Two UConn Physics graduate students were recently awarded the Directed Energy Professional Society (DEPS) scholarship to support their work in the field of directed energy. Brandin Davis and Zhanna Rodnova received awards for their research on developing long-wavelength infra-red radiation sources. They were among 20 national winners. DEPS awards students scholarships of up to $10,000 to students carrying out promising research in directed energy technology, high-power laser development, high-power microwaves, and ultrashort pulse lasers. Brandin and Zhanna are both part of Prof. Carlos Trallero’s research group, which focuses on studies of light-matter interaction using high-power ultrashort pulse lasers.
Awards
Reports on awards, grants, and other forms of recognition received by members of the Physics Department.
Physics Prof. Tom Blum recognized for Research Excellence
Prof. Thomas Blum is one of two faculty to receive the Research Excellence award from the University of Connecticut in 2022. Tom came to UConn in 2004 and is a professor and associate department head for undergraduate education in the Physics Department. As a theoretical physicist, Blum specializes in making difficult, detailed mathematical calculations concerning how basic theories of physics, such as quantum mechanics, play out in setting the properties and behavior of matter, in his case the tiniest particles known. Notably, Blum is able to figure out how to perform calculations that others have found not possible. He has held visiting professorships at KEK in Japan, CERN in Switzerland, and the Helmholtz Institute in Germany. He has also won research awards including an Outstanding Junior Investigator award from the US Department of Energy, the Ken Wilson Award (top award in his subfield), is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, and was named a Fermilab Distinguished Scholar. At the same time, he is also a dedicated mentor, who supports the development of junior colleagues, and undergraduate and graduate students.
Prof. Cara Battersby Awarded an NSF CAREER grant
Professor Cara Battersby has been awarded an NSF CAREER grant! “The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program is a Foundation-wide activity that offers the National Science Foundation’s most prestigious awards in support of early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization.”
Prof. Battersby’s CAREER Award is entitled “CAREER: Shining STARs Amidst the Turbulence” and is an ambitious project to complete the first-ever systematic study of turbulence in an extreme environment, the center of our galaxy. Turbulence is poorly understood yet plays a pivotal role in the setting the Initial Mass Function (IMF), which underpins all of modern astrophysics. The results from this research will be brought into under-resourced high school classrooms through lesson plans jointly developed by K-12 teachers and undergraduate students from traditionally under-represented groups. Battersby aims to recruit and retain students from under-represented groups in STEM through a new mentorship program UConn-STARs.
Prof. Chiara Mingarelli awarded NSF grant
Chiara Mingarelli, Assistant Professor of Physics at UConn, is the lead researcher on a $650,000 Collaborative Research Grant from the National Science Foundation, half of which is earmarked for UConn, to conduct an experiment to prove the existence of supermassive black hole binaries. This grant will combine, for the first time, traditional astronomy with gravitational wave astronomy.
“This project is really setting up a whole new way to think about low-frequency gravitational-wave and extragalactic astronomy,” Mingarelli says. “With our new method, not only can we make predictions about the amplitude of the gravitational wave background, but we can also make predictions of where the likeliest and closest supermassive black hole systems are.”
For more information about Prof. Mingarelli research, see the recent article in UConn Today.
Professor Nora Berrah Awarded a Blaise Pascal Chaire d’Excellence to Conduct Research in France
Professor of Physics Nora Berrah has been awarded the International Blaise Pascal Chaire d’Excellence, a prestigious honor whose previous winners include scientists and scholars from a wide range of disciplines, including multiple Nobel laureates. Her award was selected by a committee of scientists and voted on by the Permanent Commission Regional Council of the Région Île-de-France.
This award is bestowed to scientists of international reputation who are invited to conduct research in the Paris area. The goal is to establish international collaborations and exchange, as well as share science globally. In Berrah’s case, the collaboration is between UConn and the Commissariat à l’énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives de Saclay (CEA, Paris Saclay). The collaborative work is aimed to push the frontiers of science, as well as enrich and facilitate international research.
