Duke PHYSICS · Many students received fellowships and awards this year. Graduate student Kristine...

Duke PHYSICS

WHAT’S INSIDEDepartment Happenings ........ 1Graduate News ...................... 2Graduate Student Organization News ................. 5Undergraduate News ............. 6New Faculty Profile ................ 8Faculty Awards ...................... 9Outreach ............................. 10

Alumni Profiles:John Koskinen ..................... 11Nathan Kundtz ..................... 12 Chip Watson ........................ 13Erif Yff................................. 14

Faculty Research:Curtarolo’s Group Won MURI Competition ......... 15

Gao and Collaborators Received an NSF MRI Award ...15

Gauthier and Kim Won MURI Competition ......... 15

KamLAND-Zen Reports Neutrino Mass Limit ............. 15

Smith’s Research Highlighted in New York Times ............... 16

Visualizing Meteoric Impact .................. 16

Does a Dissipative Environment Always Destroy Quantum Tunneling? ........................... 16

Life and Death of Stars ........ 18

News .................................. 19

Editors: Haiyan Gao, Cristin Paul, Mary-Russell Roberson and Christopher Walter

http://www.phy.duke.edu Annual Newsletter 2013

– by Haiyan Gao

This has been another hectic, exciting and productive year.

There will be an important upcoming change in the departmental leadership. Prof. Henry Greenside will step down on January 1, 2014 as the Director for Undergraduate Studies (DUS) in Physics and Biophysics and Prof. Kate Scholberg will take over this important leadership role. Prof. Greenside has been working tirelessly as DUS and has been extremely effective in his interactions with majors and potential majors. I’d like to thank Prof. Greenside for his willingness to stay on as DUS in the fall 2013 semester in order to have a smooth transition. We thank Prof. Greenside for his service to the department and look forward to working with Prof. Scholberg in her new role. I am also happy to share the good news that Prof. John Mercer from Biology has agreed to be the inaugural Associate DUS in our department and he will work closely with Prof. Scholberg, particularly in the area of biophysics major.

The commencement weekend has always been the happiest time for the university. We graduated nineteen physics and biophysics majors, seven Ph.D. and two Master’s students this May, and we were thrilled. Everyone had a great time at the commencement and the graduation ceremony - Even the weather cooperated! You will read more in the section on undergraduate studies in this newsletter, contributed by Prof. Henry Greenside, and graduate studies by Prof. Shailesh Chandrasekharan, Director of Graduate Studies.

We had the first group of visiting students from Taishan College of Shandong University this past academic year and you can read about their experience also in this newsletter. With the support of Arts and Sciences and the university, our department signed another agreement on student exchange from Wuhan University. In the fall of 2013, we will have students from Shandong and Wuhan. We also signed an agreement with Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU) and a student from SJTU will join us this fall as a transfer student.

We are very happy that Dr. Phil Barbeau from Stanford University will join us this August as a tenure-track Assistant Professor in Experimental Nuclear Physics. You will meet and learn about Dr. Barbeau and his research in the new faculty profile section. Prof. Jianfeng Lu, an Assistant Professor in Mathematics will join us as a secondary faculty member in our department on July 1, 2013. Profs. Gleb Finkelstein and Ying Wu have been promoted to the rank of Full Professors, and Prof. Ayana Arce has been reappointed as a tenure-track Assistant Professor. Congratulations to them all for these important milestones. Prof. Berndt Muller became the Associate Lab Director for Nuclear and Particle Physics at the Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL). During the period of January 2013 to December 2015, Prof. Mueller holds a joint appointment between Duke and BNL. We were sorry to see Prof. Matt

Hastings’ departure from our department and we wish him all the best in his future endeavors. We were saddened by the passing of Edward Bilpuch, Henry Newson Professor Emeritus, on September 15, 2012. You can read the obituary in this newsletter. We were also very sad to lose one of our most distinguished and accomplished alumni, Robert C Richardson, a Nobel Laureate, who passed away on February 19, 2013. You can read the obituary written by Prof. Horst Meyer, Fritz London Professor Emeritus, who was Bob Richardson’s Ph.D. thesis advisor.

On the staff side, Donna Ruger, Staff Assistant to DGS retired at the end of May after more than twenty years’ service and dedication to the department and all the graduate students she helped throughout the years. We wish Donna a very happy retirement and we hope she will enjoy all the time she will be able to spend with all her wonderful grandchildren. After many years of great service in the machine shop, Bill Peterson left our department on April 19 to take a medical disability leave initially, which will transition into retirement. We wish Bill and his family all the best. We were very happy to welcome Dr. Yuriy Bomze on board as a Lab Administrator in the fall of 2012. We also welcome Nancy Morgans to join our staff as the new Assistant to DGS.

In the last year faculty and students have published many exciting research results and you can sample some of them in this newsletter. We are very proud that several of our students and faculty have received awards, which are also listed in this newsletter. Members in our department have also been very active in outreach activities, and you can read some of them in this newsletter. Thanks to the generosity of an anonymous donor, the London Postdoctoral Fellowship was created in 2012 to support an outstanding scientist in experimental condensed matter physics, broadly defined, and to honor the lifetime achievements of Professor Fritz London, who was active at Duke University between 1939 and 1954.

In closing, I would like to thank you for your support of our news program by contributing your stories and sharing with us the joy of your achievements. Our students are particularly interested in the stories of our alumni. Please continue to share and contribute to the departmental news program. In last year’s newsletter, I talked about the crucial need for a new Physics Building and the urgency and importance for raising funds. While many people have been working very hard on this in the last year, I regret to report no major breakthrough yet with the funding situation. If you have great ideas about how to make this happen, we will be extremely happy to hear from you. We look forward to the 2013-2014 academic year and hope it will bring new hope for a new physics building.

Department Happenings

2 S i g n u p f o r o u r e - n e w s l e t t e r a t h t t p : // n e w s . p h y . d u k e . e d u !

Graduate News

Graduate News- by Director of Graduate Studies, Shailesh Chandrasekharan

Last year was another exciting year for me as the Director of Graduate Studies (DGS) with many new graduate accomplishments to report. Here I will focus on the period from July 01, 2012 – May 31, 2013.

Degrees Awarded Nine students passed their PhD examinations. Seven of them received their degrees in May while two will receive degrees in September. Two students graduated with a terminal Masters degree. The table below lists the names of all degree recipients along with the names of their advisors. After their education at Duke, these students are taking up positions in academia or industry. I congratulate all of them on their accomplishments and wish them success in their future endeavors.

Graduation Photograph (left to right): Harold Baranger, Shailesh Chandrasekharan (DGS), John Thomas, Yingyi Zhang, Baolei Li, Jie Ren, Abhijit Mehta, Haiyan Gao (Chair).

Student Advisor Student Advisor

Seth Cohen* Prof. Gauthier Jie Ren Prof. Behringer

Somayeh Farhadi Prof. Behringer Junyao Tang Prof. Behringer

Xinwei Gong Prof. Socolar Yingyi Zhang Prof. Thomas

Kyle Kalutkiewicz (M.S.) Prof. Mehen Yujing Zhang (M.S.) Prof. Kruse

Baolei Li Prof. Warren Huaixiu Zheng* Prof. Baranger

Abhijit Mehta Prof. Baranger

* September Degrees

Photo by Robert Palmer

S i g n u p f o r o u r e - n e w s l e t t e r a t h t t p : // n e w s . p h y . d u k e . e d u ! 3

Duke PHYSICS

Preliminary ExamsThis year thirteen third year students took the preliminary exam and I am glad to report that all passed. Their names along with their advisors are listed in the table below. I extend my very best wishes to these students and look forward to an exciting PhD thesis from each of them in the next few years.

Fellowships, Awards and AccomplishmentsMany students received fellowships and awards this year. Graduate student Kristine Callan received the 2013 Dean’s Award for Excellence in

Teaching. Kristine completed her PhD this summer under the guidance of Prof. Dan Gauthier. Kristine has accepted a position as a Teaching Associate Professor of Physics at the Colorado School of Mines (CSM), which was recently selected as one of four 2013 recipients of the “Improving Undergraduate Physics Education Award.” Kristine is looking forward to starting her new position this August.

Taritree Wongjirad, a fifth year student working with Professor Kate Scholberg, won the Block Award as a promising young physicist, based on his poster contribution at the Aspen Winter Conference titled “New Directions in Neutrino Physics.” First year student, Anne Watson, received the GPNANO fellowship for Spring 2013. This fellowship is awarded to outstanding students associated with the Nano-Science initiative at Duke. Anne is working on a research project with Professor Finkelstein in the summer of 2013.

Every year Duke University gives fellowships to outstanding continuing students who are nominated by the department. This year Shanshan Cao, a fourth year student working with Professor Ste�en Bass on the physics of

heavy ion collisions, received the Katherine Goodman Stern fellowship to complete his PhD thesis during the 2013-14 academic year. This fellowship pays for tuition and fees along with a stipend for the entire year. Miaoyuan Liu, another fourth year student and a member of the ATLAS collaboration and working under the guidance of Professor Alfred Goshaw toward uncovering the physics beyond the Standard Model, won the International Research Travel Fellowship and the Pre-Dissertation and Dissertation Research Travel Fellowship. These fellowships will allow Mia to travel to CERN to complete her research work. Two students, Yang Yang a sixth year student and Hao Zhang a third year student, received summer research fellowships. These fellowships pay tuition and fees along with a stipend for the summer. Yang is a joint student of Professors Henry Everitt and April Brown. He is expected to complete his PhD during the summer of 2013. On the other hand Hao, who is Professor Albert Chang’s student, will use the fellowship to complete an important experiment in Professor Chang’s lab. Graduate students also play an important role in the teaching mission of the department. This year, second year student Catherine Marcoux and third year student Hao Zhang were nominated as Outstanding Teaching Assistants for 2013 of the American Associate of Physics Teachers, while first year students Reggie Bain and Anne Watson received the Mary Creason Memorial Award for Undergraduate Teaching in Duke Physics for the 2012-2013 academic year. These awards will be distributed at the annual departmental picnic, scheduled on August 25, 2013. Sixth year student Baolei Li and fifth year student Huaixui Zheng, both of whom obtained their PhD this year, re -ceived the 2012 outstanding graduate student award from the Ministry of Education of China. This award is dedicated to Chinese graduate students studying abroad and is given out each year. A total of 489 students received this award this year worldwide. Two students from our department also received the same award last year. Fifth year student Min Huang was awarded the Je�erson Sciences Associates (JSA)/Je�erson Laboratory Gradu -ate Fellowship for the 2012-2013 academic year. Min is a student of Professor Haiyan Gao and this is the second time

Kristine Callan

Student Advisor Student Advisor

Venkitesh Ayyar Prof. Chandrasekharan Meizhen Shi Prof. Gauthier

Marco Bertolini Prof. Plesser Chris Varghese Prof. Durrett

Arunkumar Jagannathan Prof. Thomas Jun Yan Prof. Wu

Chung-Ting Ke Prof. Finkelstein Hao Zhang Prof. Chang

Lei Li Prof. Arce Yang Zhang Prof. Gao

Chao Peng Prof. Gao Chen Zhou Prof. Kruse

Bonnie Schmittberger Prof. Gauthier

Taritree Wongjirad Anne Watson Shanshan Cao Mia Liu Yang Yang

Min Huang

Prof. SpringerArman Margaryan


Graduate News continued from page 3

Farewell to Donna Ruger On May 31, the assistant to the DGS, Donna Ruger retired from Duke after 28 years of service. Donna joined Duke in July 1985, but began working in the Physics Department only from March 1993. However, since then she was one of the most dependable staff members of the department. She served as the assistant to the DGS for many years under different faculty members and played a key role in the lives of graduate students when they were at Duke. The department threw her a farewell party on May 22. The event was attended by faculty, staff, students, Donna’s family as well as past co-workers who returned to bid her adieu. Although Donna will be missed by many department members, I will miss her personally as the DGS, since over the past two years I had come to rely on her for keeping me informed of important deadlines and taking care of many important tasks for me in a timely manner. All of us wish her a very happy retirement with more time to spend with her grandchildren.

