Dear Friends of UConn Physics
As we approach the beginning of the 2021-22 school year, UConn is set for having classes in person again, students on campus, and our first taste of somewhat normal university life in a year and a half. Students, faculty, and staff are all required to be vaccinated, masks are required indoors, classrooms will be fully […]
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Physics alumnus Prof. Douglas Goodman and Professor Emeritus Winthrop Smith Featured in Online Peer Review Journal
Prof. Emeritus Winthrop Smith and former student Prof. Douglas Goodman (Quinnipiac University) Edit Special Issue of Open Access Journal Atoms, on Low Energy Interactions between Ions and Ultracold Atoms The Special Issue of the online journal Atoms is a collection of current peer-reviewed articles by experts in the field of ultracold collisions and reactions involving […]
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New Faculty Hire-Dr. Anh-Thu Le
The Physics Department welcomes our newest faculty member, Dr. Anh-Thu Le, although he prefers to be called simply AT. AT worked for many years at the well-known James R. Macdonald Laboratory, rising to the rank of Research Professor. He worked alongside a world-known theorist, Dr. Chii-Dong Lin. Dr. Le went on to become an Assistant […]
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Undergraduate Researcher Nicole Khusid featured in UConn Today
Physics major Nicole Khusid, a rising senior at UConn, was featured in a UConn Today article about her research. Nicole has been working on gravitional lensing of distant sources of gravitational waves, seeking to understand their multimessenger signals and detectability by future astrophysics facilities. Nicole was awarded a SURF (Summer Undergraduate Research Fund) award to […]
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Standard model challenged by new measurement
It seems that the muon, a heavier partner of the electron, may be breaking what have been understood as the laws of physics. The findings announced on April 7th were met with excitement and speculation at what this might mean. UConn physics researchers Professor Thomas Blum and Assistant Professor Luchang Jin helped pioneer the theoretical physics behind the findings.
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Prof. Battersby’s research featured in UConn Today article
Professor Cara Bettersby’s research is featured in the article “The Study of Big Data: How CLAS Researchers Use Data Science” published by UConn Today. Prof. Battersby’s work focuses on describing and studying the center of the Milky Way galaxy, which she calls an “experimental playground” for the distant cosmos. Her work described the spectroscopy of […]
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Dr. Yasaman Homayouni featured in CLAS story on 2021 graduates
New Physics PhD graduate Yasaman Homayouni is featured in a story on the class of 2021 from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (CLAS). For the full story of what inspired Yasaman and other students during their time at UConn, see the article in UConn Today.
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An anomalous moment for the muon
Mark Rayner/CERN The Fermilab E989 experiment announced the first new result on the muon’s anomalous magnetic moment in almost 20 years. The new measurement, combined with Brookhaven’s E821, has increased the discrepancy with the Standard Model value to 4.2 standard deviations. UConn Professors Tom Blum and Luchang Jin explain the theory calculations in a feature […]
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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 […]
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Professor Munirul Islam: Celebrating His Life and His Legacy
Members and friends of the Physics Department gathered online Saturday morning, April 10, to share memories and thoughts of appreciation for Prof. Munir Islam who passed from this world on March 11, 2021. The meeting was led jointly by Profs. Win Smith and Mehdi Anwar, with expressions of appreciation and sympathy for the family by several members of the department past and present. Prof. Mannheim has offered this written tribute to our colleague and friend.
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The passing of Dr. David Katzenstein, a friend and benefactor of the UConn Department of Physics
Dr. David Katzenstein, a friend, and benefactor of the UConn Department of Physics, passed away on January 25, 2021 due to Covid-19. David was the son of Henry Katzenstein, the first Physics Ph.D. from UConn and a major benefactor of our Department. Currently, both the annual Katzenstein Distinguished Lecture and the Katzenstein Prize for a […]
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A Signal from Beyond
UConn astrophysicist Chiara Mingarelli is part of a team of researchers who recently published data on a hint of a signal that sent ripples of excitement through the physics community. These monumental findings are the culmination of twelve and a half years of data gathered from NANOGrav — a network of pulsars across the galaxy — all in the hopes of detecting gravitational waves.
