The CTEQ collaboration recently elected Frank Petriello as its co-spokesperson. CTEQ is an international community of physicists devoted to a broad program of research and education in high-energy physics centered on Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD).
For more information on the CTEQ collaboration and its activities, please read more here
Graduate student Hao Wu's image (above) of the spectrum of Majorana fermions on the surface of 3He-B was featured via Kaleidoscope for the front page of the website of Physical Review B.
Read his recent paper with Prof. Jim Sauls here.
As of this year, Bob Tilden has been with Northwestern for 40 years! He is currently a computer specialist with our particle physics group. We thank Bob for everything he has done and continues to do for the department.
Professors Adilson Motter and Frank Petriello have been elected as APS Fellows. Prof. Motter's citation is, "For his contributions to the foundations of chaos and the study of nonlinear dynamics in complex networks, including the discovery of synthetic rescues and pioneering work on network synchronization phenomena, cascading failures, and the control of nonlinear network dynamics."
Prof. Petriello's citation is, "For pioneering new methods in the application of perturbative quantum chromodynamics to high-energy processes, and for computing high precision, fully exclusive production cross sections for electroweak vector bosons and Higgs bosons at hadron colliders."
The DZero collaboration, which includes Prof. Heidi Schellman and Alumnus Sahal Yacoob, has released new details on their method of measuring the mass of the W Boson.
Read more at Fermilab Today.
Physics and Astronomy Professors Novak, Rivers, and Smutko have been included in the Associated Student Government's 2012-2013 Faculty Honor Roll.
See the full honor roll here.
Prof. Michael Smutko addressed students on the effects of laptop use in class, which he has been researching at Northwestern since 2009. Smutko found that using technology to multitask in the classroom leads to a marked decrease in performance. His advice to students: “It doesn’t affect me. But it affects you.”
Read more at the Daily Northwestern.
Work by Joe Sklenar, Seongjae Lee, and Prof. John Ketterson was recently featured on the cover of Physics Review Letters (Volume 111, Number 7). The team has recently studied the ferromagnetic resonant properties of a two-dimensional artificial quasicrystal with collaborators at the University of Kentucky Lexington as pictured here. The tiles used are Penrose P2 kites and darts that have boundaries defined by ferromagnetic permalloy bars of width 135 nm and lengths 500, and 810 nm.
Read the full article here.
Ongoing work on the Higgs Boson by Profs. Mayda Velasco, Prof. Kristian Hahn and their collaborators was featured recently in Fermilab Today.
Read the full story here.
Chaos welcomes its newest editor, Professor Adilson Motter. Chaos is an interdisciplinary journal published by the American Institute of Physics.
Professor Motter currently holds the Harold H. and Virginia Anderson Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Northwestern University. His research includes theoretical work on networks as well as network modeling and applications.
Fifty years ago Edward Lorenz revealed deterministic predictability to be an illusion and gave birth to a field that still thrives. In an invited piece featured as the cover article of Physics Today, Prof. Adilson Motter and his colleague Prof. Campbell from Boston University discuss developments that led to the discovery of chaos and implications of this fascinating phenomenon to a broad range of areas.
Read the original article here.
Adilson E. Motter has received the 2013 Erdős–Rényi Prize in Network Science. Motter is being honored for his outstanding work in complex networks; the citation notes “his groundbreaking contributions to the study of synchronization phenomena and the control of cascading failures in complex networks.” The prize is given each year by the Network Science Society to one researcher in the broad field of network science under the age of 40. It consists of a cash award, a plaque and an honor lecture at the International Conference on Network Science (NetSci2013). The award ceremony took place on June 7 at the Royal Library in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Motter will donate $3,000 from his award to Northwestern undergraduate students through activities that can promote the most outstanding students in the physics and astronomy program.
Read more at the Northwestern Newscenter.
The department celebrated the award of the Nobel Prize to the theorists who originally proposed the existence of the Higgs Boson at an event hosted by Prof. Mayda Velasco. Velasco's research, along with the work of fellow Northwestern physicists Michael Schmitt and Kristian Hahn, contributed to the discovery of the Higgs Boson by the LHC last July.
Read more here.
Nonlinearity is a hallmark of complex systems, but has generally been regarded as an obstacle to controlling their behavior. In a new paper published in Nature Communications, Sean Cornelius shows how nonlinear dynamics can be harnessed to control a network and drive it to desired states. The new approach can be used to identify control interventions in a range of large complex networks, from cells to power grids. Cornelius is a graduate student working with Prof. Motter.
Read More at the Northwestern Newscenter, or read the original publication here.
Prof. Joan Marler began her faculty appointment at Clemson University this fall. Marler was a postdoctoral fellow in Prof. Brian Odom's lab from 2009 to 2012, and returned as a visiting scholar through 2013. At Clemson, she will begin a new experimental project with trapped ultracold ions.
Read more about Marler's work at her website.
New results were released in May of 2013 from the MINERvA collaboration, which includes postdoc Laura Fields and graduate student Cheryl Patrick. MINERvA observes neutrino-nucleus interactions in order to better understand the behavior of protons and neutrons in the nucleus. Both Fields and Patrick work with Prof. Heidi Schellman.
Read more at Fermilab Today.
