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UC SAN DIEGO PHYSICS
From The Chair
Spring 2013
Professor Dimitri N. Basov
Special Recognition: Sally Ride
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Department News
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Dear Alumni and Friends of the UC San Diego Department of Physics,
This newsletter describes a number of notable events from the past year, including
scientific breakthroughs, new appointments and awards.
It was a very good year. Research carried out by our students, postdoctoral fellows and
faculty is thriving. The discovery of the Higgs Boson, in which UCSD physicists played a
critical role, is arguably the most important science achievement of this century. For the
first time in more than a decade, the Department may start growing again. Itʼs a
fortuitous development, a product of a forward-looking hiring plan that we devised in
2011 despite a dire fiscal climate on the campus. We hired three rising stars this year.
Eva-Maria Collins (joint appointment with Biology) came from Princeton; Suckjoon Jun
previously held a junior fellow appointment at Harvard; and John McGreevy moved to
San Diego from MIT. We are in the process of making additional offers that will
strengthen our current efforts in condensed matter physics, biophysics and
astrophysics. We are contemplating an expansion in an area that is new for our
Department: atomic, molecular and optical physics. The newly established Center for
the Advanced Nanoscience is moving full steam ahead with flagship efforts in
superconductivity and new materials. We have just learned that the number of physics
majors in the incoming freshman class has nearly tripled since 2011 and has reached
99. Our undergraduate program, already one of the largest in the nation, is clearly
attracting even more young people. Things are looking good and the outlook for the next
year is even better!
Changes. The Department has carried out a thorough self-study as a part of the
Strategic Planning Initiative of our new Chancellor: Pradeep Khosla. The Department
has produced a 10-year vision document in which we detailed a series of concrete and
bold actions aimed to enhance every aspect of our academic enterprise. The highlights
of our long-term vision include new research centers and a new physics major with a
specialization in quantitative biology. We are facing many challenges, including extreme
understaffing, a product of recent budget cuts. In 2013-14, we intend to complete an
aggressive hiring plan that the Department proposed two years ago. Jointly with Biology
and Chemistry, we are on course toward establishing a major effort in quantitative
biology. In partnership with the Jacobs School of Engineering, we are finalizing the
details of the plan for yet another hiring initiative in the area of advanced energy. These
efforts will ensure an expanded role for UC San Diego Physics in global intellectual
leadership in the 21st century.
As we move forward, we invite you – our esteemed alumni and friends – to become
active participants in the life of the Department. Please drop me a line
(dbasov@ucsd.edu) to share your thoughts and successes, take 20 seconds to
subscribe to our Newsletter (http://physics.ucsd.edu/news/newsletter/), or browse our
website for the latest updates and announcements of Physics events
[http://physics.ucsd.edu/]. You may be interested to attend our weekly colloquia, held on
Thursdays at 4 pm, where we ask renowned leaders in their areas of research to give
an overview of the latest exciting developments, or to attend one of our annual public
lectures. We look forward to hearing from you and to your participation in the UC San
Diego physics community in the years to come.
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Appointments & Tenure
Awards
Faculty Spotlight: Vivek Sharma 6
UCSD Physics: Funded!
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Three Generations in Physics
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Milestones: Harry Suhl
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Physics in the News
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Giving Opportunities
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Connecting with UCSD
Physics
Thank you for your support!
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This newsletter was produced by
Science Writer Bruce Lieberman.
Special Recognition: Dr. Sally Ride
This spring, President Barack Obama
announced that he would award a posthumous
Presidential Medal of Freedom to Dr. Sally
Ride, the first American female astronaut to
travel to space and a former Professor of
Physics at UCSD.
The Medal of Freedom is the Nation's highest
civilian honor, presented to individuals who
have made especially meritorious
contributions to the security or national
interests of the United States, to world peace,
or to cultural or other significant public or
private endeavors. “We remember Sally Ride
not just as a national hero, but as a role model
to generations of young women,” President
Obama said. “Sally inspired us to reach for the
stars, and she advocated for a greater focus
on the science, technology, engineering and
Credit: NASA
math that would help us get there. Sally showed us that there are no
limits to what we can achieve, and I look forward to welcoming her family to the White
House as we celebrate her life and legacy.”
