Physics & Astronomy News
Wang Appointed to Academic Education Committee
Wei-Hsung Wang has been appointed to a three-year term to serve on the Academic Education Committee (AEC) of the Health Physics Society. The primary goal of the AEC is to assure that the quality and numbers of students entering the health physics career meet professional criteria and the projected demand. The AEC also maintains the Health Physics Education Reference Book, giving a listing and description of universities and institutions offering academic health physics programs from Associate to Doctorate degrees.
Gonzalez Elected as LIGO Spokesperson
Gabriela Gonzalez has been elected as Spokesperson of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, the group of over 800 scientists worldwide who have joined together in the search for gravitational waves. The LIGO detectors are currently in the process of being upgraded to Advanced LIGO and due to come back on line in 2013.
NASA Satellites Find High-Energy Surprises in 'Constant' Crab Nebula
The Gamma ray Burst Monitor (GBM) instrument on the Fermi satellite mission has detected a decrease of several percent in the hard X-ray and gamma ray intensity from the Crab Nebula, previously thought to be a constant "standard candle". Gary Case, Mike Cherry, and James Rodi, working with an international team of collaborators, have confirmed the result with independent measurements on the RXTE, Swift, and INTEGRAL telescopes. By using archived results going back to 1999, they suggest that the Crab periodically increases and decreases in intensity by a few percent with a period of approximately three years. The current decrease is the largest so far observed. The initial catalog of hard x-ray sources observed by GBM has been published in the Astrophysical Journal 729, 105 (2011).
ICAM workshop entitled "Novel Emergent Phenomena Created by Spatial Confinement"
An ICAM workshop entitled "Novel Emergent Phenomena Created by Spatial Confinement", organized by our research group, was held at LSU on October 27-30, 2010. The focus of this workshop combines two of the major material themes of the 21st century--nano and complexity with the expectation the new emergent phenomena will appear. The challenge and the opportunity is to use what we learn to either design or discover new materials or new functionality.
77th Annual Meeting of the Southeastern Section of the APS
The 77th Annual Meeting of the Southeastern Section of the American Physical Society was held in Nicholson Hall, October 20-23, 2010, with 290 people registered, including 108 undergraduates.
USAMRAA Awarded Mary Bird Perkins Cancer Center and LSU a $2.2 Million Research Contract
The U.S. Army Medical Research Acquisition Activity (USAMRAA) recently awarded Mary Bird Perkins Cancer Center and LSU (Ken Hogstrom, PI) a $2.2 million research contract to fund proton therapy research that could result in targeting cancer treatments more effectively. A major advantage of proton therapy comes from the possibility of delivering high radiation doses to a targeted tumor while sparing surrounding healthy tissues and organs. Additional work on bolus electron conformal therapy, a new electron beam technology for individualized treatment of skin cancers, is described in the recent issue of Mary Bird Perkins Perspective.
Gravity quantized
As part of a program to develop a model of quantum cosmology, Kristina Giesel and colleagues from the University of Warsaw have proposed a new theory to describe the evolution of space-time in the very early Universe. Their paper (in Phys. Rev. D 82, 104038) describes their approach to couple the gravitational field to a scalar field using loop quantum gravity techniques to complete the quantization.
Jin Elected Fellow of the American Physical Society
Rongying Jin has been elected Fellow of the American Physical Society "for her significant contributions to materials physics, including science-driven materials development and pioneering studies of their underlying physics."
Giesel's Paper Among Editorial Board of Classical and Quantum Gravity "Highlights"
A paper by Kristina Giesel has been listed among the "highlights" of the Editorial Board of Classical and Quantum Gravity, published by the Institute of Physics in the UK. The LSU gravity group has made the highlights list every year since 2001.
Matthews Elected Co-Spokesman for Pierre Auger Observatory
James Matthews has been elected co-spokesman for the Pierre Auger Observatory. The Auger Observatory, located in Argentina and operated by a collaboration of over 470 scientists from 17 countries, is the world's largest ultra-high energy cosmic ray experiment.
Wilson Appointed to HPS
Charles Wilson, graduate student in the Medical and Health Physics program, is one of eight students from across the country who have been appointed to the Health Physics Society (HPS) Committee for Student Support.
Pullin Appointed Scholarpedia Editor
Jorge Pullin has been appointed editor for the space-time and gravity section of Scholarpedia. Scholarpedia is a wiki based encyclopedia using the same software as wikipedia, but with articles written by experts and peer reviewed.
LSU Researchers Awarded One of the Largest NSF Grants in Louisiana History
A-SiGMA will enhance materials science research capabilities for the state - Researchers at LSU, together with those at universities across the state, recently received one of Louisiana's largest grants ever from the National Science Foundation, or NSF. The Louisiana Alliance for Simulation-Guided Materials Applications, or LA-SiGMA, received $20 million in NSF support. The alliance is led by LSU Professors Mark Jarrell of the Department of Physics & Astronomy and Randall Hall of the Department of Chemistry, Louisiana Tech University Professor Ramu Ramachandran of chemistry and Tulane Professor Lawrence Pratt of chemical and bimolecular engineering.
Evidence of Coulomb blockade behavior in a quasizero-dimensional quantum well on TiO2 surface
Condensed Matter Physics - Ward Plummer and his colleagues have demonstrated that self-assembled nanostructures (SANs) can be used to fabricate the worlds smallest capacitor, setting up the stage for investigating unusual electron behavior and exploring unique opportunities for energy applications. The SANs consist of pairs of 10 to 20-nm long lines separated by 1.2 nm and act as a quantum well on the surface TiO2(110). Inside the quantum well, a long wavelength oscillatory feature of the local density of states is observed at room temperature by scanning tunneling microscopy and attributed to the formation of electronic standing wave for the lowest energy quantum state using first principles calculations. This observation is the first attempt ever made to experimentally image the transition from a strongly correlated regime in a zero-dimensional system to a quasi-independent particle or band-like behavior in an extended one-dimensional system. TiO2 is an important energy material as it is one of the main support used in industrial catalytic reactions. The unusual electronic behavior demonstrated here opens up new possibilities for highly efficient chemical reactivity with unprecedented applications in energy conversion and harvesting. ABSTRACT -- RESEARCH ARTICLE