News

2011 News

Professor Claud W. Lovelace has made a $1.5 million pledge to fund a new faculty position in the Department of Physics and Astronomy

This is the first gift toward a $27 million challenge grant to establish 18 endowed chairs at the university. The gift will fund a position named the "Professor Claud Lovelace Endowed Chair in Experimental Condensed Matter Physics.

Read more about the gift...

(12/6/2011)

Results of the APS Division of Particles and Fields (DPF) 2011 election has been announced

Professor Yuri Gershtein has been elected a member of the DPF Executive Committee.

  • For more info, see http://dpfnewsletter.org

(11/3/2011)

Rutgers has been awarded a $2.3M MRI grant that will bring a "first of its kind" nanoscale ion beam facility to Rutgers campus

The principal investigator is Professor Torgny Gustafsson. Co-PI's on the project are Professors Eva Andrei and Len Feldman, and Professors Laura Fabris and Adrian Mann from Materials Science and Engineering.

microcircuit Together with other recent NSF awards this instrument will provide new nano-scale capability and establish Rutgers as a national center for nano-scale microscopy. When complete, the facility will be the base of a multi-user center for ion microscopes providing excellent hands on opportunities for Rutgers students and researchers, the broader academic community as well as New Jersey industries.

(10/14/2011)

Rutgers Astronomical Society co-sponsored the International Observe the Moon Night event

telescopebm The Rutgers Astronomical Society co-sponsored the International Observe the Moon Night event at the Orange Public Library in Orange, NJ on October 8, 2011.

Professor Carlton Pryor and Society members Viraj Pandya, Chris Carroll, Madison Hagar, and Garth Malcolm shared interesting stories about the Cosmos and set up three telescopes for young children and their parents to view the Moon through.

(10/13/2011)

Dave Maiullo has appeared on Dark Matters (Science Channel)

Dave Maiullo has appeared on Dark Matters (Science Channel); for episode clips with him in them see

(10/06/2011)

Rutgers professor Saurabh Jha was a graduate student on a team led by today's Nobel Prize in Physics winner Brian Schmidt

Rutgers professor Saurabh Jha was a graduate student on a team led by today's Nobel Prize in Physics winner Brian Schmidt, who shares half of the prize with Adam Riess, lead author of the seminal report on the expansion of the galaxy (Astronomical Journal, v. 116, p. 1009, 1998).

Team members observed bright exploding stars at the edges of the universe, gauging how far away they were and how fast they were receding, reaching the conclusion that the universe is continuing to expand. Since then, Jha has continued to work on observing these exploding stars, called type 1a supernovae, measuring their distance and speed with increasingly higher precision. His work has contributed to the confidence that scientists have in the conclusions drawn from that original 1998 study.

Read more about Professor Jha:

Read more about the Nobel Prize for Physics..

(10/04/2011)

Professor Eva Halkiadakis has been appointed a co-convener of the Supersymmetry Search group

Professor Eva Halkiadakis has been appointed a co-convener of the Supersymmetry Search group of the CMS experiment of the Large Hadron Collider. In this capacity, she will lead CMS's supersymmetry search teams of leading scientists from the world's major universities.

(09/15/2011)

Professor Eric Gawiser has won a prestigious NSF CAREER award

Professor Eric Gawiser has won a prestigious NSF CAREER award. The CAREER award is given in support of early career development activities with special emphasis on integrating research and education. This is the 11th such award to our department since 2004.

(08/30/2011)

Professor Sasha Zamolodchikov has won the 2011 Dirac Medal

Professor Sasha Zamolodchikov has won the 2011 Dirac Medal, awarded by the International Centre for Theoretical Physics for his contributions to string theory and condensed matter theory.

The announcement can be found at http://www.ictp.it/news/2011-dirac-medal.aspx

(08/30/2011)

Professor Eric Gawiser is part of a collaboration which discovered evidence that black holes were common in the early universe

The discovery was announced by NASA June 15, 2011 (Read NASA announcement) and Eric was profiled in Rutgers Today (Read article)

(06/15/2011)

Professor Mark Croft helped develop a new battery technology with GE

Professor Mark Croft helped develop a new battery technology with GE, profiled in the Discovery & Innovation site of the Department of Energy Office of Science as published in the Journal of Power Sources (view PDF). Based on the successful collaboration, GE has a joint proposal with Rutgers for the creation of a new beam line at the National Synchrotron Light Source.