Americans were first introduced to Dr. Sally Ride when she traveled on the Space
Shuttle in 1983. After leaving NASA in 1987, she focused her efforts on science
education and on teaching girls in particular that there are no limits to what they can
accomplish. Dr. Ride founded Sally Ride Science in 2001 to develop and provide
classroom materials, programs, and professional development opportunities for K-12
science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) educators. She placed a strong
emphasis on gender and racial equality in the classroom and on introducing students to
working scientists, engineers and mathematicians who exemplified this diversity in their
respective fields. Dr. Ride was one of the architects and drivers of the Administration's
Credit: NASA
ongoing efforts to maximize participation of underrepresented groups in STEM classes
and careers. And her devotion to the exploration of space never wavered, as multiple
Administrations, including President Obama's, called on Dr. Ride to serve on advisory boards focused on national
space exploration efforts.
Dr. Ride, who passed away last year after a battle with cancer, has been bestowed posthumously with other honors.
The place where NASAʼs twin Grail spacecraft ended their missions with a well-orchestrated crash into the moon has
been named after her. Dr. Ride was in charge of the Grail missionʼs MoonKam project, which allowed students from
around the world select targets on the moon to image.
Separately, the U.S. Navy announced in April that an ocean-class
auxiliary general oceanographic research (AGOR) vessel would be
named R/V Sally Ride. Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus named the
vessel, which will be a Neil Armstrong-class AGOR ship.
Credit: US Navy
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Department News
Appointments & Tenure
Awards
The following members have been promoted to new
faculty positions. The Department congratulates them
on this milestone and wishes them continued success.
Five faculty members of the Physics Department were
named 2012 Fellows of the American Association for
the Advancement of Science. They are:
Oleg Shpyrko has been promoted to Associate
Professor with tenure. Olegʼs condensed matter group
studies nanoscale dynamics and the
structure of materials. He is
interested in developing novel
coherent x-ray scattering techniques
to probe the dynamics in a variety of
condensed matter systems.
Suckjoon Jun has been hired as an Assistant
Professor. Suckjoon is interested in
several questions related to biology,
including the driving force
underlying chromosome
segregation in bacteria, the
relationship between growth and
the cell cycle, and the origin of cell
shape plasticity.
Eva-Maria S. Collins has been hired as an Assistant
Professor. Her research interests
include the role of physical principles
for living systems. Currently, she
works in three major areas:
biomechanics, asexual reproduction,
and behavior & memory. Eva-Maria
has been selected as an Alfred P.
Sloan Research Fellow. The award
nominates the very best young
scientists from the U.S. and Canada.
John McGreevy has been hired as an Assistant
Professor. He is currently interested in
finding physical applications of string
theory. John and collaborators have
made progress toward describing a
number of systems that have proven
difficult for standard techniques,
including cold fermionic atoms at
unitarity, and non-Fermi liquid metals.
Professor Dimitri Basov, chair of
the Department, was cited for
“distinguished contributions to
spectroscopic studies of new
materials.” Dimitriʼs group uses
infrared light to probe the
electronic and magnetic properties
of novel materials such as
superconductors, spintronic
devices and graphene. He is a fellow of the American
Physical Society and was awarded the organizationʼs
Frank Isakson Prize for Optical Effects in Solids in
2012.
Professor Benjamin
Grinstein is a theorist
who studies the decay of
heavy quarks to discover
fundamental principles
that govern the basic
building blocks of nature
and their interactions. A member of the High Energy
Theory Group, Ben was recognized “for distinguished
contributions to the field of particle physics, leading to
accurate tests of theory and the precise determination
of fundamental constants of nature.” He recently
developed a test for string theory based on how
particles called W bosons scatter in high-energy
collisions, like those being carried out at the Large
Hadron Collider.
Professor Aneesh Manohar was
cited “for distinguished
contributions to the field of
elementary particle physics,
particularly for the development of
effective field theory methods and
their application to quantum field
theory.” Aneesh is a member of
the international Particle Data
Group, which publishes the biennial Review of Particle
Physics outlining critical issues in physics that help to
shape our understanding of the universe. Manohar is
an author, with Mark Wise, of the book Heavy Quark
Physics.
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Professor David Kleinfeld is
pursuing a broad range of
questions about the brain,
including how rodents wave their
whiskers to assemble a stable
representation of the physical
world through touch and the fluid
dynamics of blood as it flows
through the brain or is blocked, as
it can be in stroke. David was cited “for distinguished
contributions in quantitative neuroscience, including active
sensation of the vibrissa sensorimotor system, blood flow
dynamics within cortical vasculature, and novel analysis
and instrumentation.”
