Physics Update Fall 2020

College of Science and Technology

PHYSICS UPDATE FALL 2020

Chair’s message I write this during a rather frenzied time, after COVID-19 suddenly disrupted our spring semester and as we begin the fall 2020 term still with considerable uncertainty.

Nevertheless, we have so much to celebrate in physics at Temple University. Three of our young faculty members have earned early career awards from either the Department of Energy or the National Science Foundation. They are highly competitive research grants that demonstrate that the future of our department is bright. One of those faculty, Martha Constantinou, has also been named Selma Lee Bloch Brown Assistant Professor of Physics here at CST. Our graduates, both at the undergraduate and master’s and doctoral levels, are moving on to outstanding careers in academia and technology, from teaching in New York City to working at Lockheed Martin. Our colleague Xiaoxing Xi, Laura H. Carnell Professor of Physics, won the Sakharov Prize for his advocacy on behalf of the international scientific community.

I am very proud to lead the Department of Physics, and look forward to 2021 when we will celebrate 100 years of Physics at Temple.

Jim Napolitano Professor and Chair

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. phys.cst.temple.edu

Xiaoxing Xi recognized with APS Andrei Sakharov Prize Xiaoxing Xi, Laura H. Carnell Professor of Physics, is the 2020 Andrei Sakharov Prize recipient. Named for the renowned physicist who promoted human rights, despite persecution, in the Soviet Union, the prize is a distinguished honor within both the human rights advocacy and scientific communities.

The prize, awarded by the American Physical Society (APS), recognizes outstanding leadership of scientists in upholding human rights. Xi was honored “for his articulate and steadfast advocacy in support of the U.S. scientific community and open scientific exchange, and especially his efforts to clarify the nature of international scientific collaboration in cases involving allegations of scientific espionage,” says Jim Napolitano, professor and chair of the Department of Physics.

“I am honored to receive the prize in Sakharov’s name from APS. After I witnessed encroachments on liberty and open fundamental research in academia firsthand, as a Chinese-American physicist, I felt obliged to speak up for my community and raise awareness of the danger,” Xi says. “I am humbled to see my name associated with the name of Andrei Sakharov for what little I have done. I will continue to speak up so that more people will join the fight to defend our freedom and safeguard America’s research enterprise.”

Teaching physics in the Bronx

Physics grads working on U.S. defense projects for Lockheed Martin

Sashank Penmatsa, BS ’19, came to Temple five years ago intending to become a research-oriented physicist.

The Hyderabad, India, native did conduct some undergraduate research.

However, beginning his sophomore year, his role as an SAT math coach and career counselor at Temple’s Let’s Get Ready program for underprivileged high school students was more influential.

“Even back in high school in India I enjoyed explaining math problems to my friends, and it was really satisfying to help my Let’s Get Ready students overcome their fears and help them learn,” he says. “My ultimate passion is to make a difference in society, and I found what I was doing to be meaningful and important.”

So, after graduating last year, he became an assistant physics teacher of 9th- and 10th-graders at the year-old Urban Assembly Charter School for Computer Science in the Bronx.

“I love my students and the school,” says Penmatsa. “I expected teaching to be tough and it was. But at night, I had the peace of mind knowing that my students need me and I need them.

That’s what I love about teaching.”

Four 2019 graduates—one PhD and three BS graduates—are now working for Lockheed Martin (LM).

Since earning her doctorate in December, Danielle (Berish) Landschoot, MS ’16, PhD ’19, has been a systems engineer at LM’s Syracuse, N. Y. facility. She works on airborne radar system products for both U.S. and allied military clients.

“Since it’s for our government, for our soldiers, it’s nice to work on something that has actual impact,” she says.

Landschoot’s doctoral research involved the Precision Oscillation and Spectrum (PROSPECT) Experiment, an ongoing multi-university and national laboratory collaboration. She believes the collaborations she forged during that research, as well as with Temple students and faculty, really helped her transition into industry. “Jim Napolitano, my PhD advisor, is very good at teaching how to think and work independently while still collaborating well within a group,” she says.

Eric Miller

Kristen Ciesielka

Meanwhile, a trio of May 2019 physics BS graduates—Alissa Vizzoni, Kristen Ciesielka and Eric Miller—are working at Lockheed Martin’s Moorestown, N.J. facility on the Aegis Combat System, a guided missile system utilized on U.S. Navy cruisers and other allied countries’ naval ships.

