Greetings

Broadcast messages from the Department Head.

Department Head greeting

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Dear Friends of UConn Physics,

While I started last year’s greeting on a somewhat apprehensive note, I remained hopeful because of the deep strengths of our department. As it turns out, I am pleased to say that this has been a positively exciting year! My one-word summary last year was turbulent. This year I chose Quantum. At the Federal, State, University, and Department level, Quantum science is a top priority, for its scientific interest, its ability to revolutionize computing, and its impact on the economy. All of this potential was summed up in a large grant proposal, called QuantumCT, to the National Science Foundation’s Regional Innovation Engines program. The proposal brought together UConn, Yale, SCSU, the State of Connecticut, and many industrial partners. On July 15, NSF announced that QuantumCT is being funded! This is a major milestone on many levels. Many faculty in the Physics Department contributed to the proposal and the award will affect much of the research in the department, from condensed matter physics, to atomic, molecular, and optical physics, to nuclear physics. It will also impact our education and outreach efforts.

Even before the QuantumCT award was announced, UConn committed to pursuing Quantum science research. As part of this effort, President Radenka Maric challenged the Physics Department to find an extraordinary world-class researcher to anchor and coordinate the quantum efforts at UConn. I am pleased to say that we found and successfully recruited such a researcher: Dr. Dmitri (Dima) Kharzeev, who will be joining us in the Fall from Stony Brook. Dima has a long and distinguished career as a well-known nuclear theorist but has made significant contributions in condensed matter physics and AMO physics, as well. He has also started several Quantum initiatives. We are very excited to welcome Dima to UConn Physics!

An important aspect of QuantumCT is workforce development and UConn Physics is contributing to this, as well. Recently, through the efforts of Profs. Hancock, Valente, Volkov, McCarron, Dunne, and Colombo, we introduced an online Quantum Certificate program targeted at engineers in industry wanting to come up to speed on the latest quantum technologies. Prof. McCarron recently created a course on quantum computing, and we will be introducing quantum mechanics throughout our curriculum. Prof. Joo is developing a course on creating Artificial Intelligence on a quantum computer – combining two of the hottest fields in science, right now. Prof. Joo and our former colleague Prof. Cote organized a second DOE-workshop on the application of Quantum Information Science to Nuclear Physics at UMass Boston. In addition, Prof. Joo received not one but two major grants (>$1 M) from the DOE: “Medium Energy Nuclear Physics Experiments,” and “Quantum Monte Carlo Simulations for Studies of the 3D Nucleon Structure.”

With all the excitement about AI and Quantum, the only other field that I can think of that generates such attention is Astrophysics, and, here too, UConn Physics stands out. Prof. Battersby and her team were highlighted in a press release, shared around the world, for their large observing program, ACES. The main release was from the European Southern Observatory with a local UConn press release. Prof. Battersby was also interviewed by Sky & Telescope, and the news was covered by more than 20 outlets, including Scientific American, the Guardian, ABC Australia, Le Monde, Washington Post.

On the local level, we are very grateful to have received generous donations to our Observatory and Planetarium, which Prof. Guthrie has been using to upgrade the Observatory and make it more freely available to the public. Both facilities continue to attract much attention from the community.

Our faculty continue to be recognized with major awards. Profs. Berrah and Santos were both inducted into the Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering. Prof. Tandoğan received the 2026 Petit Family Foundation Women in Science Leadership Award of the Connecticut Science Center. Prof. Gai received a (second) Fulbright Award as a “Fulbright Specialist” with Tenure on the 2026-2029 Roster. Prof. Blum received a Humbolt Fellowship. Prof. Guthrie’s book: Demystifying Classical Particles, Fields, and Relativity Through the Lagrangian Formalism, has been published and available from World Scientific.

Our undergraduate students are doing very well with many accomplishments and awards. Alexander Yi has only been at UConn one year, coming straight from high school. Nevertheless, he is already a junior, on the Dean’s list, and in the Honor’s program. Moreover, he received our Mark Miller Award for best undergraduate research proposal and received an APS award to present his research at the APS-Division of Nuclear Physics (DNP) annual meeting. Owen Finch also received an award to participate in the same conference. Owen Finch and Sean Gasperini received Science Undergraduate Laboratory Internships at Brookhaven National Labs. Michael Frank and Owen Finch, performed summer research work at the Research Center for Nuclear Physics at Osaka University in Japan, organized by Prof. Joo. Finally, our Katzenstein Prize for best undergraduate research went to Jefferson Tang for “Dynamical signatures and control of time-reversal symmetry breaking in twisted nodal superconductors.”