Graduate Admissions This year our target goal was to recruit 15 students for the Fall 2013 class. The Graduate Admissions Committee (GAC) reviewed 244 applications during the winter break and made 52 offers to students all over the world. The department held an open house on March 7th and 8th so accepted applicants could get a better perspective of our graduate program. Senior students were extremely helpful during the whole process, and I thank them for all their time and effort in the recruitment process. In the end I am glad to report that we were successful in recruiting exactly 15 students this year. The incoming class contains students from Bangladesh (1), China (4), India (1), Iran (1), Russia (1), Taiwan (1) and USA (6). There are 13 male and 2 female students in the incoming class. We expect the new class to arrive in mid August and have planned a variety of orientation activities for the incoming students including a departmental picnic on August 25, 2013.

she has received this award in two years. Every year the Physics De-partment awards fellowships to outstanding graduate students in specific fields of research through the support of various endowments. Jie Ren, a student of Professor Bob Behringer, won the Fritz London Fellowship given to outstanding stu-dents in condensed matter physics. Jie graduated this year. Sean Finch and Jonathan Mueller, both fourth year students, won the Newson Fellowship given to outstanding students in the field of experimental nuclear physics. Sean is a student of Professor Werner Tornow and Jon is a student of Professor Henry Weller. Yang Yang, Yingyi Zhang and Yunhui Zhu won the Gordy Fellowship given to outstanding students working in atomic, molecular and optical physics. Yang featured earlier in this article, Yingyi graduated this year as a student of Professor John Thomas, and Yunhui is a sixth year student completing her thesis work with Professor Dan Gauthier. In addition to the above awards many students have published important research articles in various journals, have given research presen-tations at various conferences and have become recognized in the world through their research work at Duke. We refer the reader to the web site http://news.phy.duke.edu/topics/graduate-studies-news/ for detailed information about these other graduate student accomplishments. Congratulations to all graduate students on their accomplishments over the past year.

Jie Ren Sean Finch Jonathan Mueller Yingyi Zhang Yunhui Zhu

Hao Zhang Catherine Marcoux Reggie Bain Baolei Li Huaixiu Zheng


–by GSO Presidents, Chris Pollard and Bonnie Schmittberger

Annual PicnicThe annual department picnic, which each year welcomes the new graduate students to Duke and returning faculty, staff, and graduate students back for the fall semester, was again a success! Thanks to the graduate class of 2011 for organizing such a nice outing for the rest of us. The hard work of Chung-Ting Ke and Jonah Bernhard was rewarded with teaching assistant awards at the picnic.

Grad-Chair meetingsThis year, the graduate student body held three meetings with the department chair. These meetings facilitated a constructive dialogue in which the students were able to ask questions or voice concerns related to the department and the graduate program. The graduate students were very appreciative of Professor Gao’s time and consider-ation, and they found these meetings to be quite beneficial.

Oak Ridge TripIn October, twelve graduate students spent their fall breaks at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and were introduced to the wide range of research opportunities that it has to offer. Laboratory staff members and users gave the visitors guided tours of Oak Ridge’s many facilities, including its computing center, the Spallation Neutron Source, the High Temperature Materials Laboratory, the High Flux Isotope Reactor, and the Center for Nanophase Materials Science.

Department TeaEvery Thursday, graduate students volunteer to organize an afternoon tea. Members of the department congregate to enjoy conversation over everything from breakfast cereal and crepes to Chinese desserts. This popular weekly tradition will continue into the summer and next year.

Graduate Student SeminarTwenty graduate student seminars have taken place since last September, with more on the way over the summer. These talks give graduate students and post-docs opportunities to both present their current research projects and learn about the recent results of their

peers. Several students gave graduate student seminars in preparation for conference presentations, preliminary exams, and thesis defenses.

Open House WeekThe graduate students played an important role in this year’s Open House for prospective students. They organized a Q&A panel to answer questions about graduate student life, and they took the prospective students on a tour of Duke’s campus. Many others volunteered to present posters at the poster session, which granted the prospective students an opportunity to hear about a variety of research topics within the department. Current graduate students also took the prospective students out to dinner at Tyler’s Restaurant and to explore downtown Durham.

A Message to Our DGSAOn behalf of all graduate students, the GSO would like to extend con-gratulations and best wishes to Donna Ruger on her retirement. Donna has been the only Duke Physics Mom we’ve ever known, and we’re very sad to see her go. Thank you for all you’ve done for us, Donna!

Thanks!The Physics GSO would like to thank all the committee members whose efforts made the events of this past year so successful. The GSO Executive Committee consisted of Chris Pollard (Co-President), Bonnie Schmittberger (Co-President and Newsletter), Kevin Claytor (Vice President and Graduate Student Seminar Chair), Margaret Shea (Secretary/Treasurer and Ombudsperson), Ben Cerio (5+ year Class Rep), Sean Finch (4th year Class Rep), Meizhen Shi (3rd year Class Rep), Kristen Collar (2nd year Class Rep and Social Activities Co-Chair), and Scott Moreland (1st year Class Rep). Many thanks also to our subcommittee chairs Marco Bertolini and Chris Coleman-Smith (Curriculum Committee), Kristine Callan and Huaixiu Zheng (Colloquium Committee), Chung-Ting Ke (Ombudsperson), Jonah Bernhard (Web Chair), Kevin Finelli (Technical/Computing Chair), Chris Varghese (GPSC Rep), Mauricio Pilo-Pais (Social Activities Co-Chair), and David Bjergaard (Election Commissioner).

Graduate Student Organization News

Photo by Kevin Claytor


2013 Physics B.S. graduates l-r: Spencer Fallek, Mary Rolfes (biophysics), Colton Brown, Zach Epstein, Will DiClemente, William Weir, Stephen Jones, Jay Krishnan (biophysics), Zongjin Qian, Timothy Noe, Joshua Loyal, Paul Dannenberg, Jervis Besa (biophysics), and Physics

Chair Haiyan Gao. There are physics and biophysics majors not pictured.

Undergraduate News

At this May’s graduation, there were eleven primary physics majors and five primary biophysics majors for a total of sixteen students who received their degrees through the Physics Department. There were also two physics double majors and one biophysics double major so the total number of students graduating with a physics or biophysics degree was nineteen students. While the number of physics majors continues to be roughly steady from year to year, this year was only the second year in which Physics awarded biophysics degrees, and the number of biophysics majors continues to increase towards a steady state likely to be about ten majors per year, comparable to the number of physics majors.

Download the 2013 graduation program here: http://tinyurl.com/n5afgvc

This year’s undergraduate physics and biophysics theses can be read here: http://tinyurl.com/ktl7v6u

As in previous years, about sixty percent of our physics majors are going on to graduate school in physics, with the other physics majors pursuing a variety of interests including software, economics, technology, and medical school. About two thirds of the

biophysics graduates are going directly to medical school, with the others doing biophysics-related research, attending a biophysics PhD program, or taking a gap year to gain research or other experience before continuing on to medical school or to graduate school. The biophysics program continues to be attractive especially to Duke’s premeds, with about 80% of the biophysics majors expressing an interest in going to medical school or entering into an MD/PhD program. Despite the relatively small number of majors compared to other science departments, the Physics Department is fortunate to continue to attract many students who are strong academically. Two of our seniors (Paul Dannenberg and Zongjin Qian) were nominated to Phi Beta Kappa and junior Kushal Seetharam, who is double majoring in Electrical Engineering and Physics and who is the current president of Duke’s Society for Physics Students, won a prestigious national Goldwater award for academic excellence and promise for a future career related to science and technology. Five seniors wrote and successfully defended honors theses with four of these students achieving high distinction and one student achieving distinction. Seniors Will DiClemente and Zongjin Qian shared the Daphne Chang Memorial Award of $1000 for excellence for undergraduate physics

Undergraduate News

Photo by Robert Palmer

– by Director of Undergraduate Studies, Henry Greenside


research, and their theses (related respectively to LHC physics and to condensed matter theory) were indeed impressive. Overall, about eighty percent of our majors did undergraduate physics or biophysics research, with most of these students doing research for more than one semester or one summer. The Physics faculty continue to be heavily involved with improving and innovating physics education. This last year Professors Daniel Gauthier and Roxanne Springer taught undergraduate courses using a so-called Team Based Learning (TBL) approach, which has been attracting national attention for its ability to improve student understanding and appreciation of course material. In this approach, traditional lectures are eliminated, students learn material on their own through online videos or via assigned reading, and all class lectures are replaced with individual and group problem solving, in which students spend most of their time in active collaboration with classmates or with the instructors. Based on the success of this effort in these two classes and based on similar successes by Duke professors in other majors, there is now underway an effort to use TBL for the large intro physics courses for life science majors (now numbered 141L and 142L). If successful, this has the potential to greatly improve the learning experience in these intro courses and to free up physics faculty who could then teach new upper-class electives or teach new graduate courses. Another major effort underway is to restructure what physics and biophysics majors learn about experimental physics. For many years, our majors learned experimental physics via labs that were rather closely aligned to course content or that replicated some rather famous historical physics experiments, but little attention was made to identify key experimental skills or to teach these skills early enough that they would benefit students interested in doing experimental research. A committee led by Dan Gauthier recommended this last year that this arrangement be changed substantially, e.g., by splitting off the lab components of the intro physics and Modern Physics courses into new 1/2-credit courses that would only loosely be connected to the courses, by adding a few additional upper-level 1/2-credit courses, by more systematically teaching skills that are common to many Duke experimental labs, and especially by teaching students how to be creative and independent when doing experimental physics. These changes are at an early planning stage with the goal of implementing some first stages by fall of 2014. The Department is hopeful that these changes will lead to a substantial improvement in our majors’ abilities to carry out and enjoy experimental physics research. Another educational advance this last year was represented by Professor Ronen Plesser being the first physics professor to produce a so-called Massive Open Online Course or MOOC, based on his introductory astronomy course Physics 134 that he has been teaching for many years at Duke with great success. (See the Coursera course

entry: http://tinyurl.com/ktrhgy2.) Professor Plesser’s course was taken by over ten thousand people world wide and was received with great enthusiasm by these people; it is worth noting that these MOOC students for Professor Plesser’s course represent many more students than Professor Plesser would be able to teach at Duke even if he taught the same course each semester over a professional career spanning about 40 years. Professor Plesser’s course is one of nearly 20 MOOCs taught through Duke, and Duke has aggressively become one of the leaders of MOOC courses during the last two years. Based on Professor Plesser’s success, the Physics Department plans to offer further MOOCs in the future. The teaching and mentoring efforts of the Physics Department were recognized this last year by several of our faculty receiving prestigious awards from Duke University. Professor Plesser is the winner of the inaugural 2012-2013 Dean’s Teaching and Technology Award for his many efforts and innovations, especially for creating the Duke Observatory for introductory astronomy in the Duke Forest, for his recent efforts with his MOOC course, and for his overall excellence over many years as an undergraduate physics instructor. The High-Energy Physics ATLAS group (staff and faculty) is the winner of the inaugural 2012-2013 Dean’s leadership award for its outstanding contributions to discoveries made at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and for their successes over many years in attracting undergraduates (including many freshmen) to do physics related to the LHC. Not only has this group’s efforts been able to send many students each summer to CERN to work at the LHC, these efforts have encouraged students to come to Duke to major in physics, to do research that led to writing and defending a thesis, and to continue on with graduate research in experimental high energy physics. During the next several years, the Physics faculty will explore further improvements to undergraduate physics education. One will be to try to restructure the introductory physics course for potential physics and biophysics majors (currently numbered 161L and 162L) to move away from a traditional encyclopedic textbook and instead organize the course content around a few key questions related to current frontiers of physics. Another will be to introduce more computational components to upper-level physics and biophysics courses, so that our majors can solve a richer variety of scientific problems and understand better the interplay of theory, experiment, and simulation. A third effort will be to introduce 1/3-credit upper-level modules on specific research themes such as astrophysics, nanoscience, quantum computing, computational physics, biophysics, and neutrino physics. These modules will address a shortcoming in the current physics major, which is that students have a difficult time finding out about the many exciting frontiers of physics, there is not enough time in the current curriculum to take many elective courses.

