2006 News

Congratulations to Noemie Koller who is the recipient of the 2006 Distinguished Service Award of the Division of Nuclear Physics of the American Physical Society

She was recognized "For her sustained and exceptional contributions to the Division of Nuclear Physics and to the American Physical Society on behalf of the Division, for her creative promotion of education and the climate for women in nuclear science, and for her vigorous efforts to develop the Division's initial Nuclear Physics brochure and to fund the Bonner Prize." The award was presented at the meeting of the Division in Nashville in October of 2006.

First Light for the Rutgers Fabry Perot Instrument on the SALT Telescope

firstlightThe Farby-Perot system of the Robert Stobie Spectrograph was used for the first time on September 22, 2006 to acquire on-sky images with the Southern African Large Telecope.

Read more (PDF)

CDF experiment at Fermilab has measured the oscillation of the Bs meson into Bs-bar

The CDF experiment at Fermilab has measured the oscillation of the Bs meson into Bs-bar. Quoted as a mass difference, the value is Delta_ms = 17.77 +- 0.10 (stat) +- 0.07 (sys) ps-1.

The oscillation is explained by the Standard Model, and the value above is in accordance with it. However, there are many beyond SM models (supersymmetry for instance) that cannot avoid affecting this oscillation. So this result will help narrow the window for new physics. The details are in hep-ex/0609040. Read more at the CDF Web site at FermiLab

Kitta MacPherson of the Newark Star-Ledger had a story this morning: http://www.nj.com/search/index.ssf?/base/news-9/1159251134290850.xml?starledger?ntop&coll=1

Note an egregious mistake near the end: "For reasons of physics, the Higgs boson, which has much less mass, would likely be drawn to the heavier b quark in the meson." Oh, don't we wish the Higgs were that light! In fact, the Higgs boson has much MORE mass than the b quark. It is (probably) lighter than twice the top quark mass, so it will want to decay to the LIGHTER b quark. Assuming of course the Higgs is indeed what is responsible for breaking electroweak symmetry.

Vesselin Marinov and Brian Vancil presented the Richard J. Plano Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award

At this year's Graduate Student Organization sponsored Dept Welcome Reception, the Richard J. Plano Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award was presented to Vesselin Marinov and Brian Vancil.

Dave Maiullo to be awarded the NJAAPT Lifetime Contribution to Physics Education Award

The NJ Science Teachers Association and the NJ Science Education Leadership Association have selected Dave Maiullo to be awarded the NJAAPT Lifetime Contribution to Physics Education Award at the New Jersey Science Convention Awards Dinner October 11, 2006.

Emil Yuzbashyan has been awarded a prestigious CAREER award from the National Science Foundation

This award, given to the most outstanding young scholars, will provide substantial research support for the next five years.

According to the NSF web site, the Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program is a Foundation-wide activity that offers the National Science Foundation's most prestigious awards in support of the early career-development activities of those teacher-scholars who most effectively integrate research and education within the context of the mission of their organization. Such activities should build a firm foundation for a lifetime of integrated contributions to research and education.

Gabe Alba and Hsu-Chang Lu have won First Prize in the 2006 Apparatus Competition of the American Association of Physics Teachers

Their entry was entitled "Bend It Like Bernoulli" and demonstrated how a soccer ball is made to bend around a wall of defenders from a kicker imparting a spin to it.

annual Departmental Awards Banquet on April 18, 2006

At the annual Departmental Awards Banquet on April 18, 2006, the following awards were presented:

 

Society of Physics Students Outstanding Teacher Award: Thomas Devlin
Richard J. Plano Dissertation Prize: Juntai Shen
Richard T. Weidner Physics Prize: Joseph Walsh
Mary Wheeler Wigner Memorial Scholarship: Joseph Wolf
Robert L. Sells Scholarships: Pablo Mosteiro
and
Javier Sanchez
Herman Y. Carr Scholarships: Anthony Barker
and
Jack Hanson
Noemie B. Koller Scholarships: Kinga Partyka
and
Christine Hsieh
Richard J. Plano Summer Research Internships: Stanislav Solomovich
and
Matthew Calhoun
Summer Research Internship in
Experimental High Energy Physics:		 Scott Robinson

Professor Mohan Kalelkar has been selected to receive a Warren I. Susman Award for Excellence in Teaching

This award is Rutgers University's highest honor for outstanding and innovative performance in the classroom by a tenured faculty member. The award is named in memory of Professor Susman, a prominent cultural historian and popular teacher.

