Events

Reports of events hosted by the physics department, such as colloquia, special seminars, and outreach programs offered to the public.

UConn Celebrates National Academies Members

Nora Berrah, Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Physics, speaking at the UConn National Academy of Sciences Celebration at UConn School of Law on Aug. 27, 2024. (Sean Flynn/UConn Photo)

On August 27, 2024, scholars, trustees, and friends of UConn gathered at the University of Connecticut School of Law to honor members of the university community elected to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Established by an Act of Congress in 1863, the National Academy of Sciences was followed by the National Academy of Engineering in 1964 and the National Academy of Medicine in 1970, all under the same congressional charter. Collectively, they are known as the National Academies.

“Few honors can compare with election to a National Academy. It is a recognition by peers and the Academy itself of outstanding achievements in research and scholarship,” President Radenka Maric said at the celebration. Six UConn faculty members are elected members of the National Academies, with the most recent being Professor of Physics Nora Berrah, whose election was announced in May 2024.

For more information about the event, see the UConn Today article.

UConn Physics Department Hosting January 2025 CU*iP.

Every year, the American Physical Society (APS) sponsors CU*IP – Conference for Undergraduate Women and Gender Minorities in Physics – at several locations around the country. This year, led by Prof. Nora Berrah, UConn Physics applied to host this national conference in Storrs and our proposal was accepted for January 24-26, 2025! The purpose of the conference is to bring together over 120 undergraduates from around the country to learn about many research areas in physics and also to lean many skills for pursuing a career in Physics or Science, such as networking, applying to graduate school, finding role models in academia or industry, learning how to succeed as an underrepresented minority, etc.

While the conference is partially funded by the APS, the host institution needs to raise a substantial amount of funds. So far, we have commitments from UConn, some generous donors, such as the Ed Eyler and Karen Greer foundation, alumnus Mark Miller, and the Del Boca family, as well as the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and Mirion Technologies.

The current members of the local organizing committee, composed of faculty, staff and students, are Cara Battersby, Tom Blum, Cameron Brady, Carrie Cichocki, Simone Colombo, Meg Davis, Elena Dormidontova, George Gibson, Matt Guthrie, Adam Kolano, Luchang Jin, Dani Lipman, Jessica Mitlehne, Michael Rozman, Dave Perry, Erin Scanlon, Peter Schweitzer, Juliette Stecenko, Sarah Trallero, Kaley Wilcox, Alan Wuosmaa and Nora Berrah.

The planned events demonstrate the Physics Department’s and UConn’s commitment to helping undergraduate women and gender minorities pursue physics following their undergraduate degree by providing them the opportunity to learn about different career tracks in STEM fields, graduate studies, and various professions in physics.

We will be very grateful to receive any donations to assist the Department in hosting the conference, which will be used to cover students’ meals, accommodation and travel, as well as the invited speakers’ and panelists’ travel and accommodation. Please visit our website at: https://physics.uconn.edu/cuwip/

Nobel Prize Winner, Professor Adam Riess, Katzenstein Distinguished Lecturer

The University of Connecticut, Department of Physics is proud to announce the 26th Annual Katzenstein Distinguished Lecturer that will be on Friday, November 15th. For the details of the lecture see the Web Calendar post.

Adam Riess is a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor, the Thomas J. Barber Professor in Space Studies at the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences at Johns Hopkins University, a distinguished astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He received his bachelor’s degree in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1992 and his PhD from Harvard University in 1996. His research involves measurements of the cosmological framework with supernovae (exploding stars) and Cepheids (pulsating stars). Currently, he leads the SHOES Team in efforts to improve the measurement of the Hubble Constant and the Higher-z Team to find and measure the most distant type Ia supernovae known to probe the origin of cosmic acceleration.

In 2011, he was named a co-winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics and was awarded the Albert Einstein Medal for his leadership in the High-z Supernova Search Team’s discovery that the expansion rate of the universe is accelerating, a phenomenon widely attributed to a mysterious, unexplained “dark energy” filling the universe. The discovery was named by Science magazine in 1998 as “the Breakthrough Discovery of the Year.” His accomplishments have been recognized with a number of other awards, including a MacArthur Fellowship in 2008, the Gruber Foundation Cosmology Prize in 2007 (shared), and the Shaw Prize in Astronomy in 2006.

2024 Sigma Pi Sigma Honors Society Celebration!

Sigma Pi Sigma induction ceremony 2024

2024 Sigma Pi Sigma Honors Society Inductees:

  • Daniel Baker
  • Rachel Cleveland
  • Jack Conley
  • Grace Farrell
  • William Livesayand
  • Patrick McGovern
  • Kabir Sewrathan
  • Teddy Smith
  • Jefferson Tang
  • Thomas Tarutin
  • Nicholas Thiel-Hudson
  • Joseph Van Vlack
  • Elic Wu

The initiation ceremony was held on Friday, April 26th. The event began at 3:00 with a pre-colloquium reception, followed by the colloquium at 4:00 in GW-002 and by the banquet and initiation ceremony at 6:00.

Solar Eclipse Viewing Event: 2-4:30pm Mon Apr 8 on Horsebarn Hill

UConn faculty and students will host a community event to view the solar eclipse at 2:00-4:30pm this Monday, April 8, on Horsebarn Hill (behind the Dairy Bar). Here in Storrs we’ll observe a maximum occultation of 92% at 3:28pm. This is a very exciting and special opportunity, since the next time that our location will experience such an eclipse is not until 2079(!).