Undergraduate News continued from page 6

Duke PHYSICS


New Faculty Profile

New Assistant Professor Phil Barbeau Searches for Rare Events

–by Mary-Russell Roberson

Physicist Phil Barbeau builds detectors to look for rare events in nuclear and particle physics. He says, “We use very standard particle-detection techniques that are taken to the extreme. In general, all of these experiments are so sensitive that a single fingerprint left behind on the detector can blind it.” Barbeau, currently a post-doc at Stanford, will be joining the Duke Physics faculty and the Triangle University Nuclear Laboratory (TUNL) on August 1. He searches for neutrinoless double beta decay, coherent-neutrino nucleus scattering, and dark matter. “It can be difficult to get all three topics into one conversation,” he says, “until you realize that the underlying connection is really about innovative detector technology and development.” Barbeau thrives on the creative thinking necessary to design and build new detectors, and is looking forward to sharing that with Duke students. “Wherever I’ve been I’ve enjoyed teaching physics in the laboratory and doing research with the students,” he says. “Detector development allows you to employ students at all levels—high schoolers, undergraduates, graduate students, postdocs—such that they can all have impact on the final results of the experiment.” An added benefit: “If you do a good job teaching students they become very powerful researchers in their own right and start to benefit your research in a very positive way.” All of Barbeau’s experiments take place underground to shield them from cosmic radiation. He’s put detectors in a variety of places—including in the salt mines of New Mexico where nuclear waste is stored, within 25 meters of the core of a nuclear reactor, and in the sewers of Chicago. “All of them were interesting in their own way,” he says. Then he adds: “Sewers were less interesting.” At Duke, Barbeau intends to use the Kimballton Underground Research Facility (KURF) in a limestone mine near Blacksburg, Virginia, which he considers “very close.” He says, “It’s much easier if we don’t have to travel across country to go underground.” Neutrinoless double beta decay is a particular kind of radioactive decay that has been predicted but not observed. If it is observed, it would prove neutrinos to be Majorana particles—that is, particles that serve as their own anti-particles. It would also provide information that would help physicists calculate the mass of neutrinos and maybe help explain why they have so much less mass than any other type of particle. The detectors used by Barbeau and his colleagues on the

EXO experiment (Enriched Xenon Observatory) are filled with more than 100 kilograms of liquid xenon enriched with xenon 136, which decays to barium 136. The xenon 136 serves as a source for the decay and as the medium with which to detect decay. “Ultimately, we would like to marry that particle physics technique with an atomic physics approach to tag the barium daughter ion, which would give us a paradigm-shifting zero-background experiment,” Barbeau says. “That’s an example of how you take standard particle physics experiment to the extreme.” Another rare event Barbeau looks for is coherent neutrino-nucleus scattering. “The process is predicted as part of the Standard Model of particle physics—it was predicted 40 years ago, but so far it’s been unobserved because we haven’t had adequate detection.” Barbeau hopes to help change with his large-mass (about 1.2 kilograms), low-background, ultra-low threshold detectors. “Measuring the strength of this process will allow us to perform some very sensitive tests of physics beyond the Standard Model,” he says. Barbeau also uses the coherent scattering detectors to search for dark matter, such as hypothetical particles called axions and WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles). The same type of detectors may one day have applications for homeland security as well, in an area called nuclear reactor safeguards. The detectors could be used to look for illicit diversion of nuclear fuel rods by keeping track of nuclear fuel in reactors through neutrino detection and monitoring. Of the driving force behind his work, Barbeau says, “I’m interested in searches of rare events in neutrino and astroparticle physics because oftentimes these rare events can have a big impact on our understanding of physics and the world around us.” He says, “To be in this field you have to be a little bit crazy, because of the extreme nature of a lot of what you have to do—to make sure that you don’t leave any fingerprints on the detector, to get rid of all the dust. Sometimes you have to grow copper for your experiment underground so it doesn’t get activated by radiation at sea level.” But for Barbeau, any tedious aspects of building these detectors are far outweighed by the enjoyment he gets from the creative process of designing them, and the chance to extend the experimental reach of physics. “The goal,” he says, “is to perform measurements not previously possible.”


Faculty Awards

Smith Awarded 2013 McGroddy Prize for New Materials

Prof. David Smith has been awarded the 2013 James C. McGroddy Prize of APS for New Materials sponsored by IBM together with Drs. John B. Pendry, Imperial College and Costas M. Soukoulis, Ames Laboratory and Iowa State University. The Prize was established to recognize and encourage outstanding achievement in the science and applica-tion of new materials. It consists of $10,000 (divided equally) and a certificate with the appropriate citation. The citation that will appear on the certificate for Prof. Smith reads as follows: “For the discovery of metamaterials.”

Plesser Won Dean’s Teaching & Technology Award

Prof. Ronen Plesser is the winner of the 2012-2013 Dean’s Teaching and Technology Award and was featured in the DukeToday article “Teaching Excellence In and Outside the Classroom” on April 24, 2013.

Kotwal Earned Fellowship and New AppointmentProf. Ashutosh Kotwal has been elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Sci-ence (AAAS). Kotwal was cited by the AAAS Council for performing “a series of high precision, world-leading measurements of the mass of the W boson, and for stringent tests of the standard model of fundamental particles.” Each year the Council elects members whose “efforts on behalf of the advancement of science or its applications are scientifically or socially distinguished.” In addition, Prof. Kotwal has been appointed the Physics Advisor of the US contingent on the ATLAS Experiment at the Large Hadron Collider. In this role he will be providing leadership on physics issues to US

collaborators on ATLAS, numbering about 500 scientists and students from 44 institutions. One of the priorities is preparations for physics analysis of the new data starting 2014-15, to be collected at the substantially higher energy of 13 TeV compared to 8 TeV in 2012. Prof. Kotwal is also leading physics studies to motivate an upgrade of the LHC accelerator and detectors to collect ten times more data starting in 2022.

Petters Named in NC’s Top 20

Prof. Arlie Petters, along with Prof. Mohamed Noor in Duke’s Biology Department, has been named as one of the top 20 Science & Technology Professors in North Carolina. View the story online here: http://tinyurl.com/ls4lnfw

ATLAS Group Won Inaugural Dean’s Leadership Award

The ATLAS group (staff and faculty) is the winner of the inaugural 2012-2013 Dean’s leadership award. The group consists of the following faculty and staff (present and past) members: Profs. Ayana Arce, Al Goshaw, Ashutosh Kotwal, Mark Kruse, and Seog Oh, researchers Doug Benjamin, Andrea Bocci, William Ebenstein, Jack Fowler and Chiho Wang.

ATLAS Experiment © 2013 CERN


Physics Outreach Featured

in Duke TodayProfs. Calvin Howell and Ronen Plesser along with graduate student Kristine Callan and staff member Derek Leadbetter were featured in the Duke Today article “Fun With a Rocket-Pro-pelled Faculty” for their outreach efforts. Read the feature here: http://tinyurl.com/koyua7k

Kruse Hosted LHC Outreach EventProf. Mark Kruse, with graduate students David Bjergaard and Kevin Finelli, hosted an LHC Outreach event on March 16, 2013. It was well attended and DukeToday writer Ashley Yeager wrote about it in an article “Local high-schoolers analyze real LHC data at Duke.”

Read the story at: http://tinyurl.com/kmmr7c2

Faculty Awards / Outreach

Thomas and Weller Awarded APS Outstanding Referees

Profs. Emeritus John E. Thomas and Henry Weller were awarded 2013 Out-standing Referees for the American Physical Society. From the website: The Outstanding Referee program was instituted in 2008 to recognize scientists who have been exceptionally helpful in assessing manuscripts for publication in the APS journals. By means of the program, APS expresses its appreciation to all referees, whose efforts in peer review not only keep the standards of

the journals at a high level, but in many cases also help authors to improve the quality and readability of their articles – even those that are not published by APS.

Outreach

Photo by Duke University Photography


Alumni Profiles

“As a general matter, I’ve always liked organizing people and institu-tions.” So says John Koskinen, a Duke alumnus and the recently retired non-executive chairman of Freddie Mac. Over the years, he’s held an array of diverse positions, including being the Year 2000 czar (his favorite position) and the city administrator of Washington, DC (the toughest one). He has also been president of a corporate turn-around company, the deputy director of President Clinton’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB), the president of the United States Soccer Foundation, and the chair of the DC Host Committee that brought the 1994 World Cup to Washington. It’s an unexpected career path for anyone, but perhaps especially so for someone who majored in physics (Duke, 1961) and then earned a law degree (Yale, 1964). Koskinen sees a common thread throughout the positions, however. “They really required you to step into the middle of a set of challenges, sort out the issues, and get people to work as a team,” he says. Some of the challenges were enormous. When asked by President George W. Bush in 2008 to become the leader of a new board of Freddie Mac, the government-backed mortgage company, he says he found “5500 people and $2.5 trillion in assets in the middle of a collapse.” He was City Administrator of DC during the bursting of the dot-com bubble, the 9/11 attacks, the anthrax scare, and the Beltway sniper attacks. At OMB, he ran the government shutdowns in 1995. While coordinating the United States’ response to the Year 2000 problem (Y2K), he ended up helping the entire world get ready. Koskinen says, “President Clinton gave me an office and an assis-tant and said, ‘Don’t let the world stop,’ and left me alone.” Koskinen set up working groups to address different sectors in the United States, and invited all 50 states’ Y2K coordinators to a meeting, which motivated those governors who had not yet done so to appoint a Y2K coordinator. After he spoke about his work at the UN, the chair of the UN working committee on “informatics” asked him to do something to help other countries prepare. So he divided the world along continen-tal lines, appointed a steering committee of 12 global coordinators, and ran worldwide teleconferences and meetings. “The art form was to harness all the organizations around the country and world and facilitate their information-sharing and working together, because there was no way I could hire enough experts to run around and fix everything,” he says. In the end, a few systems went down for a day or two at the dawn of the 21st century, but, because there was no injury or loss of life, the public remained largely unaware of all the work that went into pre-emptively fixing computer codes around the world. Looking back over his varied career, he says, “They were all turnaround opportunities. What you learn is to rely on experts and keep asking questions.” To Koskinen, experts include not only leaders but also the rank and file. “The people who know the most about what’s going on in an organization and what the challenges are, are the people on the front lines,” he says. “So I’ve spent my career trying to organize institutions so that you get feedback from people actually doing the work, and that information gets fed into the decision-making process.” Koskinen came to Duke from Ashland, Kentucky, already planning to major in physics. His father had recently died, and a scholarship from Duke made attending college possible. He remembers enjoy-ing his classes with William Fairbank and Harold Lewis. “Everybody

knew both Fairbank and Lewis were established physicists, so to have them as instructors was an honor and exciting,” he says. Even while majoring in physics, Koskinen was trying to decide be-tween a career in science versus one in the public sector. He made up his mind one day while visiting a fellow physics major in his room. “He had a blackboard with equations all over it and Scientific American on the table and I thought, I don’t have a blackboard, let alone one with equa-tions. If I’m going to be good at something where would I rather spend my time? While I enjoyed math and physics, I decided it would be more rewarding for me personally to be involved and engaged in the public sector—to be engaged more with people than with electrons.” All the same, he says his physics major contributed to his suc-cess. “Physics taught me to concentrate and pay close attention to details,” he says. “You get used to being very thorough and careful and analytical. Throughout my career, both in the private and public sector, being able to analyze and understand the principles behind what was going on—the forces at work—was always very helpful.” And of course his science background came in handy working on the Year 2000 project and working on science- and research-related issues in the President’s budget while at OMB. Koskinen chose physics partly as a patriotic reaction to the Rus-sians sending up Sputnik in 1957. Although the United States faces dif-ferent challenges today, he says science is more important than ever. “The world is becoming more technically complicated and challenged, so science—and physics in particular—are always going to be critical. My concern about where the country goes is whether we continue to have the capacity to develop the intellectual capital that brought us to where we are. I hope people will understand and remember this, even in the budget crunch we presently face.” Through the years, Koskinen has stayed involved at Duke, begin-ning as a local fundraiser and then participating on many boards and committees, including as president of the Alumni Association and chair of the Board of Trustees. “While I have spent a large percentage of my spare time working for Duke, it’s never been a burden,” he says. “There’s a feeling on my part that I should give back to the university since I would not have been able to attend without the scholarship assistance that I received.” In 1999, he and his wife Pat gave a gift of $2.5 million to Duke to support female student-athletes and to enhance Duke’s recreational and athletic facilities. Duke’s Koski-nen Stadium for soccer and lacrosse is named in their honor. He’s received three Duke awards: the University Medal for Distinguished Meritorious Service, the Distinguished Alumni Award, and the Charles A. Dukes Award for Outstanding Volunteer Service. He also received the Distinguished Service Award in Trusteeship from the Association of Governing Boards as the nation’s top trustee in 1997. In February, upon turning 72, he retired from Freddie Mac as required by regulatory policies. He’s keeping busy reading, playing ten-nis, and spending time with his family—including four grandchildren—and he’s still on the boards of directors for two public companies. But is he retired for good? “Most of the things I’ve done in the last 20 years have been unexpected and unplanned,” he says. “I’m happy to have free time, but if somebody calls, I’ll probably listen.”

