College of Letters & Science writer Becky Oskin’s blog post highlights some of the many options.

This Give Day 2021, generous donors have the opportunity to transform our students' lives. Please consider supporting our Give Day Challenges described below. A gift of any amount will make a big impact, and it will help our College come out on top to win the UC Davis Battle of the Colleges

With 9 days left to go to Give Day, 27 gifts have come in to the College of Letters and Sciences already. 12 of the gifts are to Physics and Astronomy, with eight of these in response to Department Chair Rena Zieve’s Give Day Challenge in support of a new graduate student support fund, the Opportunity Award. Chair Zieve will donate $50 for a donation from any current UC Davis Physics and Astronomy graduate student or major.

Some of the Milky Way’s oldest stars have been spotted in a surprising place — the disk the youngest region of the galaxy. Computer simulations of their orbits suggest these "metal-poor" stars came from a smaller galaxy that slammed into the Milky Way more than 7 billion years ago. Isaiah Santistevan, a doctoral candidate in our department is the lead author of a new study examining the simulation results, which is available on arXiv.org

For the 2021 UC Davis Virtual Picnic Day, the Physics Department will present the following talks.

For the last eight years a research team from UC Davis has been working with an international team of scientists to build the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory Plus (SNO+) detector in Northern Ontario. SNO+ is designed to investigate the nature of the neutrino, a small, electrically neutral subatomic particle that has been seen to have unusual properties that set them apart from other known particles.

Jaroslav Trnka received a 2021 Distinguished Teaching Award for Undergraduate Teaching from UC Davis.

As described in a recently published paper in Nano Letters, UC Davis Adjunct Professor Kai Liu and collaborators have demonstrated light weight nanowire-based metal foam filters that are highly efficient, durable, reusable, and recyclable, particularly for deep submicron airborne particulates.