Professor Arthur Wolfe studies
the formation of galaxies,
particularly the set of early events
that gave rise to the rotating disks of
stars and gas that we find in spiral
galaxies today. Arthur was elected
“for distinguished contributions to
the fields of astronomy and
cosmology, particularly for predicting anisotropies in the
cosmic microwave background and discovering Damped
Lyman Alpha Systems” – cold quiescent layers of neutral
hydrogen gas that likely held the component of the early
universe that became stars.
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Patrick Diamond has been awarded
the 2012 Nuclear Fusion Award from
the International Atomic Energy
Agency. The Board of Editors voted
his paper, Physics of Non-diffusive
Turbulent Transport of Momentum
and the Origins of Spontaneous
Rotation in Tokamaks, as the most
outstanding paper from the 2009
volume. The Nuclear Fusion prize is
awarded annually to recognize outstanding work published
in the journal. Each year, a shortlist of ten papers is
nominated for the Nuclear Fusion prize. These are papers
of the highest scientific standard, published in the journal
volume from two years previous to the award year.
Nominations are based on citation record and
recommendation by the Board of Editors. The Board then
votes by secret ballot to determine which of these papers
has made the largest scientific impact. The award was
presented at the 2012 Fusion Energy Conference in San
Diego.
George Fuller was selected to
receive the 2013 Hans A. Bethe
Prize. The prestigious award is
given annually by the American
Physical Society to “recognize
outstanding work in theory,
experiment or observation in the
areas of astrophysics, nuclear
physics, nuclear astrophysics, or
closely related fields.” The prize,
which was established to honor Bethe, a renowned
nuclear physicist at Cornell University, consists of
$10,000 and a certificate citing the contributions made by
the recipient. George was cited for “outstanding
contributions to nuclear astrophysics, especially his
seminal work on weak interaction rates for stellar
evolution and collapse and his pioneering research on
neutrino flavor-mixing in supernovae.” He formally
received his award at a special session of the society's
April 2013 meeting in Denver. George has focused much
of his recent research on the physics of the mysterious
and ghostlike particles in the universe known as
neutrinos, which hold the keys to physicists' improved
understanding of cosmology, exploding stars called
supernovae, and the origin of the elements. George and
his research group at UC San Diego have been
calculating how neutrinos likely changed their “flavors” in
the early universe, how they do so now within
supernovae, and how this process affects the synthesis
of elements within stars - a process astrophysicists call
nucleosynthesis.
Massimiliano Di Ventra was
elected APS Fellow “for
contributions to the theory of
electronic transport in nanoscale
conductors” and was nominated by
the Division of Condensed Matter
Physics. The criterion for election
is exceptional contributions to the
physics enterprise, for example:
outstanding physics research;
important applications of physics;
leadership in or service to physics; or significant
contributions to physics education. The Fellowship is a
distinct honor that signifies recognition by one's
professional peers. Each nomination is evaluated by the
Fellowship committee of the appropriate APS division,
topical group or forum, or by the APS General Fellowship
committee. After review by the full APS Fellowship
Committee, the successful candidates are elected by the
APS Council.
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Suckjoon Jun, an assistant
professor of physics and molecular
biology, has won a $1.6 million
award from the Paul G. Allen Family
Foundation. This is the first award
given to a UC San Diego recipient
from the Foundation, which was
established by the co-founder of
Microsoft to support high-risk, highreward ideas in science. Suckjoon's
effort is one of five awards announced by the
Foundation to projects that aim to unlock key questions
in cellular decision-making and modeling dynamic
biological systems. “I am hoping to develop tools and
methods that will ultimately help us answer some of the
most fundamental questions in biology,” Suckjoon said
after winning the award. “I am deeply grateful to the
Paul G. Allen Family Foundation for believing in young
scientists pursuing big, but risky, questions.”
Undergraduates Geoffrey Stanley and Minyoung You
have received the Deanʼs Award for Excellence.
Geoffrey works in Prof. David Kleinfeldʼs lab and is
headed for graduate work at Stanford University.