Distinguished Alumnus John Koskinen Looks Back Over Varied Career— by Mary-Russell Roberson

John and Patricia KoskinenPhoto by Duke University Photography

1 2 S i g n u p f o r o u r e - n e w s l e t t e r a t h t t p : // n e w s . p h y . d u k e . e d u !

“I’ve always wanted to work on something that had a real-world applicability,” says Nathan Kundtz, PhD ’09. “I was looking for ways to take what was fundamental science research and turn it into something which could be of value.” Only three years after earning his PhD in physics at Duke with Prof. David Smith, Kundtz has already designed a new type of satel-lite antenna that can supply internet connectivity to people in far-flung locales—such as relief workers, journalists, military personnel, and scientists—as well as to passengers on planes, trains, buses and trucks. The new antenna, called mTenna, is about the size of a laptop. It’s thinner and lighter than what’s currently available, and uses less power, takes less time to set up, and is less expensive. It also gives higher performance than a conventional satellite antenna of similar size because almost its entire surface is available for sending and receiving signals via satellite. Kundtz used technology from the meta-materials field to design the mTenna, which points a beam in an entirely different way than conventional satellite antennas, such as satellite dishes (which point a beam physically) or phased array antennas (which point a beam by manipulating the phases of different signals). The mTenna uses some of the materials and technology used in David Smith’s so-called invisibility cloak, but in a novel way. “Rather than trying to use the materials in a refractive context, we could implement the same design concepts in a diffractive context, where you are using the material as a diffractive aperture and allowing en-ergy to pass through in a small opening. You can think of the antenna as a diffraction grating or a reconfigurable hologram,” Kundtz says. Different diffraction gratings can be created by switching ele-ments on the surface of the mTenna on or off. Voltage applied to the elements adjusts a built-in dielectric that controls the resonance of each element. If the frequency of an incoming signal matches the resonance of an element, that element is “on” or “open,” and if the frequency does not match, that element is “off” or “closed.” “You have a traveling wave underneath some resonant ele-ments,” Kundtz explains. “You can change the pattern of which elements are on and off, and when you do, those elements have a different phase offset between them so you end up with a beam going off in different directions.” This means the mTenna can “find” a communications satellite overhead without the user having to precisely aim the device toward the satellite. A laptop sized version of the mTenna called the Portable Satel-lite Hotspot is designed for people going places where 3G or 4G coverage doesn’t exist or has been destroyed by war or a natural disaster. The current options for connectivity in such situations are slow and expensive, or awkward to carry and difficult to set up. The mTenna can also be installed atop an airplane or other modes of transportation to provide internet service to passengers. Kundtz came up with the idea for mTenna while working at

Intellectual Ventures, an “invention capital company” headquartered in Bellevue, Washington. His job was to provide technical insight for various inventions and technologies the company was looking into, but he also suggested some ideas of his own. “One of those turned out to be something we felt there was a significant market for, so we decided to invest in bringing that to maturity,” he says. Intellectual Ventures spun out Kymeta Corporation to develop the mTenna, which should be available commercially in 2015. Kundtz is founder and chief technology officer at Kymeta Corporation. When Kundtz first arrived at Duke, he worked with Prof. Albert Chang on quantum electronics. Funding for that project dried up after three years, and Kundtz considered leaving Duke with a MS in electrical engineering. “I went to the DGS of the engineering depart-ment, which happened to be David Smith,” Kundtz says. “David was looking for someone with an interest in electrical engineering but who also had experience with general relativity, specifically with differential geometry. I fit the bill and he invited me to come work with his team on ideas related to meta-materials. So I finished my PhD with David Smith.” David Smith holds appointments in both the engineering and physics departments. Kundtz says his path to inventing the mTenna was paved not only with the knowledge he gained at Duke about solid state electronics and meta-materials, but also the culture of physics, which helped him look at the goal of improving the performance of satellite anten-nas from an entirely new angle. “The value [of a physics background] is two-fold,” he says. “In doing hard experiments in the way they are typically done in most physics departments, you develop a level of scientific rigor and discipline that’s required to really carry some-thing out that’s novel. At the same time, you’re encouraged to not be restricted to a set of design tools that already exists, but you’re taught to develop your own design tools.”

Duke Alum Nathan Kundtz Invents New Satellite Antenna—by Mary-Russell Roberson

Alumni Profiles

Photo by Kyle Johnson

S i g n u p f o r o u r e - n e w s l e t t e r a t h t t p : // n e w s . p h y . d u k e . e d u ! 1 3

Duke PHYSICS

Like father, like daughter. Both Chip Watson and his daughter Anne Watson love physics and computer science and don’t like having to choose between the two. They both love traveling to China to teach English to high school students. And they both chose Duke for postgraduate work in physics. Chip earned his PhD in 1980 working with Prof. Emeritus Bilpuch and Anne began her graduate studies at Duke this fall. Chip is the manager of the High-Performance Computing Group at Jefferson National Lab in Newport News, Virginia, where he has been since 1988. He decided to pursue a career in computing while he was a postdoc. “While I was at Duke doing my physics research I was also picking up a lot of useful skills in computing, working on data acquisition systems and analysis,” he says. “When I did a postdoc at Stony Brook I found the computing was more enjoyable and I engaged my fellow researchers more with my computing than with physics so I abandoned the publish-or-perish rat race and took on a supporting role in being a staff member working on computer systems. But I didn’t take those skills out into industry—I very much enjoy the physics research environment.” The high-performance computers that Chip oversees are used to analyze experimental physics data and perform calculations for theorists who are studying quantum chromodynamics—how quarks and gluons interact—using a lattice approach to manage the incredible array of necessary calculations. At each point on a grid, a discrete equation represents the environment around that point. “Lattice QCD is a numerical approach to pulling predictions out of that fundamental theory,” Chip says. “It’s incredibly difficult and very demanding on the processors.” Right now, the theorists are simulat-ing areas slightly larger than a nucleon, but they hope to soon be able to model a small nucleus. In 2009, Chip directed a major overhaul: “I built a system big enough and powerful enough that if users would take the effort to rewrite some code they would get a enormous benefit,” he says. The lab used funds from a $5 million economic stimulus grant to purchase graphic processing units (GPUs), which were originally designed for video games. GPUs can handle all the calculations needed to keep track of thousands of objects in a video game and provide realistic images of those objects falling, bouncing off each other, spinning, and shattering. “It did require considerable rewrit-ing of code to take advantage of these things,” he says. “It was a major effort, but it was too compelling to ignore.” He says the GPUs provide about 10 times the performance on the dollar compared to more conventional platforms.

“We have over 500 GPUs,” he says. “It’s not the biggest in the world, but it’s a pretty good size. Ours in unusual in that it’s dedi-cated to a particular science domain.” As a child, Anne visited Jefferson Lab during open houses and she also went with her dad to work on sick days or teacher workdays. (Her mom is a professional violinist, and Anne also plays violin.) Her middle-school and high-school science fair projects were always related to either physics or computers—or both. She says, “My dad in the true science spirit would say, ‘I’ll help you set it up, but you’re doing all the experiment yourself.’” He also connected her with other mentors at Jefferson Lab. In her last two years of high school, she attended a regional public school called New Horizons Regional Education Center that of-fered advanced science classes. “What really made me love physics was a great teacher there,” she says. After high school, she was a Park Scholar at NC State, where she double majored in physics and computer science. While her dad ended up at Duke primarily because his advisor at Georgia Tech recommended it, Anne applied to and was accepted at a number of graduate programs. “I ended up choosing Duke not just because of the feel of the place but because of the opportunities I have at Duke,” she says. “I’m not married to a particular subspecialty of physics and Duke has four or five different professors I would like to work with—they are very encouraging about exploring all those opportunities versus other schools that would only offer me the opportunity to do research in a particular kind of condensed matter. Another thing I like about Duke is that it’s interdisciplinary.” The Free Electron Laser was also a major draw, since she has some familiarity with the FEL at Jefferson Lab. Before arriving in Durham, Anne spent one week at Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee, meeting with some of the physicists there and investigating whether there might be a project she could collaborate on during her time at Duke. “Working at one of the Department of Energy National Labs is something I could see myself doing for a career,” she says. If Duke Physics runs in your family, let us know: [email protected].

Duke Physics is a Family Tradition for Chip Watson

— by Mary-Russell Roberson

Chip Watson, PhD ‘80, and his daughter Anne Watson, a current Duke Physics graduate student, pose for a picture in the Guangxi province of China after playing a game with

students at a summer camp where they were teaching English. Chip has spent 11 sum-mers teaching English in China, and Anne has accompanied him on six of those trips.


Picture yourself trying to teach high-school science to 80 students in a classroom with no equipment besides a blackboard and some desks. Then imagine that these students don’t understand English very well. That’s the situation Eric Yff (’10) found himself in as a Peace Corps volunteer. Yff recently returned home after a two-year stint in Malawi, a small country in sub-Saharan Africa near Mozambique and Zambia. Faced with designing experiments for his students in a school with no scientific materials, Yff had to improvise. “If I was doing a titration experiment,” he says, “we didn’t have graduated cylinders or burettes so I’d go to the nearest health clinic and borrow syringes there to measure liquid.” To get magnets or electrical components he would take apart old speakers and radios that he bought at local markets. Creating the experiments was Yff’s favorite part of the job, and his students enjoyed the results. “They weren’t used to seeing a lot of experiments and they really enjoyed the experiments I did,” he says. Yff taught math and physical science to students in forms 1-4 (analogous to grades 9-12) at the Msenjere Community Day Second-ary School in Msenjere Village, near the shore of Lake Malawi. The school consisted of four classrooms. Each grade stayed in one classroom, while teachers moved from room to room. There was no electricity, no running water, and no break for lunch. There were also no administrators or support staff—teachers were responsible for speaking to parents, managing finances, overseeing maintenance, and anything else that came up during the school day. At the beginning of the school year, the classrooms would be crowded with as many as 80 or 90 students. As the year pro-gressed, classes shrank to 50 to 60 students in the younger grades and 30 to 40 in the upper grades. “During the rainy season, which is from late December up until April, the roads become really muddy and it’s difficult to travel either on foot or bicycle,” Yff says, “so the students are very late to school or don’t come at all.” Students also dropped out of school to help their parents farming or fishing, or

due to pregnancies. The earlier grades had equal number of girls and boys, but by the upper grades, the ratio of boys to girls was about 3 to 1. Yff completed two months of teacher training before being assigned to his school. “Once you get to the village, it’s a matter of building confidence and finding out what works for the students and what doesn’t,” he says. At first, just communicating with the students was a challenge. The national exams are conducted in English, which is the official language of Malawi, so high school classes are conducted in English. But most Malawi people speak Chichewa. “It’s difficult to teach the younger students because they don’t understand much English,” Yff says. “They were supposed to have learned it in primary school, but a lot of times they weren’t adequately prepared. To get through to them, you have to talk very slowly, use simple English, enunciate very carefully, and write on the board. The upper grades understand English quite a bit better although you still have to speak more slowly and enunciate things somewhat differently because people are accustomed to English accents.” He adds, “I would occasion-ally mix in the local language but that was mainly to entertain the students.” Yff applied to the Peace Corps when he was a senior, and he left for Malawi a month and a half after graduation. “They especially like people from math and science backgrounds to teach because there’s a big shortage of teachers of math and science in some of these developing countries,” he says. At Duke, Yff double-majored in physics and philosophy. He spent one summer abroad, on the Duke in Oxford program, which was his only experience outside of the United States before going to Malawi. Now Yff is at home in Louisville, Kentucky, applying for jobs and considering going back to school. Although he’s enjoying seeing family and friends, driving his own car, and eating American food, he misses his friends in Malawi. “I was really close to the headmaster at my school and I had a lot of friendships with the other teachers and students so it was sad to leave that,” he says.