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UConn Physics alumnus Dr. Michael Wininger
UConn Physics alumnus Dr. Michael Wininger (BS, 2003) was recently featured in the professional journal O&P Almanac (Orthotics and Prosthetics). The article describes how his eclectic background, beginning with degrees from UConn, has enabled him to lead innovations in several areas of health research. Mike is currently an Assistant Clinical Professor in the Biostatistics Department […]
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The passing of UConn Physics Professor Emeritus, Arnold Russek
Arnold Russek, a theoretical atomic physicist, born July 13, 1926, in New York, passed away on October 13th, 2020, in Colorado. As a young man of 18, he served honorably as a radio engineer in the Pacific during WWII. He earned his Ph.D. at the Courant Institute at New York University in 1953, and taught […]
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AAS Author Interview with Gloria Fonseca Alvarez
UConn graduate student Gloria Fonseca Alvarez was featured with a video in the Author Interview series produced by the American Astronomical Society (AAS). In this video, Gloria talks about her work to understand the inner environments of black holes. The paper highlighted in the video shows that the orbits of emission-line gas around supermassive black holes are often smaller than expected from previous observations.
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Stretching Makes Superconductor
Most superconductors only work when they’re super cold. Chemists and metallurgists have experimented with different combinations of elements for years, trying to get superconductors that work at temperatures close to room temperature. Sochnikov and his students are thinking about it differently. What if mechanical changes such as squeezing or stretching could make a material a superconductor?
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Longtime Science Pioneer Passes Away
Throughout her long life, Cynthia Peterson educated and enriched her family, her students, and her community through science, discovery, and a lifelong enthusiasm for teaching prospective scientists. Through community outreach and during her many years as a professor, Cynthia taught many that wonderment can be found simply by looking up at the night sky.
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My Long-time Friend and Colleague, Prof. Cynthia W. Peterson
When I arrived in Storrs from New York City in 1969 to teach physics at the University of Connecticut, one of the first colleagues I met was Dr. Cynthia Peterson. She had an infectious enthusiasm that appealed to me and my wife Anne. It turned out that Anne and Cynthia had both been students at […]
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New Physics Faculty: Erin Scanlon
Erin Scanlon joins our Department in fall 2020 as Assistant Professor in Residence at the Avery Point Campus. Erin comes to UConn with an impressive track record of university teaching experience and scholarship in physics education research (PER). After earning a master’s degree in physics from Georgia Institute of Technology, Erin joined the faculty at […]
[Read More]2020-Newsletter Department Head Greeting
It’s been crazy. That holds for everybody over these past six months; UConn and the Physics Department as well. Events unfurled rapidly last March. Within a week the March Meeting of the APS was cancelled, our department had to postpone the 2020 Katzenstein Lecture with Donna Strickland, and then the University announced that students would […]
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Graduate Student Erin Curry, Department of Physics, University of Connecticut, "Investigations of nonequilibrium processes in additively manufactured metallic alloys and negative thermal expansion materials", PhD Dissertation Defense2:30pm
5/13
Graduate Student Erin Curry, Department of Physics, University of Connecticut, "Investigations of nonequilibrium processes in additively manufactured metallic alloys and negative thermal expansion materials", PhD Dissertation Defense
Thursday, May 13th, 2021
02:30 PM - 04:30 PM
Storrs Campus Video meeting
Graduate Student Erin Curry, Department of Physics, University of Connecticut
Investigations of nonequilibrium processes in additively manufactured metallic alloys and negative thermal expansion materials
Additive manufacturing, also known as 3D printing, is an emergent manufacturing technique capable of realizing novel topologies more efficiently and with more design flexibility than traditional approaches. For laser-based powder bed fusion (LPBF), a high power laser incident on a bed of metallic powder sinters a part in a layer-by-layer construction. While laser-powder interactions are vital to successful build with known microstructure and residual stress states, little is known about the interaction point and the role the melt pool evolution has on the reliability of the final piece. In this talk, I will describe progress in the study of the optical properties of disordered nickel and titanium based additively manufactured alloys, and also present the development of novel sensor technology capable of reading time-dependent temperature profiles on the appropriate time scales. The results of this work provide in-situ monitoring options in LPBF processes, an important fundamental science step needed to bring AM technology into full scale production use.