Minyoung, who is also the recipient of the Norm Taylor
Award, is an undergraduate in Prof. Brian Keatingʼs lab,
and she is moving on to Caltech. Congratulations
Geoffrey and Minyoung!
Chelsey Dorow, an incoming graduate student, has
won the Harold Ticho Award.
Frederick Matsuda, a graduate student in Prof. Brian
Keatingʼs lab, has won an Inamori Foundation
Fellowship. Frederick, right, is pictured below in a
group with Dr. Inamori.
Terry Hwa has been elected to
Fellowship in the American Academy
of Microbiology. Fellows of the
Academy are elected annually
through a highly selective, peerreview process, based on their
records of scientific achievement and
original contributions that have
advanced microbiology. There are
more than 2,000 Fellows
representing all subspecialties of microbiology,
including basic and applied research, teaching, public
health, industry, and government service. Terry's lab is
interested in attaining a quantitative, predictive
understanding of links between molecular interactions
and physiological responsesPellentesque:
in bacteria, focusing
mostly on E. coli. They use a complementary twopronged approach. In a bottom-up approach, his lab
performs quantitative characterization of combinatorial
transcriptional control and post-transcriptional controls
to construct quantitative models of gene regulation
based on molecular properties. In a top-down
approach, they characterize phenomenological laws
governing bacterial growth, metabolism and gene
expression. The phenomenological laws can be
exploited to provide precise quantitative predictions
between physiological perturbations and responses;
they can also be used to guide the elucidation of
molecular signaling mechanisms.
Alison Coil has been awarded
extensive access to the Keck
Telescope. Alison is the co-PI of a
major new faint galaxy redshift
survey underway at the 10-meter
telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii.
The MOSFIRE Deep Evolution
Field (MOSDEF) survey will exploit
the new capabilities of a new multiConsectetuer:
object near
infrared spectrograph
called MOSFIRE, built at the UCLA
Infrared Laboratory. Using this new spectrograph, the
MOSDEF survey will target 2,000 distant galaxies lying
9 to 11.5 billion light years away. With these data, the
team will obtain rest-frame optical spectra to study the
stellar and gaseous content of very young galaxies,
charting galaxy evolution when the Universe was only
2-4 billion years old. Alison will study the growing
supermassive black holes in these distant galaxies.
The MOSDEF team has been awarded 47 observing
nights on the Keck I telescope for the survey, which will
take four years to complete. MOSDEF is a UC-wide
collaboration; additional co-PIs include Alice Shapley
(UCLA), Mariska Kriek (UCB), Naveen Reddy (UCI),
Brian Siana (UCI), and Bahram Mobasher (UCI).
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Faculty Spotlight: Vivek Sharma
Hunting the Higgs and preparing
for the next Discovery
July 4, 2012 marked one of the most monumental
days in the history of physics: the public
announcement that researchers had discovered a
Higgs-like boson, the theoretically predicted particle
that imparts mass to all elementary particles in the
universe. Prof. Vivek Sharma, leader (2010-11) of
the international Higgs search team of the CMS
experiment at CERN that includes UCSD
Professors James Branson, Frank Würthwein,
and Avi Yagil, spoke about the epic hunt, and the
work ahead to complete the portrait of this discovery
and the searches for new physics beyond the Higgs
boson.
BRUCE LIEBERMAN: Take me back to the
announcement of the discovery on July 4, 2012.
What was it like to be there?
VIVEK SHARMA: The 4th of July was the day we
announced the beginning of the end of a search, a
decades-long world-wide search, for a fundamental
piece of knowledge which was crucial to understand
how the universe got to be the way it is – where the
mass in the universe came from.
It was a very suspenseful day. Being there was an
exhilarating and simultaneously an exhausting
experience. Most importantly I was very curious what
our competing experiment, ATLAS, had to say because
we did not know what their results would be. The
suspense was very high as far as whether they would
agree with our observations and discovery, or whether
their data would point to something contrary – which
would have been VERY interesting.
But the scene, for those who were not directly involved
in the search, was something like a Super Bowl party.
There wasn't any tailgating, but people had lined up
from the night before. I remember going to the cafeteria
for a late dinner and seeing people outside on the
steps of the auditorium, snaking all the way down to the
street with their sleeping bags just to get a seat in a
rather small auditorium designed for about 500 people.
