DEPARTMENT OF PHYSICS AND ASTRONOMY

Dr. Koichiro Nishikawa has received a Fundamental Physics Breakthrough Award for "fundamental discovery and exploration of neutrino oscillations, revealing a new frontier beyond...the standard model of particle physics." Dr. Nishikawa received his Ph.D. in 1980, working with Prof. David Buchholz.

James Sauls and Erik Lujiten will direct the Applied Physics Ph.D. program, a collaboration between WCAS and McCormick including departments of Physics & Astronomy, Chemistry, Earth & Planetary Sciences, Biomedical Engineering, Electrical Engineering and computer Science, and Materials Science & Engineering. There are currently 41 students in the program.

Prof. Vicky Kalogera has been elected to the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope Corporation’s (LSSTC) Executive Board of Directors. In this capacity, Dr. Kalogera will participate in the oversight and administration of the Corporation. Learn about the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope.

Learn about the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope.

E.O. Haven Professor and CIERA director Vicky Kalogera has been awarded the 2016 Hans A. Bethe Prize from the American Physical Society.  This annual award recognizes outstanding work in astrophysics and Prof. Kalogera is the first woman to receive the honor.  She will be honored with this prestigious prize at a reception ceremony during the April, 2016 meeting of the APS.

Shane Larson, Research Associate Professor and Astronomer at Adler Planetarium, has been elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society.  His citation commends him for "Impacting science and society through the integration of public engagement and research, and for empowering generations of future scientists by his example."

James Sauls is named Visiting Scholar of the Institute for Materials Science at Los Alamos National Laboratory.  Prof. Sauls will deliver lectures on frontiers in hybrid quantum materials and devices, and on electrodynamics of topological superconductors at Los Alamos.

Jens Koch co-organized and lectured at the international research workshop "Nonequilibrium physics of driven-dissipative many-body systems," hosted by the Center for Quantum Technology at the University of Kwazulu-Natal, South Africa, 21-25 September, 2015.  Prof. Koch is also an invited lecturer at the workshop "Many-body physics with light," hosted by the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

CIERA Director Vicky Kalogera has accepted an invitation to serve on the Committee on Astronomy and Astrophysics (CAA) of the National Research Council. The CAA’s purpose is to support scientific progress in astronomy and astrophysics and assist the federal government in integrating and planning programs in these fields. It is a joint committee of the Space Studies Board and the Board on Physics and Astronomy under the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in Washington, D.C.

Prof. Adilson Motter's group will be hosting the third Network Frontier Workshop at Northwestern on December 6-7, 2015.

The Network Frontier Workshop 2015 is a two-day event highlighting current research on network dynamics. Presentations will emphasize physical principles underlying  control and collective behavior in networks of dynamical systems, as well as network problems in biological, ecological, social, and physical systems. 

Work by Prof. Adilson Motter and Prof. Yoram Lithwick was featured in the 2014 Annual Report from the Northwestern Office of Research.

Read more here. You can find Prof. Lithwick on page 42 and Prof. Motter on page 44.

Xiaowen Chen has received the Prize for Distinguished Honors Thesis from Northwestern’s Integrated Science Program (ISP) for her senior thesis entitled “Fractal Geometry of Undriven Dissipative Systems”. Xiaowen is an undergraduate majoring in Physics, Mathematics, and ISP, and has performed her research on transient chaos in Prof. Adilson E. Motter’s group. She is graduating this spring and will join Princeton University in the fall to pursue her graduate studies in physics.

Prof. Kalogera has been awarded one of eight NRT Awards.  Along with Prof. Michael Schmitt and key participants from EPS, SESP, EECS, and IEMS, she will lead interdisciplinary training on data-driven discovery.  Over the 5-year duration, the $3 million award will provide NRT graduate fellowships to over 35 students drawn from multiple existing Ph.D. programs.

Joshua Fixelle, a first-year graduate student, has been awarded an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship.  Fixelle works with Prof. Fred Rasio.  In addition, two alumni have received the award: Stephen Okoniewski and Kyle Kremer.  Okoniewski is currently a Ph.D. candidate in physics at the University of Colorado, Boulder.  He graduated from Northwestern in 2013, and worked with Prof. John Ketterson, publishing a first author paper during that time.  Kremer worked with Prof. Vicky Kalogera, and graduated from Northwestern in 2012.  He was the recipient of a Churchill Scholarship to study astrophysics at the University of Cambridge.

New research by Professor Farhad Yusef-Zadeh and colleagues shows that stars could be forming near the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, which was previously thought to be too hostile for such activity.

You can read more about the work at Discovery News, Sky and Telescope and Physics World.

Prof. Mayda Velasco was recently appointed to the The High Energy Physics Advisory Panel (HEPAP). HEPAP has advised the Federal Government on the national program in experimental and theoretical high energy physics research since its inception in 1967. The Panel reports directly to the Associate Director, Office of High Energy Physics, Office of Science (DOE), and the Assistant Director, Mathematical & Physical Sciences Directorate (NSF), under the guidelines established by the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA).

Prof. Jim Sauls gave an invited talk at the recent APS march meeting, as part of the Symposium on Novel Phenomena in Helium in Reduced Dimensions and Confinement. Find more information about his talk, "Signatures of Majorana and Weyl Fermions in confined phases of superfluid 3He,"here, and the presentation here.

The Simons Foundation has named Prof. Adilson Motter one of their 2015 fellows in theoretical physics.

You can find the full list of fellows here.

A thirty year old paper by Anthony Leggett (of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) and Anupam Garg continues to challenge experimentalists to find ever more macroscopic manifestations of quantum mechanics. The latest test of the so-called Leggett-Garg inequality shows that Cesium atoms can exist in states with indefinite properties, which while not as drastic as Schrodinger's imagined dead-and-alive cat, are still remarkable.

Read more here.

Graduate Student Luke Robison has been selected for the DoE Office of Science Graduate Student Research Program (SCGSR). The SCGSR fellowship will allow him to spend a year working with the photon beam particle collider at Thomas Jefferson National Lab (JLab), in Newport News, Virginia. Luke will work with both Prof. Kam Seth at Northwestern and Dr. Lubomir Pentchev, a physicist at JLab.