Congratulations to Assistant Professor Masha Kamenetska, who received a three-year grant, totaling $450,000, through the Air Force's Young Investigator Research Program! Her anticipated area of research is robust conductance and force measurements of single DNA molecules to quantify nucleosome unwinding.

Read more about it here!

Physics Professor Lee Roberts was invited to write a Viewpoint for an article published in a recent issue in Physical Review D. The article focuses on an important recent step in the evaluation of the strong interaction contribution to the Standard Model value of the muon's anomalous magnetic moment. Lee writes in reaction that "This [article] represents the most precise evaluation of the hadronic contribution, and it reaffirms a long-standing discrepancy with experiments". This reaction stems from their measurements of the muon's magnetic anomaly at Brookhaven National Lab

Lee Roberts, along with Jim Miller and Rob Carey play important roles in the BNL measurement and are continuing to be important in the new Fermilab measurement.

Click here to read the full Viewpoint!

 Congratulations to Graduate Program Coordinator Mirtha Salcedo-Cabello. Mirtha has been named one of three winners of the 2018 John S. Perkins Award for Distinguished Service. The award is presented by the Faculty Council to BU staff members who serve the university with great distinction. Mirtha has been with the Physics Department for 23 years, and is responsible for overseeing the day-to-day functioning of the Physics Department's Graduate Program as well as providing routine academic advising as students’ progress through the Graduate Program. 

Congratulations to Emanuel Katz, who has been promoted to the rank of Full Professor. Katz's research explores theoretical particle and condensed-matter physics, using conformal field theory techniques to develop new ways of thinking about interacting fields and working to improve understanding of the physics related to large hadron collider experiments.

Assistant Professor Anushya Chandran was recently named a 2018 Sloan Research Fellow. The two-year fellowships are awarded annually to 126 researchers for their unique potential to make substantial contributions to their field of work. Chandran's research focuses mainly on quantum many-body theory and non-equilibrium systems. Congragualtions Anushya for recognition!

You can read more here at BU Today: http://www.bu.edu/today/2018/bu-astronomer-physicist-and-mathematician-win-sloan-fellowships/

Work done by the Ahlen group and the Scientific Instrument Facility (SIF) at BU have been featured in a press release by the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument or DESI project.  The SIF at BU and the Ahlen group, which consists of Professor Steve Ahlen and grad student Yutong Duan, and have contributed to the production of a large number of components for DESI.

The DESI will be installed and run from Kitt Peak National Observatory. The project aims to provide new insights about the universe’s expansion and large-scale structure. In addition, it aims to help set limits on theories related to gravity and the formative stages of the universe, and could even provide new mass measurements for a variety of elusive yet abundant subatomic particles called neutrinos.

The project will use an array of 5,000 swiveling robots, each carefully choreographed to point a fiber-optic cable at a preprogrammed sequence of deep-space objects, including millions of galaxies and quasars, which are galaxies that harbor actively feeding, massive black holes. It aims to scan one-third of the sky and will capture about 10 times more data than predecessor surveys.

For the CAS News article, click here!

For the press release, click here!

 From March 11^th to March 15^th, BU Physics will be hosting the Non-thermal Quantum Systems Conference. This conference, located in the Rajen Kilachand Center, will emphasize short talks, long open discussion periods and a large number of junior participants including speakers.

This BU-CUNY workshop continues in this tradition and aims to bring together a group of creative experts, young and old, to push the non-equilibrium frontier. In this workshop there will be two main topics which will be discussed. The first is the attempt to unify concepts between classical mechanics and high energy physics on glassiness, scrambling, chaos and thermalization in the context of many-body quantum systems. The second topic is theoretical ideas in dynamical control of quantum information motivated by recent exciting experiments in superconducting and quantum optical platforms demonstrating small-scale coherent quantum computation.

The workshops will be organized by BU physics professors Chris Laumann, Anushya Chandran, Anatoli Polkovnikov, BU Physics student Phillip Weinberg as well as CUNY professors Vadim Oganesyan and Sarang Gopalakrishnan.

To learn more about this exciting conference, click here!