Prof. Chiho Nonaka of Nagoya University will spend a one-year sabbatical in the Physics Department as a Senior Research Scientist working with Prof. Steffen A. Bass. Nonaka was a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the QCD group from 2002 to 2005.

This year’s Daphne Chang Memorial Award for excellence in undergraduate research goes to Katrina Miller. Katrina's faculty mentor is Prof. Phil Barbeau. The award comes with a certificate as well as a monetary award. For more about Daphne Chang and the award begun in her memory, please click here.

Katrina Miller: 2016 Daphne Chang Memorial Awardee

Prof. Werner Tornow spent two and a half weeks in Japan to help with the refurbishment of the so-called Outer Detector of the main KamLAND detector located in the Kamioka mine adjacent to the Super-Kamiokande detector. The Outer Detector was built with Prof. Tornow as Principle Investigator in the years 2000 and 2001 by members from the TUNL consortium using funds provided by the United States Department of Energy. The Outer Detector is a water Cherenkov detector employing 225 large (20” diameter) photomultiplier tubes, which were recycled from the old Kamiokande detector.

Prof. Tornow Contributed To Refurbishment of Outer Detector at KamLAND

Research Scientist Sean Finch’s paper “Search for neutrinoless double-electron capture of 156Dy” was selected as an Editors’ Suggestion in Phys. Rev. C 92, 065503 (2015). This is the third paper of Prof. Werner Tornow’s research group within about one year that was selected as an Editors’ Suggestion.

Prof. Tornow's Group Published

Prof. Maiken H. Mikkelsen won the Cottrell Scholar Award from the Research Corporation for Science Advancement given annually to outstanding teacher-scholars who are recognized by their scientific communities for the quality and innovation of their research programs and their academic leadership skills.

Prof. Mikkelsen Receives Early Career Award

Prof. Warren Warren became chair of Duke Physics on September 1, 2015, replacing interim chair Prof. Dan Gauthier.

Since then, he’s been taking the long view, asking himself and other faculty members what the department should look like in 10 years, and what investments are needed to make that happen.

Chair Warren S. Warren on the Future of Duke Physics

Congratulations to Profs. Stephen Teitsworth and Emilie Huffman whose course evaluations were among the top 5% of all undergraduate instructors at Duke for a medium class (20-59 students) in Fall 2015 for the course PHY 142 "General Physics II: Electricity and Magnetism" and its discussion sections. Eligibility for this recognition requires the completion of the instruction course description as well as receiving 5 or more student evaluations across all of the eligible courses in the term.

Profs. Teitsworth and Huffman's Course Evaluations Among Top 5%

Prof. Robert P. Behringer's work was on the front page of the Science and Technology section of the The News & Observer on Monday, January 18, 2016. Read the story "Duke physicist bullies beads to study avalanches" online here. The same story also ran in The Charlotte Observer. See it here.

Prof. Behringer's Work in N&O and Charlotte Observer

Below are photos taken at the Conference for Undergraduate Women in Physics (CUWiP) held this year at Old Dominion University, January 15-17, 2016. Six Duke Physics undergraduates attended.

Photo at Right: l-r, Fan Zhang, Tianji Cai on Jefferson Lab Tour

Photos from CUWiP 2016

Physics majors Hao Geng, Zhetao Jia, and Fan Zhang won a silver medal in The University Physics Competition 2015 Contest held this past November. The competition problems and results were posted online here. Congratulations to the team and their faculty supervisor Prof. Roxanne Springer. Hopefully this news will encourage other teams to compete in future years.