“I love what I do,” says Vizzoni, a systems engineer in LM’s Weapons Control System Department. “Every day I use something I learned in my physics classes.”

Ciesielka is also a systems engineer who works on the Aegis Combat System’s Command and Decision element, including designing message flows between the Aegis’ different elements and functions.

“It’s very challenging,” says Ciesielski, who, this fall, will continue working while beginning a part-time online Johns Hopkins University master’s degree program in systems engineering. “I’m fascinated by the system’s complex design and how it all comes together as a whole.”

Miller, who earned a mathematics & physics BS last year, is also working at LM’s Moorestown facility on the Aegis system as part of a three-year engineering leadership development program. “The people who interviewed me were aware of Temple’s good reputation,” he says. “And the problem-solving mindset of the curriculum was great training. I learned that you don’t know all of the answers, so you have to make the answers yourself.”

Grassi helps assemble and use HAXPES Since December 2018, senior Joseph Grassi has worked as an undergraduate research assistant in Associate Professor Alexander Gray’s laboratory. For eight months last year, he helped assemble a highly sophisticated hard X-ray photoelectron spectroscope (HAXPES). Since then, he has helped Gray use the device and MATLAB coding to probe the electronic structure of technologically promising novel materials.

Furthering his research, Grassi traveled with Gray to the Paul Scherrer Institute in Villigen, Switzerland, to perform measurements that helped fine tune the Temple device and conduct ongoing investigations.

“Assembling major portions of the device, including the electron analyzer, was incredibly enlightening regarding the considerations we need to make in actual HAXPES experiments,” says Grassi, the student coordinator of the student advisors/ advocates in all six CST departments and treasurer of the college’s Physics Club.

“I’ve learned a lot about scientific collaboration,” adds Grassi. “I’ve also gained greater insight into what the condensed matter field looks like. It has helped guide me in my grad school preparations.”

Three professors earn early career research rewards Three assistant professors—Martha Constantinou, Darius Torchinsky and Qimin Yan—earned prestigious, highly coveted early career research grants from either the Department of Energy or the National Science Foundation.

Yan, a DOE Early Career Award recipient, notes that less than 5 percent of applicants are successful. His $750,000, five-year award will fund a graduate student in his lab for all five years and a postdoctoral fellow for three-and-ahalf years. “That’s a lot of support for an early investigator engaged in highrisk, high-reward research,” says Yan. “It’s almost double the amount of research funding young faculty typically receive,” agrees Constantinou, whose similar DOE award is funding three graduate students and a postdoctoral fellow. “You can really build a team and push your research forward.”

Constantinou came to Temple in 2016, and was named Selma Lee Bloch Brown Assistant Professor of Physics this year. “More than 99% of the mass of the visible world resides in atomic nuclei and, therefore, in nucleons,” says the theoretical physicist. “My ultimate goal is to understand the visible matter that surrounds us and its connection to nuclear physics.” To do so, she utilizes lattice quantum chromodynamics to study the internal quark-gluon structure of hadrons.

Yan was a postdoctoral fellow at the Lawrence Qimin Yan Berkeley National Laboratory and UC Berkeley before joining Temple in 2016. “My research involves using artificial intelligence techniques to accelerate the discovery and design of functional inorganic materials for energy conversion applications,” he says, “such as transparent conducting oxides, light-emitting devices and solar fuel generation.”

Torchinsky did postdoctoral work at both MIT and CalTech before joining Temple in 2015. His five-year, $600,000 Early Career Development Program Award from NSF is enabling him to explore new materials that could facilitate the development of smaller, faster and more efficient electronic devices.

“The limitations of currently used materials are threatening to slow further technological advancements, but there is a novel class of ‘topological’ materials that holds great promise,” he says. “However, the very properties that make these materials unique can be tricky to observe directly, so I am trying to develop methods that probe these unique characteristics.”

