News & Events

Latest News

#

David Wittman Awarded the 2023 Chancellor's Fellowship for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion

Professor David Wittman was selected as a recipient of the 2023 Chancellor's Fellowship for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. This fellowship recognizes exceptional contributions in supporting, tutoring, mentoring, and advising underrepresented students and/or students from underserved communities and comes with a $5,000 award.

#

A new type of metal is now even more anomalous

Metals come in various flavors: heavy-fermions metals, half-metals, semimetals, strange metals, and others. There are also distinctions within each family.

#

PHY 7 DL Classroom Refresh

Campus Design & Construction Management and campus Building Maintenance Services personnel worked quickly in the short break between end of spring quarter 2023 and the start of summer session 1 to refresh our PHY 7 discussion/lab classrooms in the Earth & Physical Sciences Building. All five rooms were refreshed with refinished lab table tops and painted walls, and enhanced with the addition of audio visual projectors. Three of the rooms also had floor covering completely replaced. The campus Office of Undergraduate Education invested approximately $300,000 in this classroom refresh. Physics lecturer Armela Keqi was pleased with the result, saying, “I am really happy that the DL rooms are in such better shape now. I like the new design too…. I think having a nicer and cleaner environment should make it better for our students and TAs to teach and learn in those rooms.”

#

Heavy Lifting

Many thanks go to Peter Klavins, David Barnes, and David Hemer (not pictured) who helped Professor Dong Yu’s group move a >800 lb optical table to new lab space in the basement of the Physics Building. The group added verity to the adage, where there’s a will there’s a way!

#

Warm Congratulations to Physics Majors on Invitations to Phi Beta Kappa

The Physics & Astronomy Department is proud to announce that the following department-sponsored physics majors were invited to join the national honor society Phi Beta Kappa for 2022-2023. Via donations from faculty, the department paid the one-time membership dues for all the students. We'd like to congratulate all of the invited students and commemorate their efforts with a few words from their respective professors and mentors:

#

Professor Lloyd Knox to give public lecture "Cepheids, Supernovae, and the Cosmic Microwave Background"

The Tuesday May 23 general meeting of the Mount Diablo Astronomical Society will feature Professor Lloyd Knox speaking about "Cepheids, Supernovae, and the Cosmic Microwave Background." This event will be shared on YouTube. More information can be found here.

#

Professor Maxwell Chertok is spending the spring as a Bristol Benjamin Meaker Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Bristol, UK.

Professor Maxwell Chertok is spending the spring as a Bristol Benjamin Meaker Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Bristol, UK. Performing ground-breaking research in particle physics at the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) Experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider, both the Bristol and UC Davis groups had a hand in the monumental Higgs boson discovery back in 2012.

#

Congratulations to our 2022-2023 undergraduate and graduate award winners!

Congratulations to our 2022-2023 undergraduate award winners!