Fall 2020: waitlists, PHY 7, PHY 9

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. However, helium is a non-renewable resource on Earth in the most fundamental sense: it is a byproduct of uranium fission and its supply on earth is fixed by the quantity of radioactive rocks that were produced during the formation of the earth. Once helium is released into the atmosphere, it cannot be recovered, and it is eventually lost to space. A properly designed helium recovery and liquefaction system maintains a stable and reliable supply of liquid helium for low temperature experiments. The facility was built as part of major renovations in the basement and second floor of the Physics Building that updated condensed matter physics lab space. Support for the facility's continued operations comes from faculty research funding and a generous donation by physics researcher Peter Klavins and chemistry professor Susan Kauzlarich.

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. The students hope Quid Pro Quo will be used for quantum education in classrooms and for STEM outreach programs.

Dustin Gilbert, UC Davis Physics alumnus (Ph.D. 2014; major professor Kai Liu) and Assistant Professor of Materials Science & Engineering at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, was one of a select group of scientists to receive funding through the Department of Energy Early Career Research Program in 2020.

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.

Message from the Physics Department chair, 6/9/2020

The Office of Research has announced a move to Phase 2 for research, starting Monday June 1. Continue reading for more information.

Recent graduate Daine Danielson has been awarded a Hertz Foundation Gradaute 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.