The crystallization of molecules with polar and hydrophobic groups, such as ionic amphiphiles and proteins, is of paramount importance in biology and biotechnology. Research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by a Northwestern University collaboration demonstrated how to combine X-ray scattering and theoretical to study how crystalline order within membranes formed by coassembled cationic and anionic amphiphiles can be controlled by varying pH and molecular tail length. Their work suggests how to design bilayer membranes with specific crystalline arrangements at ambient temperature and physiologically relevant pH environments by suitable choices of molecular headgroups and tails. Changes in crystallinity are likely to affect molecular diffusion rates across membranes and may enable control over the encapsulation and release of molecules within the membrane. Moreover, pH-induced crystalline transformations are likely used by organisms to control metabolic flow in harsh environments.
Citation:
“Crystalline polymorphism induced by charge regulation in ionic membranes”, Cheuk-Yui Leung, Liam C. Palmer, Sumit Kewalramani, Bao Fu Qiao, Samuel I. Stupp, Monica Olvera de la Cruz, and Michael J. Bedzyk, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, (2013).
Read more here.
In May of 2013, 20 middle-school students visited Northwestern as part of the after-school Science Club run by Science in Society. They joined Prof. Jens Koch and a group of our graduate students to learn about extremely low temperatures in a "physics adventure."
Graduate student Bill Gannon told Science in Society that, “I think the thing that we hope the kids will get out of the trip is that science is not just your teacher, who you may or may not like very much, writing on the blackboard. Science is something that’s happening all the time and it’s fun and it’s not just something that’s abstract.”
Read the full story from Science in Society, or visit their facebook page for more pictures.
Fifty years ago Edward Lorenz revealed deterministic predictability to be an illusion and gave birth to a field that still thrives. In an invited piece featured as the cover article of Physics Today, Prof. Adilson Motter and his colleague Prof. Campbell from Boston University discuss developments that led to the discovery of chaos and implications of this fascinating phenomenon to a broad range of areas.
The AAAS is an international non-profit organization whose mission is to "advance science, engineering, and innovation throughout the world for the benefit of all people."
See the full list of 2012 fellows here.
Prof. Farhad Zadeh and his colleagues have discovered evidence of star formation close the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy. Astronomers have doubted whether it was possible for stars to form so close to a black hole. But as Prof. Zadeh told the Northwestern Newscenter, "what we seem to have found are patches of dust and gas that have become so dense that they are able to overcome their inhospitable surroundings."
Read the full story from the Northwestern News Center here.
Or, read more coverage of Prof. Zadeh's work at astronomy.com, upi.com, skyandtelescope.com, or discovery.com.
Sara A. Solla, Professor of Physiology and Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Northwestern University, has been invited to participate in a new national panel on the `Physical and Mathematical Principles of Brain Structure and Function'. This is of the first steps in the implementation of the BRAIN (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) Initiative announced by President Obama on April 2, 2013.
Professor Solla, who represents Northwestern University, is a theoretical physicist working in computational and theoretical neuroscience. Her research focuses on constructing mathematical models to understand how networks of neurons acquire, store, and process information. Current projects include the decoding of neural signal from primary motor cortex for the guidance of prosthetic limbs, and the encoding of sensory signals by neurons at the base of rats' whiskers.
Prof. Eric Dahl is part of a group of physicists that has just launched an unusual new experiment in an attempt to be the first to directly confirm the existence of dark matter.
He spoke with the Northwestern Newscenter recently about his research. Read the full article here.
In May of 2013, 20 middle-school students visited Northwestern as part of the after-school Science Club run by Science in Society. They joined Prof. Jens Koch and a group of our graduate students to learn about extremely low temperatures in a "physics adventure."
Graduate student Bill Gannon told Science in Society that, “I think the thing that we hope the kids will get out of the trip is that science is not just your teacher, who you may or may not like very much, writing on the blackboard. Science is something that’s happening all the time and it’s fun and it’s not just something that’s abstract.”
Read the full story from Science in Society, or visit their facebook page for more pictures.
Prof. Giles Novak has been awarded the Weinberg College Award for Excellence in Mentoring Undergraduate Research.
The college's teaching awards "applaud excellence in instruction, significant contributions to curricular innovation, exemplary mentoring of research and independent study, and fostering of a sense of community both inside and outside the classroom."
An imperative condition for the functioning of a power-grid network is that all of its power generators remain synchronized. A new study by Profs. Adilson E. Motter and Takashi Nishikawa published in Nature Physics establishes conditions under which power grids can synchronize spontaneously. Given that most power outages involve equipment or operational errors, this is relevant both for reducing dependence on conventional control devices, thus offering an additional layer of protection, and for contributing to the development of self-healing networks that can recover from failures in real time. The other authors of the study are Prof. Motter's former undergraduate mentee Seth A. Myers (now a graduate student at Stanford) and Marian Anghel of LANL.
Read the full news article here.
Read the original article here.
Prof. Farhad Zadeh was featured the Northwestern Newscenter recently for his new work on radio imaging of dusty stars and interstellar clouds. He told the Newscenter that "knowing details of these clouds is important because the clouds can produce stars and also provide material for the growth of black holes."
Prof. Zadeh presented his results to the American Astronomical Society on January 8th.
Read the full article here.
Prof. Frederic A. Rasio has been appointed as the next editor of The Astrophysical Journal Letters. The mission of the letters section is to allow "astrophysicists to rapidly publish short notices of significant original research."
Rasio will begin serving as editor on January 1st, 2013.
Full article from Northwestern News Center here.
