Physics & Astronomy News
Looking for a Gravitational Wave Research Guru?
Dr. Gabriela González is opening a new window into the cosmos.
Direct measurement of the cosmic-ray proton spectrum with the CALET on the ISS (phys.org)
Recent advances in the observation of high-energy radiations, including X-rays and gamma-rays, have unveiled many high-energy aspects of the universe.
Celebrating Ten Years of Involving Undergraduates in Computational Science Research
Juana Moreno, associate professor at the LSU Department of Physics & Astronomy and the LSU Center for Computation & Technology, recently received $358,900 from the National Science Foundation towards her tenth consecutive year providing interdisciplinary research experience in computational sciences for undergraduate students.
LSU Ph.D. Candidate Lydia Wilson Works to Improve Patient Health
While earning her master’s degree and Ph.D. at LSU, Lydia Wilson combined her love for physics and medicine. Her research has taken her around the world and she hopes to improve the quality of healthcare for every person. Below she shares her love of problem solving and collaboration.
Gabriela González Named 2019 SEC Professor of the Year
LSU becomes the first university with two SEC Professor of the Year honorees
How Does Real Science Fit into Science Fiction?
Dr. Shane Stadler had a taste for storytelling long before he published his first novel, Exoskeleton.
"An objective method to evaluate radiation dose distributions varying by three orders of magnitude" by Lydia Wilson, Wayne Newhauser, and Christopher Schneider. Medical Physics. February, 2019
Modern radiotherapy practices typically report the absorbed dose (D) within the 5% relative isodose volume (i.e., the therapeutic dose region) to an accuracy of 3%–5%. Gamma‐index analysis, the most commonly used method to evaluate dosimetric accuracy, has low sensitivity to discrepancies that occur outside of this region. The objective of this study was to develop an evaluation method with high sensitivity across dose distributions spanning three orders of magnitude. Read more...
World-renowned Physicist Gabriela González Awarded SEC Faculty Achievement Award
SU Department of Physics & Astronomy Professor Gabriela González has been named LSU’s honoree for the 2019 Southeastern Conference, or SEC, Faculty Achievement Award. González is an experimental physicist with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory, or LIGO, who contributed to the detection of gravitational waves in 2015 predicted by Albert Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity.
Hello, Quantum Vacuum, Nice to See You
Thomas Corbitt, associate professor at the LSU Department of Physics & Astronomy, and his team of researchers measure quantum behavior at room temperature, visible to the naked eye, as reported today in the journal Nature.
Small Science Wields Big Ideas
LSU Celebrates NanoDays: The Biggest Event for the Tiniest of Science
Ten Minutes with Mark M. Wilde, Associate Professor in the LSU Department of Physics and Astronomy and the LSU Center for Computation & Technology (CCT) and 2018 Rainmaker
“Like most people, I couldn’t have done a lot of things on my own. My parents played a big role in giving me a strong foundation, and they have always provided helpful advice when I needed it. I’ve also had good academic mentors throughout my career—especially during my Ph.D. years at University of Southern California, with Todd Brun as my supervisor.
Beyond Einstein: Physicists develop new theory to answer fundamental questions about black holes
LSU Department of Physics & Astronomy Associate Professor Parampreet Singh and collaborators LSU Postdoctoral Researcher Javier Olmedo and Abhay Ashtekar, the Eberly Professor of Physics at Penn State developed new mathematical equations that go beyond Einstein’s theory of general relativity overcoming its key limitation—the central singularity of black holes.
LSU & ULL researchers receive $3 million from NASA EPSCoR & LA Board of Regents
Louisiana research teams at LSU & ULL were awarded a combined $3 million in Federal and State Funding under the 2018 NASA Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) Implementation Award program.
LSU Physicist Designs Tool to Decode Light Particles
A Louisiana State University physicist has discovered an important step in the field of quantum communications by developing a tool that can extract large amounts of information encoded on photons, or particles of light.
LSU Physicist Designs Tool to Decode Light Particles
In a recent paper published by Optica, a high-impact scientific journal, Omar Magana-Loaiza, an assistant physics professor, details his research on quantum photonic technologies by measuring properties of telecom photon pairs formed by spontaneous parametric down-conversion -- when a single high-energy photon splits into a pair of photons with half the initial energy. This is a key resource for quantum photonic technologies such as quantum metrology and quantum optical information processing.
"The Montevideo Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics: a short review" by Gambini and Pullin, Entropy 2018, 20(6), 413
The Montevideo interpretation of quantum mechanics, which consists in supplementing environmental decoherence with fundamental limitations in measurement stemming from gravity, has been described in several publications. However, some of them appeared before the full picture provided by the interpretation was developed. As such it can be difficult to get a good understanding via the published literature. Here we summarize it in a self contained brief presentation including all its principal elements.
LSU Physicists and Student Researchers Provide Essential Components in Deep Underground Neutrino ExperimentPage Title
"At LSU our team of student and post-doctoral researchers, technical personnel and faculty built and tested field cage modules for ProtoDUNE, a liquid argon-based detector, and later installed them at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland," said LSU Department of Physics & Astronomy Professor Thomas Kutter. The field cage modules hold hundreds of thousands of volts and line the three-story inner volume of ProtoDUNE to ensure uniform readout of the tracks which particles leave in the detector. Associate Professor Martin Tzanov's work focuses on the electronics that successively reads and records the electrical signals.