College of Science and Technology
PHYSICS UPDATE SPRING 2017
Chair’s Message Physics at Temple continues to grow stronger. It has been my privilege to lead the department these past 18 months, and I’m looking forward to working more with our outstanding faculty, staff and students. This year, we welcomed two new assistant professors who add to our growing capabilities in computational physics. Martha Constantinou studies the fundamental forces that hold together quarks inside the nucleus, and Qimin Yan discovers the properties of new and novel materials with an eye towards their applications. As you can see on page 3, our funded research continues to grow. In other faculty news, Xifan Wu was promoted to associate professor with tenure; Bernd Surrow was promoted to professor; and professors Ted Burkhardt and Dieter Forster retired to professor emeritus status. We are all very grateful for their important contributions to our department and to the College of Science and Technology. We also said goodbye to Karen Woods-Wilson, who served for many years in the Physics Department office. Since then, Diane Pittman has augmented our excellent team of Connie O’Donnell and Jackie Farley. Our student enrollment number continue to grow. We are attracting outstanding young people, like the students profiled on page 2, who are discovering the excitement of studying physics. Finally, in fall 2017 we will have the first external review of our department in 10 years. I am looking forward to showcasing our progress and discussing future opportunities with this panel. Our future is looking very bright.
Jim Napolitano Professor and Chair Department of Physics
phys.temple.edu
Department welcomes two outstanding professors Martha Constantinou, Assistant Professor Martha Constantinou’s research Martha Constantinou Qimin Yan interests are in lattice quantum chromodynamics, focusing on the topics of perturbation theory and hadron structure simulations. Constantinou received her bachelor’s degree, and then in 2008 her PhD, from the University of Cyprus. Before coming to CST, she was a research associate and then a postdoctoral fellow for the physics department at the University of Cyprus and the Computational Center of the Cyprus Institute. Since 2008, she has been a member of the European Twisted Mass Collaboration, and in 2014 she became a country team leader for the Women in Physics Working Group of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics.
Qimin Yan, Assistant Professor Qimin Yan obtained his PhD in materials in 2012 from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Since 2013, he has been a post-doctoral fellow at the Department of Physics, University of California, Berkeley and the Molecular Foundry, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Yan’s primary research interest is using combinations of first-principles computational methods and data-driven technologies to identify and exploit structure-property relationships in new and existing functional materials including energy, quantum and two-dimensional materials. His work has been published in a number of journals, including Advanced Energy Materials, Physical Review Letters, Nano Letters and Applied Physics Letters.
Support Physics and CST You can contribute to the continued success of CST and the Department of Physics by supporting scholarships, undergraduate research, faculty endowment and innovative programs. Make your gift at giving.temple.edu/givetocst.
STUDENT NOTES 7 attend APS conference for undergraduate women Seven female Temple students attended the Mid-Atlantic regional APS Conference for Undergraduate Women in Physics in midJanuary at Princeton University. “The biggest benefit was being able to meet and network with women already advanced in the fields we are interested in,” says Karla G. Oñate Melecio, a junior born in Mexico who graduated from George Washington High School in Philadelphia. “It really opened up the possibility of developing academic and professional relationships with them and made me confident that I would be capable of succeeding in my desired field, which is computational physics.”
Graduating senior heading to NSF-funded research opportunity in Singapore Caroline M. Kerrigan, a dual physics and engineering major, will be spending more than two months conducting research in Singapore later this year as a participant in the highly selective PhiladelphiaSingapore Optics Research Experiences for Undergraduates program funded by the National Science Foundation. Kerrigan will earn her BS degree in physics this May and then, following her research experience in Singapore, will return to Temple to complete her BS in engineering during the 2017-18 academic year. While in Singapore, Kerrigan’s fluids research could involve areas such as nanobubbles, sonoluminescence, drug delivery, and microand nanofluidics. Ultimately, she says, “I hope to pursue a career that involves investigating fluid mechanics from a physics point of view.”
