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Kiro TV: Radiation Risk in Seattle? Not Likely

Efimov States

First predicted almost 40 years ago,  Efimov States recently have been created in atomic systems.

In 1970, UW Physics Department Lecturer Vitaly Efimov (then at the Ioffe Physico-Technical Institute, St. Petersburg, Russia) predicted a very strange phenomenon, which is now widely known as Efimov effect. If two bosons interact in such a way that a two-body bound state is exactly on the verge of being formed, then in a three-boson system one should observe an infinite number of bound states. All these states are very similar to one another, differing essentially in scale only. If one would be able to change the interaction strength, by making it either weaker or stronger, the number of three-body bound states would become finite. What is even more strange is the fact that this phenomenon can be observed only in a three dimensional system and only in a three-body system. For many years, researchers have sought two-body systems with such finely tuned properties that by adding the third body one would be able to observe the remarkable and very delicate quantum phenomenon of Efimov states. Only recently has Nature been kind enough to provide such a system; atomic physicists have learned how to manipulate the interaction strength between atoms. Several atomic experimental groups now have been able to demonstrate that Efimov states really exist and have the properties predicted long ago by Professor Efimov. A scientific meeting in Rome, Italy,  has been organized and dedicated to the physics of this remarkable quantum phenomenon:  "Efimov States in Molecules and Nuclei: Theoretical Methods and New Experiments," see http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/itamp/efimovschedule.html.  Professor Efimov will be the guest of honor at this meeting. Congratulations, Professor Efimov!

J. Gregory Dash (1923-2010)

A Celebration of Prof. Sam Fain

Former colleagues and friends of Professor Emeritus Sam Fain, with support from the Department of Physics and the Center for Nanotechnology at the University of Washington have organized a colloquium and two seminars to be given by former graduate students of Sam on Monday, November 16 and Tuesday, November 17, preceded by a reception also on Monday, November 16.

More details and a complete schedule can be found here

CDO Networking Day to be held November 18-19, 2009

The Career Development Organization for physicists and astronomers at UW will be hosting it's annual Networking Day on November 18-19, 2009. Please see this announcement flyer and the CDO website for additional information

Prof. Miguel Morales featured in "Scientists Like Me" exhibit

UW Physics Professor Miguel Morales is featured in the Pacific Science Center exhibit "Scientists Like Me." His poster can be found here.

Feynman Lectures now on the web, with help from UW Physics students!

Through the efforts of folks at Microsoft, the 1964 Messenger Lectures by Richard Feynman on the “Character of Physical Law”, filmed by the BBC at Cornell University, became available in July at
http://research.microsoft.com/tuva.   The underlying Silverlight software (from Microsoft, of course) allows the observer to add notes and annotations tied to the timeline of the lecture. The first lecture is, in fact, enriched by extras added by a team of our own undergraduates (members of the SPS, scroll down to the last “extra” for Lecture 1 to see a list of the contributors).  The annotations provide
definitions and links to background material (e.g., on the Eot-Wash experiments here in this Department) available elsewhere on the WEB.   As always, Dick Feynman is a pleasure to watch, especially so with the extra materials. There is also a historical component to the lectures, e.g., who has recently seen graduate students come to a lecture in dresses, ties and jackets?

Other descriptions of the Lectures are available at

http://www.techflash.com/microsoft/Gates_Microsoft_put_legendary_Feynman_physics_lectures_online_50845657.html

http://www.xconomy.com/national/2009/07/24/project-tuva-or-bust-how-microsofts-spin-on-feynman-could-change-the-way-we-learn/

http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/15/gates-puts-feynman-lectures-online/

Symposium to Honor John Cramer

Planning is underway for a symposium to honor Prof. John Cramer's roles in Quantum Mechanics, Science Fiction, RHI physics, and low energy physics. For more information, please see here. If you would like to present a talk, please email Prof. Jerry Miller.

2009 Physics/Astronomy Graduation Photos

Congratulations 2009 Physics and Astronomy Graduates! Photos from the ceremony are posted here

Department Obituary for Professor Emeritus Samuel C. Fain, Jr.

Our department and the international physics community lost a dear friend and prominent member when Prof. Emeritus Sam Fain passed away on May 26, 2009 after a long illness. Prof. Oscar Vilches has composed a department obituary in memory.
Department Obituary for Professor Emeritus Samuel C. Fain, Jr. (pdf)

UPDATE: Physics/Astronomy Library will remain open

The University has agreed to keep the Physics/Astronomy library open on a reduced schedule. Please see here (www) for more information.

