2010 News

David Maiullo was recently featured on the Rutgers radio station "The Core" on 90.3FM. In the interview, David discusses the 2010 Faraday Christmas Children's Lectures.

• Information about the 2010 Faraday Christmas Children's Lecture...
• Listen to David Maiullo's "The Core 90.3" radio interview (mp3 file)...
• Article from MyCentralJersey.com...

(12/09/2010)

• Profile(s): Maiullo, David

Steve Schnetzer was named this year as a Fellow of the American Physical Society. The citation reads: "For his work co-founding the AMY detector collaboration, at which he and his student made powerful quantitative tests of quantum chromodynamics, and for his work on experimental particle physics hardware, especially his pioneering work on diamond-based detectors.".

(12/02/2010)

• Profile(s): Schnetzer, Stephen

Noemie Koller has been awarded the 2010 Nicholson Medal for Human Outreach. The citation reads "For unselfish commitment to advocating the freedom of scientists around the world and for leadership in fostering equal opportunities for women in science."

More info...

(12/02/2010)

• Profile(s): Koller, Noemie

Eugenia Etkina, Professor of Education and member of the Graduate Program of Physics and Astronomy, has won the Science Prize for On-Line Technology Resources of the AAAS, a prize for the best on-line materials in science education.

• Press release

(11/02/2010)

• Profile(s): Etkina, Eugenia

Their discovery is published in the November 10 issue of the Astrophysics Journal.

• Read more about the discovery

(11/01/2010)

• Profile(s): Hughes, John P.

Professor Alexander (Sasha) B. Zamolodchikov has won the 2011 Lars Onsager Prize of the American Physical Society. The citation reads "For outstanding contributions to theoretical physics, and especially for the remarkable ideas that they introduced concerning conformal field theory and soluble models of statistical mechanics in two dimensions."

Sharing the prize were Alexander A. Belavin of the Landau Institute and Alexander M Polyakov of Princeton University

(10/25/2010)

The Aresty Center has awarded a travel scholarship to physics senior Sean Yeager. He is writing his honors thesis on search for supersymmetry under Prof. Sunil Somalwar. Sean has previously received research fellowships from the department as well as the Aresty Center.

(10/25/2010)

Professor Sang-Wook Cheong is coauthor of an article appearing in the October 2010 issue of Physics Today entitled Multiferroics: Past, present, and future.

Read the article (subscription required)

(10/21/2010)

• Profile(s): Cheong, Sang-Wook

Professor Vitaly Podzorov, along with postdoctoral researcher Hikmat Najafov, graduate students Bumsu Lee and Qibin Zhou, and Leonard Feldman, director of the Rutgers Institute for Advanced Materials, Devices and Nanotechnology (IAMDN), have been published in Nature Materials. Their paper entitled "Observation of long-range exciton diffusion in highly ordered organic semiconductors" discusses a newly discovered property in a material that may lead to efficient and inexpensive plastic solar cells.

• Read the Rutgers Press Release
• Read the Nature Materials Article

(10/11/2010)

• Profile(s): Podzorov, Vitaly

Professor Philip Batson, with co-PI's Sang Cheong, Fred Cosandey (Materials Science and Engineering), Jing Li (Chemistry and Chemical Biology) and Ondrei Krivanek (Nion Corp.) have been recognized in the report http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/100-Recovery-Act-Projects-Changing-America-Report.pdf (project 46) as one of 100 projects funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act which are helping to transform America. The project will make Rutgers a leading university for electron microscopy.

• Read more about it at US News & World Report

(9/17/2010)

• Profile(s): Cheong, Sang-Wook

This is the National Science Foundation's most prestigious award in support of early career development activities with special emphasis on integrating research and education. The award provides long term stability (5 years) for young professors. Vitaly received the award in 2009, we apologize for the delayed announcement. This makes this the 10th NSF career award to our department in the past 6th years.

(9/17/2010)

• Profile(s): Podzorov, Vitaly

He is majoring in Physics and Mathematics and is interested in a career in academia.

More info

(9/1/2010)

More info:

• Nature
• Royal Society of Chemistry
• Cornell News

(8/26/2010)

• Profile(s): Rabe, Karin M.

