Distinguished Professor of Physics and Astronomy John Rundle has been tapped to be a Keynote speaker at the upcoming Natural Disasters Exposition in Anaheim, CA, in recognition of his high visibility in the area of earthquake forecasting. His talk will be titled: “Anticipating Earthquakes"
Join us for a screening of the film "Secrets of the Universe" at the Mondavi Center on October 26. Through the film, you will embark on a journey into one of the most amazing scientific instruments ever built, the Large Hadron Collider. Filmed at CERN, this 45 minute film follows UC Davis professor Manuel Calderón de la Barca Sánchez and his graduate students as they use the world's largest particle collider to recreate conditions a microsecond after the Big Bang and reveal clues about the strongest force of the universe. The film explores how the questions explored at the collider are connected to the larger questions we have been asking in Science through the centuries. The screening will be followed by a Q&A session with professor Calderón de la Barca and the students featured in the film. The event will be free. More details to follow.
Prof. David Wittman was awarded 8 orbits of Hubble Space Telescope time to study collisions of galaxy clusters. These are the largest masses in the universe and a large fraction of their mass is dark matter. Hence, merging clusters can be thought of as "large dark matter colliders" probing the properties of dark matter in ways that Earthbound colliders cannot.
James Crutchfield, a physics professor and director of the Complexity Sciences Center at UC Davis and graduate student Kyle Ray have a cooler proposal, and it involves a fundamental shift in how computers handle information. A paper about the work is currently available as a preprint and was featured on the cover of the July issue of Scientific American.
An international team of astronomers has discovered dozens of strong gravitational lenses that will allow astronomers to look deep into the universe, revealing ancient structures and giving insight into the nature of dark matter.
A technological breakthrough often requires the discovery of a new material with unprecedented physical properties. Ferromagnetic materials for example, enable a wide range of technologies with diverse applications ranging from energy production to computer hardware, memory storage, and transportation. As such, intense efforts are pursued worldwide to improve the magnetic properties of known materials, by, for example, reducing their economic or environmental cost, or to find new magnetic materials altogether. The search for entirely new families of ferromagnetic compounds is challenging, and, as a result, efforts are often focused on already known families that can be further improved. Accelerating material discovery remains one of the greatest challenges in material research.
An international team of physicists have used atoms about 3 billion times colder than interstellar space to open a portal to an unexplored realm of quantum magnetism. The results were published Sept. 1 in Nature Physics. “Fermions are not rare particles. They include things like electrons and are one of two types of particles that all matter is made of.”
Professor Sir Michael Berry will visit UC Davis as Distinguished Lecturer in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, hosted by Warren Pickett on behalf of sixteen other faculty in four departments involved in research of joint interest. Michael will provide a colloquium and a public lecture, with topics ranging from the geometric phase (Berry phase) upon which his early career and reputation is based, to everyday phenomena such as the physics of light, touching on the dancing lines of light on the bottom of swimming pools.