Journey to the Center of the Neutron

Protons and neutrons contain three quarks, and physicists  want to understand more about these move within these particles. Last year, an analysis [1] by Gerald A. Miller, a UW physics professor, provided a new way to extract a detailed, two-dimensional "snapshot" of the quarks in the neutron and discovered that the neutron possesses  a small, central core of negative charge.

Now   a new article [2] in Phys. Rev. C, Rapid Communications by Miller and John Arrington of Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois relates  low energy electron-neutron scattering results to
information on high speed quarks obtained in separate high energy measurements to find that the fastest moving down quarks are responsible for the neutron's negative central density. This work is the subject of a Physical Review Focus story.

[1] G. A. Miller, "Charge Densities of the Neutron and Proton."

[2] G. A. Miller and J. R.  Arrington, "Neutron negative central charge density:
An inclusive-exclusive connection"

LHC First Beam

The first beam in the Large Hadron Collider at CERN was successfully steered around the full 27 kilometers of the world's most powerful particle accelerator at 10:28 this morning (Geneva, Switzerland time). This culminates over two decades of preparation and opens a new era of
scientific discovery.

The University of Washington physics department has been part of the ATLAS detector collaboration since 1993.  Our group was part of the team that designed the muon chambers (shown in blue) and built 1/3 of the endcap muon chambers built in the US. These chambers are part of those seen detecting particles in the first collision photos.  Currently three of our graduate students, two postdoctoral fellows and Professor Henry Lubatti and Joe Rothberg are in residence at CERN.

We also have a substantial effort to prepare for data taking and are focusing on new physics beyond the Standard Model. The Physics department ATLAS group includes Professors Toby Burnett, Anna Goussiou, Henry Lubatti, Joe Rothberg, Gordon Watts and Tianchi Zhao; post docs Antonio Policicchio and Shabnaz Pashapour and graduate students Orin Harris, Justin Griffiths, John Keller, Jacob Minor, Dan Ventura.

For more information please visit the LHC website or CERN First Beam Day page.

Nasa renames GLAST to "Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope" and releases "first light" image.

Since its flawless launch on June 11, the NASA/DOE mission GLAST, now Fermi, has  exceeded all expectations. The UW group, headed by Prof. Toby Burnett, designed the all-sky analysis that turned the first 4 days of data, around 100 000 detected gamma rays,  into the beautiful picture shown here:  http://www1.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/images/content/267641main_allsky_labeled_HI.jpg.

The first light for a telescope is a very symbolic and ceremonial event. But this isn’t an imaging device, it rather detects the gamma rays, which are like x-rays but more energetic, one at a time. Each such detection must be carefully analyzed, especially to make sure it was not actually a charged cosmic ray, which are 1000 times more numerous. Another important feature is that it can “see” 20% of the sky at one time. Thus rather than pointing at a target, it looks away from the Earth and records the sky as it passes by, seeing the whole sky every two orbits. All the known features of the gamma-ray are visible. In the coming months, expect to see many new results.  A longer-term but very exciting project is the possibility of detecting the self-annihilation of dark matter, which would help identify the particles involved.

Hank Simons wins 2008 Distinguished Staff Award

The key role played by Hendrik "Hank" Simons, the CENPA shop administrator, in the success of many of CENPA's experiments was recognized with a 2008 UW Distinguished Staff Award. Hank is an extraordinary instrument maker, an efficient and realistic scheduler, and a helpful and patient design consultant for faculty, students and staff.
Distinguished Staff Awards provide the University an opportunity to honor the extraordinary accomplishments of staff. Nominees must exemplify extraordinary service and demonstrate the University of Washington values of integrity, diversity, excellence, collaboration, innovation and respect. Nearly 100 staff members were nominated across the campus for 2008 Awards.  From this group, five individuals or teams were selected for a $5,000 award, and each awardee will be recognized at the annual University of Washington Recognition Ceremony.

KATRIN Neutrino Mass Project Receives DOE Support

The KArlsruhe TRItium Neutrino mass project is a new, large-scale experiment on the beta decay of tritium with the goal of determining the mass of the neutrino with ten times the sensitivity of the best previous experiment (see http://www-ik.fzk.de/~katrin/index.html).  The ultimate sensitivity of the project is a mass of 0.2 eV, which will provide key information about the cosmological role of neutrinos in shaping the structure of the universe.  KATRIN is being constructed at the Forschungszentrum Karlruhe in Germany, and makes use of the tritium-handling facility built there for the ITER project.  Five nations including the US are collaborating.  The US Department of Energy Division of Nuclear Physics recently agreed to support the US role in KATRIN.  The UW and MIT are to receive a total of $2.6 M over 5 years to provide the focal-plane detector for the instrument, the data-acquisition system, and a number of special-purpose calibration systems.  The Project Manager for the US is Peter Doe, the US Spokesman is Hamish Robertson, and John Wilkerson leads the data-acquisition task.  All three are professors in the UW Physics Department and members of CENPA.

