NEWS !!

2008 -

• Congratulations to the Physics and Astronomy students honored at the 2008 College of Basic Sciences Choppin Honors Convocation:
  • Keen-Morris Prize - Nicholas Van Meter
  • Undergraduate Research Award - Stacey Bright and Brad Corso
  • Undergraduate Service Award - Rachel Mannino
  • College Honors - Shawn Wilkinson

• Physics and Astronomy faculty were successful on seven separate Enhancement, Research Competitiveness, and Graduate Fellows awards recently announced by the Louisiana Board of Regents:
  • P. Adams, J. DiTusa, D. Young, "Upgrade of the LSU Helium Liquefier Facility"
  • J. Blackmon, "Development of a Novel Prototype Detector of Low Energy Neutrinos"
  • D. Browne, M. Cherry, G. Gonzalez, B. Schaefer, " Graduate Fellows in Physics and Astronomy"
  • S. Guo (Mech. Eng.), D. Young et al., "A Quantum-Design Physical Property Measurement System (PPMS) for Novel Thermoelectric Material Studies"
  • R. Kurtz, P. Sprunger et al., "Acquisition of a Variable-Temperature SPM for Multidisciplinary Materials Research and Education"
  • J. Madden (Math), M. Cherry et al., "Professional Master's Degree Programs for K-12 STEM Teachers"
  • D. Sheehy, "Superfluidity and Strong Correlations in Ultracold Atomic Gases"

• One of the prestigious prizes awarded at the American Physical Society meeting in New Orleans in March 2008, was the Aneesur Rahman Prize to Gary S. Grest of Sandia Laboratories for "his ground-breaking development of computational methods and their applications". Gary received his Ph.D. from our department in 1974 (thesis advisor: A.K. Rajagopal).

• Edward Seidel has been elected to the Board of Trustees of Internet2.

• John Gibbons, chief of clinical physics at Mary Bird Perkins Cancer Center and an adjunct professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, has helped introduce a new treatment for a rare form of eye cancer, choroidal melanoma, in which low-dose radiation is applied to the affected area in an ingenious way: Radioactive "seeds" about 3 millimeters long are placed inside a solid gold cap, or plaque, that is attached to the eyeball. Approximately two thousand new cases of choroidal melanoma are diagnosed in the United States every year. Gibbons' new treatment procedure is available through a partnership between Mary bird Perkins Cancer Center and Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center and is described in the March 25, 2008 issue of the Baton Rouge Business Report.

• Ken Schafer and colleagues from Lund and Amsterdam have demonstrated that a train of attosecond UV pulses phase locked to an infrared field can be used to control the ionization of helium atoms with extremely rapid precision. Their work is highlighted in a Nature Photonics Research Highlights article. In a separate article, Schafer and his collaborators demonstrate the use of a train of ultrafast infrared laser pulses to produce images of electron motion on sub-femtosecond timescales. The "electron stroboscope" enables "unprecedented control of electron dynamics" and is expected to lead to detailed, precise studies of electron-atom interactions. A Physical Review Focus article describes the electron stroboscope.
  
  
• Congratulations to Dana Browne, who will receive the 2008 Basic Sciences Tiger Athletic Foundation President's Award at the University's Distinguished Faculty Award Reception at Lod Cook Alumni Center May 6 at 4:00 p.m.

• Congratulations to Bob O'Connell and Ravi Rau, who were honored as "Outstanding Referees" by the American Physical Society at its recent March meeting. This recognition was awarded to referees who "have been truly exceptional in their contributions to the physics community by their hard work and careful attention to the peer review process." The complete list of awardees can be found at http://publish.aps.org/OutstandingReferees.

• The Wired Campus - Education-technology news from around the web -
  Universities Win $9-Million to Create High-Speed Computing Tools

2007 -

• LIGO Sheds Light on Cosmic Event - PDF

• LSU Faculty are involved in two of the top 10 physics stories of the year according to the list published by the American Institute of Physics. LSU faculty are involved in the MiniBooNE experiment and the Auger experiment. MiniBoone (which involves Professor William Metcalf and his research group) recently showed evidence that appears to rule out a fourth generation of neutrinos. Previous measurements of neutrino oscillations had provided tentative evidence for a family of "sterile" neutrinos; MiniBooNE has ruled that out, leaving only the standard three neutrino families associated with the electron, muon, and tau particles. Auger, the world's largest cosmic ray telescope, involves Professor James Matthews; Auger has provided the first direct evidence that the highest energy cosmic rays are produced by active galactic nuclei powered by massive black holes at the cores of galaxies.