Research Grants Martha Constantinou • EIC physics from Lattice QCD, Department of Energy Early Career Research Program • Hadron Form Factors using State-of-the-art Simulations in Lattice QCD, Argonne National Laboratory Alexander Gray • Lab-Based Hard X-Ray Photoelectron Spectrometer and Diffractometer for Probing Depth-resolved Electronic Structure of Quantum Materials and Interfaces, U.S. Army Research Office Early Career Research Program • Emergent Phenomena at Mott Interfaces: A Time- and Depth-resolved Approach, U.S. Department of Energy Jeff Martoff • Collaborative Research: DarkSide-20k: A Global Program for the Direct Detection of Dark Matter Using Low-Radioactivity Argon, NSF Andreas Metz • Hard Scattering Processes in QCD, NSF Dmitri Romanov • Transient Optical Nonlinearities Engendered by Femtosecond Laser Filamentation In Gases, NSF Nikolaos Sparveris • Hall C Experimental Hall Effort, Jefferson Science Association • Studies of Hadronic Structure, U.S. Department of Energy Qimin Yan • Design, Control and Application of Next-Generation Qubits, U.S. Department of Energy • Synthesis of Motif and Symmetry for Accelerated Learning, Discovery and Design of Electronic Structures for Energy Conversion Applications, Department of Energy Early Career Research Program

Temple Physics plays key role in new electron ion collider The U.S. Department of Energy, supported in part by the efforts of Physics Department faculty, has selected Brookhaven National Laboratory as the site for a new multi-billion-dollar electron ion collider (EIC), a powerful microscope for studying the “glue” that binds the building blocks of visible matter. The EIC will smash electrons into protons and heavier atomic nuclei in an effort to penetrate the mysteries of the “strong force” that binds the atomic nucleus together. The nuclear physics research facility, to be designed and constructed over 10 years at an estimated cost between $1.6 and $2.6 billion, is located in Upton, N.Y.

“Scientists will be able to explore the structure of matter in a way that it has never been done before; literally imaging the structure of matter, the structure of the atomic nucleus and the structure of nucleons, like the proton, for example,” says Professor Bernd Surrow, vice chair of Temple’s Department of Physics who also serves as steering committee chair of the Electron-Ion Collider User Group (EICUG), an international affiliation of more than 900 scientists dedicated to developing and promoting the scientific, technological and educational goals for a new high-energy EIC. Another Temple physics professor, Andreas Metz, serves on EICUG’s Physics Working Group.

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Physics Department sponsors Mercury in Transit and Owlstronomy The Physics Department played a major role in two free public astronomy events during the last academic year: A daytime viewing event in November of Mercury in transit—one of the dozen or so times each century that the planet travels directly between the Earth and sun and a February “Owlstronomy” night-sky event.

At the November event organized by CST and the Charles Library, an estimated 500 students, faculty and others observed Mercury’s movement from the library’s fourth-floor terrace.

To safely observe Mercury crossing in front of the sun, attendees used telescopes with professional-grade solar filters.

The event also included solar system simulations through an interactive computer program, informational posters and 1-to-4 billion scale-sized models of planets and the sun.

In February, in an event mainly organized by Morgan Caswell and Kerri Little, two physics majors who are Franklin Institute

docents, the institute brought a 9.5‑inch telescope. “There aren’t many opportunities to observe the night sky in North Philadelphia,” says Matthew Newby, assistant professor of instruction who helped organize both events. “But on the library’s fourth-floor deck, we could clearly see both the planet Venus and the Orion Nebula, part of the Orion constellation in the Milky Way.”

APS Conference for Undergraduate Women in Physics (CUWiP) This January, the Physics Department and CST hosted its first regional CUWiP. It was one of 13 such American Physical Societyaffiliated conferences held simultaneously throughout the U.S. and Canada. The conference drew 117 registered students and 20 Temple students.

While male students did attend, the main purpose of the conferences, is to give female undergraduates an opportunity to attend a professional conference where they can network with other women in physics and learn about potential graduate programs and physics professions.

Speakers from the Physics Department included Professor Maria Iavarone, Associate Professor Adrienne Ruzsinszky

and Assistant Professor of Instruction Matthew Newby. John Perdew, Laura H. Carnell Professor of Physics and Chemistry, gave one of the plenary addresses. CST Dean Michael Klein also made remarks.

“Twenty-five percent of our physics faculty are female, which is significantly higher than the national average,” says Susan Jansen-Varnum, CST’s associate dean for science education, who organized the CUWiP conference. Women physics faculty at Temple have wide-ranging expertise covering both experiment and theory in atomic, nuclear and condensed matter physics, as well as with instructional development.