Duke Alum Yff Teaches Science in Malawi

—by Mary-Russell Roberson

Alumni Profiles


The KamLAND-Zen collaboration (with Prof. Werner Tornow) reported in Phys. Rev. Lett. a new neutrino mass limit of mββ < (120 – 250) meV from a neutrinoless double-beta decay search of 136Xe. This limit is based on a range of representative nuclear matrix element calculations, and excludes the Majorana neutrino mass range expected from the neutrinoless double-beta decay claim of 76Ge by the Heidelberg-Moscow Collaboration at more than 97.5 % confidence level. Read the paper online here: http://tinyurl.com/khhy94c

KamLAND-Zen Reports New Neutrino Mass Limit

Faculty Research

Curtarolo’s Group Won MURI CompetitionProf. Stefano Curtarolo and his group have won the competition for the MURI topic#20 “Replacing Strategic Ele-ments in DoD Materials” for the proposal “Topological decompositions and spectral sampling algorithms for ele-ment substitution in critical technologies.” Instead of discovering novel compounds, the group proposed to explore “mechanisms of phase decompositions” to reproduce functionalities instead of chemistry. Curtarolo is the PI on this new grant.

Gao and Collaborators Received an NSF MRI AwardProf. Haiyan Gao and collaborators from Norfolk State University, North Carolina A&T State University and Mississippi State University have been awarded recently by the National Science Foundation a Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) grant for the construction of a cryogenic, internal hydrogen gas target for a new experiment on a precise mea-surement of the proton charge radius, a fundamental quantity important for both atomic and nuclear physics. The recent development of the “proton radius puzzle’’ refers to the intriguing fact that the proton charge radius determined from muonic hydrogen Lamb shift with about 0.05% precision is about 7 sigma away than those from electron scattering experiments and from electronic hydrogen Lamb shift measurements. Before one can determine whether the difference is due to new physics or not, new experiments both in lepton (electron and muon) scattering and atomic Lamb shift are crucial. The NSF award allows Prof. Gao and collaborators to carry out a new experiment at Jefferson Lab on electron-proton scattering using the combined technique of a high-precision electromagnetic calorimeter, an internal hydrogen gas target, and the well-known quantum electrodynamics electron-electron scatter-ing to achieve a sub percent precision in an unprecedentedly low electron momentum transfer squared region.

Gauthier and Kim Won MURI CompetitionOn May 31, 2013, the Department of Defense announced the winners of the annual Multi-disciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) competition. The project, entitled “Funda-mental research on wavelength-agile high-rate quantum key distribution (QKD) in a marine environment,” was selected for funding by the Office of Naval Research. This project is lead by Prof. Paul Kwiat from the University of Illinois – Urbanna-Champaign and includes researchers from the University of Arizona and Boston University, as well as Profs. Daniel

Gauthier and Jungsang Kim of Duke Physics and Electrical and Computer Engineering respectively. The Duke efforts will focus on the devel-opment of a full quantum key distribution (QKD) system to achieve secure communication of a random string of bits that can be used as a cryptographic key for encoding and decoding plain-text messages. Their system will use weak pulses of light generated by a laser for distribut-ing the key, and the properties of quantum mechanics to prevent an eavesdropper attack. In the later stages of the project, the system will be brought to the Duke University Marine lab where its capability for secure communication in free space over the sea will be assessed. Also, the Duke team will develop a new class of detectors that are capable of sensing single-photons over a broad range of wavelengths and with high efficiency. The project will last over a five-year period. The purpose of the MURI program is to support teams of researchers from the sciences and engineering that straddle traditional disciplin-ary boundaries and provides sustained support at a level beyond that typical of single-investigator grants and for a longer period, with a focus on graduate student training and infrastructure development.


In an August 2012 Nature paper (Nature 488, p. 61), our team (H. Mebrahtu, I. Borzenets, D.E. Liu, H. Zheng, Yu. Bomze, A. Smirnov, H. Baranger and G. Finkelstein) reported unexpected results on quantum-mechanical tunneling with dissipation. Specifically, we showed that resonant tunneling can survive in the presence of dissipation, which is normally thought to suppress any tunneling events. The role of the surroundings, or environment, in quantum me-chanics has captivated physicists’ attention since the early days of the theory, resulting in the famous paradoxes at the interface of quantum and classical worlds. Starting from the seminal paper by Feynman and Vernon (1963), the environment is commonly understood as an ensemble of oscillators, or a “bosonic bath”. Such a bath is known to induce dissipation in the classical context; in the case of quantum tunneling, it is generally known to suppress the tunneling rate. The effects of dissipation on quantum processes can be readily tested in electron tunneling across a nanoscale barrier contacted by resistive leads, which serve as the dissipative bath. The tunneling rate across the barrier is suppressed, as evidenced by the electri-cal conductance G = I/V through the barrier which exhibits a power law dependence on temperature: G ~ T2r. [Here, the dimensionless quantity r=e2R/h is a rather peculiar combination of the lead resis-tance R, the electron charge e, and the Plank constant h.] Note that at zero temperature, the electron tunneling across the barrier is totally suppressed, G=0. One can visualize this situation in terms of the

following analogy: If one thinks of tunneling as a process of jumping across a creek, dissipation can be represented as swampy banks. In this case, once cannot just step across the creek – it takes some energy to push oneself for a jump. Similarly, in a quantum system at low temperature, the electron does not have the necessary energy to yield to the dissipative environment, and tunneling is suppressed. In our paper, we investigated the problem of resonant tunneling with dissipation (see Fig. 1), where the single tunnel barrier discussed above is replaced by a resonant level. Quantum resonant levels are ubiquitous in many branches of science, from chemistry to optics to particle physics, and familiar from quantum mechanics textbooks as the double barrier problem. In our case, the resonant level is formed

Does a Dissipative Environment Always Destroy Quantum Tunneling? — by Harold Baranger and Gleb Finkelstein

Figure 1: Schematic of the resonant level formed between two tunneling barriers inside the nanotube. It is coupled to two leads – the source and the drain. The tunneling elec-tron excites the bosonic modes in the leads (wavy lines). Side gates (Figure 2) allow us to control the relative transparency of the two barriers.

Figure 1: Schematic of the resonant level formed between two tunneling barriers inside the nanotube. It is coupled to two leads – the source and the drain. The tunneling electron excites the bosonic modes in the leads (wavy lines). Side gates (Figure 2) allow us to control the relative transparency of the two barriers.

Figure 2: Atomic Force Micrograph of a carbon nanotube (thin diagonal line running through the figure) on a silicon dioxide substrate. The raised surfaces are gold electrodes and gates made by electron-beam lithography and metal film evaporation. The nanotube is contacted by the source and the drain; the number of electrons in the nanotube is controlled by the main gain on right-hand side; the tunnel coupling to the source and the drain is controlled by the two side gate. Scale: approximately 1x1 micrometer.

Source

SG

SG

Gate

Drain

Nanotube

Faculty Research

The Technology section of the New York Times featured an article highlighting the research of Prof. David Smith. Read the article “Scientists Develop Device for Image Compression” here: http://tinyurl.com/mjqon7n

Smith’s Research Highlighted in New York Times

Prof. Bob Behringer and his graduate student Abe Clark, along with Prof. Lou Kondic of NJIT, recently had a paper accepted in PRL titled “Particle scale dynamics in granular impact.” The image at right is a typical image from one of their experiments, where the bright particles are experienc-ing force. They are exploring the questions of: How does granular material respond to a high-speed impact by a foreign object, such as a meteor striking a planetary surface? How do the grains col-lectively push back against the intruder, bringing it to a stop? They answer these questions with novel impact experiments on granular materials made from a photoelastic substance. This approach has the special property of allowing them to see how individual grains bear forces, and where the energy of the object goes. High-speed videos reveal rich acoustic activity: as the intruder moves, lightning bolts of force emerge, traveling along networks of grains. These intermittent acoustic pulses along granular ‘chains’ are responsible for decelerating the intruder and carrying away energy. This study is particularly novel because it captures the granular behavior in a way that has not been done previously. It offers a new perspective for a process of considerable importance in natural phenomena and in industry, which has frequently been studied in the past, but without access to what the grains are doing. This article has been published as a “Physics” Focus. Please read it online here: http://tinyurl.com/mx2hwat. Additionally, an article has been written in “Scientific American” here: http://tinyurl.com/c9m5427 and a DukeToday article here: http://tinyurl.com/kdnuzlj.

Visualizing Meteoric Impact

Photo by Abe Clark and Bob Behringer. This work was supported by DTRA.


Duke PHYSICS

Photo by Abe Clark and Bob Behringer. This work was supported by DTRA.

in a carbon nanotube – an atomic monolayer of carbon atoms rolled up to make a long hollow cylinder (see Fig. 2). The nanotube is further contacted at the ends by two metallic leads, each separated from the resonant level by a tunnel barrier. An electron occupying the resonant level travels back and force along the length of the nanotube, forming a standing wave. The resistance of the leads provides dissipation. In the general case, we find that resonant tunneling is suppressed by the dissipative environment, just like for non-resonant tunneling. There is one important exception however: exactly on-resonance and when the resonant level is equally coupled to the two leads, the resonant tunneling is not suppressed at all! (See Fig. 3.) In fact, its probability grows and at lowest temperatures reaches unity – which means that despite dissipation, electrons tunnel through the resonant level between the two contacts with 100% probability. Furthermore, the width of the resonance level, which is inversely proportional to the lifetime of the resonance, tends to zero as a power law of tempera-ture. In other words, the tunneling electron spends a longer and longer time at the resonant level as the temperature is decreased. To sum-marize the experimental results, we obtain zero conductance (at T=0) everywhere except at a single special point for which the nanotube is fully conducting, as if there were no barriers (G=1 in units of e2/h). Our theoretical analysis shows that this peculiar behavior signals the presence of a quantum phase transition (QPT) – a sudden change in the many-body quantum ground state driven by some control parameter (in our case, the gate voltage). QPTs are currently attract-ing strong interest in widely different fields of physics, ranging from quantum magnets and strongly correlated materials to, more recently, cold atoms, nanostructures, and particle physics. The foremost remarkable property of QPTs is the possibility to create exotic quan-tum states of matter at the quantum critical point; these exotic zero temperature states then cause anomalous physical properties at finite temperature. Despite the ubiquity of QPTs in contemporary theoretical physics, obtaining clear experimental signatures has been challenging. Our experiment provides a rare thorough characterization of all facets of a QPT in a fully-tunable system. To analyze the QPT, the quantum electrical properties of the sys-tem—that is, the quantum fluctuations of the charge on the capacitor formed by the tunneling barrier—are recast as a quantum field theory. Then standard techniques of the renormalization group are brought to bear. The result is an understanding of not only the two extreme behaviors of the conductance but also of the approach to these extremes as a function of temperature. The peculiar full transmission point does indeed correspond to an exotic state of matter. The theoretical analysis shows that a natural way to understand the experiment is to split the fermion correspond-ing to the resonant level into two “Majorana fermions”. One of these Majoranas is coupled to the leads, yielding the full conductance, but the other is decoupled from the system entirely. A decoupled Majo-rana mode is a strange entity which is the subject of an intense search world wide in a variety of contexts. The four graduate students who conducted the theoretical and experimental research have all graduated. Henok Mebrahtu is now with Intel Corporation, Ivan Borzenets is a postdoctoral fellow at the Tokyo University, Dong Liu is a postdoctoral fellow at the Michigan State University, and Huaixiu Zheng will start an industrial career this fall at CGG.