I will also present my work on a second laser-based interaction nonequilibrium process, ultrafast laser pulse induced strain solitons. Previous experiments have shown that when laser pulses of sufficiently large fluence are incident an opaque transducer film on a substrate the evolution of the induced acoustic strain wave experiences a balance of dispersion and nonlinear elastic properties of the substrate. This balanced evolution yields the formation of solitary strain waves known as solitons, which can be numerically described by the nonlinear differential Korteweg-de Vries (KdV) equation. To my knowledge all such experiments have been performed on conventional positive thermal expansion material substrates. I will present numerical solutions to the KdV equation under the unusual case where the substrate experiences negative thermal expansion and show, using realistic linear and nonlinear parameters, that the emerging solitons are qualitatively different from those through PTE materials in several ways. -
Graduate Student Candost Akkaya, Department of Physics, University of Connecticut, "Entanglement Entropy in Gauge Theories", PhD Dissertation Defense1:30pm
4/20
Graduate Student Candost Akkaya, Department of Physics, University of Connecticut, "Entanglement Entropy in Gauge Theories", PhD Dissertation Defense
Tuesday, April 20th, 2021
01:30 PM - 03:30 PM
Storrs Campus Video meeting
Graduate Student Candost Akkaya, Department of Physics, University of Connecticut
Entanglement Entropy in Gauge Theories
Studying long range correlations in non-abelian gauge theories is important to understand the interaction between charged states in their non-perturbative regime. One can study the entanglement properties of these theories to probe their long range structure. However, calculating entanglement entropy is a complicated endeavor and even in free theories since the calculation raises various technical difficulties. We present a way to study the entanglement properties of field theories in their continuum limit by considering the theory of free photon in 3+1 dimensions with a bipartition of local degrees of freedom by a plane. We calculate the entanglement entropy by integrating over the degrees of freedom in one half space using an approximation that assumes slow variation of the magnetic fields in the longitudinal direction. We discuss the differences in the contribution of longitudinal and transverse modes and conclude that the long range entanglement arises due to the necessity to solve the no-monopole constraint condition for the magnetic field.
Meeting link: https://zoom.us/j/99867842922?pwd=Qlg1aDIzUTJ6bWpsRklTYUxpRWdHUT09 -
Graduate Student Nikko Cleri, Department of Physics, University of Connecticut, "Paschen-line Star Formation and Dust Attenuation with HST and JWST", MS Dissertation Defense1:00pm
3/18
Graduate Student Nikko Cleri, Department of Physics, University of Connecticut, "Paschen-line Star Formation and Dust Attenuation with HST and JWST", MS Dissertation Defense
Thursday, March 18th, 2021
01:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Storrs Campus Video meeting
Graduate Student Nikko Cleri, Department of Physics, University of Connecticut
Paschen-line Star Formation and Dust Attenuation with HST and JWST
Star formation rates (SFRs) are one of the most critical quantities in understanding galaxy evolution. There exist many different methods of measuring extragalactic SFRs, commonly using emission-line luminosities. Recombination lines of hydrogen are especially useful as SFR tracers due to their insensitivity to nuisance parameters like metallicity, density, and temperature in the interstellar medium. Paschen emission offers a 'gold standard' tracer of recent (< 10 Myr) star formation with its relative insensitivity to interstellar dust attenuation compared to more common Balmer and UV continuum SFRs, while maintaining the benefits of hydrogen recombination lines. We use Paschen (1282 nm) observations from the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) G141 grism to study star formation and dust attenuation properties of 32 low redshift (z < 0.3) galaxies in the CANDELS Lyman Emission at Reionization (CLEAR) survey. We find evidence suggesting that Pa is revealing star formation otherwise 'hidden' within gas optically thick to shorter wavelengths, and we use Pa/H. We also find evidence to support the claim that lower mass galaxies exhibit burstier star formation histories. We will also discuss future observations of Paschen-line star formation with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).
Webex link: https://uconn-cmr.webex.com/join/jot16106 -
Graduate Student Yasaman Homayouni, Department of Physics, University of Connecticut, PhD Dissertation Defense1:00pm
2/26
Graduate Student Yasaman Homayouni, Department of Physics, University of Connecticut, PhD Dissertation Defense
Friday, February 26th, 2021
01:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Storrs Campus Video meeting
Graduate Student Yasaman Homayouni, Department of Physics,
University of Connecticut
Supermassive black holes are among the most exciting and unusual objects in our Universe, as literal rips in space and time. Reliable measurements of mass, the structure, and geometry of infalling material to supermassive black holes are critical to understanding the growth history of black holes and galaxy formation and evolution over cosmic time. Beyond the local Universe, the gold standard for black hole mass and accretion-disk structure is reverberation mapping. I will present a new generation of industrial-scale study of the structure, and geometry of infalling material and black hole mass studies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Reverberation Mapping (SDSS-RM) project and Ultraviolet-monitoring using the Hubble Space Telescope. These new measurements have transformed our understanding of supermassive black holes by dramatically expanding the number of quasars with reliable mass and accretion structure in distant Universe. These measurements have also revealed a surprisingly large diversity in accretion structure and the broad-line region size of quasars at the peak of supermassive black hole assembly. My work lays the foundation by developing the framework to reliably measure mass and the structure of accretion using direct disk size measurements from future massive time-domain photometric monitoring studies from SDSS-V and Rubin/LSST.