The University of Washington has made two of the AIP top 10 physics stories for 2007. Single-top production seen first at D0 where the EPE group played a leading role; two of the three separate analyses were introduced and carried out by them. The other is the Gundlach et al. test of Newton’s second law.  

Congratulations are due to Professors Nikolai Tolich and Paula Heron.

Professor Tolich has been awarded the 2008 American Physical Society Dissertation Award in Nuclear Physics for his thesis prepared under the supervision of Professor Giorgio Gratta at Stanford.  He shares the award with Dr. Deepshikha Choudhury of Ohio University.   Dr. Tolich is cited “For his dissertation presenting an experimental investigation of terrestrial electron antineutrinos with KamLAND.”

Professor Heron has been elected to the APS Fellowship.   Paula was cited “for her leadership in the physics education research community and development of research-based curricula that significantly impact physics instruction throughout the world."

Our Physics Education Group is Recognized by the APS

The Physics Education Group at the University of Washington recently received the APS Award in Physics Education. This award honors the Group for their sustained commitment to excellence in Physics Education. The group, which includes faculty Lillian McDermott, Paula Heron and Peter Shaffer, focuses their research on teaching and learning of physics, developing curricula, and helping teachers improve their effectiveness. Their early groundbreaking research established the methodology for understanding how students learn physical concepts. This group established an important new role for physics education research within physics departments.

Their citation reads,

“For leadership in advancing research methods in physics education, promoting the importance of physics education research as a subdiscipline of physics, and developing research-based curricula that have improved students’ learning of physics from kindergarten to graduate school.”

We congratulate the Group for their success and we are proud to have them in our Department.

Research overturns accepted notion of neutron's electrical properties

For two generations of physicists, it has been a standard belief that the neutron, an electrically neutral elementary particle and a primary component of an atom, actually carries a positive charge at its center and an offsetting negative charge at its outer edge. The notion was first put forth in 1947 by Enrico Fermi, a Nobel laureate noted for his role in developing the first nuclear reactor. But new research by a University of Washington physicist shows the neutron's charge is not quite as simple as Fermi believed.

Using precise data recently gathered at three different laboratories and some new theoretical tools, Gerald A. Miller, a UW physics professor, has found that the neutron has a negative charge both in its inner core and its outer edge, with a positive charge sandwiched in between to make the particle electrically neutral.  "Nobody realized this was the case," Miller said. "It is significant because it is a clear fact of nature that we didn't know before. Now we know it." This discovery has implications for understanding the strong force, one of the four fundamental forces of nature (the others are the weak force, electromagnetism and gravity).  The strong force binds atomic nuclei together, which makes it possible for nuclei and therefore atoms, the building blocks of all matter to exist.
His analysis was published on line Sept. 13 in Physical Review Letters. The work was funded in part by the U.S. Department of Energy. 

NEWTON'S SECOND LAW OF MOTION, that pillar of classical physics, the formula that says the force on an object is proportional to acceleration, has now been tested, and found to be valid, at the level of 5 x 10^-14 m/s². This is a thousandfold improvement in precision over the best previous test, one carried out 21 years ago (Physical Review D, vol 34, p 3240, 1986). The new test was performed by physicists at the University of Washington using a swiveling torsion pendulum, a special kind of pendulum in which the restoring force is not gravity (as you would have in a hanging pendulum) but is provided by a very thin torsion fiber. One implication of Newton's law is that the pendulum's frequency (its tick-tock rate) should be independent of the amplitude of its swiveling (as long as the oscillation is small). Looking for a slight departure from this expected independence the Washington researchers watched the pendulum at very small amplitudes; in fact the observed swivel was kept so small that the Brownian excitation of the pendulum was a considerable factor in interpreting the results. Newton's second law is expected to break down for subatomic size scales, where quantum uncertainty frustrates any precise definition of velocity. But for this experiment, where the pendulum has a mass of 70 g and consists of 10²⁴ atoms, quantum considerations were not important.

According to one of the scientists involved, Jens Gundlach (206-616-3012, jens@phys.washington.edu), this new affirmation that force is proportional to acceleration (at least for non-relativistic speeds), might influence further discussion of two anomalies: (1) oddities in the rotation curves for galaxies---characterizing the velocity of stars as a function of their radii from the galactic center---suggest either that extra gravitational pull in the form of the presence of as-yet-undetected dark matter is at work or that some new form of Newton's Second Law could be operating (referred to as Modified Newtonian Dynamics, or MOND); and (2) the ongoing mystery surrounding the unaccounted-for accelerations apparently characterizing the trajectory of the Pioneer spacecraft. (Gundlach et al., Physical Review Letters, upcoming article).