• Diola Bagayoko, Professor of Physics at Southern University and Adjunct Professor at LSU, along with the Timbuktu Academy he founded and currently directs, received the 2007 Benjamin Banneker Legacy Award for their work and excellent results in grade school education (K-8th grade). The award ceremony took place on November 7, 2007 in Washington, D.C. Dr. William (Bill) Cosby presented the award to Dr. Bagayoko. The Benjamin Banneker Legacy Awards are made by the Benjamin Banneker Institute for Science and Technology in Washington. More information on the K-16 systemic mentoring and research participation programs of the Timbuktu Academy, click the link above. Congratulations to Diola and the Timbuktu Academy.

• Gabriela Gonzalez has been appointed Chair of the committee that will select the winner of the GWIC thesis prize. GWIC is the Gravitational Wave International Committee, a sub-committee of the IUPAP, International Union of Pure and Applied Physics. The committee selects the winner based on the best thesis in gravitational wave research worldwide.

• Joel Tohline receives honor from world's largest general scientific society. He has been awarded the distinction of being named Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

• Edward Seidel has been elected as fellow of the American Physical Society by the Division of Computational Physics (DCOMP).

• Luis Lehner has been elected to the "40 under 40" by the Baton Rouge Business Report.

• Gabriela Gonzalez has been named a Fellow of the American Physical Society in recognition of "her experimental contributions to the field of gravitational wave detection, her leadership in the analysis of LIGO data for gravitational wave signals, and for her skill in communicating the excitement of physics to students and the public."

• LSU and Southern Receive Unprecedented Awards: Board of Regents provides matching funds to stimulate research in Louisiana. Winning proposal - "Multi-Wavelength and Multi-Messenger Observations in Conjunction with the Gamma Ray Large Area Space Telescope, or GLAST, Satellite Mission," submitted by Michael Cherry, Professor of Physics and Astronomy at LSU, with J. Gregory Stacy from the Department of Physics at LSU and Southern University.

• Kenneth Hogstrom has been named a Fellow of the American Society for Therapeutic Radiology and Oncology in recognition of his long service to the society and his contributions to the field of radiation oncology.

• The Auger experiment has announced the first correlation of ultra-high energy (10²⁰ eV) cosmic ray arrival directions with extragalactic sources. Based on a sample of data taken between 2004 and 2007, Auger sees evidence for their highest energy events coming from the directions of nearby active galactic nuclei. The scientific article appears in Science. The LSU press release can be found here.

• The ATIC cosmic ray balloon experiment is featured on LSU's home page as part of LSU's Antarctic research program. ATIC is preparing for its third flight to measure the composition and energy spectrum of high energy cosmic ray nuclei and electrons. Details and the latest news regarding the current flight campaign can be found here.

• At the 209^th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle, Washington, astronomers announced findings of unusually high levels of the oxygen isotope ¹⁸O in two extremely rare types of stars. This breakthrough has led astronomers to believe that the origin of these add stars could be the merging of white dwarf stars, the burnt-out remnants of normal stars like the Sun. Read the entire article in our Fall 2007 departmental newsletter. For more information, The Gemini Observatory website press release can be found here.  The Gemini press release recorded more hits (more than 50,000) in the first three months after its release than any previous Gemini press release.

• "The Pierre Auger Observatory: Measuring the Highest Energy Cosmic Rays" - In July 2007, the initial Auger results were presented at the 30^th International Cosmic Ray Conferece in Mexico. The data indicated a clear cutoff in the spectrum near 10²⁰ eV, a result known as the "GZK cutoff" and expected due to interactions of high energy cosmic ray protons with the cosmic microwave background. The Auger Collaboration consists of over 200 scientists from more than 20 countries. The group participating from LSU is led by Prof. James Matthews and includes Prof. Roger McNeil, postdocs Alexei Dorofeev and Javier Gonzalez, graduate student Megan McEwen, and undergraduate students Rachel Mannino and Brittan Farmers. Prof. Matthews has been a part of the project since it was first conceived in 1992. More information about Auger can be found by visiting Nature.com, Science Magazine, or the Auger Observatory website. Read the entire article in our Fall 2007 departmental newsletter. Also, the LSU News press release on this exciting research can be found here. Links to additional news articles about the Auger discovery can be found at Google News (search for "Auger cosmic rays").