Student Awards Outstanding Graduate Student Teaching Award Amani Kraishan (2016)
Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award in Physics Avik Biswas (2017)
Outstanding Research Award in Physics Narendra Acharya (2017) Devika Gunarathne (2017)
Peter Havas Humanitarian Scholarship for Outstanding Physics Graduate Students: Aydin Sanli (2017) Devika Gunarathne (2016)
The Stanislav Kotsev, CST ’99, Memorial Award Hamza Atac (2017) Christopher Kim (2016) Qingyu Lei (2016)
Dr. Paul G. & Beatrice Zackon Physics Scholarship Antonio Franco (2017) Brian Gander (2016)
J.A. Poole Award for Exceptional Department Service by an Undergraduate James Fitzgerald (2016)
Murray Green Memorial Prize in Physics James F. Fitzgerald III (2017)
Oto Kurschner memorial Award Jill Snyder (2017)
Undergraduate Research Program Symposium Awards James Fitzgerald (2016)
Aaron Kaplan: research assistant at Temple Materials Institute As part of CST’s Undergraduate Research Program, Aaron Kaplan is working as a research assistant in the Temple Materials Institute under Ke Chen, associate professor (research). “I’m really enjoying working on condensed matter and creating superconducting devices,” says Kaplan, a junior honors student from Massachusetts. “It’s sometimes hard to grasp the physical meaning of day-to-day lectures, but it’s a lot easier to understand what’s going on with equations and theories when I am involved in hands-on research and can see how different aspects of physical theory work together.” Kaplan, whose mother, Sherry Van Buskirk Kaplan, earned a mathematics degree from Temple in 1984, hopes to pursue a graduate degree before pursuing a physics career in either research or industry. Kaplan was also considering majoring in engineering when he arrived at Temple, but he opted for physics instead. “It’s interesting to be able to have a better lens on how things interact in the world beyond what we can actually see,” he says.
Melanie Rehfuss: conducting research at Jefferson Laboratory Prior to her senior year as a cum laude physics major, Melanie Rehfuss (BS ’15, physics) worked in a quantum engineering laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania as part of the National Science Foundation’s Research Experiences for Undergraduates program. That same year, 2014, the current doctoral student began working with Temple Professor Zein-Eddine Meziani, who conducts research at the Jefferson Laboratory, the Department of Energy’s national accelerator facility in Virginia. Rehfuss and Meziani are among the co-authors of a paper titled “Enhanced UV light detection using a p-terphenyl wavelength shifter,” submitted to Nuclear Instruments and Methods. “I fell in love with physics because it constantly pushes you to learn more and it challenged me in a way that many other subjects didn’t,” says Rehfuss, a former CST Undergraduate Research Program participant. Ultimately, the former undergraduate math/physics tutor hopes to conduct research and teach at a university: “I want to reach out to students who are passionate about science but not necessarily precocious early on, and I want to be a role model for other women pursuing science.”
FACULTY NEWS
FACULTY NOTES AND HONORS Professor Mia Luehrmann returned to the department this academic year after serving 11 years as associate dean for undergraduate affairs for the College of Science and Technology. She is one of the department’s most highly valued instructors, and is contributing to a new round of curriculum development for the BS degree in physics.
Theodore Burkhardt
Dieter Forster
Burkhardt and Forster become professors emeriti The Physics Department is honoring the contributions—and celebrating the welldeserved retirements—of two long-time faculty members, Theodore Burkhardt and Dieter Forster. After earning his PhD from Stanford University in 1967, Burkhardt taught at Lincoln University for four years and then spent several years as a researcher at the Institute Laue-Langevin in Grenoble and the Jülich Research Center in West Germany. He joined Temple as an associate professor of physics in 1981. Burkhardt, who was part of the statistical physics group, became a professor in 1987. The productive researcher also taught a range of course, including a musical acoustics course he tailored specifically for students in Temple’s Ester Boyer College of Music and Philadelphia’s renowned Curtis Institute of Music. From 1996 to 2015, he was the department’s graduate advisor. Forster, who earned his PhD from Harvard University in 1970, taught for several years at the University of Chicago before he came to Temple as an associate professor of physics in 1974. His 1975 book, Hydrodynamic Fluctuations, Broken Symmetry, and Correlation Functions, was published as part of W.A. Benjamin’s Frontiers in Physics series and reissued in 1990 by Addison-Wesley in its Advanced Book Classics series. A professor since 1977, the statistical physics group member also regularly taught one of the introductory physics courses for the Temple University Honors Program. This ultimately led to his appointment as director of the program from 1995 to 2002. In addition, in 1992 he was the first recipient of the Honors Professor of the Year Award and, in 2014, was again selected for that honor by the student-led Honors Activities Board.
