Department Achievements

April 2010

  • Prof. Haiyan Gao was invited to give a plenary talk on "Recent results on structure functions" at the upcoming 2010 International Conference on High Energy Physics (ICHEP) that will take place in Paris, France from July 22 to July 28.  This conference is the major event in particle physics and will have a special taste in 2010 with the presentation of the first LHC results.  It is particularly significant that Prof. Gao was invited to speak at this conference as her area of research is experimental nuclear physics.  See further information about the conference at the ICHEP website.

February 2010

  • Prof. Roxanne Springer was elected Vice Chair for the American Physical Society's Southeastern Section (SESAPS).  This is a four year commitment; she will be vice chair, then chair-elect, then chair, and finally past-chair.   The "local" APS chapters such as SESAPS are an important forum for encouraging young scientists to consider physics as a focus of study and/or future careers.  SESAPS is pleased to welcome Puerto Rico as its newest member "state," joining Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina,Tennessee, and Virginia (see the SESAPS states here.) Duke physicists are encouraged to join SESAPS (which is free to APS members).  The next SESAPS meeting will be held at LSU in the Fall of 2010.

DECEMBER 2009

  • Prof.  Kate Scholberg was elected a member of the Executive Committee of the American Physical Society (APS) Division of Particles and Fields for a 3 year term, starting 2010.  Congratulations to Prof. Scholberg!
  • Prof. Daniel Gauthier was recently named a 2009  Outstanding Referee of the Physical Review and Physical Review Letters.  This annual program recognizes a small percentage of American Physical Society's 44,000 journal referees each year as "Outstanding Referees."  Congratulations to Prof. Gauthier!
  • Prof. Daniel Gauthier's research group just published a paper on "Boolean Chaos."  Hugo L. D. de S. Cavalcante has published a new website about the group's accomplishments.
  • Prof. Steffen Bass will serve on the American Physical Society (APS) Division of Nuclear Physics Program Committee.  This prestigious appointment is an incredible opportunity for both Prof. Bass and the Duke Physics department.

OCTOBER 2009

  • Prof. Haiyan Gao was recently appointed to the Chang Jiang Lectureship Chair at Tsinghua University.  While holding this chair, she will spend a few months each year at Tsinghua University collaborating with faculty, jointly mentor Ph.D. students and post-docs, and deliver mini courses on advanced topics in nuclear physics.
  • Prof. Albert Chang and Prof. J.C. Chen (National Tsing-Hua University, Taiwan) recently published an extensive review article on the “Kondo effect in coupled-quantum dots” [Rep. Prog. Phys. 72, 096501 (2009)].  This comprehensive review discusses asymptotic freedom in Kondo systems, and quantum phase transition in coupled Kondo systems. Novel behaviors such as correlated bonding Kondo spin-singlet states, as well as non-Fermi-liquid behavior are reviewed from both the experimental and theoretical perspectives.  This is an area of research that cuts across physics sub-disciplines, including condensed matter physics, high-energy particle physics, and field theory.
  • Prof. Steffen Bass recently was awarded funding from the NSF in the form of a “Cyber-enabled Discovery and Innovation” (CDI) grant.  The grant is motivated by the fact that advances in computing power have led to  breakthroughs in modeling complex systems. Likewise, experimental data sets  have similarly grown in size and complexity,  surpassing the petabyte scale in many instances. Lagging behind this progress is the development of rigorous tools for comparing model and simulation output to large data sets. The complexity and scope of both the models and the data sets demands new strategies and tools that exploit twenty-first century advances in computing, statistics and visualization. This project will bring together scientists from Michigan State University, Duke and UNC in the areas of Nuclear Physics, Cosmology, Astophysics, Athmospheric Sciences, Statistical Sciences and Computer Science to develop novel statistical analysis and advanced visualization techniques to tackle this modeling and data analysis challenge.
  • Prof. Haiyan Gao has been asked to serve for five years on the Editorial Board of  Progress in Physics, a review journal published by the Chinese Physical Society.

 

Please let us know if you have an update we should publish.