• "The Relativistic Turducken Approach to Stuffing a Black Hole" - Erik Schnetter, Manuel Tiglio, and Peter Diener from LSU's Physics and Astronomy Department and the Center for Computation and Technology, working together with colleagues from the Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolas de Hidalgo in Mexico, North Carolina State University, the University of Southampton in Britain, and the Albert Einstein Institute in Germany, have shown how to stuff a black hole. The result is that their "turducken" approach to stuffing a back hole may lead to useful methods of simulating the behavior of real black holes irrespective of many of the unobservable details f how the interior stuffing is arranged. A preprint of the paper can be found on the web. More information can be found the an article in our Fall 2007 departmental newsletter.

• "Medical Physics is a fundamental science concerned with improving people's lives," said Dr. Polad Shikhaliev, who joined the LSU faculty in January, 2007 as an Assistant Professor in its joint Medical Physics Program with Mary Bird Perkins Cancer Center. "Medical Physics has a direct impact on people's health, helping cure breast cancer. As a medical physicist, I conduct research with detector technology to find cancer earlier". Dr. Shikhaliev's current research is focused on developing a new breast CT system that will allow detecting breast cancer at its very early stages. Breast CT, as proposed by Dr. Shikhaliev, should be able to detect breast lesions as small as 2-3 mm, compared to 10mm, which is often the case in current mammography x-rays. He also expects his research to acquire the CT scan with less radiation dose to the breast than current low-risk mammography techniques and with no paid or discomfort. Read the entire article in our Fall 2007 departmental newsletter.

• Joel Tohline has been elected as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Each year the Council elects members whose "efforts on behalf of the advancement of science or its applications are scientifically or socially distinguished." Dr. Tohline is being honored for his " . . . contributions in the astrophysical application of numerical hydrodynamics, in particular to star formation, galactic dynamics, and compact objects, and for contributions to the development of computational astrophysics in Louisiana."
  - - posted October 24, 2007

• Ravi Rau has been elected Vice-Chair of the American Physical Society (APS) Topical Group on Few-Body Problems.
  - - posted October 16, 2007

• Joel Tohline has been invited to serve a 3-year term on the National Science Foundation's Directorate of Math & Physical Sciences Advisory Committee (MPSAC). The MPSAC is the only official advisory body to the Divisions within the Math and Physical Sciences Directorate, and the Directorate relies on the AC for both high level advice and connection to the community. More information on the MPSAC can be found here.
  - - posted October 9, 2007

• Luis Lehner has been appointed to the Selection Committee of the Nicholas Metropolis Prize of the American Physical Society. The prize is awarded every year for the best dissertation in computational physics. Lehner was the first recipient of the prize in 1999.

• Profs. Jerry Draayer and Jorge Pullin have been appointed to the editorial board of Research Letters in Physics, an open access journal.
  - - posted September 18, 2007

• The conference Profs. Rodolfo Gambini (University of the Republic, Uruguay) and Jorge Pullin are organizing in Uruguay in October has been decleared "of national interest" by the government in Uruguay. Signatures at the bottom of the document are those of the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Education, and the President of the Republic.
  - - posted September 11, 2007

• Luis Lehner will be one of the participants in the invitation-only workshop "Enabling Science Discoveries through Visual Exploration", organized by the National Science Foundation in Washington, D.C. on September 27-28, 2007.
  - - posted September 10, 2007

• Two papers by Physics and Astronomy Professors Manuel Tiglio and Peter Diener with Research Associate, Eric Schnetter, and by former LSU graduate student and PhD graduate Gioel Calabrese (currently in England) have been chosen among the highlights of 2006/2007 by the Editorial Board of the Journal "Classical and Quantum Gravity", published by the Institute of Physics of the UK -
  (http://www.iop.org/EJ/journal/-page=extra.high0607/0264-9381). Papers published by members of the LSU Relativity Group have made the highlights list for the last six years.

• The proceedings of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific conference series entitled "The Future of Photometric, Spectrophotometric and Polarimetric Standardization" that took place in Blankenberge, Belgium was dedicated to Arlo U. Landolt in recognition of his life work of setting standars in photometry.

