Latest News

November 20, 2020

A survey, which is open to everyone affiliated to the department, is now being carried out to assess the climate in our department. The survey is entirely confidential and will be analyzed by members of the Budget & Institutional Analysis (BIA) office on campus. This survey is intended to identify areas of strength in the department, any issues that individuals and groups within our community might have, and to conduct a broad demographic census of the department in order to help us identify areas for improvement that may help guide department policy moving forward.

From the article on the UC Davis "Egghead" research blog:

Brian Lemaux and Lori Lubin were featured, through UC Davis and other institutions, in a press release on observations of distant galaxies with radio telescopes in Chile as part of an astronomical survey called 'ALPINE'.

Jaroslav Trnka received 2021 Henry Primakoff Award for Early Career Particle Physicists from American Physical Society (APS) for "For seminal work on the computation of particle scattering amplitudes, including the development of a new mathematical approach, the amplituhedron."

The full citation and can be found at

https://www.aps.org/programs/honors/prizes/prizere...

Published: October 12, 2020, 3:46 pm

Professor Richard Scalettar received a Graduate Program Advising and Mentoring Award.

Although the award's focus is graduate mentoring, his nomination materials noted his efforts in mentoring high school students, undergraduates, and even other faculty. Students and faculty singled out his patience, his broad concern for his students' well-being and professional development, and the resulting supportive atmosphere in his research group. He is a model for all of us.

Published: September 30, 2020, 12:51 pm

We must all complete the Daily Symptom Survey before entering a UC Davis campus facility. When Physics & Astronomy department members receive the email Approval Notification, please forward that email to [email protected].

These approval notices will be maintained up to 30 days before being deleted from our department records. The Qualtrics survey takes about 30 seconds on your smartphone or other device.

September 3rd, 2020

All of the Physics and Astronomy fall offerings will be entirely remote and in some cases asynchronous. We always aim to make space for all students interested in our courses. In some ways remote instruction makes this easier, by removing constraints from lecture hall sizes and available lab setups. If a course you want appears full, please add yourself to the waitlist. That tells us there is extra demand, and it lets us communicate with you when new seats are added.

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.

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.

Published: July 1, 2020, 3:49 pm