Professor Adrienn Ruzsinszky earned the prestigious Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Fellowship for Experienced Researchers. She will use her fellowship for scientific collaboration at the Fritz-Haber-Institute in Berlin. She and Associate Professor Xifan Wu are both recipients of the National Science Foundation’s Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program award. Professor Bernd Surrow is co-author of Foundations of Nuclear and Particle Physics, a textbook published by Cambridge University Press. Suitable for more advanced courses, the textbook presents a balanced view of nuclear and particle physics and the interplay between the two. The Oct. 28, 1996 Physical Review Letters paper co-authored by John Perdew, Laura H. Carnell Professor of Physics and Chemistry, Kieron Burke and Matthias Ernzerhof, “Generalized Gradient Approximation Made Simple,” was recently declared by the journal as its most cited paper of all time. Noted PRL, “The improved gradient approximation to density functional theory laid Bernd Surrow out in this 1996 PRL … has served as the basis for research in several fields. The paper is still heavily used, receiving more citations now than when it first published …”
DEPARTMENT OF PHYSICS FUNDED RESEARCH Svetlana Kotochigova • Quantum Magnetism of Strongly Correlated Magnetic Atoms and Molecules, 2014-19, U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research • Efficient Sympathetic Cooling of Neutral and Ionic Polar Molecules for Quantum Information Processing, 2016-19, NSF
Marjatta A. Lyrra • Molecular Quantum Control by Coherence Effects, 2016-19, NSF
Andreas Metz • Measurements on the Structure and Dynamics of Matter, 2015-18, NSF • Hard Scattering Processes in QCD, 2015-18, NSF • Coordinated Theoretical Approach to Transverse Momentum Dependent Hadron Structure in QCD, 2016-20, Brookhaven National Laboratory
Jim Napolitano • Precision Møller Polarimetry for Electroweak Scattering Experiments in Hall A at Jefferson Lab, 2015-18, NSF
John Perdew • Density Functional Theory of Electronic Structure, 2016-19, NSF
Adrienn Ruzsinszky • Toward the Chemical Accuracy for the Description of the Catalytic Desulfurization Process, 2016-18, American Chemical Society Petroleum Research Fund • Electron Correlation and Optical Spectra with a Nonlocal Energy-Optimized (NEO) Kernel, 2016-21, NSF CAREER
Nikolaos Sparveris • Equipment for and Running of the PSI MUSE Experiment, 2016-18, NSF
Xifan Wu • To understand fundamental physical, chemical and life-related processes in liquid water at the level of quantum mechanics, 2016-18, NSF CAREER
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Department hosts international conferences Last November, the Physics Department hosted a five-day Joint CTEQ Meeting and POETIC 7—the 7th International Conference on Physics Opportunities at an ElecTron-IonCollider—on the Main Campus. Attended by 120 American and international physicists, the conference focused on advancing the field of electron-ion collider physics. It was co-chaired by Temple professors Andreas Metz and Bernd Surrow. A Workshop on Experiment and Theory of the Electronic Structure of Correlated F-Electron Materials was hosted by the department last August. Forty-five physicists and students, including 19 speakers from the U.S., Europe and Japan, attended the NSF-sponsored conference. It brought together researchers in the diverse fields of novel spectroscopies and highly-correlated f-electrons in order to explore opportunities at the frontier of condensed matter physics, close the gap between theory and experiment and spur the career development of budding researchers. Between May 22 and 26, the Physics Department will host the 5th International Conference on Micro-Pattern Gas Detectors (MPGD2017) and RD51 Collaboration Meeting. Beyond nuclear and particle physics applications, use of MPGD technology has realistic commercial applications for as medical imaging, homeland security, beam monitors and neutron detection. The Temple group under Surrow’s leadership has played a major role in the development of MPGDs. The conference will be followed by a meeting of the RD51 Collaboration, the world-wide community dedicated to the development and dissemination of MPGD technology and its applications
Dean’s Distinguished Lecture series: Rainer Weiss Rainer Weiss, professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, spoke to 111 attendees on “Probing the Universe with Gravitational Waves.” Weiss is known for his pioneering measurements of the spectrum of the cosmic microwave background radiation, his inventions of the monolithic silicon bolometer and the laser interferometer gravitational wave detector, and his role as a co-founder of the Laser Interfermeter Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) Project—which led to 2015’s monumental discovery of a pulse of gravitational radiation from more than a billion years ago.
The nature of light Jim Napolitano, professor and chair of the Physics Department, delivered a lecture on the “Nature of Light” at Longwood Gardens in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania. The sold-out event was sponsored by The Conwell Society, which celebrates Temple’s top donors.
Summer school for PhD students and postdocs The department is hosting the first TMD Collaboration Summer School on June 22-28. The school, for PhD students and recent postdocs, is sponsored by the recently funded Department of Energy Topical Collaboration in Nuclear Theory for the Coordinated Theoretical Approach to Transverse Momentum Dependent (TMD) Hadron Structure in QCD. The school will be followed by a two-day meeting of the TMD Collaboration, which includes researchers from 14 U.S. institutions, including Brookhaven National Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Maryland and Temple.