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.
Prof. Manuel Calderón de la Barca will be the featured speaker at a webinar hosted by TELUS World of Science, in Edmonton, Canada. The webinar will focus on the Giant Screen film "Secrets of the Universe", and will also feature Director Stephen Low. They will answer questions from webinar participants about the science of the film and the making of the film.
Victoria Strait, a student of Marusa Bradac, was just awarded a DAWN fellowship at the Cosmic Dawn Center in Copenhagen, one of the top astrophysics fellowships in Europe. Victoria was selected from a pool of approximately 100 applicants. She will be studying the star formation in the galaxies at the earliest epoch.