The day before the announcement several of us were
doing final crosschecks of our results, and helping
prepare the presentation that the head of our
experiment would give. I had also been fielding a
barrage of frantic calls from newspapers and television
stations, and conducting Skype interviews with
television people, including one in San Diego. So it
was, all in all, a pretty tense and exhausting day.
LIEBERMAN: How would you encapsulate the
reaction of the layperson on this important
discovery?
SHARMA: The layperson was actually very, very
deeply engaged. They had been following the Higgs
chase since the LHC, the worldʼs highest energy
accelerator, started smashing protons in 2010. And we
were very surprised and a little bit scared by how
enthusiastic people from all over the world were.
People found out my e-mail address, and there were
tons of email queries and I was quite overwhelmed by
them. I think people got the sense that something very
important was going down, and that this discovery was
confirmation of the basic postulate made back in 1964
– where the mass in the universe comes from.
I think it's important to realize that if the electron and
other elementary particles were massless, then there
would be no atoms, no molecules, no chemistry, no
biology, not us, not galaxies. None of this would exist.
And I think this is something that the public may not
have realized at first, but they caught on quickly when
this particle was dubbed the “God Particle” because it
actually is the particle that is necessary to explain our
existence in the universe. Iʼve tried to communicate this
central theme, in a proper scientific context, to
newspapers, television crews, and through one-on-one
interactions with students at UCSD and elsewhere.
UCSD students have been very curious, and some of
them went on to write essays for their writing classes
on this discovery. Public lectures are very important to
communicate the thrill of this discovery, partly because
our science is funded almost entirely by the taxes of the
citizens of this planet. It's very important to convey to
them what it is that we have discovered – the return on 6
their investment.
LIEBERMAN: The UCSD Physics Department has
had a large role in this search. Tell me about this.
SHARMA: UCSD has played an important role in this
discovery, on several levels. For example, the Physics
Department was very helpful when I was appointed the
coordinator of the Higgs search by CMS. This required
me to be present at CERN for the duration of the
search, which turned out to be about 2 1/2 years, and
the Department and the Dean (along with financial
assistance from the US Department of Energy) was
kind enough to find ways to give me teaching relief and
other flexibility so I could go run the search from
Geneva, Switzerland for 2 1/2 years.
The UCSD experimental particle physics group has
contributed in very strong ways to several aspects of
the construction and excellent performance of the CMS
detector. For example, in data acquisition, in tracking
charged particles that are produced in these protonproton collisions, in the development of software to
analyze the data, and in the enormous amount of
computing, utilizing worldwide computing infrastructure,
that is required to search through petabytes of data
representing trillions of proton collisions and find these
rare handful of events that would prove to be the first
evidence for the Higgs-like boson.
LIEBERMAN: False alarms occurred periodically in
the months leading up to the discovery. You
referred to them as “good drills.” What did you
mean by that?
SHARMA: When the LHC started smashing protons
together in 2010, we didn't really know what exciting
discoveries lay ahead. So we had to be ever vigilant,
and be able to come together – and these are large
international groups of people – as a rapid response
team. We routinely went through mock exercises to
prepare ourselves, to make sure that all the resources
were in place and ready to be deployed very quickly.
But these were mock challenges and everyone knew
that it was just a drill.
So when the first serious ATLAS rumor occurred in
April 2011, this provided a real-life test of this rapid
response team we had set up at CMS. And we came
out in flying colors. In what I dubbed as the “Easter
Bump Hunt” we activated and mobilized this
international team of the best physicists, young and not
so young and many from Europe, over the Easter
weekend. Easter is a very special holiday in Europe, so
being able to corral people away from their holiday and
get them going on the search was a big deal. Checks in
our data lasted about five days, and in that short period
we could quickly rule out the ATLAS rumors.
In that sleepless five-day stretch we analyzed trillions
of collisions and came to a definite conclusion. That's
the kind of furious pace that was needed and that's
what was done, and we showed to ourselves and to the
world that we could do it correctly. That's why it was a
very good drill for what would come ahead. The April
rumor turned out to be a false alarm, but we did not
know how much collision data we would need to
acquire before some kind of real Higgs signal would
come about, and when we would see that signal then
we would have to react very quickly.
LIEBERMAN: So now we had this 5 Sigma
th
confidence of the Higgs detection on the 4 of
July, and reflecting back youʼve commented that
every measurement you've made in your career
has been a confirmation of the standard model of
particle physics. Youʼve said that if we did not
discover the Higgs, that in some respects that
would've been more exciting.
