News

September 3rd, 2020

All of the Physics and Astronomy fall offerings will be entirely remote and in some cases asynchronous. We always aim to make space for all students interested in our courses. In some ways remote instruction makes this easier, by removing constraints from lecture hall sizes and available lab setups. If a course you want appears full, please add yourself to the waitlist. That tells us there is extra demand, and it lets us communicate with you when new seats are added.

Located in the basement of the Physics Building is a new helium recovery facility using state-of-the-art technology to recover approximately 90% of the helium used in the department. Liquid helium is the cryogen with the lowest boiling temperature, making it a ubiquitous tool for achieving temperatures close to absolute zero needed for most modern research programs in physics.

Applied Physics undergraduate majors Jesse Patton and Liang Li, along with Ph.D. students Victoria Norman (Physics) and Sridhar Majety (Electrical Engineering), won the California division of the Qiskit Summer Jam Hackathon, sponsored by IBM. Their project, QUantum Information Demonstrations PROmoting QUantum Optics (Quid Pro Quo) used the quantum circuit programming package, Qiskit, to simulate quantum optics phenomena. The team created a suit of user-friendly desktop applications to display and illustrate quantum optics experiments.

Published: July 1, 2020, 3:49 pm

Physics Professor Daniel Cox and colleague Professor Michael Toney of the Department of Chemistry are adapting technology to make self-assembling protein scaffolds to combat coronavirus. Read the full story on the UC Davis News website here:

And see the stories on Sacramento's CBS13 and KCRA3 here:

CBS13:

To all interested parties:

A recent end-of-term message from a physics instructor contained an inappropriate analogy which was upsetting to many who read it. I am deeply sorry that our department has in any way added to the stress of these times and to the already heavy burden carried by some members of our university community. We will strive to do better in the future.

The UC Davis Physics Department is devoted to promoting equity and inclusion in our community moving forward. Here are some of the concrete actions we are taking:

The Office of Research has announced a move to Phase 2 for research, starting Monday June 1:
https://research.ucdavis.edu/wp-content/uploads/UC...

Message from Chair Rena Zieve to the UC Davis Physics researchers:

There is not a huge difference between the current Phase 1x and Phase 2. In particular, you still need to:

Recent graduate Daine Danielson has been awarded a Hertz Foundation Graduate Fellowship. Daine earned his Applied Physics BS in winter 2017. He worked on neutrino research in Professor Bob Svoboda's lab for most of his time at Davis and is now in physics graduate school at the University of Chicago. The Hertz Fellowship is highly selective; this year there were 16 awards nationwide across science, mathematics, and engineering. You can read more about Daine here:

Professor Tucker Jones has been named one of three 2020 Dean's Faculty Fellows in the College of Letters & Science at UC Davis.

The program, instituted by former Dean Elizabeth Spiller, aims to support emerging junior faculty who have a potential for extraordinary research impact in the coming years. The award will provide Professor Jones with $7,500 per year for three years.

Congratulations!

Published: April 23, 2020, 11:29 am

SUMMER SESSION 2020

• Session 1: June 22 - July 31
• Session 2: August 3 - September 11

Physics will offer PHY 1A, the PHY 7 series, and the PHY 9 series remotely in summer 2020. We will accommodate as many students as possible and will expand course maximums as demand dictates, so if you encounter a section that appears to be full, register for the waitlist and let your interest be known.