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UPDATE SPRING 2018
For more news, go to phys.temple.edu
Department enhances physics curriculum The Physics Department has introduced several curriculum enhancements: • a new course on oscillations and waves for sophomores; • the 3-credit, one semester computing course is now three 1.5-credit half-semester courses; • a new 1-credit, half semester introduction-tophysics seminar for incoming freshmen; and • new courses in astrophysics, as well as atomic & molecular physics. According to Darius H. Torchinsky, the assistant professor who led the faculty curriculum committee, “We introduced the waves and oscillations course to fill a gap during the first semester of the sophomore year when our majors took no physics classes.” The department has also transformed its single three-credit introductory computing course into three 1.5 half-semester courses. Says Matthew Newby, assistant professor of instruction, “Students who had no prior programming experience were having a hard time and those who had some experience were finding it too easy.” Students with no programming experience will take the first two courses and those with some experience will take the second and third courses. Finally, the introductory seminar course features research talks by faculty, graduate students and non-Temple physicists. “We wanted to get incoming students excited about physics and their career possibilities, as well as help create a stronger physics community,” says Torchinsky.
New BS degree in data science The Physics Department and the other five College of Science and Technology departments are now offering an interdisciplinary BS degree in data science with a concentration in computation and modeling. “Rather than wait until students enter graduate school to acquire advanced computing skills, this prepares undergraduates to use advance skills—either directly after their graduation in industry or in the field of their choosing in graduate school,” says Matthew Newby, assistant professor of instruction.
Lasers probing stronglycorrelated materials Assistant Professor Darius H. Torchinsky’s research focuses on the physics of strongly-correlated electron systems, a broad term that describes materials from iron- and copper-based superconductors to so called “heavy” fermion systems and 4d and 5d transition metal oxides. After a doctorate and post-doctoral fellowship at MIT and post-doctoral scholar position at CalTech, Torchinsky came to Temple in 2015, focusing on emergent behaviors that arise when the interactions between electrons in such materials become very strong. “When you tweak the system, such as changing the composition slightly, squeezing it at high pressure or adding a magnetic field, you wind up getting radically different electronic behavior,” he says. “We’re trying to understand what all these forms of order that the electrons assume have to do with each other.” To understand these phenomenon, Torchinsky uses cutting-edge tools of modern nonlinear and ultrafast optical spectroscopy—including spectroscopic tools that he himself has developed. These include a laser probe that produces light pulses which last for a millionth of a billionth of a second. He likens directing the laser at the materials he is investigating to hitting a bell with a hammer. “When a bell is struck, it resonates at a particular frequency, and many components of a material behave in a similar way,” he says. “We measure the materials’ response to the laser on a time scale that’s on the order of from a millionth to a billionth of a second to a thousandth of a second.”
Chair’s Message It has been an exciting year for the Physics Department at Temple, with plans to continue growing stronger in the years ahead. Professor Jeff Martoff won a $1.2M award from the Keck Foundation to build and execute an ambitious experiment to search for “sterile neutrinos.” Earning such a highly competitive award, Martoff will construct the Heavy Unseen Neutrinos from Total Energy-momentum Reconstruction (HUNTER) experiment in collaboration with researchers at UCLA and Houston. Cultivating strong leadership is part of the department’s success. This past year, Maria Iavarone was promoted to professor and Nikolaos Sparveris promoted to associated professor with tenure. I am so pleased to play a role in helping cultivate the careers of younger faculty. At the recommendation of a committee chaired by Assistant Professor Darius H. Torchinsky, the department enacted undergraduate curriculum changes. Students now have new courses in computing and theoretical physics, as well as new elective courses in astrophysics and atomic & molecular physics. Finally, for the first time in 10 years, an external committee visited the department and provided feedback and advice for future directions. Next year’s newsletter will discuss our response to their recommendations.
Martoff wins prestigious $1.2 million grant to investigate dark matter Professor C. Jeff Martoff has been awarded a prestigious $1.2 million grant to investigate dark matter—which the National Academy of Sciences calls the No. 1 question facing astrophysicists. Although dark matter has not been directly observed, physicists believe it comprises most of the mass of the universe because of its gravitational effects on objects and particles in space. “The whole thing is very embarrassing to physicists, or should be if they have any sense,” Martoff says. “On one hand, we’re saying we know how everything works, from atoms to the solar system, in great mathematical detail, and yet on the other hand, we know there’s a big piece missing. More than two-thirds of the universe’s mass is made out of something we don’t understand at all and have not even identified.” Current methods in the race to find dark matter include particle accelerators— the 17-mile-diameter CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland is the largest—and sensitive detectors located in labs deep underground. Both methods target “weakly interacting massive particles” (particles known as WIMPs), which are predicted in elementary particle theories and are widely considered good candidates for making up the dark matter. Although more and more stringent WIMP searches have been done, they continue to come up empty. Martoff will test a new, highly interdisciplinary technique and seek a different candidate for dark matter. With colleagues from the University of California, Los Angeles—where he will be spending his 2018-19 fall/spring sabbatical—and the University of Houston, he will be building a 12-foot-long “tabletop” spectrometer to search for the presence (or absence) of sterile neutrinos. If detected, they would constitute the first visible evidence of a good candidate for a dark matter particle. continues on page 3
Please contact me if you want to visit the department. It would be an honor to show you our new facilities and introduce you to our new faculty members.