Source: The Johns Hopkins University
Content: Press Release
Date Issued: 9 April 2007 *********************************************************************** FELLOWSHIPS AIM TO STIMULATE YOUNG THEORETICAL PHYSICISTS LHC Theory Initiative Awards First-Ever Grants The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) Theory Initiative, a U.S.-based consortium of theoretical physicists aiming to stimulate and cultivate new young talent in anticipation of the opening of the Large Hadron Collider later this year, announces its 2007 LHC Theory Graduate Fellowship Awards. Administered by The Johns Hopkins University and funded by the National Science Foundation, the $40,000 awards -- being distributed for the first time this year -- will provide selected young theorists with funds to underwrite the costs of their research, including travel and computing needs. Recipients of the 2007 LHC Theory Initiative Graduate Fellowship Awards are Randall Kelly (University of California, San Diego) and Jonathan Walsh (University of Washington). Their research interests include calculations of higher-order corrections both within and beyond the Standard Model, as well as the development of new, improved, simulation tools to confront with data theoretical models. In addition, LHC Theory Initiative Travel Awards, which provide $3,000 for LHC-related travel, were presented to Dai De Chang (Case Western Reserve University), Wei Gong (University of Oregon), David Krohn (Princeton University) and Keith Rehermann (Johns Hopkins University). All six winners are graduate students selected through a national competition. The chair of the selection committee was Fred Olness from Southern Methodist University. "The goal of these fellowships and awards is to stimulate the work of theoretical physicists who will help interpret the treasure trove of data that will emerge from the Large Hadron Collider," said Jonathan Bagger, a member of the LHC Theory Initiative and chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Johns Hopkins. "Our initiative will help the high-energy physics community take full advantage of the LHC."

UW Group Finds Evidence for Lonely Top Quarks

The DZERO experiment has seen evidence for single top quark production at the Tevatron particle accelerator located at Fermilab, just outside of Chicago Illinois. The physics department's Elementary Particle Experimental group played a central role in the observation of single top quark production. Group members involved in DZERO include T. Burnett, G. Watts, A. Garcia-Bellido, H. Lubatti, T. Zhao, and graduate student T. Gadfort. The top quark was discovered in 1995 produced in pairs and its mass was found to be surprisingly heavy -- almost that of a gold atom. It has been the subject of intense study since then: its high mass has led many to speculate that it is associated with the Higgs mechanism responsible for electro-weak symmetry breaking -- one of the great open questions in particle physics. While the strong force produced the discovery signature, it has been known that the top quark could also be produced by the electro-weak force. This production mechanism is known as single-top production because only one top quark is produced in the final state. For the first time we have observed evidence for this production mechanism of the top quark. Single top production also allows us to make the first ever direct measurement of the Vtb matrix element of the CKM quark-coupling matrix. This measurement is just the beginning of an exciting top-quark research program. As we accumulate data we will be able to better probe top quark interactions for evidence of physics beyond the standard model and better constrain the as yet unobserved Standard Model Higgs. Observing single top production is also important because is it one of the last backgrounds to the Standard Model Higgs. Fermilab has issued a press release on this important discovery.

SciDAC Award

The Department of Energy has announced that a University of  Washington team will lead a new $15M project to bring advanced computing resources to bear on the physics of atomic nuclei.  Knowledge in this area is needed for engineering as well as pure science.  Engineering applications of nuclear physics include the design of power reactors, waste burning, and simulations to obviate the need for nuclear testing.  In pure science,  better theory of nuclear properties is needed for understanding of astrophysical processes, particularly concerning the creation of the elements in the stars. An important aspect of the project is to bring advanced computing resources and expertise to bear on the physical questions through the heavy use of the upcoming supercomputers with up to a quarter million processors and capable of operating in the petascale regime (thousands of million of million of operations per second).  It is anticipated that this collaborative effort between computer scientists and nuclear physicists will bring about a dramatic improvement in the accuracy and reliability of theoretical predictions of the nuclear properties.  The project, called "Low-Energy Nuclear Physics National High-Performance Initiative: Building A Universal Nuclear Energy Density Functional",  includes 8 universities and 6 national laboratories, and will extend over 5 years. It is led by George Bertsch and Aurel Bulgac in the Institute for Nuclear Theory and the Department of Physics at the University of Washington.

UW link                             
SciDAC physics link