They studied the structure of the doubly magic tin-132 nucleus through the addition of a neutron to form tin-133. The results impact on the r-process which produces heavy nuclei in supernova explosions.

The work was published in Nature, one of only a few papers a year from the department to appear in that journal. The work has been described in

• Rutgers Today,
• Physics Today, and
• Oak Ridge National Laboratory Review.

(8/10/2010)

• Profile(s): Cizewski, Jolie A.

This is the National Science Foundation's most prestigious award in support of early career-development activities with special emphasis on integrating research and education. The award provides long term funding stability (5 years). This is the 9th such award to our department during the past six years.

(8/4/2010)

• Profile(s): Baker, Andrew J.

Dr. Losada received her Ph.D. from Rutgers in 1996, under the supervision of Professor Glennys Farrar.

Professor Chuck Keeton will receive two awards from the University at a reception on May 5, 2010. One of the awards is a Board of Trustees Fellowship for Scholarly Excellence. The other award is a Presidential Award for Teaching Excellence.

Congratulations go out to Chuck for his many wonderful contributions to our department and our university.

• Profile(s): Keeton, Charles R.

At the April 15 meeting, the Board of Governors approved the promotion of Misha Gershenson to Professor II, and Yuri Gershtein and Chuck Keeton to Associate Professors with tenure.
Warmest congratulations to Misha, Yuri and Chuck for these richly deserved promotions!!

• Profile(s): Gershtein, Yuri, Keeton, Charles R.

Professor Andrew Baker will be awarded an SAS Award for Distinguished Contributions to Undergraduate Education at a ceremony in the Winants Hall Assembly room in Voorhees Hall at 4 PM on May 4.

• Profile(s): Baker, Andrew J.

Professor Jolie Cizewski has been elected Member-at-Large for the Section on Physics of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Her term started February, 2010.

• Profile(s): Cizewski, Jolie A.

Professor Eva Andrei will receive the Trustees Award for Excellence in Research at a ceremony on May 5, 2010, recognizing her widely known and highly appreciated work on graphene. This award is the university's highest honor for distinguished research contributions. It is the second year in a row that this award goes to our department - Jack Hughes won last year.

• Profile(s): Andrei, Eva Y.

The scholarship is awarded annually to 300 students across the nation, across all of the natural sciences, math, and engineering. For more information, please visit the Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Program website at http://www.act.org/goldwater/.

This is the National Science Foundation's most prestigious award in support of early career-development activities with special emphasis on integrating research and education. The award provides long term funding stability (5 years). This is the 8th such award to our department during the past three years.

• Profile(s): Gershtein, Yuri

Andrei Malashevich has won one of the six annual Dean's awards for outstanding research, based on his dissertation "FIRST-PRINCIPLES STUDY OF ELECTRIC POLARIZATION IN PIEZOELECTRIC AND MAGNETOELECTRIC MATERIALS", under the guidance of Professor David Vanderbilt. The award includes a prize of $1000.

Brian Tice was selected to attend the 2010 Nobel Laureate Meeting at Lindau June 27-July 2. About 600 students in chemistry, physics, and medicine/physiology are chosen in a world-wide competition. Over 60 Nobel Laureates will attend the meeting to give lectures and meet with the students. Brian is a student of Professor Ron Ransome.

Physics support specialist David Maiullo is featured in Rutgers Magazine. As the author of the article writes: David "takes hard-to-understand scientific principles and creates ways to make audiences sit up and pay attention".

Read more..

• Profile(s): Maiullo, David

Assistant professor David Shih has won the DOE Early Career Award (the DOE equivalent of the NSF CAREER award) for his proposal: "Supersymmetry Breaking, Gauge Mediation and the LHC".
More information about the Early Career Research Program can be found at the U.S. Department of Energy website.

• Profile(s): Shih, David

A recent APS Phys Rev E paper, entitled "Diffusion of scientific credits and the ranking of scientists" describes a method for ranking publications and authors, and then compares the system to the assignments of major career awards. The authors discuss that while this ranking system uses the Phys Rev database, it can be applied to other disciplines as well. By visiting http://www.physauthorsrank.org you can enter a name and receive the rank based on their algorithm.