Jim Napolitano Professor and Chair
phys.temple.edu
This Keck-supported vessel will be a 12-foot-long vacuum. Each partner institution is responsible for building a certain subsystem.
Six attend APS Conference for Undergraduate Women in Physics Six female undergraduates attended the 2018 APS Conference for Undergraduate Women in Physics (CUWiP) at George Washington University’s downtown Washington, D.C. campus in mid-January. The students— Kristen Ciesielka, Kelly Devlin, Karla Onate, Brittany Smith, Alissa Vizzoni and Kayla Yuskoski—learned about new, cutting-edge physics from female leaders in their fields; attended workshops and panels on professional skills and career opportunities; participated in a career fair; and toured NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
Students accepted into Singapore optics research program Senior Ian Schwartz, of Ambler, Pa., and junior Alissa Vizzoni, of Hillsborough, N.J., will be spending the summer at a prestigious NSF-funded optics-based research experience in Singapore. The program includes eight weeks of research at Nanyang Technological University and a two-week industrial optics internship.
Marcus Forst, junior physics major, wins Temple’s first Goldwater Scholarship After years of hard work and adversity that included battling a serious illness, Marcus Forst has been selected as a 2018 Barry Goldwater Scholar, the first Temple student to ever win this honor. The Goldwater Scholarship is the most prestigious STEM award for undergraduates. Granting awardees up to $7,500 per year, this scholarship is “the Rhodes Scholarship of STEM.” “Marcus is the kind of student every serious educator wants to work with,” said Jim Napolitano, professor and chair of Physics. “He combines enthusiasm, discipline and congeniality with a powerful natural talent for science.” Forst used one of his first research projects in his Goldwater application. He proposed a new way to study non-Joulian magnets using a scanning-tunneling microscope (STM) by coating them in a super-conductor to allow STM to gain magnetic resolution. On that research, Forst eventually published a paper. By fall of sophomore year, Forst, through CST’s Undergraduate Research Program, began working with Associate Professor Maria Iavarone and her STM group. “The scholarship money will help me next year to focus on research without having to work outside the lab. And it will also help me stand out to when I apply to graduate schools,” Forst said. “I am going to get a PhD in physics, and having a Goldwater will give me a little bit of a leg up in the application process.”
Colin Lauer explores hadronic physics In 2016, Colin Lauer—now a fourth-year PhD student—joined the laboratory of Martha Constantinou, shortly after the assistant professor arrived at Temple. Constantinou (see page 3) is utilizing the Lattice Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) approach to attack key problems in hadronic physics. “I had a little bit of background in high-performance computer simulations, which was useful, and I was fascinated by her research because she is looking at the fundamental laws of physics,” says Lauer, a Morgantown, Pennsylvania native who earned his BS in physics from Houghton (N.Y.) College. “We’re making calculations about particles made up of quarks and gluons, including protons, starting from the very beginning of QCD.” His doctoral research uses Lattice QCD to study meson structures, which have two quarks rather than the three contained in protons. Lauer, who expects to earn his doctorate in 2020, ultimately hopes to work as a researcher in a national laboratory or government facility. “Working with Dr. Constantinou, I’ve definitely done more research than I ever have. You don’t always know how to exactly get to the solution and I like the challenge of figuring that out, knowing what questions to ask other people, conducting internet searches in order to determine how to answer those questions.”
Constantinou investigating QCD dynamics
FACULTY NOTES Ted Burkhardt, professor emeritus, was one of three speakers at a Lehigh University symposium that honored retiring Lehigh Professor James Gunton’s contributions to statistical physics. Burkhardt received his PhD in 1967 from Stanford University months after Gunton earned his doctorate there. Gunton taught in the Temple Physics Department for two decades before he moved to Lehigh to become dean of its College of Arts and Sciences for six years. Burkhardt spoke about “Equilibrium of a Fluctuating Polymer Chain in a Channel.” Maria Iavarone, professor, is on sabbatical in Japan at RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science. Supported in part by the Japan Science and Technology Agency, she is extending her expertise to quantum quasi-particle interference and apply this technique to study potential topological superconductors. This powerful technique allows, through scattering at impurity sites, to visualize real-space spectroscopic images with high spatial and energy resolution and to obtain momentum-resolved information. Jim Napolitano, professor and chair, has produced two books. A Mathematica Primer for Physicists, part of the Taylor & Francis Group’s textbook series in physical sciences, which was published in April 2018. Last year, Cambridge University Press published an updated version of the second edition of Modern Quantum Mechanics, a classic graduate level textbook. Originally written by the late J.J. Sakurai, the second edition was updated by Napolitano and published in 2011. In the latest issue of the second edition, Napolitano introduces topics that extend the text’s usefulness into the 21st century. Bernd Surrow, professor and vice chair, was elected chair of the Electron-Ion Collider Users’ Group (EICUG) last July in Trieste, Italy. EICUG, which also met at Temple University in November 2017, is providing a users’ forum to develop the case for a new EIC facility in the U.S. to be built either at Jefferson Lab in Newport News, Virginia, or at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York.”