Webex link: https://uconn-cmr.webex.com/join/jot16106 -
Graduate Student Phillip Price, Department of Physics, University of Connecticut, PhD Dissertation Defense1:00pm
12/9
Graduate Student Phillip Price, Department of Physics, University of Connecticut, PhD Dissertation Defense
Wednesday, December 9th, 2020
01:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Storrs Campus Video meeting
Graduate Student Phillip Price, Department of Physics,
University of Connecticut
We propose a model that combines magneto-association across a Feshbach resonance with STIRAP into a continuous and coherent process to form ultra- cold molecules. This can add to the toolbox of ultracold coherent chemistry and potentially enable the production of more ultracold molecules species. To that end, our proposed method should prove beneficial when the Feshbach molecule state has a very short lifetime, with the additional benefit of working within existing experimental setups. -
Graduate Student Kemal Tezgin, Department of Physics, University of Connecticut, "Theoretical and Phenomenological Studies of the Nucleon Structure in High Energy Reactions ", PhD Dissertation Defense1:00pm
11/18
Graduate Student Kemal Tezgin, Department of Physics, University of Connecticut, "Theoretical and Phenomenological Studies of the Nucleon Structure in High Energy Reactions ", PhD Dissertation Defense
Wednesday, November 18th, 2020
01:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Storrs Campus Video meeting
Graduate Student Kemal Tezgin, Department of Physics,
University of Connecticut
Theoretical and Phenomenological Studies of the Nucleon Structure in High Energy Reactions
The understanding of the internal structure of the proton and other strongly interacting particles is at the forefront of modern nuclear physics research. Generalized Parton Distribution Functions (GPDs) are a powerful tool to advance the understanding of the hadron structure. In addition to the information about the one- dimensional collinear momentum distributions of partons (quarks, anti-quarks, and gluons) known from studies of high energy deep-inelastic reactions, GPDs also carry information on the distribution of partons in the transverse plane, and allow us in this way to access the three-dimensional structure of the nucleon. GPDs can be studied in hard-exclusive reactions and contain also information on the energy-momentum tensor form factors which will allow us to gain insights on quantities like pressure or angular momentum distribution inside the nucleon. The goal of this thesis is to deepen our understanding of the three-dimensional structure of the nucleon. We investigate energy-momentum tensor form factors and densities, and all leading-twist GPDs in the bag model. This quark model provides a consistent theoretical framework to investigate many general concepts that have recently attracted interest, and allows one to study insightful limits like the large-Nc limit, heavy-quark limit, or the non-relativistic limit. Another important aspect of this thesis is the discussion of the monopole and quadrupole contributions to the angular momentum density. Finally, the description of pseudoscalar meson production in exclusive processes in terms of GPDs is discussed in the Goloskokov-Kroll model and implemented in the PARTONS framework, a software development project which will provide direct support for experiments at the Jefferson National Lab and the future Electron-Ion Collider. -
Theoretical and Phenomenological Studies of the Nucleon Structure in High Energy Reactions , Doctoral Dissertation Oral Defense Of Kemal Tezgin1:00pm
11/18
Theoretical and Phenomenological Studies of the Nucleon Structure in High Energy Reactions , Doctoral Dissertation Oral Defense Of Kemal Tezgin
Wednesday, November 18th, 2020
01:00 PM - 02:30 PM
Storrs Campus Zoom
Theoretical and Phenomenological Studies of the Nucleon Structure in High Energy Reactions
In high energy collisions, Parton Distribution Functions (PDFs) are fundamental objects to describe one-dimensional collinear momentum distributions of partons (quarks, anti-quarks, and gluons) inside the nucleon. In addition to PDFs, Generalized Parton Distribution Functions (GPDs) also carry information on the distribution of partons in the transverse plane to its motion and allow us to access the three-dimensional structure of the nucleon. On the other hand, energy-momentum tensor (EMT) densities allow us to access the pressure, shear forces, and angular momentum density inside the nucleon. The goal of this thesis is to deepen our understanding of the three-dimensional structure of the nucleon. We investigate energy-momentum tensor (EMT) form factors and densities, and all leading-twist GPDs in the bag model, formulated in the large-N_c limit. We also evaluate all leading-twist chiral-odd GPDs of the relativistic nucleon in the bag model. The consistency of this quark model allows us to investigate many general concepts that have recently attracted interest, including pressure, shear forces, and angular momentum density. Another important aspect of this thesis is to discuss that the monopole and quadrupole contributions to the angular momentum density can be generated from each other uniquely in a model-independent way. The last chapter is dedicated to the phenomenology of GPDs and the Goloskokov-Kroll model's implementation in the PARTONS framework for pseudoscalar meson production in exclusive processes.