Congratulations to Tom Iadecola for winning the University Award for Early Achievement in Research. This award recognizes a tenured or tenure-track faculty member who has demonstrated outstanding accomplishments in research and/or creative activity unusually early in their professional career. Tom is a theorist using diverse analytical and numerical tools to study a variety of topics in quantum condensed matter. We are honored to have him in our department.

https://www.provost.iastate.edu/faculty-success/awards/university

A great day for particle physics activities, our department hosted students from Ames High School for this year's International Masterclass Programme.

UPTON, NY—The Board of Directors of Brookhaven Science Associates (BSA) has named theoretical physicist JoAnne Hewett as the next director of the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory and BSA president. BSA, a partnership between Stony Brook University (SBU) and Battelle, manages and operates Brookhaven Lab for DOE’s Office of Science. Hewett will also hold the title of professor in SBU’s Department of Physics and Astronomy and professor at SBU’s C.N. Yang Institute for Theoretical Physics.

Joanne received her BS in physics and mathematics and her PhD in physics from ISU.

CONGRATULATIONS SUNIL GHIMIRE!!

Sunil was one of the DCMP Graduate Travel Awardees for the 2023 APS March Meeting in Las Vegas.

Title of Talk: Effect of 2.5 MeV electron irradiation on vortex dynamics of Ca₃(Ir,Rh)₄Sn₁₃ superconductor

“The history of modern scientific research,” wrote Wang and his operations team in a recent research paper, “stands upon cycles of great discoveries enabled by the development of revolutionary new machines.”

Congratulations to Noah Brenny and Sayan Mitra for being awarded the 2023 Ozaki Fellowship! 

The fellowship program has been established in honor of the late Dr. Satoshi Ozaki at Brookhaven National Laboratory to strengthen U.S.-Japan scientific collaboration and, in particular, facilitate greater accelerator and particle physics cooperation. Mr. Brenny and Mr. Mitra are graduate students working on experimental particle physics with Professor Chunhui Chen. With the financial support of the Ozaaki fellowship, they will spend one year at the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization in Tsukuba, Japan, to carry out their Ph.D. thesis project using the Belle II detector.

More details on the Ozaki fellowship are available at: https://www.bnl.gov/ozaki/

Congratulations to ISU Sophomore, Luke Champion!! 

Luke was presented with the LAS Dean’s High Impact Award for undergraduate research. The research award will cover $3,000 for wages during the summer for the project titled, “Toward Maximum Likelihood Analysis of IACT Observations of the Jellyfish Nebula.” Luke will be mentored by Dr. Amanda Weinstein.

LAS Week (3/27-4/3/2023) is an event to celebrate the college’s diverse academic areas in the Physical and Life Sciences, Math and Computational Sciences, Communications, Arts and Humanities, and Social Sciences.

On Monday afternoon, the Physics and Astronomy Club served free homemade ice cream and frozen marshmallows using liquid nitrogen. They also performed demonstrations of hair raising with a Van de Graaff generator and the Meissner effect with visible levitation.

Jake Simon, Assistant Professor in Astronomy, was selected as a 2023 Scialog Fellow for the Signatures of Life in the Universe (SLU) program. SLU is a program involving early-career rising stars, interested in pursuing collaborative, high-risk, highly impactful discovery research on untested ideas applicable to creating breakthroughs in understanding planetary signatures of life and the search for signatures in the Universe. The program has a format in which participants are encouraged to engage in dialog and form new research teams, through interaction with a collection of scientists who approach the problem from different perspectives and disciplines. 

The Department of Energy recently announced the winners for the 2022 Chemical and Materials Sciences to Advance Clean-Energy Technologies and Transform Manufacturing (CEM) awards. Among the winners is a project led by Rebecca Flint, Ames National Laboratory scientist and associate professor at Iowa State University. The project is titled, “Exploiting the interplay of mixed valence and magnetic anisotropy in rare earths.” 

Other professors in the department that participate in the project are Raquel Ribeiro, Ben Ueland, Cai-Zhuang Wang, and Paul C. Canfield.

Iowa State's Massimo Marengo is ready to use the newly launched James Webb Space Telescope to study distant clouds of dust in a galaxy with a "primitive environment" that resembles the conditions of the early universe. Webb's data will help Marengo and his colleagues understand the "galactic ecosystem" and the early steps in "the cycle of life of the universe."

See full press release here.

Professor Mayly Sanchez is among three professors in Iowa State University’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (LAS) have been honored with an LAS Dean’s Professorship, one of the college’s most prestigious recognitions of faculty excellence. 

Sanchez studies neutrino physics, a highly specialized branch of particle physics. Her research promotes a deeper understanding of how the universe works and has led to the development of new technologies that detect neutrinos, which are difficult to detect. Sanchez spearheads three neutrino experiments, and she has earned numerous awards for her research. She was elected a 2020 Fellow by the American Physical Society and received a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. 

Please find more information in the press release of the college. 

Iowa State physicists are contributing their expertise and sending thousands of pounds of Ames-manufactured hardware to the sPHENIX experiment at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York. The experiment's particle detector is designed to explore the flowing, liquid-like, quark-gluon plasma. That plasma is an exotic state of matter and part of the universe’s earliest history.

Full news release

As interest in the transformative potential of quantum computing continues to grow, the Department of Physics and Astronomy is excited to offer a new course, “PHYS 422X/ 522X: Foundations of Quantum Computing”. It is taught for the second time in the spring semester of 2022. The course is aimed at advanced undergraduate and beginning graduate students, with the goal of understanding how quantum mechanics can be applied to solve hard computational problems.