Details about the event are in the flyer embedded below, and also on the UConn Events Calendar. You can also listen to Prof. Jonathan Trump talk more about the solar eclipse on WILI-AM and on NBC CT.

Physics Celebrates 51’st Annual Ascent of Mount Monadnock

On October 14, 2023 40-50 members and friends of the UConn Physics department took part in the 51’st annual ascent up Mount Monadnock, near Jaffrey, New Hampshire. After the hike, the then-hungry hikers descended to the campground near Gilson Pond and enjoyed some well-earned refreshments, including burgers, hot dogs, and more sausages than anyone could eat. News of the group’s cheer “Let’s Go, Physics” from the summit is expected soon to be trending on youtube. Rumors are circulating that it may have been heard as far as Boston and Storrs.

UConn Physics annual climb of Mount Monadnock, taken October 14, 2023
UConn Physics Department members rest after ascent of Mount Monadnock near Jaffrey, NH 14-Oct-2023

Nobel Prize Winner, Professor Gérard Mourou, Katzenstein Distinguished Lecturer

The University of Connecticut, Department of Physics, is proud to announce that on October 20, 2023, Gérard Mourou, professor and member of Haut Collège at the École Polytechnique and A. D. Moore Distinguished University Professor Emeritus at the University of Michigan and 2018 Nobel Prize winner, will be presenting the 25th Distinguished Katzenstein Lecture.

For the details of the lecture, see Physics Events Calendar

Gérard Mourou received his undergraduate education at the University of Grenoble (1967) and his Ph.D. from University Paris VI in 1973. He has made numerous contributions to the field of ultrafast lasers, high-speed electronics, and medicine. But, his most important invention, demonstrated with his student Donna Strickland while at the University of Rochester (N.Y.), is the laser amplification technique known as Chirped Pulse Amplification (CPA), universally used today. CPA revolutionized the field of optics, opening new branches like attosecond pulse generation, Nonlinear QED, and compact particle accelerators. It extended the field of optics to nuclear and particle physics. In 2005, Prof. Mourou proposed a new infrastructure, the Extreme Light Infrastructure (ELI), which is distributed over three pillars located in the Czech Republic, Romania, and Hungary. Prof. Mourou also pioneered the field of femtosecond ophthalmology that relies on a CPA femtosecond laser for precise myopia corrections and corneal transplants. Over a million such procedures are now performed annually. Prof. Mourou is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, and a foreign member of the Russian Science Academy, the Austrian Sciences Academy, and the Lombardy Academy for Sciences and Letters. He is Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur.

Department of Physics is hosting Summer School on Electron-Ion Collider

The Department of Physics is hosting UConn-NSF summer school on Parton Saturation and Electron Ion Collider (EIC). The School will take place in Storrs, from August 1 to August 10, 2023. The school chair is Professor Alex Kovner. The school website can be found at https://www.phys.uconn.edu/Conferences/saturation-eic/.

The Electron-Ion Collider is the next big experiment in high-energy nuclear physics. It is going to address a plethora of questions about the structure of protons and nuclei. One of the main exciting phenomena that it is intended to clarify is the manifestations of parton saturation. This has been predicted to occur in hadrons at high energy as well as in nuclei at lower energies. Although tantalizing hints of saturating behavior have been observed at Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) in Brookhaven National Lab and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, no cut-and-dry experimental case has been made for it yet. We hope that the experiments on nuclei at EIC will provide a convincing case for saturation. Another important aspect of EIC physics is scattering on polarized proton beams, which should improve our understanding of the so-called “proton spin crisis”.

The school is intended to graduate students and postdocs who want to extend their physics horizons or plan to pursue research in this or related areas. A preliminary list of lecturers at the school includes A. Mueller (Columbia), O.Hen (MIT), N. Armesto (Santiago de Campostela), A. Dumitru (CUNY, Baruch College), Yu. Kovchegov (Ohio State), L. Jin (UConn), V. Skokov (North Carolina State), B. Schenke (BNL). The schedule of lectures is available on the school website at https://www.phys.uconn.edu/Conferences/saturation-eic/

Physics Department runs Women in Science Outreach at the Connecticut Science Center

Promoting gender diversity and inclusion in the field of science, technology, engineering, and
mathematics (STEM), the Connecticut Science Center’s Women in Science Initiative hosted a captivating
outreach event led by UConn’s Sarah Trallero, Aslı Tandoğan, and Aislinn Daniels. This event took place
on April 15th, 2023 at the Connecticut Science Center.

In the outreach event, Sarah, Aslı, and Aislinn engaged children and adults alike to have “Fun with
Physics” and experience physics hands-on. Multiple interactive stations encouraged enthusiastic
participants to “feel” what principles affect rotation, to learn how lightning works by playing with Van de
Graaff generators, and to even build their own simple DC motor.

The Women in Science Initiative at the Connecticut Science Center encourages girls and young women to
pursue studies and career paths in STEM and celebrates the achievements of women in the sciences. By
breaking down gender barriers and inspiring curiosity, such initiatives play a vital role in shaping the
future of scientific discovery and innovation.

From right: Aslı Tandoğan, Sarah Trallero, Aislinn Daniels.