Assistant Professor Martha Constantinou recently received her first National Science Foundation grant to research hadrons. More than 99 percent of the mass of the visible world resides in hadrons which are bound states of quarks and gluons, the fundamental constituents of Quantum Chromodynamics. QCD, which is the theory governing the strong force, successfully describes a wide range of complex processes from the sub-nuclear interactions, to macroscopic phenomena, such as the state of matter at the birth of the universe. The three-year, $240,000 grant enables Constantinou to investigate questions surrounding QCD dynamics that remain nearly a half century after QCDs were first explored. She will be using powerful computers to make ab initio calculations in Lattice QCD in order to study the protons that are at the heart of hadronic matter. “A better understanding of the proton structure will be valuable for the interpretation and guidance of experiments,” says Constantinou, “and might shed light on long-standing puzzles, such as the proton spin.”
NEW EXTERNAL RESEARCH GRANTS A. Marjatta Lyyra • Molecular Quantum Control by Coherence Effects, NSF
Andreas Metz • Coordinated Theoretical Approach to Transverse Momentum Dependent Hadron Structure in QCD, US Department of Energy
James Napolitano • Fundamental Physics Experiments with Reactor Neutrinos, US Department of Energy
John Perdew • Density Functional Theory of Electronic Structure, NSF
Adrienn Ruzsinszky
Support Physics and CST You can contribute to the continued success of CST and the Department of Physics by supporting scholarships, undergraduate research, faculty endowment and innovative programs. Make your gift at giving.temple.edu/givetocst.
Jason Dinh Tran is laser sharp Senior Jason Dinh Tran may still be an undergraduate, but you’d never know it by the results he has achieved with a new instrumentation technique he has developed in Assistant Professor Darius H. Torchinsky’s laboratory (see page 4). “I really like the hands-on aspect of the research,” says Tran. “I spend most of my time at the optics table and I helped develop a new laser probe to assess semiconductors. Our research has also shown me how much grit you have to have to work at a single project for extended periods of time without immediate end results in a very intense research environment.” Tran has conducted both chemical and physics research through CST’s Undergraduate Research Program and its Science Scholars Program. He has also served as a math, physics and chemistry tutor and a Peer Assisted Study Session (PASS) leader for physics at the university’s Center for Learning and Student Success. Last year, he served as a Diamond Peer Teaching Program teaching assistant for a general chemistry class. “I get a lot of satisfaction from helping other students realize ‘Aha!’ moments,” he says. After pursing a PhD degree in the combined physics/chemistry field, Tran intends to pursue an industrial position. “I really want to be able to produce physical things,” he says.
Martoff
continued from page 1
Martoff and his colleagues believe the existence or nonexistence of sterile neutrinos can be detected in the laboratory using kinematics to measure the energy and mass of the particles—an atom, an electron and an X-ray—produced by a specific kind of radioactive decay and then examine what is missing. The decay also produces a neutrino, which may be the ordinary type or the sought-after sterile type. “We believe we can conduct an extremely sensitive and precise measurement of the energy and momentum of these particles,” explains Martoff. “This will reveal missing energy and momentum from which we can compute the masses of the undetected neutrinos.”
• CAREER: Electron Correlation and Optical Spectra with a Nonlocal Energy-Optimized (NEO) Kernel, NSF • Toward the Chemical Accuracy for the Description of the Catalytic Desulfurization Process, American Chemical Society Petroleum Research Fund
Nikolaos Sparveris • Collaborative Research: Equipment for PSI MUSE Experiment, NSF • Studies of Hadronic Structure, US Department of Energy
Rongjia Tao • Demonstration of Viscosity Reduction with Saudi Aramco Crude Oil Samples, QS Energy, Inc. • Mass Spectroscopy Measurement for Ionized Air by Various Isotopes and Other Gas Ionizers, Naval Research Laboratory • Reduction of Blood Viscosity and Turbulence by Magnetic Field Reduces Atherosclerosis, American Heart Association
Xiaoxing Xi • Coating of Magnesium Diboride on 3 Ghz Cavities, Argonne National Laboratory