SHARMA: Much more exciting! The common
theoretical expectation was that there would be a Higgs
boson of some kind. People were unsure about what its
mass would be, although several were betting that this
would be around 114 to 170 GeV (1 GeV is roughly the
mass of a proton). But if these detectors, CMS and
ATLAS – both of which were capable of searching and
finding the Higgs boson, if it existed over a very large
mass range – failed to find a particle like that it would
have basically killed the conjecture of the Higgs field.
That would've caused a revolution in physics, in our
knowledge of the underlining theory of the behavior of
subatomic particles.
So in some sense, it would be like a time before the
dawn of quantum mechanics, and the revelation that
there was much more to physics than what classical
physicists had distilled by 1899.
If we had not found this Higgs-like boson, the first thing
I and people like me involved in the search would have
had to do is to convince everybody that we didn't screw
up! Because that's one way of not finding something –
to have a detector where you think you can find it and
setting a trap where you think something will come in,
and then your trap is just loose or wrong and the
particle escapes. So it would've been a priority to show
everybody that had the Higgs existed, we would've
found it and the fact that we didn't find it meant it simply
didn't exist.
LIEBERMAN: So, what would you be doing now if
the Higgs had not been found?
SHARMA: If the Higgs boson did not exist, then the
mystery of how mass originates in the universe would
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still remain. And, it would definitely point to the fact that
there is something much more mysterious than the
Higgs field around in our universe. We know that things
have mass, atoms are as compact as they are, so
there must be something that is giving these particles
mass because our existing theory without the Higgs
field conjecture is a theory of massless particles. It
doesn't describe massive particles. So, somehow
somewhere there has to be a symmetry breaking and
that basically means that there's some exciting new
physics that is just around the corner. So at this
moment, had there been no Higgs boson discovery we
would be searching for different signatures of
alternatives to the Higgs field, and the Quantum
particles associated with it, trying to find out what is
causing sub-atomic particles to have mass. Any one of
these alternatives could have shown up in our
detectors two days later or two months earlier. When
you don't know what the alternatives are, you don't
know when it's going to show up in your detector.
That's the thing about research at the bleeding edge: a
discovery could be two days or years away.
LIEBERMAN: At what point did you become
confident the Higgs discovery was at hand?
SHARMA: On Thanksgiving, 2011 I knew. By October,
we had finished taking data and analyzed the entire
data in two or three weeks that followed. I came home
from Geneva for Thanksgiving, but my postdocs were
busy working at CERN. Thanksgiving dinner started
around 4 pm, which is at the end of the day in Europe,
and by that time they had produced a plot synthesizing
results of all Higgs searches that showed that we had
ruled out the Higgs boson everywhere except in a tiny
mass window near 125 GeV where we were seeing an
evidence of a signal. So this became a special
Thanksgiving for me!
Soon after, in the December 13, 2011 public meeting at
CERN, CMS showed this evidence and ATLAS had a
similar result. Although 3 sigma signals, shown by the
two independent experiments, rarely go away, we
wanted to keep the excitement down. At this meeting,
each experiment showed their data but made no strong
claims of a discovery. We just said that we were seeing
something that looks and quacks like a Higgs boson.
But we needed more data to really say for sure. That's
th
what brought us to 4 July 2012.
LIEBERMAN: The next stage of this work is to
investigate the DNA of this Higgs-like particle. How
is it more of a marathon race, and what will be your
strategy?
SHARMA: Discovering a new particle is like a sprint
and it goes very quickly. In the case of the Higgs it took
about a year of taking data to discover something that
looks like it. The next question is, “What exactly have
you discovered?” And this requires that we carefully
analyze the DNA of this new boson. This is a task that
requires much more data so that we can be quite
precise. And in that sense, it's a marathon compared to
a sprint. This DNA characterization is basically
checking that the particle that we have discovered is
THE scalar particle predicted in the Higgs conjecture.