Figure 3: Shape of the resonance peak: conductance vs. gate voltage measured at several temperatures in the case of symmetric coupling of the resonant level to the two leads. The peak conductance grows with decreasing temperature, while the peak width drops. This situation corresponds to the quantum phase transition: in the limit of zero temperature, the conductance is zero everywhere except for the singular point at the center of the peak, where it reaches e2/h (perfect transparency).

Figure 3: Shape of the resonance peak: conductance vs. gate voltage measured at several temperatures in the case of symmetric coupling of the resonant level to the two leads. The peak conductance grows with decreasing temperature, while the peak width drops. This situation corresponds to the quantum phase transition: in the limit of zero temperature, the conductance is zero everywhere except for the singular point at the center of the peak, where it reaches e2/h (perfect transparency).

continued from page 17

Figure 1: Schematic of the resonant level formed between two tunneling barriers inside the nanotube. It is coupled to two leads – the source and the drain. The tunneling electron excites the bosonic modes in the leads (wavy lines). Side gates (Figure 2) allow us to control the relative transparency of the two barriers.


Source

SG

SG

Gate

Drain

Nanotube



Faculty Research

Late-stage red giant stars produce energy in their interiors via helium burning. The outcome of helium burning in red giant stars is the formation of the two elements: carbon and oxygen. The ratio of carbon to oxygen at the end of helium burning has been identified as one of the key open questions in Nuclear Astrophysics. Helium burning proceeds through the 3α (three He nuclei) process to produce carbon, which eventually burns to oxygen via the 12C(α,γ)16O reaction. For stars in the 10 to 25 solar mass region, the 12C(α,γ)16O reaction ultimately determines the mass of the iron core. The uncertainty in the rate of this reaction is still large enough to limit our understanding of the latter stages of stellar evolution. A higher rate of carbon burning would result in over-production of heavy-mass nuclei, such as nickel and iron in the core of the stars, and would tilt the balance towards supernova explosions leading to the production of black holes. Likewise, an oxygen deficient star would most likely not reach its fate as a black hole but instead become a neutron star. Hence, the two elements which are critical for our existence also determine the life of these red-giant stars. An excited state in 12C, named the Hoyle State after Fred Hoyle who predicted its existence, plays a central role in stellar helium burning by enhancing the production of 12C in the Universe- allowing for life as we know it. It is the first and quite possibly still the best example of an application of the anthropic principle in physics. Soon after the discovery of this excited state in 12C, predictions of the rotational band structure of the Hoyle state led to a fifty year search for an excited state built upon the Hoyle state. An excited state having the properties of the Hoyle State excitation was unambiguously identified at the High Intensity Gamma-Ray Source (HIGS) of the Triangle Universities Nuclear Laboratory (TUNL) and was reported recently in a letter [Physical Review Letters, 110, 152502 (2013)]. This work was a collaborative effort which includes TUNL, the University of Connecticut, Yale University, Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt, Germany, and the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel. This discovery was made possible by the use of a state-of-the-art detector system called the Optical Time Projection Chamber (OTPC) at HIGS. The OTPC is also being utilized for the measurement of the 12C(α,γ)16O reaction by studing the inverse reaction 16O(γ,α)12C. In this process, a gamma ray breaks apart the 16O nucleus into helium and carbon fragments. The OTPC measures the energy and the angular distribution of these fragments leading to a complete kinematic description of this reaction. The probability or cross section of this reaction is extremely small, 10-43 m2 (or a femtobarn) in the energy region of interest for nuclear astrophysics. With the world’s highest intensity polarized gamma ray source, HIGS, it would take us few hundred hours to carry out this measurement at low enough energies to be able to extrapolate to the astrophysical energy. Initial studies have begun and an example of a typical event in which 16O breaks into the helium and 12C fragments is shown in the Figure 1 through the eyes of the OTPC. These studies will conclude in the next three years.

Life and Death of Stars— by Mohammad W. Ahmed & Henry R. Weller

Figure 1. A gamma ray of 9.5 million electron-volts (MeV), not seen in the image, breaks apart an Oxygen nucleus into a helium (α) fragment and a 12C fragment. A fast, high resolution, and image intensified camera creates this image. Other components of the OTPC gather information on the energy of these fragments and angles with which these are ejected to paint a complete picture of this reaction.


Duke PHYSICS

Duke at CERN with President Brodhead

— by Al Goshaw

The High Energy Physics (HEP) group, in collaboration with the Duke Alumni Office, hosted an all-day event at the international laboratory CERN on July 1, 2013. The activities were centered around a visit by President Richard Brodhead and his staff as part of European tours of Duke programs in Geneva, London and Berlin. CERN was chosen as the location in Geneva in order to highlight the Duke HEP group’s par-ticipation in elementary particle research with the ATLAS experiment. This also happened be the one-year anniversary of the announcement at CERN by the ATLAS and CMS experiments of the discovery of the particle that has now been identified as the Higgs Boson. The day’s activities included underground tours of the ATLAS detector and CERN science demonstrations, followed by a reception and program in the CERN Council Chamber. The event planned for 50 people eventually attracted about 150 Duke participants, with an overflow crowd for the evening program which featured recent Duke University news and a “conversation with the President” about el-ementary particle physics. The Duke HEP group1 fielded the questions from President Brodhead and the audience, ranging over the past 50 years of HEP theory and experiment, and in particular discussed the meaning and significance of the discovery of the Higgs boson. The lively conversations extended into the evening and established many new contacts between members of the Physics Department and the broader Duke community. David Charlton, ATLAS Spokesperson, and Steve Myers, Director of Accelerators and Technology at CERN, helped make this event a success. The day’s activities were particularly enriched by the attendance of alumni from all over Europe and the participation of faculty and students from three Duke summer programs: Duke in Geneva Global-ization, the Duke Program on Global Policy Governance and Duke-Ge-neva Institute in Transitional Law. This event was the largest gathering ever of Duke people in Switzerland. The enthusiasm of the response from faculty, alumni and students encourages us to consider offering a similar program at CERN next summer.

1At CERN the HEP people hosting this event were faculty members Ayana Arce, and Al Goshaw, senior physicists Andrea Bocci, Enrique Kajomovitz and Shu Li, and students Lei Li, Mia Liu, Caroline Steiblin and Chen Zhou

President Brodhead and Prof. Al Goshaw at the event of “Conversation with the President”

Photo by Jene Goshaw


News

Tom Katsouleas, Dean of the Pratt School of Engineering, is in con-stant motion as he teaches a Tuesday afternoon recitation section for Physics 151. One minute he’s scribbling equations and drawing graphs on the blackboard; the next he’s singing an old Crosby, Stills and Nash song to help students remember that long waves travel faster than short ones. Every 15 minutes or so, he assigns a practice problem and strides out among the tables to interact with students one-on-one. Even though this is the last meeting before the final exam, the mood in the room is one of easygoing collaboration. The students bring up topics for review, suggest different approaches to prob-lems, point out the origin of a sign error, and laugh when Katsouleas makes an unintended pun on the word “wavelength.” Near the end of the recitation, he hands out the midterm and says how proud he is of the students: the average in this recitation section was 3 points higher than the overall class average. Last fall, when students signed up for the Tuesday afternoon recitation, they didn’t know who would be teaching them. Michaela Walker, a first-year engineering student from Boston, says, “On the first day of physics lecture, Dr. Behringer said who the recitation profs were, and we looked at each other and were like, ‘Wait. Dean K? Really? ’” At first, Walker was a little worried that a dean might not be the best professor, but that notion was quickly dispelled. “I feel really lucky to be in this recitation. Dean K. really does care about teach-ing. He really likes it when we have ‘ah ha’ moments,” she says. “And it’s really cool to be able to go to his office for office hours and know he has time for first-year undergraduates.” Katsouleas, who has a PhD in physics and a secondary ap-pointment in the physics department, answered the call when the physics department asked for volunteers to teach recitation sections for Physics 151, which is Introductory Mechanics for engineers and other non-physics science majors. Katsouleas hadn’t taught an undergraduate class in a couple

of years and was anxious to get back in the classroom. “I do like to teach and I feel like it’s so central to the mission of the university that if I don’t do it some, I feel out of touch with the main activity of campus,” he says. Courses in the engineering school were covered, so he decided to sign up for a physics recitation section. “It’s worked out perfectly for me because it’s reminding me how much I love physics and how much fun it is to teach physics,” he says. “At the same time it’s given me an opportunity to meet a lot of freshmen engineering students, which is something that’s also important to me. I really enjoy getting to know them and saying hi on campus.” Michael Sutton, a first-year engineering student from near Pittsburgh, says he “thoroughly enjoyed” the recitation and appreci-ates Katsouleas’s engineering perspective. “Dean K makes sure we understand that engineering is really involved in what we’re doing,” he says. Indeed, when the class was doing estimation problems (Fermi problems), Katsouleas asked his students how they would respond to actual requests that he’s received from colleagues or board members to evaluate the feasibility of an idea. “These are the kinds of problems engineers get paid to solve,” he says. Although it’s certainly unusual to find a dean teaching a recita-tion section, Katsouleas says he would do it again. The less-struc-tured time allowed him to respond to the needs and interests of the students in a way that’s not easy to do in a large lecture class. “We didn’t always do what I thought we would do in that two-hour period, and the same is not true when you are teaching a formal lecture,” he says. “It was two hours full of learning moments.” Perhaps more importantly, the less-structured time made it easy to interact with the students and get to know them. “Even be-fore I came to Duke—after I’d been hired but before I came here—faculty said, ‘Wait ‘til you get into the classroom—you’re going to love our students,’” Katsouleas says. “There really is something special about Duke students.”

Dean Katsouleas Teaches Mechanics Recitation Section


Dean Katsouleas works with PHY 151 student Craig Vincent.

Photo by Cristin Paul


Duke PHYSICS

Banner headlines—in one-inch tall type—shouted “Duke to Get Nuclear Lab” and “$2.5 Million Nuclear Lab to be Established at Duke.” The date was November 23, 1965, and the occasion was the funding of the Triangle University Nuclear Laboratory (TUNL) by the federal Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). The news was so big that an editorial cartoon in the Durham Morning Herald showed two farm-ers discussing the equipment that would be in the new lab. Duke professor Henry Newson had succeeded—on his third try—in securing funding for a 15-MeV tandem Van de Graaff ac-celerator and a 15-MeV cyclotron. In 1963 and 1964, Newson had submitted similar proposals to AEC from Duke alone, neither of which were funded. What made the third time the charm? Eugen Merzbacher, profes-sor emeritus at UNC, says, “Henry had this brilliant idea to combine the three universities.” Merzbacher helped write the proposal, as did Worth Seagondollar, who was chair of the physics department at N.C. State. Each university would supply faculty members and gradu-ate students to conduct research using the equipment. Henry Newson’s brilliant idea is still fostering collaborations today among faculty and students from Duke, North Carolina State University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill—and now North Carolina Central University as well. Newson’s other creative twist was the idea of using the cyclotron to inject a beam into the Van de Graaff to cost-effectively double the beam energy. Scientists at TUNL called the combination the cyclo-graaff. Shortly after the proposal was funded, Newson came up with the idea of naming the lab the Triangle Universities Nuclear Laboratory, or TUNL, building on the name recognition of the newly minted Research Triangle Park. Construction of the cyclo-graaff lab, located behind the Physics building on West Campus, was partly supported by a grant from the North Carolina Board of Science and Technology. Newson served as director of TUNL from 1968 until his death in 1978. Russell Roberson, professor emeritus and a former TUNL direc-tor, arrived at Duke in 1963. At the time, the Duke Physics depart-ment had two small Van de Graaff accelerators—one rated at an energy of 4 MeV and another rated at 3 MeV—but Newson wanted a bigger accelerator for bigger experiments. Before coming to Duke in 1948, Newson had done stints at Oak Ridge, Hanford, and Los Alamos National Labs, and had worked on the Manhattan Project. “Because of his work on the Manhattan Project, Newson understood how many people could effectively use a big facility like the tandem Van de Graaff,” Roberson says. “He knew Duke couldn’t provide that many people. But by dividing it up among the three universities, we were able to establish a very significant faculty pres-ence with a large number of graduate students and make it one of the top accelerator and nuclear facilities in the country.”