Prof. Pablo Jarillo-Herrero, from MIT, presented our Katzenstein Distinguished Lecture titled “Magic Angle Graphene: The Twist and Shout of Quantum Materials.” Despite the non-standard timing of the lecture, it was exciting and well-attended.

Our Edward Pollack Distinguished Lecture was presented by Prof. Vladan Vuletić, Lester Wolfe Professor of Physics at MIT. The lecture was titled “The Quantum Age: from Atomic Clocks to Quantum Computers” and fit perfectly with our current excitement about all things Quantum!

Finally, I would like to cordially invite you to attend our 28th annual Katzenstein Distinguished Lecture on Friday, October 16, 2026, which will be held in our department. This year’s speaker is Prof. Federico Capasso, Robert L. Wallace Professor of Applied Physics and Vinton Hayes Senior Research Fellow in Electrical Engineering at Harvard University. Dr. Capasso is known for his pioneering work on quantum cascade lasers and has received numerous prizes and awards, including the Arthur L. Schawlow Prize in Laser Science. He is also a member of the

National Academy of Sciences. I hope you can all attend and catch up on everything that is going on in the department. I look forward to seeing you there!

Sincerely,

George Gibson
Department Head, Physics

Department Head greeting

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Dear Friends of UConn Physics,

While I look forward to sharing the news and accomplishments of the Physics Department over the past year, I can’t help but say that one word keeps coming to mind: turbulent. There is no getting around the fact that at the university, state, and federal levels, things have been changing on an almost daily basis. This uncertainty has presented the department with many challenges, but two things have helped me immensely. First, in my position as Department Head, I have always appreciated the abilities and dedication of the department staff. However, the past three months have stressed the department in ways I have not seen in all my time at UConn and I am so grateful for how the staff rallied in response and showed the incredible depth of their commitment to the department. Second, despite the difficulties, the faculty and students have carried on doing great work as though nothing unusual was going on and I am excited to share some highlights with you.

Our faculty have been very busy this past year. Prof. Pavel Volkov received the Nevill F. Mott Prize for his work on unconventional superconductors. Prof. Cara Battersby is a team leader on a NASA program, PRIMA, one of two proposals that are competing to become a $1B space probe. Prof. Daniel Angles-Alcazar managed, in one year, to get tenure and promotion to Associate Professor and receive a Sloan Fellowship and an NSF Early Career Award. Prof. Andrew Puckett got promoted to Full Professor and Prof. Niraj Ghimire and Prof. Erin Scanlon were promoted to Associate Professor in Residence. CLAS Awards went to Prof. Matt Guthrie for Broader Impacts, Service, and Visibility and Prof. Sarah Trallero for Teaching, Learning, and Student Success. We had two books published: Mode-Locked Lasers: Introduction to Ultrafast Semiconductor and Fiber Lasers, by Prof. Niloy Dutta, and The Music of Physics: An Introduction to the Harmonies of Nature, by Prof. George Gibson.

Our alumni have also been active. Prof. Manasse Mbonye (Ph.D. 1995) gave a commencement address and received an honorary degree from UConn for his profound contributions to rebuilding the university system of Rwanda. We are lucky to have Manasse come for an extended visit this fall, hosted by Prof. Gerald Dunne. Prof. Ron Mallett was featured in yet another article on time travel, this time in earth.com. Prof. Kyungseon Joo co-organized a workshop on Quantum Information Science with our former Prof. Robin Cote and a second workshop is being planned.

As usual, we gave out two honors to our undergraduate students. Our Katzenstein Prize for the best undergraduate research thesis went to Thomas Tarutin, supervised by Prof. Asli Tandoğan. Our Mark Miller Award for best research proposal went to Ayssar Farah, supervised by Prof. Gerald Dunne. The undergrads also had a busy travel schedule with Grace Gardella spending the summer at Brookhaven National Lab and Michael Frank and Owen Finch went to the Research Center for Nuclear Physics in Japan.

Our graduate students also did well: Provakar Datta won this year’s JSA/Jefferson Lab Thesis Prize, supervised by Prof. Andrew Puckett. Gursimran Kainth spent the summer at CERN, and Alessio Illari went to Los Alamos National Lab. Our students (undergrad and grad) showed up in various press releases representing the excellent research done in the department, including Noah Frese, Cameron Brady, Clark Bray, Bochao Xu, Brenna Petrelli, Danya Alboslani, and Logan Fries.