The Région Île-de-France selects every year four laureates of high international standing in their field of expertise. All research areas are included, such as the humanities, arts, and sciences, in the selection of the awardees. Six Nobel laureates have been selected for the award since 1996. Prof. Berrah was selected by the Blaise Pascal Chaire Committee for the field of Fundamental Physics.
For more information about Professor Berrah’ award, see the article in UConn Today
Jonathan Trump wins NSF Early Career Award
Jonathan Trump, Assistant Professor of Physics, will receive $738,090 over five years to compile a census of supermassive black holes in the universe. This will give insights into how supermassive black holes and galaxies evolve across cosmic time. Trump will also develop a bridge program for underrepresented undergraduate physics majors at UConn to increase their participation in STEM fields.The NSF Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program supports early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education, and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization. Activities pursued by early-career faculty build a firm foundation for a lifetime of leadership in integrating education and research.
Trump was one of 7 junior faculty at the University of Connecticut to receive the prestigious Early Career awards from NSF in 2020. For a description of all 7 awards, see this recent article published in UConn Today.
Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell – 2019 Katzenstein Lecturer
The UConn Physics Department is delighted to announce that our 2019 Distinguished Katzenstein Lecturer will be
Professor Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell
Friday, November 8th, 2019
04:00 PM – 05:00 PM
Storrs Campus, Student Union Theater
Professor Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell 
(pictured at left) is world-famous for her discovery of pulsars in 1967. Pulsars are a special type of neutron star, the rotating dense remnant of a massive star. Pulsars have highly magnetic surfaces and emit a beam of electromagnetic radiation along their poles. This beam of light moves into and out of our line-of-sight at quick, constant intervals, appearing as a regular “pulse” of light.
At the time of this discovery, Bell Burnell was a graduate student at the University of Cambridge and worked with her supervisor, Anthony Hewish, to construct the Interplanetary Scintillation Array to study another class of objects called quasars. In the course of her daily detailed analysis, she noticed a strange “pulsing” signal in her data. Jokingly dubbed “Little Green Man 1” (LGM-1), further data-taking and analysis revealed this signal to be rapidly spinning neutron star, eventually dubbed a “pulsar.”
Bell Burnell’s discovery is considered one of the most important achievements of the 20th century and was recognized by a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1974, awarded to her supervisor Anthony Hewish as well as to astronomer Martin Ryle. While many condemned the omission of Bell Burnell for the award, she rose above, graciously stating, “I believe it would demean Nobel Prizes if they were awarded to research students, except in very exceptional cases, and I do not believe this is one of them. Finally, I am not myself upset about it – after all, I am in good company, am I not!”
Professor Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell has a highly distinguished career. Some notable highlights include serving as head of the Royal Astronomical Society and as the first female president of both the Institute of Physics and The Royal Society of Edinburgh. She was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire for services to astronomy in 2007. Her story has been featured in a number of works, including the BBC Four’s Beautiful Minds and BBC Two’s Horizon. Bell Burnell is currently the chancellor of the University of Dundee in Scotland and a visiting professor of astrophysics at the University of Oxford.
In 2018 Bell Burnell was awarded a Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics. Only four such prizes have been awarded, one to Stephen Hawking, one to the CERN scientists who discovered the Higgs Boson, and one to the LIGO team for their detection of gravitational waves. This award recognizes her discovery of pulsars and “a lifetime of inspiring scientific leadership.” In addition to her research accolades, her teaching, leadership, and work to lift up women and minorities in science is without parallel.
2019 Pollack Lecture
On April 11th and 12 of 2019 Prof. Paul Corkum of the Joint Attosecond Laboratory (University of Ottawa and the National Research Council of Canada) visited the department. Prof. Corkum’s main area of research is on the interaction of ultrashort laser pulses with matter broadly defined. His most notable contribution is perhaps the discovery of the so-called three-step model, which has become the basis of the emerging field of attosecond science. Attoseconds, equal to 1 billionth of 1 billionth of a second (10-18 s) is the shortest time scale ever measured or controlled by humans and is at the forefront of modern optics.
Prof. Corkum is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Austrian Academy of Sciences, the Royal Canadian Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society of London. He has received many accolades throughout his career, including the Thomson Reuters Citation Laureate which is awarded to researchers who are “of Nobel class” and likely to earn the Nobel someday and the Order of Canada.