(06/14/2011)

Professor Sang-Wook Cheong was named Board of Governors Professor

Professor Sang-Wook Cheong was named Board of Governors Professor at the June 14, 2011 meeting of Board of Governors. Board of Governors Professorships are awarded to individuals whose accomplishments are recognized nationally or internationally as being consistently and unusually outstanding at a level exceeding even the extremely high standards expected of faculty members who have earned Professor II designations at the University. These professorships recognize faculty members whose accomplishments are particularly outstanding and have earned the individual faculty member national or international distinction within the discipline.

(06/14/2011)

Assistant professor Eva Halkiadakis has been awarded an LHC Physics Center Fellowship for the 2011-12 academic year

She joins current fellow John Paul Chou who will be an assistant professor at Rutgers starting fall 2011. More information on the LPC program can be found at http://lpc.fnal.gov/fellows/index.shtml

(05/26/2011)

Professor Saurabh Jha won the 2010-2011 Bart J. Bok prize from the Harvard Department of Astronomy

It is awarded annually to a Harvard Astrophysics Ph.D. recipient 35 or younger for outstanding research.

He received the award for "outstanding work and keen insight in crafting methods to make supernovae into sharp tools for measuring the universe."

Saurabh gave the Bok Prize Lecture at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center on May 5.

(05/10/2011)

Professors Gregory Moore and Thomas Banks have been elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Professors Gregory Moore and Thomas Banks have been elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the nation's most prestigious honorary societies and a leading center for independent policy research. Founded in 1780, the AAAS is one of the most prestigious honorary societies and counts more than 200 Nobel Prize laureates and 50 Pulitzer Prize winners among its fellows.

(4/20/2011)

Junior physics major Kiersten Ruisard has won the highly prestigious Barry Goldwater Scholarship

The scholarship is awarded annually to 275 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/

(4/1/2011)

Professor Eva Andrei's work on graphene has been spotlighted at the physicsworld.com website

grapheneProfessor Eva Andrei's work on graphene has been spotlighted at the physicsworld.com website.

(4/4/2011)

Professor Jack Hughes and postdoctoral researcher Kristoffer Eriksen have made the discovery of a pattern xraystripes11 of X-ray "stripes"

Professor Jack Hughes and postdoctoral researcher Kristoffer Eriksen have made the discovery of a pattern xraystripes11 of X-ray "stripes" in the remains of an exploded star. Their work used observations of the Tycho supernova remnant made with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory.

(3/25/2011)

Eva Andrei has been recently highlighted in Physics-spotlight of Physical Review Letters at the American Physical Society

The work of Eva Andrei has been recently highlighted in Physics-spotlight of Physical Review Letters at the American Physical Society. The groundbreaking paper provides "experimental proof of the influence of twisting on the band structure of bilayer graphene."

(3/22/2011)

Samia Bouzid, while participating in a summer research program in Arizona, was on a research team that unexpectedly discovered two novae in the Andromeda Galaxy

Rutgers University astrophysics major, Samia Bouzid, while participating in a summer research program in Arizona, was on a research team that unexpectedly discovered two novae in the Andromeda Galaxy.

(3/3/2011)

Physical Review Letters recognized 3 from Rutgers as outstanding referees for their journals

In 2008 Physical Review and Physical Review Letters began a program to recognize outstanding referees for their journals. Of the 45,000 active referees, about 150 are recognized each year for their unpaid (and unacknowledged) work in maintaining the high standards of our most prestigious journals.

Among this year's winners are:

  • Charles Glashausser
  • Gabi Kotliar
  • Eugenia Etkina (a member of our Graduate Program and faculty member in the Department of Education)

They join past winners from this department Elihu Abrahams, Jolie Cizewski and Piers Coleman.

Read more at the APS website

(2/11/2011)

Piers Coleman and collaborators from Rice and Tokyo have found a new material that is "intrinsically quantum critical with very simple behavior."

The research may have discovered an exotic new phase of matter known as the "critical strange metal" phase. Read more about this ground-breaking discovery below:

More information available at:

(1/20/2011)

AAAS has announced that Eva Andrei and Karin Rabe have been named fellows

The AAAS has announced that Eva Andrei and Karin Rabe have been named fellows of the AAAS. The American Association for the Advancement of Science is an international non-profit organization dedicated to "advance science and serve society". Amoung the publications published by AAAS is it's journal Science. Professors Andrei and Rabe will be recognized for their contributions to science, along with other new fellows, at the Feb 19 2011 AAAS Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C.

More information can be found at:

(1/11/2011)