• John DiTusa and a group of international colleagues have discovered an unusual magnetic material that has major implications Quantum Physics. Their findings were published online July 26, 2007 by Science in an article entitled "Mesoscopic Phase Coherence in a Quantum Spin Fluid."

• Jonathan Dowling was elected Fellow of the Optical Society of America.

• Jorge Pullin has been named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). In addition, he also has been elected corresponding member of the Mexican Academy of Sciences (Academia Mexicana de Ciencias), a non-profit organization comprising over 1,800 distinguished Mexican scientists.

• FACULTY AWARDS:
  Jerry Draayer - Distinguished Research Master by the LSU Council on Research
  Richard Kurtz - LSU Distinguished Faculty Award
  Michael Cherry - LSU Alumni Association Faculty Excellence Award
  Juhan Frank - Tiger Athletic Foundation President's Award

• Jonathan Dowling has been appointed to the Oak Ridge Associated Universities National Security Experts Team.
  - - posted August 28, 2007

• LSU Professor Works with International Researchers to Make Quantum Physics Discovery
  John F. DiTusa, working with international researchers, will publish the findings in Science on July 26.
  - - posted August 24, 2007

• LSU Professor Receives Award for Work with International Neutrino Experiment
  Thomas Kutter work on large-scale project in Japan in hopes of solving neutrino mysteries.
  - - posted August 22, 2007

• Dr. Polad Shikhaliev has just received a $389K NIH grant beginning June 1, 2007 entitled "In-vivo intravascular autoradiography with storage phosphor detector".
  - - posted August 7, 2007

• Prof. Bradley Schaefer has just won a share of the 2007 Gruber Cosmology Prize as a particiapant in the discovery that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating, not decelerating as expected. By measuring the brightnesses of a large number of very distant supernovae, two competing teams -- the Supernova Cosmology Project and the High-z Supernova Search team -- simultaneously determined that the expansion of our Universe is accelerating, a surprising result since confirmed by several independent methods. The conclusion is that approximately 70% of the mass/energy of our Universe is due to a previously unknown 'force' now called 'Dark Energy'. The $500,000 prize money will be shared amongst the co-authors of the original papers, with the award ceremony being held on 7 September 2007 at Trinity College in Cambridge. Past winners of the Gruber Cosmology Prize are John Mather and the COBE team, Martin Rees, Vera Rubin, and Allan Sandage. The Gruber Award is described in more detail here. The original papers can be found here and here
  - - posted August 7, 2007

• Profs. Jonathan Dowling (PI) and Hwang Lee (Co-PI), have just received $600K grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA) Strategic Technology Office (STO) Quantum Sensors Program (QSP).

  The objective of QSP is to develop pratical sensors operating outside of a controlled laboratory environment that exploit non-classical photon states to surpass classical sensor resolution. The Phase I grant has a duration of 18 months, and could lead to additional phase grants. Co-investigators include scientists from the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Raytheon Corporation, and MathSense Analytics, all well as collaborators from the University of Calgary and the University of Toronto.

• Former LSU Physics undergraduate, Barrett Deris has received an NSF Graduate Fellowship. Deris is currently a graduate student at Univ. of California-San Diego.

• LSU Physics & Astronomy graduate student, Enrique Pazos, won the prize for the best graduate student presentation at the 3rd Gulf Coast Gravity Conference held at University of Alabama-Huntsville.

• The SPIRES bibliographical service at Stanford University has compiled a list of the most cited articles of all time to appear in the GR-QC preprint repository. This repository contains almost all papers in gravitation starting in 1992. Our paper with Dr. Rodolfo Gambini, "Nonstandard Optics in Quantum Space-time", cited 240 times, is the 21st most cited paper ever in the repository.
  - - posted February 2, 2007

• LSU Professor Hosts "Ask the Astronomer" Event Observatory - Topic will be antimatter, but all space related questions welcomed.
  - - posted January 26, 2007

• Jorge Pullin has been elected corresponding member of the National Academy of Science of Argentina.
  - - posted January 24, 2007

• LSU Professor Named LIGO Head - Joseph A. Giaime, Associate Professor of Physics and Astronomy at LSU, was recently named head of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory, or LIGO, based in Livingston, LA.
  - - posted January 10, 2007

Past News items from 2006-2005

Fri, 09-Nov-2007 10:03 AM10:02 AM