Sang-Wook Cheong was officially awarded the Donald H. Jacobs Chair in Applied Physics

On Apr 6, 2006, Sang-Wook Cheong was officially awarded the Donald H. Jacobs Chair in Applied Physics for the period Jan. 1, 2006 to Dec. 31, 2008 during a ceremony at the Board of Governors meeting.

Professor Harry Kojima has been elected as Fellow of the APS

Professor Harry Kojima has been elected as Fellow of the APS for his work in Condensed Matter Physics for experimental discoveries of unusual low-temperature excitations and dynamics in quantum liquids and solids (especially superfluid 3He).

Congratulations go to Aaron Warren and Dr. Jeff Thomas

Aaron has won the Graduate School at New Brunswick award for outstanding teaching by a graduate student. Jeff, a student of Prof. Jolie Cizewski, has won the Graduate School at New Brunswick outstanding dissertation award.

Carlos Badenes, a post-doc in the astronomy group, has been awarded a Chandra Fellowship for 2006

This highly competitive, prestigious fellowship will support Carlos' research on supernovae and their remnants at Rutgers over the next three years.

Professor Emil Yuzbashyan has just been named a Sloan Foundation Research Fellow for 2006

These awards are intended to enhance the careers of the very best young faculty members in specified fields of science. Currently a total of 116 fellowships are awarded annually in seven fields: chemistry, computational and evolutionary molecular biology, computer science, economics, mathematics, neuroscience, and physics.

Rutgers Professor Gabriel Kotliar has been awarded The 2006 Agilent Technologies Europhysics Prize, along with Antoine Georges, Walter Metzner, and Dieter Vollhardt, for the Development and Application of the Dynamical Mean Field Theory

From the European Physical Society announcement:

The Agilent Technologies' Europhysics Prize for Outstanding Achievement in Condensed Matter Physics is an annual award, funded by donations from the Agilent Technologies' corporate contributions programs to the European Physical Society.

The Europhysics Prize is considered to be one of the most prestigious physics prizes presented in Europe. Eight previous winners have subsequently won Nobel Prizes for their work. Since 1975, the award has been given to leading scientists in nearly every internationally important area of condensed matter physics.

The award is given in recognition of recent work by one or more individuals in the area of physics of condensed matter, particularly work leading to advances in the fields of electronic, electrical and materials engineering, which, in the opinion of the Society's Selection Committee, represent scientific excellence. The Selection Committee consists of five members who are appointed by the Society and includes an Agilent Technologies' representative.

Agilent is proud to continue the tradition of funding the prize, a tradition started by HP in 1975. It includes a substantial cash award. Agilent sponsorship demonstrates its commitment to technical innovation, including fundamental physics.

Professor David Vanderbilt is the winner of the 2006 Aneesur Rahman Prize in Computational Physics, one of the major prizes of the American Physical Society

The prize was established in 1992 by the IBM Corporation to recognize and encourage outstanding achievement in computational physics research. The citation reads, "For his conceptual breakthroughs in his development of the ultrasoft pseudopotential and the modern theory of polarization and their impact on first-principles investigations of the properties of materials." The prize will be awarded at the 2006 APS March Meeting in Baltimore.

The 2006 budget request to Congress by the Dept. of Energy highlights the recent measurement of the g-factor of an accelerated radioactive nucleus by Prof. Noemie Koller and her group

It was carried out at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which is supported by the DOE.