This past January, we hosted the Conference for Undergraduate Women and Gender Minorities in Physics, sponsored by the American Physical Society and organized by Prof. Nora Berrah. Over 100 students were in attendance, making the conference a big success. Renovations of the UConn Planetarium were completed under the supervision of Prof. Matt Guthrie and we are now hosting regular shows at the planetarium and night viewing sessions at the recently renovated observatory. Responding to the budget situation at UConn, we expanded our summer online offering with a new course created by Prof. Diego Valente and Prof. Belter Ordaz. The course filled up the first day of registration and a second session was added, which also filled up.

Due to the fiscal uncertainties at the university, our special lectures are being postponed until the spring semester. Please look forward to future announcements.

Sincerely,

George Gibson
Department Head, Physics

Department Head greeting

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Dear Friends of UConn Physics,

Last year, I wrote to you as a new Interim Head of Physics and only barely a month into my appointment. During the past year, we conducted a search for a permanent head and I was selected. For this, I am very grateful for the trust and support I received from the department. The past year has been a bit of a rollercoaster: on the one hand, the complex budget situation has preoccupied the department heads and upper administration and student protests sparked discussions about free speech and activism on campus. On the other hand, the Physics Department had another excellent year in terms of research, teaching, and outreach and I had the pleasure of meeting several of our generous donors.

The most notable achievements of the past year were the election of Prof. Nora Berrah to the National Academy of Sciences, one of the highest honors in science, and her appointment as a UConn Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor, the highest honor at UConn. These will be celebrated at a special Edward Pollack Distinguished Lecture, on October 14, 2024, given by a longtime friend and colleague of Nora’s, Prof. Philip Bucksbaum, himself a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the Marguerite Blake Wilbur Professor in Natural Science at Stanford University.

A number of other faculty received notable awards this year. Prof. Moshe Gai will travel to Romania on a U.S. Fulbright Scholarship. Two faculty received awards from the College of Liberal Arts and Science (CLAS): Prof. Peter Schweitzer for Faculty Mentoring of Faculty and Prof. Erin Scanlon for promoting Climate, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. CLAS also funded a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Initiative: “UConn STARs (Science, Technology, and Astronomy Recruits),” Prof. Cara Battersby, PI.

We gave out our two undergraduate awards: the Katzenstein prize for the best undergraduate research paper went to Danya Alboslani and our Mark Miller award to fund a summer research project went to Leilani Ainsworth, working with Prof. Simone Colombo

We are fortunate to welcome two new faculty this year:

  • Assistant Professor Aleksandra Kuznetsova is currently a fellow at the Flatiron Institute and works on star and planet formation. She will join us this August.
  • Assistant Professor Shohini Bhattacharya currently holds an Oppenheimer Fellowship at Los Alamos National Laboratory in theoretical nuclear physics and will join us in January 2025.

This was also a great year for outreach. We welcomed over 100 enthusiastic second graders for a variety of hands-on activities, organized by Prof. Jason Hancock and Sarah Trallero. We held a viewing party for the opening of our newly renovated observatory, spearheaded by Prof. Matt Guthrie and we got permission to officially name it in honor of the late Prof. Cynthia Peterson, who funded and built the observatory in 1980. And, we had another exciting eclipse viewing party organized by Prof. Jonathan Trump – the second in seven years! We are looking forward to hosting CU*IP: Conference for Undergraduate Women and Under-represented Minorities in Physics, sponsored by the American Physical Society. It will take place in January2025 and is being organized by Prof. Nora Berrah, along with a large local organizing committee. Finally, I would like to cordially invite you to attend our 26th annual Katzenstein Distinguished Lecture on Friday, November 15, 2024, which will be held in our department. This year’s speaker is Professor Adam Riess from Johns Hopkins University where he is the Bloomberg Distinguished Professor. He was a joint winner, with Drs. Saul Perlmutter and Brian P. Schmidt, of the 2011 Nobel Prize for Physics, awarded “for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the Universe.” I hope you can all attend and catch up on everything that is going on in the department and the Universe! I look forward to seeing you there.