For many years, TUNL was funded solely by AEC, which later became the Department of Energy. Today, DOE’s Office of Nuclear Physics is still the major funder, but there is support from other agencies as well, including the National Nuclear Security Administra-tion, the National Science Foundation, and the Domestic Nuclear Detection Office of the Department of Homeland Security. Originally, the focus of TUNL was nuclear structure. Newson used a high-resolution neutron beam to study the nucleus. Later, Duke professor Edward Bilpuch modified the equipment to produce a proton beam, which he and colleagues used in a series of well known experiments to study isobaric analogue states of the nucleus with ultrafine energy resolution. Over the years, TUNL has broadened its focus. The current director, Duke professor Calvin Howell, says TUNL’s evolution often followed the interests and technical innovations of faculty members. For example, when UNC professor Tom Clegg built a polarized ion beam at TUNL in 1986, other faculty members and students caught his enthusiasm and used it for their own experiments. “That’s been the history of TUNL—new people come in with new ideas and new technology and techniques, and they don’t just hoard those things for themselves,” Howell says. “The collaboration and the synergy between faculty members works beautifully. We don’t have institutional boundaries.” Howell did his graduate work as a Duke student at TUNL in the 1980s. Today, TUNL physicists are pushing scientific frontiers in several areas, including studying strong interaction physics to bet-ter understand the structure of nuclei and nucleons (protons and neutrons); modeling nuclear reactions in stars; and delving into the fundamental nature of neutrinos to discover whether these charge-

Looking Back at the First 50 Years of TUNL— by Mary-Russell Roberson

This cartoon about the funding of TUNL appeared in the November 28, 1965, Durham Morning Herald. - Courtesy of The Herald-Sun


less particles serve as their own anti-particles and how they may have played a role in the processes that generated the visible matter in the universe. Parts of the Van de Graaff that arrived in 1966 are still being used by TUNL physicists, but newer machines have come online as well. One of these is the free electron laser known as the HIGS (high intensity gamma-ray source), housed in a separate building behind the original TUNL building. HIGS is now producing the world’s most intense polarized gamma-ray beams. As TUNL approaches its 50th anniversary, both Roberson and Howell say that one of the most important contributions of TUNL has been its role in educating the next generation of scientists. Roberson says, “We’ve continued to be one of the more significant laboratories in the country in terms of producing students. Many of our graduate students go in industry and the national labs and universities. At one time, there were 35 graduates from TUNL work-ing at Los Alamos National Lab, helping provide a significant national defense to the country.” Howell says, “The record speaks for itself in the outstanding

scientists we have produced at the PhD level. In the last 15 years, we’ve put considerable effort into creating opportunities for under-graduates.” The NSF-funded Research Experience for Undergradu-ates (REU) program supports 10-12 undergraduates from around the country each summer to work and learn at TUNL. Last year, TUNL began collaborating with Duke’s high-energy program to allow some of the REU students to spend the summer at the Large Hadron Col-lider at CERN in Switzerland. There are other examples of universities that tried to create shared physics laboratories but were not able to work together as a team to make it happen, according to Steve Shafroth, who came to UNC and TUNL in 1967. Shafroth says, “TUNL is such a unique thing, with the three universities collaborating like that and staying friends.” He adds with a laugh, “You know, with the basketball rivalry and all so strong.” Merzbacher agrees, saying, “TUNL is the only tripartite lab in the country. There’s nothing else like it.” Note: We are sad to report that Eugen Merzbacher died on June 6, 2013.

On November 23, 1965 and November 24, 1965, the Durham Sun and Durham Herald announced the funding of the consortium that would become TUNL.

Looking Back continued from page 21


Prof. Berndt Mueller will be the new Associate Lab Director for Nuclear & Particle Physics at the Brookhaven National Laboratory from January 2013 to December 2015. During this period, he will hold a joint appointment between Duke and BNL. Below is the news release from BNL. An official news release from BNL is online here: http://tinyurl.com/k9mkvhp

Associate Lab Director for Nuclear & Particle Physics by Sam Aronson, Lab Director I am pleased to announce the appointment of physicist Berndt Mueller as the new Associate Laboratory Director (ALD) for Nuclear & Particle Physics (NPP), effective January 1, 2013. Berndt brings world-class experience as both a scientist and program manager to this key leadership position at Brookhaven Lab. Berndt replaces Steve Vigdor, who retires on December 31 after spending five years as ALD advancing the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) research program, guiding the Lab’s participation in the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), and further developing programs in cosmology, astrophysics, and neutrino research. The Laboratory owes Steve a debt of gratitude for his deft and visionary leadership of these large and complex projects and programs which are so important to our strategy. Berndt, an active scientist with more than 300 peer-reviewed publications and 9,000 citations, currently serves as James B. Duke Professor and Director of the Center for Theoretical and Mathematical Sciences at Duke University, a position he assumed in 2008. He will continue his work at Duke for the remainder of the current academic year, splitting his time there and at BNL for the next five months. During that time, BNL’s David Lissauer will act as interim ALD to share responsibilities and bring Berndt up to speed on existing operations and new initiatives at the Lab. Berndt has a long association with BNL, going back many years, and recently co-authored a paper for “Science” reviewing the scientific achievements of RHIC and outlining the complementary physics opportunities for the next decade of the LHC and RHIC experiments. He has also served on many physics review panels for both the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation. Berndt has held several leadership positions at Duke, including Chair of the Department of Physics, Principal Investigator for grants that expanded and supported research at the Duke Free Electron Laser Laboratory, and Divisional Dean of the Natural Sciences. He received his Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics from Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, and completed his postdoctoral studies at Yale University and the University of Washington. He currently serves as Chair-Elect of the Division of Nuclear Physics of the American Physical Society, and in this role he collaborated with Steve Vigdor on establishing a white paper writing group for the subfield of hot QCD matter. As a leading member of the nuclear physics commu-nity, Berndt will play a crucial role in the coming years at BNL. Please join me in warmly welcoming Berndt to the Laboratory.

Mueller a New Associate Lab Director at BNL

While many in the Physics department were taking a well-earned respite from studying, teaching, and research during Fall Break, twelve intrepid graduate students traveled to Oak Ridge, Tennessee for a visit to the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL).Together with 17 students from the Chemistry and ECE departments, they took an extensive tour of the laboratory’s facilities and met with its staff, who introduced them to the wide range of research opportu-nities that ORNL has to offer. The students were greeted with breakfast by Dr. Ian Anderson, director of ORNL Graduate and University Partnerships, who introduced them to the lab’s goals for student involvement in its scientific program. David Dean, Director of the Physics Division, gave an overview of Oak Ridge’s many areas of active physics research. Georgia Tourassi, who conducted her graduate work at Duke and is now Director of Oak Ridge’s Biomedical Science and Engineering Center, presented the work that is being done at the lab in the biomedical sciences. There was also an opportunity for the visiting students to speak with former Duke graduate students Matthew Blackston and Jerry Parks, both of whom are now researchers at ORNL, about the transi-tion from the University to the national lab. Laboratory staff members and users then gave the visitors guided tours of Oak Ridge’s considerable research facilities, includ-ing its computing center, the Spallation Neutron Source, the High Temperature Materials Laboratory, the High Flux Isotope Reactor, and the Center for Nanophase Materials Science.

The students also toured the historic Graphite Pile Reactor, the first nuclear reactor designed for continuous use and only the second ever built (after Fermi’s Chicago Pile-1). For the graduate students, it was quite an eye-opening trip, especially for those who had never considered conducting research at a national lab. Several commented on the impressive breadth of research programs at Oak Ridge. “I learned a lot by getting to meet so many people with such diverse scientific backgrounds,” said Kristen Collar, a second year graduate student. Many also agreed that one of the highlights of the trip was speak-ing to Duke alumni who had settled into staff positions at Oak Ridge. Jon Mueller (entered ’09) said, “I especially enjoyed interacting with former Duke graduate students who went on to work at ORNL.”Oak Ridge and Duke recently penned an agreement on Cooperation in Graduate Research and Education. Program participants will receive mentoring from the laboratory staff, access to Oak Ridge’s facilities, and fellowship opportunities through ORNL.

Graduate Students Tour Oak Ridge National Lab —by Chris Pollard

Berndt MuellerCourtesy: Brookhaven National Laboratory

Photo by Lynn Kaack


“Life here is really busy, but colorful,” says Xiaqing Li, one of five physics majors from Shandong University in China who spent the 2012-2013 academic year at Duke. The students lived on West Campus and took physics classes, electives, and did independent study research. While the five students had five different experiences, they all agree they enjoyed choosing their own classes and schedules, being immersed in a foreign culture, and experiencing new ways of learning. “I think it’s good to study abroad and have a different experi-ence,” says Xiaomeng Jia. “I learned a different culture, a different kind of lifestyle, and a different way of thinking. And I introduced my way of thinking to my friends as well. It’s the best experience in my life up to now.” This was the first year that Shandong students studied at Duke; in the fall three more students from Shandong will follow in their footsteps. In addition, two physics students from Wuhan University will spend fall term here. Wuhan University is the partner university for Duke Kunshan University (DKU), Duke’s campus in China. “As a university, we have a strategy for making new connections to China,” says Prof. Robert Calderbank, dean of natural sciences and professor of computer science, math, and electrical and computer engineering. “Part of that strategy is making good connections with places like Shandong University that are top-tier Chinese universities. We’re really excited about this opportunity to bring some of their very best students to Duke.” The idea originated at the 2011 U.S-China Hadron Workshop in China when Prof. Haiyan Gao was approached by a physics profes-sor from Shandong’s incredibly selective Taishan honors college. “He said they really wanted to provide extraordinary opportunities to their students and they really wanted to have better connections with pres-tigious [foreign] universities,” Gao says. “He said, ‘Is this something you can help with?’” Gao, who is on the China Faculty Council, talked to Calderbank and several other deans about the idea of having Shandong physics students spend a year at Duke, and was met with enthusiastic sup-port. Prof. Lee Baker, dean of academic affairs and associate vice provost for undergraduate education says, “We wanted to support the relationship with that university, and support our faculty members like Haiyan Gao, and bring really smart students in. It all lined up.” Later that fall, Calderbank visited Shandong’s honors college and gave a talk to students. “I talked for about 45 minutes and for the next 45 minutes these students just peppered me with questions

in perfect English,” he says. “I was just blown away. I was very, very impressed.” Turning the idea into reality was, as Gao says, a “complicated interaction” involving everything from interviewing and selecting the students to spelling out financial agreements. Gao says key sup-port during the planning phase came from Steve Nowicki , dean and vice provost of undergraduate education. “In the end, I was just glad everything worked,” she says. “The provost’s office was very support-ive.” The students are funded by Shandong University, Duke, and the Chinese government. While at Duke, the Shandong students took three physics classes a semester including an independent study with a professor in an area of their interest. Although physics is physics no matter the language, the students found there’s more than one way to teach it and learn it. For one thing, the Chinese students say that at Duke they spent less time in class but more time on homework compared to Shandong University. And homework here often required creative problem-solving that led to insights not necessarily presented by the professor in lecture. Another difference is how students do their homework. “Students here have the spirit of studying together and of course our professors encourage that,” Jia says. “Sometimes you benefit even more from your classmates because they are all a similar level as you and may have a breakthrough for how to describe it to you. Actually the efficiency is higher if you study in a group. . . so long as you don’t talk about movies!” The students also say that asking questions in class or seeking help from professors outside of class is a bigger part of the learning process here than in China. Each student also took a couple of non-physics classes, explor-ing subjects as varied as Latin, psychology, logic, music appreciation, tennis, and swimming. Yuchen Zhao says he “accidentally” took a modern dance class taught by Prof. Barbara Dickinson, which ended up being one of his favorite experiences. At first he was flummoxed by theoretical discussions about the meaning and experience of dance, but he enjoyed learning new dance styles and working with the other students, many of whom were “excellent” dancers. For the final group project, Zhao worked with some of his classmates to choreograph an original four-minute dance. He says,“I didn’t know any dancing steps so I added martial arts, which I did in my home university.” Zhao found the group creative process thought-provoking: he says the dance developed layer by layer as they continually refined the whole thing,