The theory predicts very accurately the rate at which
the Higgs boson would decay into a bunch of familiar
particles like electrons or muons or quarks. And we
have to establish that these particles decay into those
familiar forms, and then measure the rate of
disintegration very precisely. Then, we have to
compare all this with what the theory predicts. If this
comparison works out within a small margin of error,
then our portrait of this particle would be complete, and
we can confirm that what we have found is indeed the
predicted Higgs boson. We are currently putting
together this picture, a complete portrait, if you will. And
that is a slow and methodical process. With more data
th
taken since the July 4 announcement, we already
have a pretty good characterization. The portrait that
we have so far is based on the data that we took until
October of last year, which is essentially 2 1/2 times
the data that we had when we announced the
discovery in July 2012. From these studies, it begins to
look like the DNA of this particle is just like that of the
particle that Peter Higgs et. al. predicted.
But we need to make a very sharp portrait to make sure
this is indeed the Higgs boson and not some look-alike
imposter. To complete this portrait weʼll need much
more data, and that will be coming when the LHC starts
colliding protons again in the spring of 2015.
LIEBERMAN: Are you amazed by the fact that the
portrait that you're filling in matches so closely
with what Peter Higgs predicted?
SHARMA: I think the people who would be most
pleased are Peter Higgs and other theorists who came
up with this conjecture. For me, it's pretty cool that the
portrait we have so far is close to that of the Higgs
boson and that it took experimentalists like me to find it
in less that two years since the first LHC collisions
began.
LIEBERMAN: What is the next frontier for the LHC?
SHARMA: The LHC accelerator is being upgraded to
be able to smash protons with almost twice more
energy. The primary purpose of the LHC is to search
for new particles and the new phenomena that they
would herald. When the machine turns on again in
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2015, we will continue these investigations. We know
that there is new physics beyond our current theory, the
standard model, but donʼt know what the nature of this
new physics might be. So discovery of a new massive
particle will give us the needed direction. And because
it could be one of several directions, the thrill of the hunt
is quite a bit heightened and we are looking at all
possible scenarios. This is different from the hunt for
the Higgs boson, where we had a good idea of what it
was supposed to look like. We knew all its properties
except its mass. So we were hunting for a subatomic
“animal” that was more or less very well characterized.
But in this next stage of the hunt for new physics, we
know that there is something exotic in the sub-atomic
jungle, but we don't know exactly what it is. So it's a
very different way of approaching the searches. If you
don't know what exotic animal you are hunting for, you
set traps for almost every form of the animal that you
imagine is out there. And you set the traps and wait.
You take more data, and see whether something
extraordinary has walked into your traps. That is what
we are preparing for now. With luck, some of these
discoveries may come as early as Christmas 2015!
***
9
UC San Diego Physics – Funded!
Faculty members continue to be awarded
research grants at an increasing rate, with
total department funding for the academic
year of $16 million. Notable special funds
have included:
Simons Foundation gives $4.3 million for
expansion of CMB cosmology project
ONRʼs MURI program awards $7.5 million
for nervous system study
Where do we come from? What is the universe made
of? Will the universe exist only for a finite time or will it
last forever? These are just some of the questions that
University of California, San Diego physicists are
working to answer in the high desert of northern Chile.
The Office of Naval Researchʼs MURI program, an
interdepartmental, interdivisional group of UCSD
faculty led by Physics Professor Henry Abarbanel, has
won a $7.5 million, five-year award from the US Office
of Naval Research.
The project will study the biophysical dynamics of
functional nervous system activity through theoretical
analysis, numerical simulation, and laboratory
experiments. Other UCSD participants include Gert
Cauenberghs, Professor of Bioengineering; Tim
Gentner, Professor of Psychology; Katja Lindenberg,
Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry; Misha
Rabinovich of the BioCircuits Institute; and Terry
Sejnowski, Professor of Neurobiology.
There are also participants from the University of
California, Berkeley and the University of Chicago, with
UCSD as the lead institution. Twenty MURI awards
annually are announced by the US Department of
Defense after a competition among several hundred
applicants. UCSD has led and participated in many
MURI efforts over the years, including several within
the Department of Physics and several others within
the now BioCircuits Institute.
The Simons Foundation has awarded $4.3 million in
funding for construction and installation of two new
telescopes to measure universe at its inception.
Armed with a massive 3.5-meter (11.5 foot) diameter
telescope designed to measure space-time fluctuations
produced immediately after the Big Bang, the research
team will soon be one step closer to understanding the
origin of the universe. The Simons Foundation has
recently awarded the team a $4.3 million grant to build
and install two more telescopes. Together, the three
telescopes will be known as the Simons Array.