On page 7 of the article two tables show the top 20 scientists ranked according to their method for two years, 1973 and 2004. Rutgers Physics professor Claud Lovelace ranked 14th according to their system in 1973 and professor David Vanderbilt ranked 13th in 2004 on these charts! This provides further evidence of the highly influential work being performed in the department.

• Profile(s): Vanderbilt, David

This large array of telescopes is currently being constructed and tested and will be used for observations in 2011.

• Rutgers SAS International Programs story
• More information about the ALMA project

• Profile(s): Baker, Andrew J.

George had been in poor health for some time, but his death still came as a surprise to his many friends.

George received his Ph D in 1949 at Birmingham University in the UK, under Sir Rudolph Peierls. After doing a post-doc in Zurich, he moved to the University of Alberta in Canada in 1951. In 1960, he came to Rutgers as chair of the physics department at Douglass college. The spring semester 2010 would therefore have been his 100th semester here.

George was a condensed matter theorist with a specialization in lattice dynamics, particularly in strongly anharmonic crystals. As late as in 2003, he still published on this subject. He had a long and lasting impact on the department and on Rutgers. He was a popular and loved teacher and did important work related to the teaching of physics, both locally and on the national scene. He created the Physics Learning Center (now the MSLC), the Gateway program and was very active in forming the AAUP chapter at Rutgers. He was also the central figure in establishing an HMO at Rutgers, which very significantly improved the health benefits for all his colleagues here. He received many honors for his work, such as the Georgina Smith Award from the AAUP "For Creative and Distinguished Leadership", the presidential Award for Distinguished Public Service, the Sussman Award for Excellence in Teaching, Best Teacher of the Year Award and several more.

-Torgny Gustafsson, Physics & Astronomy Chair

Visit Geoge Horton Memorial website

From the Nature press release:

"Physics: Charge break-up in graphene"

"Researchers confirm that charge carriers in graphene interact strongly with each other and exhibit collective behavior manifesting as fractions of an electron's elementary charge. Graphene is expected to find a range of applications in future electronics and these findings are important for understanding its complex physical properties."

"When charge carriers such as electrons are confined to moving in a two-dimensional plane and subject to a perpendicular magnetic field, they can form new quasi-particles with a fraction of the electron's elementary charge. This is known as the fractional quantum Hall effect FQHE. Graphene could be considered such a perfect two-dimensional system because the carbon atomic constituents are arranged in a single plane. Its charge carriers are remarkably mobile and have been predicted to interact strongly with each other. But firm evidence of collective behavior such as the FQHE has been difficult to obtain."

"Eva Andrei and colleagues report the experimental observation of FQHE using devices containing suspended sheets of graphene probed in a two-terminal measurement set-up. Their approach removes disturbances from impurities that would normally obscure the effects of electron interactions, and may explain why previous searches have failed."

More press releases and news articles:

• Profile(s): Andrei, Eva Y.

Daniel Friedan, Professor II and a founding member of the New High Energy Theory Center (NHETC) has won the 2010 Lars Onsager Prize of the American Physical Society, one of the most prestigious prizes the APS awards. The citation reads:

For seminal work on the classification and characterization of two-dimensional unitary conformal field theories of critical states

Daniel shares this prize with Steve Shenker of Stanford University. Steve was also a founding member of the NHETC and a member of our faculty until the end of 1998.

• Profile(s): Friedan, Daniel

Professor Sang-Wook Cheong is being honored by the American Physical Society with the 2010 James C. McGroddy Prize for New Materials, one of the most prestigious prizes the APS awards. The citation reads:

For groundbreaking contributions in theory and experiment that have advanced the understanding and utility of multiferroic oxides.

The prize consists of a cash award and a certificate. He shares this prize with Ramamoorthy Ramesh, UC-Berkeley, and Nicola Spaldin, UC-Santa Barbara (Nicola, a theorist, got her start in this field working with Karin Rabe of our department).

• Profile(s): Cheong, Sang-Wook