general relativity: high-order discretizations, numerical stability and applications" by Luis Lehner, Manuel Tiglio, and Oscar Reula was highlighted by the editorial board of the journal "Classical and Quantum Gravity".
  - - posted September 18, 2006
• Jorge Pullin has been appointed to the Basilis Xanthopoulos Prize selection committee. This prestigious international prize is awarded every three years to a physicist under the age of 40 for contributions in gravitational physics. It consists of $10,000 and the opportunity to give a plenary lecture at the International meeting on General Relativity and Gravitation. The prize is funded by the Greek Foundation for Science and Technology (FORTH).
  - - posted September 11, 2006
• Physics faculty involved in $1M National Science Foundation (NSF) Computer Science initiative at LSU.
  - - posted September 8, 2006
• Professor Rainer Weiss of MIT (LSU Physics Adjunct Professor), received the Gruber Prize.
  - - posted August 21, 2006
• Luis Lehner guest edited a special issue of the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity (Institut of Physics, UK), collecting the papers of the program on numerical relativity at the Banff International Research Station.
  - - posted July 31, 2006
• Luis Lehner has been appointed to the NSF cyberinfrastructure User Advisory Committee. Taken from his invitation to join this new committee, "Your nationally renowned research expertise and experience with cyberinfrastructure make you an ideal choice as one of the initial members of this new advisory committee. You will be among one of the initial twelve members asked to serve on this CUAC.
  - - posted May 26, 2006
• Article published in Physical Review Focus by Philip Adams, et al. - out of hundreds of papers published every week in the Physical Review series, one is chosen for a Focus coverage.
  -- posted May 4, 2006
• Gabriela Gonzalez is quoted in "Black Holes Collide, and Gravity Quivers", The New York Times, May 2, 2006 article.
  - - posted May 4, 2006
• Scientists pitch regional hurricane center.
  - - posted April 6, 2006
• Nicholas Van Meter, Senior Undergraduate Physics Major, has been named a 2006 Goldwater Scholar
  - - posted March 20, 2006
• News Release - Local Astronomy and Educational Groups to Celebrate Sun-Earth Day with a Special Event.
  - - posted March 15, 2006
• "Boundary Conditions for Einstein's Field Equations: Mathematical and Numerical Analysis", by Olivier Sarbach and Manuel Tiglio, published in The Journal of Hyperbolic Differential Equations 2,839-883 (2005), has been chosen as featured article of the Journal.
  - - posted February 6, 2006
• The Louisiana Board of Regents gave their final approval to the creation of the Horace Hearne, Jr. Institute of Theoretical Physics.
  - - posted January 25, 2006
• Bradley Schaefer made announcement through a Press Release on Wednesday, January 11 at the 207th meeting of the American Astronomical Society meeting in Washington, D.C., described his GRB results and its implications for the not-so-constant cosmological constant. See and hear "All Things Considered" on NPR and read more in the New York Times.
  - - posted January 17, 2006
• Dmitry Uskov and Ravi Rau have developed a very compact solution of time dependent operator equations in quantum physics. A general problem for N quantum states has been formulated as analogous to one with two states. The N dimensions are viewed as split into (N-1) and one dimensions, and effective Hamiltonians derived for each of those two sets. Thereby, a stepwise solution is provided for any N. A specific focus is on phases of the evolution operator and their decomposition into dynamical and geometrical contributions, these considerations of interest today in the fields of quantum computation and quantum information. Among recent papers submitted for publication is one which draws parallels between effective Hamiltonians for time-dependent and time-independent problems in quantum physics.
  - - posted January 11, 2006
• Jorge Pullin has been appointed Managing Editor of the International Journal of Modern Physics D. This is a peer reviewed journal published by World Scientific in Singapore and is the leading journal in gravitation and cosmology published in Asia.
  - - posted January 5, 2006

2005 News

• Assistant Professor, Hwang Lee , has been awarded as Principal Investigator of a $400K one year grant from the prestigious National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) Directors Innovation Initiative (DII) program for a seed research project entitled "Photonic-Crystal Satellite Reflectors and Radiators: A New Approach to Satellite Thermal Control."
  - - posted December 19, 2005
• Visiting Professor, Rodolfo Gambini, has been elected to the Academy of Sciences of the Third World (Trieste).
  - - posted December 7, 2005
• Jonathan Dowling was elected a Fellow of the Optical Society of America (OSA) by the OSA Board of Directors at the October 18th meeting. He is being recognized for "fundamental contributions to optics in the areas of photonic crystals, quantum imaging, quantum metrology, and quantum information processing, and for service to OSA." Dowling will receive the award at the Quantum Electronics and Laser Science Conference in May, 2006.
  - - posted December 7, 2005
• Book Authored by LSU Researcher Published - Carlos Palenzuela, Postdoctoral Researcher at LSU in Physics and Astronomy and the Center for Computation & Technology, celebrated the publication of his first book, "Elements of Numerical Relativity: From Einstein's Equations to Black Hole Simulations."
  - - posted October 3, 2005
• Jorge Pullin has been elected as a corresponding member of the Latin American Academy of Sciences. The Academy has 205 members from Argentina, Brazil, Columbia, Costa Rica, Chile, Ecuador, France, Germany, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Panama, Peru, Uruguay, USA and Venezuela.
  - - posted September 27, 2005
• Research paper by M. Tiglio, L. Lehner, and O. Reula highlighted in Classical and Quantum Gravity journal (PAPERS 5819).
  - - posted September 13, 2005
• Jonathan Dowling has been awarded a NASA Tech Brief Award for NTR no 40552: "High Power Fiber Laser Technology Using Linear and Nonlinear Photonic Bandgap Materials" by the NASA Inventions and Contributions Board.
  - - posted August 1, 2005
• Jorge Pullin and Rodolfo Gambini receive 2005 Essay Award from the Gravity Research Foundation. "Classical and Quantum General Relativity: A New Paradigm", R. Gambini, Instit. de Fisica, Montevideo, Uruguay and J. Pullin, LSU Physics and Astronomy.
  - - posted June 28, 2005
• Jonathan Dowling and Hwang Lee are Co-Investigators on a new four-year, Quantum Computation Concept Maturation (QCCM) grant on Linear Optical Quantum Computing, awarded by the National Security Agency (NSA) in conjunction with the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARDA) and Army Research Office (ARO).
  - - posted April 8, 2005
• Jonathan Dowling is Co-Investigator on a new 5-year, Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) on Quantum Imaging, awarded by the Army Research Office (ARO).
  - - posted March 3, 2005
• Picture of a binary black hole simulation of the LSU Relativity Group on the cover of the National Science Foundation (NSF) budget.
  - - posted February 9, 2005
• LSU Physics & Astronomy Assistant Professor receives prestigious NSF CAREER Award. Grant will support research related to superconductors, education initiative targeting minority students.
  - - posted February 1, 2005
• LSU researcher, Bradley E. Schaefer, solves ancient astronomy mystery - Physics & Astronomy faculty member discovers long-lost star catalog on Roman statue - Farnese Atlas.                                                                                                                          Back to top