Sincerely,

George Gibson
Department Head, Physics

Department Head Greetings

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Dear Friends of UConn Physics,

Before highlighting some of the major events in the Physics Department during the past year, I need to sincerely thank Prof. Barry Wells for his leadership as Department Head for the past five years. Dr. Wells guided the department through the turbulent times of the COVID pandemic and resulting shutdown of virtually all in-person interactions at UConn and has left the department great shape. Fortunately, Dr. Wells will continue to support the Physics Department in his new role as Associate Dean for Life and Physical Sciences in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. Thus, I am writing to you as the Interim Department Head while a search is conducted during the Fall Semester for a permanent head.

An indication of the health of the department is the success in our newest faculty obtaining external funding. In particular, Profs. Christopher Faesi, Lea Santos, Anh-Thu Le, and Erin Scanlon have all received major grants. While our more senior faculty have also been very successful, this has been a particularly good year for our Nuclear Physics program, with Prof. Kyungseon Joo having been named the Chair of the CLAS Collaboration, one of the largest programs at Jefferson Lab, as well as receiving the single largest grant in the DOE-Nuclear Physics program. In addition, Prof. Andrew Puckett just received one of the largest grants in the same program, and they are joined by their colleagues Profs. Richard Jones, Peter Schweitzer, Alan Wuosmaa, and Moshe Gai to round out an exception program at UConn.

In addition to research, the department hosted a series of five colloquium and seminar speakers from groups underrepresented in physics. Spearheaded by Profs. Menka Jain and Belter Ordaz, and with strong student involvement, including Debadarshini Mishra, Lauren Gorman, and Bjorn Larsen, the highlight of the series was a visit by Prof. Sylvester James Gates Jr. of the University of Maryland. In a separate focus on inclusion, Prof. Erin Scanlon (Avery Point) organized a Faculty Online Learning Community (FOLC) to explore issues of accessibility for students with various ability constraints.

Many of our undergraduate and graduate students have also had noteworthy successes. However, one in particular stands out: undergraduate Abigail Moran has recently been selected as a finalist for the Apker Award from the American Physical Society for her work on measuring galactic acceleration with pulsar timing. As this is a national award for the top outstanding performance and original scientific contribution from a graduating senior, being a finalist is already quite an honor.

In the meantime, we continue to grow our department with two new hires:

  • Assistant Professor Simone Colombo – an experimentalist working on pushing quantum measurements to their absolute limit.
  • Assistant Professor in Residence Matt Guthrie who has taken a special interest in modernizing our planetarium and observatory.

We also welcome Assistant Professor Pavel Volkov – a condensed matter theorist working on strongly correlated quantum materials, who spent last year on research leave at Harvard and is starting at Storrs this Fall.

Finally, I would like to cordially invite you to attend our 25th annual Katzenstein Distinguished Lecture on Friday, October 20, 2023 which will be held in our department. This year’s speaker is Professor Gérard Mourou is Professor Haut-Collège at the École polytechnique. He was joint winner, with his student Donna Strickland (UConn Katzenstein Lecturer in 2022), of the 2018 Nobel Prize for Physics, awarded for the development of Chirped Pulse Amplification of lasers. Professor Mourou has made numerous contributions to the field of ultrafast lasers, high-speed electronics, and medicine and this promises to be a fascinating lecture. I hope you can all attend and catch up on all that is going on in the department. I look forward to seeing you there.

Sincerely,

George Gibson
Interim Department Head, Physics

Department head greeting

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Dear Friends of UConn Physics,

Probably the biggest event in the physics world this past year was the successful launch and early data taken by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). It’s not just pretty pictures – the far infrared capabilities allow for the measurement of the most redshifted, thus most distant and earliest, galaxies in the universe and the infrared spectroscopy capabilities allow for the detection of specific gasses, like water, about distant exoplanets. Our astronomy group at UConn is fully involved with four professors (Profs. Trump, Battersby, Angles-Alcazar, and Faesi) participating in 15 separate first-year observation programs. Jonathan Trump has already written his first JWST paper on the chemical enrichment of the earliest universe. Jon has found that the production of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium proceeded more quickly than had been thought. For Jon’s paper, see https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.12388. A list of UConn-JWST-related links is available in a separate article in this newsletter.

Several of our faculty earned accolades. Tom Blum received the UConn Alumni Faculty Excellence Award in Research and Creativity. This is a career award, with a major element Tom’s contribution of new techniques for calculating the magnetic moment of the muon – the well-known g-2 result where the combination of experiment and calculation has now, for the first time, shown the inadequacy of the standard model. Cara Battersby received the CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation. This is one of the most important awards available to new-career scientists. Cara won for her proposal to study turbulence in the center of our galaxy coupled with a project to create astronomy-related lesson plans for use in under-resourced high schools. Both of these awards, along with several other impressive accomplishments, are described in the articles in this newsletter.

