June 25, 2010: Prof. Ophelia Tsui, postdocs Zhaohui Yang and Yoshihisa Fujii, former postdoc Fuk Kay Lee, and a collaborator from Hong Kong Polytechnic University uncovered a mechanism by which the glass transition temperature of polymer films can be decreased with decreasing film thickness – a question that has been under debate since 1994. Their result shows that the phenomenon is attributable to a mobile layer at the free surface of the films that provides an additional flow channel to the films that can sustain material flow even below the bulk glass transition temperature. As a result, the glass transition is postponed. This work has been published in Science in June 2010. The paper can be accessed via sciencemag.org.

June 02, 2010: We now have photos of the 2010 Convocation online, at our image gallery. You may also view Sheldon Glashow’s speech to the graduating class here. Congratulations once again to all our 2010 graduates!

April 07, 2010: Professor James Rohlf was inducted into the Academy of Science and Engineering at the Univ. of Minnesota, Duluth. You can read more at the SCSE website.

April 01, 2010: Jonathan Celli and Professor Rama Bansil star in a movie highlighting research done in the Biological Physics group in the Bansil-Erramilli group. The movie was produced by the National Science Foundation, as an episode in Science Nation. You can view the video on their website, which is also embedded below.

March 30, 2010: The Boston University Physics Department joins in celebrating with our research groups both in Atlas and CMS the great success of the Large Hadron Collider, which ran at 7 TeV earlier today. You can read the official CERN press release on their website and find more information on their LHC First Physics website.

Our first group of undergraduate juniors in the BU/UniGe program were working on the experiments in Geneva today. They are, from left to right, Max Yellen, Chelsea Bartram, Mike Lloyd, Michael Hedges, Andrea Welsh, Elim Cheung, Ashley Rubinstein. Behind them are photos of the CMS detector and TV monitors of the CMS Control Rooms.

Here in Boston, we also assembled to watch the news come in as it happened as a community. Furthermore, our own Professor Tulika Bose was interviewed by the BBC, which you can replay online at their website. You can also read more about the event at BU Today.

February 25, 2010: The T2K experiment in Japan has recorded its first long-baseline neutrino event in the Super-Kamiokande detector, announced by a press release from KEK, the Japanese high energy physics laboratory. In this experiment, a beam of neutrinos is created at the new J-PARC accelerator facility in Tokai, Japan and sent 295 km to the Super-Kamiokande detector. The experiment plans to study, for the first time, the appearance of electron neutrinos from a quantum mechanical flavor oscillation of muon neutrinos. A graphical display of the first event, recorded on February 24, 2010, is shown here.

KEK Press Release

Boston University participants in T2K include: Professors Ed Kearns, Jim Stone, and Larry Sulak, postdoctoral associate Jen Raaf, and graduate students Mike Litos, and Fanny Dufour, now at the University of Geneva.

January 22, 2010: Professor Gene Stanley has been recognized by the American Physical Society as one among the 157 Outstanding Referees of the Physical Review and Physical Review Letters journals, as chosen by the journal editors for 2010.

Initiated in 2008, the Outstanding Referee program expresses appreciation for the essential work that anonymous peer reviewers do for their journals. Each year a small percentage of their 42,000 referees are to be selected and honored with the Outstanding Referee designation. Selections are made based on the number, quality, and timeliness of referee reports as collected in a database over the last 20 years. The program will recognize about 150 referees each year, although larger groups were selected in 2008 and 2009. A full listing and further details on the program are available on the APS website.

January 24, 2006: Please visit our online memorial to Alexander Marin. If you have any materials you would like to share, please send them to Richard Laskey.