Students from China’s Shandong University Spend a Year with Duke Physics

l-r: Xiaojun Yao, Xiaqing Li, Yajing Huang, Xiaomeng Jia and Yuchen Zhao


Photo by Cristin Paul


Edward George Bilpuch died on September 15, 2012, in Durham, North Carolina. He was the Henry W. Newson Professor Emeritus of physics at Duke University, and he served many years as the director of the Triangle Universities Nuclear Laboratory (TUNL). Bilpuch, a gifted experimentalist, used high-resolution spectroscopy to probe the structure of the nucleus. Bilpuch was born in 1927 in Connellsville, Pennsylvania, and after a stint in the Navy earned his undergradu-ate and graduate degrees in physics at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. He joined the faculty at Duke in 1962. In the 1960s, perhaps the most exciting topic in nuclear physics was the discovery of isobaric analogue states in the nucleus by John Fox and Donald Robson at Florida State University. In revealing this phenomenon, Fox and Robson were able to achieve an energy resolution of 2 keV in their measurements. While speaking at a symposium in honor of Bilpuch this November, Robson recalled: “We needed a truly high resolution. Ed wanted to use the high resolution system at Duke to shoot protons.” Henry Newson, the first director of TUNL, had developed a high-resolution neutron beam, and Bilpuch had the idea to adapt the system to use a pro-ton beam to study isobaric analogue states. In a seminal experiment, Bilpuch and his student George (Jay) Keyworth did just this, achieving an energy resolution of 0.25 keV—the best resolution achieved in a nuclear-structure experiment in the world. Their groundbreaking experiment established that within the analogue states observed by Fox and Robson there were many narrow compound nuclear states. “It was beautiful data,” Robson said. When this data was presented at a conference in Tallahassee in 1966, the British nuclear physicist Sir Denys Wilkinson, inventor of the analog-to-digital converter and recipient of the Royal Medal, summarized his reaction as follows: “In describing this Duke work, I would call it stupendously beautiful. I have never seen such an experiment before. It gave me an immediate sensual thrill.” Later, Bilpuch shifted his attention to the statistical behavior of the largest collection of proton resonances ever accumulated. Work by James Rainwater had strongly suggested that random matrix theory could be used to describe the experimental width and spacing distribu-tions. Bilpuch and colleagues proved this was the case by their successful description of the proton resonance data in a different mass region. Teamwork was an important theme in Bilpuch’s life. He attended UNC on a football scholarship, and played in three major bowl games—the Cotton, Sugar, and Orange Bowls. As a physicist, he promoted teamwork among scientists, among institutions, and among countries. He realized that although individual talents are important, much more can be accomplished through collaboration than by an individual. He helped establish TUNL, a cooperative nuclear laboratory at Duke run jointly by Duke, UNC, and NC State, and helped transform it from a regional lab into an internationally respected center for nuclear physics. He was deputy director of TUNL from 1966 to 1978, and director from 1978 to 1992. Throughout his career, Bilpuch fostered international collaborations. He maintained a friendship and working relationship with Walter Greiner, professor of physics at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University and founding director of the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies, who said that the multi-institutional model of TUNL was one of the inspirations for reaching out to institutions in Germany in establishing the GSI Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion Research in 1969. Bilpuch was also one of the first scientists at Duke to collaborate with physicists in China. Haiyan Gao, the current Henry W. Newson Professor of physics and department chair at Duke, said that as an undergraduate in China, she was familiar with TUNL. According to Bilpuch’s former students, he created an atmosphere of teamwork and possibility in the lab. John Browne, who earned his PhD at Duke in 1969 said, “Ed would encourage you to take chances. It was a can-do time. I think all of us took that attitude with us when we left.” Browne was the director at LANL before retiring. “I’ve had a great career,” he said. “And that would not have been possible without Ed’s support.” Keyworth, who earned his PhD at Duke in 1968 and worked with Bilpuch on the high-resolution spectroscopy experiment, said, “Ed and [his wife] Marilyn had no children, but an extended family of graduate students. I was Ed’s first graduate student. When I left Duke, I felt ready to take on the world.” Keyworth was the director of the Physics Division at LANL, and also served as President Ronald Reagan’s science advi-sor. “Ed made you feel that he believed in you,” he recalled. “What I learned from Ed was the sheer joy of discovery and exploratory research as well as the patience needed to get there.” Bilpuch understood deeply the connection between technology and scientific exploration, and he helped create an environment at TUNL that encouraged scientific creativity and technical innovation. His legacy will be his belief that if you can improve the technology, you can almost always make new contributions to physics.

Prof. Edward Bilpuch, Dead at 85

Edward Bilpuch

in contrast to a scientific project, which proceeds step by step with each step being dependent on the completion—and accuracy—of the previous one. “That’s the power of the liberal arts,” says Baker. “We want to make sure they take a class they couldn’t take back home, not just math and physics. We’re glad we empower these students to broaden and stretch their knowledge acquisition.” While all of the students excelled academically, the year wasn’t all work and no play. They visited nearby stores and restaurants, traveled to Washington and New York, and were invited home for Thanksgiving by Gao and other professors. They also got to know Duke students. “They are very independent, more independent than I imagined, but they are really sociable. They really fancy the parties,” Li says. Yajing Huang says, “When they have fun, they just focus on

having fun, not worry.” Two of the students returned to China after spring semester, while the other three will return home after continuing their research over the summer. One of them—Xiaojun Yao—will be returning to Duke Physics as a graduate student in the fall. With the first year a success, Gao is looking forward to welcom-ing more students from Shandong and Wuhan to Duke Physics in the fall. She’s also working to set up similar programs with two other Chinese universities: Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Nanjing University. And in the future, she hopes there will be opportunities for Duke students to study in China, as does Calderbank. He says, “There are more and more students showing up at Duke whose foreign lan-guage in high school was Mandarin. They spend time at Duke learning more Mandarin and they want to spend time in China.”

— by Calvin Howell and Gary Mitchell


Robert Richardson, 1996 Nobel Laureate in Physics, obtained his PhD degree in our Physics Department in 1965, and in 1997 was elected member of the Duke University Board of Trustees, where he served for ten years. When I arrived at Duke in the fall of 1959, I saw his application for admission to graduate studies in our Department. I was impressed, and corresponded with him, and still have the copy of the letter from the Physics Acting Chair, Harold Lewis, offering him a “Research Assistantship in Low Temperature Physics under the direction of Dr. Horst Meyer”. He accepted our invitation, and I was very fortunate to have him as a graduate student. After initial calorimetric research on a superconductor, he got involved with the measurement of NMR relaxation times in solid 3He. Here the purpose was to study the nuclear spin-spin interaction, which would give information on the nuclear ordering temperature to take place at temperatures well below 1 K. The arrival of Earle Hunt, a postdoctoral fellow with experi-ence in pulsed NMR, was crucial in the success of this program. In this research we competed with a group at Oxford University, and we were able to obtain significant results leading to several publications. Bob received his PhD degree in 1965. Also, in 1963, he was married to Betty McCarthy, the last gradu-ate student of Prof. Hertha Sponer in our Department. In fact, Bob designed the cryostat where Betty made her optical measurements at liquid nitrogen temperatures. Their two daughters, Jennifer and Pamela, were born in Durham. The first picture shows Bob, Betty and Jennifer at the swimming pool of their residence in Durham in 1965.

In spring 1966, I wrote a letter to my colleague Donald Holcomb at Cornell University, suggesting Bob for the available position of

postdoctoral associate, giving him high praises. Bob left Duke in early fall of 1966 for Cornell, and, in collaboration with a graduate student, Douglas D. Osheroff, and a faculty member, David M. Lee, he contin-ued the research on 3He. Using a recently proposed technique, the “Pomeranchuk effect”, they cooled a mixture of solid and liquid 3He into the millidegree range. The rest is history: the trio of researchers discovered by chance the superfluidity in liquid 3He, which had been the object of many theoretical predictions and speculations. Over the next twenty years, this momentous discovery gave a tremendous boost to research, both theoretical and experimental, in superfluid 3He and well beyond, and led to the discovery of several superfluid phases of 3He. In 1973, with a further improved low temperature technology, Bob and his graduate student, William Halperin, discov-ered the long hoped-for nuclear ordering transition in solid 3He. There followed about twenty years of very productive research by Bob at Cornell with his graduate students and also while on sabbatical in Helsinki, Finland. Furthermore he pioneered the design and construc-tion of the Cornell University “millidegree laboratory” where ultra-low temperature experiments were to be performed. His honors and in the scientific community were numerous: in 1976 he, Lee and Osheroff were awarded the Simon Prize of the British Physical Society, and in 1981 the Oliver Buckley Prize; in1986 he was elected Member of the National Academy of Sciences, in 1993 Foreign Member of the Finnish Academy of Science and letters, in 1996 he received the Nobel Prize, shared with Lee and Osheroff. He was a leading member of a large number of domestic and international scientific organizations, for instance within the American Physical Society. He served as Vice Provost for Research at Cornell University from 1998 until 2007, and in 2007 he began a two-year term as senior advisor to the president and provost at Cornell. Furthermore he was a co-author of a very popular book “Experimental Techniques in Condensed Matter Physics” and of “College Physics”, co-authored with his wife Betty Richardson and Alan Giambattista, and he helped in the production of instructional videos. Richardson was also very concerned about issues of national and international importance: in 2005 he was co-author of a National Academy of Sciences report: “Rising above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future”. He also wrote articles about the conservation of helium gas, a pre-cious natural resource, an issue he felt strongly about. In 2012, Richardson received an honorary degree from Duke University, and the official picture taken before the ceremony shows him (second from left) together with Duke President Broadhead, Trustee member David Rubenstein (on the right) , who had nominated

Robert C. Richardson (June 26, 1937 - February 19, 2013)— by Horst Meyer


him for the honor, and myself as the faculty member to escort him. As a person, Richardson was a very congenial one, lighthearted, and with a great sense of humor. At Duke he made long-lasting friend-ships with several graduate students of my Low Temperature Physics group and beyond. I am grateful for the friendship with him ever since his arrival at Duke, which we maintained through correspondence after he left for Cornell, and by mutual visits and encounters at scien-tific meetings. In this way I was kept informed of the exciting events leading to the discovery of 3He superfluidity, and I treasure these letters which I have carefully kept. My wife Ruth Mary and I remember with pleasure the visits of the Richardsons to our home, before and after Bob was appointed to the Duke Board of Trustees. The Richardsons were avid travelers, with frequent trips to

interesting and exotic destinations, particularly after the award of the Nobel Prize. Travels continued even after Bob’s stroke a few years ago, which limited his speaking ability and where he was immensely helped and supported by his wife Betty. After 2007, together with Betty, he still came to Duke University Board meetings as an Emeritus Board member. He continued to make travel plans under increasing health issues, and was able to travel thanks to Betty.Bob’s strong loyalty to Duke extended to enthusiastic support of the Duke basketball team, and he hardly ever missed watching games where Duke was playing. This summer there will be at Duke a reunion of old graduate stu-dent friends from the sixties, who remained in touch all these years. The Richardsons planned to be there. Betty will attend and Bob will be with them in spirit.

Robert C. Richardson continued from page 26

Department of Physics

Duke University

Box 90305

Durham, NC 27708-0305

StandardUS Postage

PAIDDurham, NC

Permit No. 60

Cover banner image: “Visualizing Meteoric Impact” Photo by Abe Clark and Bob Behringer. This work was supported by DTRA.

David Rosin views a Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) development board. Rosin is a visiting scholar and member of Daniel Gauthier’s Laboratory in Nonlinear Optics, Quantum Optics, and Nonlinear Dynamics of Physical Systems. Photo by Joel Greenberg.

Duke PHYSICS · Many students received fellowships and awards this year. Graduate student Kristine...

Documents

Transcript of Duke PHYSICS · Many students received fellowships and awards this year. Graduate student Kristine...