On April 12, Prof. Corkum presented the annual Edward Pollack Distinguished Lecture, entitled “Attosecond Pulses Generated in Gases and Solids”. This lecture is supported by an endowment established by the family of the late Professor Edward Pollack in 2005. Ed’s family, friends and colleagues made contributions in his memory. This special colloquium provides a presentation in Ed’s honor in the field of atomic, molecular and optical physics, his area of research expertise. This year Mrs. Rita Pollack and their three children: Cindy [U.S. Government civil servant], Lois [now a professor of applied physics at Cornell], and Howard [professor of modern languages (German) at dePauw University in Indiana] were all in attendance.
Below, dinner with the Pollack family members, UConn faculty, and guests.
UConn Physics Professor elected to AAAS
UConn physics professor Nora Berrah has been elected to the historic and prestigious American Academy of Arts and Sciences. This year, more than 200 individuals were elected to the academy with compelling achievements in academia, business, government, and public affairs. Berrah, who was head of the physics department from 2014 to 2018, has been recognized for her distinguished contributions to the field of molecular dynamics, particularly for pioneering non-linear science using X-ray lasers, and spectroscopy using synchrotron light sources.
Using big lasers – like the Linac Coherent Light Source at SLAC National Laboratory on the campus of Stanford University, the most powerful X-ray laser in the world – Berrah’s research explores transformational changes occurring inside molecules when exposed to ultra-intense beams of light. In particular, she investigates physical molecular processes that occur at the femtosecond time scale: one quadrillionth, or one millionth of one billionth, of a second.
“The American Academy for Arts and Science honors excellence and convenes leaders to examine new ideas, and that it is a high honor bestowed on me,” Berrah said.
The 2019 class includes poet and Andrew W. Mellon Foundation president Elizabeth Alexander; chemical and biological engineer Kristi S. Anseth; artist Mark Bradford; gender theorist Judith Butler; economist Xiaohong Chen; academic leader and former Governor Mitchell E. Daniels Jr.; neuro-oncologist Robert B. Darnell; The Atlantic journalist James M. Fallows; author Jonathan Franzen; cell biologist Jennifer Lippincott-Schwartz; data science and McKinsey & Company technology expert James Manyika; former First Lady Michelle Obama; Cisco Systems business leader Charles H. Robbins; mathematician Sylvia Serfaty; philosopher Tommie Shelby; actress and playwright Anna Deavere Smith; and paleoclimatologist Lonnie G. Thompson.
This post has been transcribed from the announcement on UConn Today.
Charles Reynolds Lecture 2018: Prof Andrew Millis
The 2018 Reynolds lecture speaker was Prof Andrew Millis, a Professor of Physics at Columbia University and a co-Director of Center for Computational Quantum Physics at the Flatiron Institute. Dr. Millis’s research focus is theoretical condensed matter physics. He is the leading authority in theory of correlated materials, application of new theoretical ideas to actual experiments on novel materials including high temperature superconductors. His theory of ‘colossal’ magnetoresistance seen in manganites has been the key theoretical advance that enabled a complete understanding of these materials. Andrew has also been working on quasi one-dimensional conductors and heavy fermion compounds. The lecture, entitled “Meeting Dirac’s challenge: from quantum entanglement to materials theory” presented a broad-stroke account of developments in humankind’s capability of explaining and predicting materials properties through advanced computational approaches.
Dirac wrote 90 years ago: “The underlying physical laws necessary for the mathematical theory of a large part of physics and the whole of chemistry are thus completely known, and the difficulty is only that the exact application of these laws leads to equations much too complicated to be soluble. It therefore becomes desirable that approximate practical methods of applying quantum mechanics should be developed, which can lead to an explanation of the main features of complex atomic systems without too much computation.’’ Professor Millis described the development of the new computational tools to meet the challenge laid out by Dirac in our quest for effective predictive tools for quantum materials. Center for Computational Quantum Physics, The Flatiron Institute is superbly positioned to address this challenge. The lecture was held on March 15 2019 and was well attended with a large number of undergraduate and graduate students present.
Contributed by Alexander Balatsky, edited by Jason Hancock