Another major theme of the year is turnover and renewal. This year saw the retirement of Professor Lanny Brooks from the Hartford campus, Professor Juha Javaneinen, and Professor Philip Mannheim. We hosted colloquia on the career accomplishments of Philip, Juha, and 2020 retiree Phil Gould. From Philip’s colloquium, beyond the notable highlights of his own career, we learned of the ultimately unsuccessful attempts to develop a mathematical career for his Liverpool high school classmate – one Paul McCartney. Also leaving us this year were Financial Assistant Anna Huang and Lab Technician Zac Transport. While we miss all of them, we have had tremendous renewal as well. We have nine new staff/faculty hires in the department. These are:

  • Professor Lea Ferreira dos Santos – a theorist specializing in quantum chaos and many body systems.
  • Assistant Professor Pavel Volkov – a theorist specializing in engineerable quantum materials.
  • Assistant Professor in Residence Sylvanie Wallington has joined our Stamford campus.
  • Assistant Professor in Residence Asli Tandogan Kunkel has joined our Hartford campus.
  • Aislinn Daniels has joined as a Laboratory Technician.
  • Kaitlin Gorman has joined the main office as a Financial Assistant.
  • Robert Shamirian has also joined the main office as a Financial Assistant.
  • In addition, anyone calling into the department office may speak with Victoria Rosado has been working in our main office since May to cover for Carrie Cichocki while out on maternity leave.

Finally, I would like to remind everyone that we are having our first in-person public event since the pandemic hit. On September 23rd we will host Professor Donna Strickland, Nobel Laureate 2018, for the Katzenstein Distinguished Lecture. Prof. Strickland was scheduled to give this talk in March 2020 but was the first event that we canceled due to the pandemic. It seems fitting that this long-delayed lecture will now serve as a reopening. I urge you all to come to Storrs for the event, hear a fascinating talk, reconnect with your old professors, and let us know what you are up to now.

Best wishes to all,

Barry Wells
Physics Department Head

Greetings from the Department Head

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New building, new teaching approach, new people – there is a lot of change and excitement in the air for the Physics Department in 2019. The most obvious change is that physics has moved into a newly renovated building. What most alumni will remember as the Math Building has been taken down to its frame and rebuilt as the new physics building, formally Gant South. The new building features large windows with lots of light, revamped teaching labs, and a theory suite at the east end of each hallway. There are also plenty of meeting rooms and nooks, complete with writing spaces, to foster spontaneous discussions. We moved into the offices and teaching spaces at the start of fall semester, whereas the research lab relocations are ongoing as I write.

Along with the new building comes new teaching laboratories. The most striking of these are our studio-labs, located in the Gant Plaza building in the center of the Gant Complex. These studio labs have allowed us to redesign how we teach our introductory physics with calculus courses. Instead of three one-hour lectures per week and a three hour lab, there are now three two-hour meetings per week with mixed activities. The rooms are arranged with groups sitting around tables, and class time is spent on group efforts to explore concepts, solve problems, and conduct laboratory measurements. We have been developing this program using the Phys 1601 and 1602 courses for physics majors. This fall we rolled out the first of four other courses to be taught in this method with Phys 1501, to be followed in successive semesters by Phys 1502, Phys 1401, and Phys 1402.

If your travels bring you to the Storrs area, please stop by our new building. I will give anyone interested a tour myself if my schedule allows.

We also have several new faces around the department this fall. We have hired two new assistant professors in astrophysics, Chiara Mingarelli and Daniel Angles-Alcazar. Both have been hired in a bridge program with the Flatiron Institute of the Simons Foundation. Simons is the leading philanthropic foundation focused on science, and the four centers hosted at the Flatiron are world leaders in computational methods. We also have two new full-time teaching faculty, Niraj Ghimire and Sarah Trallero. Niraj was our own Ph.D. student who had previously worked on our Studio Physics development team. Sarah has been working with our teaching lab support team, with previous experience at Kansas State teaching studio-style physics courses. We have several new members of our teaching lab support team, with three new technicians. Zach Transport and James Jaconetta began working with us last January, and Hannah Morrill joined us over the summer. And finally, while I am not a new face, I took over as department head about a year ago and this is my first go-round writing a welcome to our newsletter. I would like to personally thank Professor Nora Berrah, our past department head, for putting our department on a firm footing that has made my job much easier.

Barry Wells