“The Simons Array will inform our knowledge of the
universe in a completely new way,” said Brian Keating,
associate professor of Physics at UC San Diego's
Center for Astrophysics and Space Sciences. Keating
will lead the project with Professor Adrian Lee of UC
Berkeley. UCSDʼs Prof. Hans Paar is also a co-PI.
Fluctuations in space-time, also known as “gravitational
waves,” are gravitational perturbations that propagate
at the speed of light and can penetrate through matter,
like an X-ray. The gravitational waves are thought to
have imprinted the primordial soup of matter and
photons that later coalesced to become gases, stars
and galaxies - all the structures that we now see. The
photons left over from the Big Bang will be captured by
the telescopes to give scientists a unique view back to
the universe's beginning.
The telescopes of the Simons Array - named in
recognition of the grant - will focus light onto more than
20,000 detectors, each of which must be cooled nearly
to absolute zero. The result will provide an unmatched
combination of sensitivity, frequency coverage and sky
coverage.
10
Three Generations in Physics
Three generations of physicists at UCSD completed and analyzed the first angiome,
which is a fully vectorized reconstruction of the vasculature from the cortex of a
mouse. Philbert Tsai, PhD 2004 (left); Harry Suhl, founding faculty 1961 (center);
David Kleinfeld, PhD 1984 (right); and other colleagues worked on this project, which
will appear as an article in Nature Neuroscience in July 2013. This work reveals the
organization and rules that nature chose to traffic blood in and out of the brain and,
as one application, provides a means to calculate when damage to even a single
small blood vessel will lead to a stroke.
Please see our Q&A interview with Prof. Harry Suhl, on the next page of this newsletter.
11
Milestones: Harry Suhl
Harry Suhl, Professor Emeritus in the UCSD Physics
Department since 1991, has had a long and
distinguished career in physics that began as a young
man helping to develop radar technology for the British
Admiralty during World War II. Dr. Suhl is a specialist in
statistical mechanics, critical effects in non-equilibrium
systems, magnetism on macroscopic and mesoscopic
length scales, reaction kinetics and non-linear
dynamics. Dr. Suhl has explained many phenomena,
among them the nonlinear effects in ferromagnetic
resonance, known as the Suhl instability. Department
Chair from 1965 to 1968 and again from 1972 to 1975,
Dr. Suhl also was the former director of UCSDʼs
Institute for Pure and Applied Physical Sciences from
1980 to 1991. Below is a wide-ranging conversation
with Dr. Suhl about what heʼs up to now, his current
interest in neuroscience, and his life-long love for
physics.
BRUCE LIEBERMAN: How have you been spending
your time lately?
HARRY SUHL: Since I retired, I mainly have been a
house theorist for the Physics Department. That's
meant to be a person who takes interest in the
theoretical problems of various experimental groups
and tries to help.
LIEBERMAN: Tell me about your work with Prof.
David Kleinfeld.
SUHL: His project was concerned with blood flow in
the brain, which goes through a very elaborate
network, and there is a whole branch of mathematical
physics called network theory. Networks, even though
they have superficially random properties, have certain
inherent regularities. And some of these regularities are
very complicated mathematically, and I collaborated
with Kleinfeldʼs group on exploring some of the
mysteries of these vascular networks in the brain.
LIEBERMAN: For people who are not scientists,
the connection between physics and neuroscience
is not immediately obvious.
SUHL: Neuroscience is not yet at the stage where you
can have really detailed deconstructive theories, so the
connection between neuroscience and physics is at
very early stages. Neuroscience is still at the stage at
which we are partly guided by the behavioral aspects of
it. The actual workings of the brainʼs neural network,
the computational aspects of it, are not yet thoroughly
understood. One important aspect of Kleinfeldʼs study
is how the brain is supplied with energy by the
bloodstream. That is what his people have been
interested in for a number of years now.
LIEBERMAN: How did you get involved in the
collaboration?
SUHL: I do physics mainly for fun, and when there's a
challenging problem I like to look at it – partly to amuse
myself, now that I'm retired, and partly because it
sometimes has important applications. When David
talked to me about the brainʼs vascular network, I
realized that there may have been some theoretical
applications there, so I decided to look at it.
LIEBERMAN: What was it like working across
generations on this project, I mean, with Dr.
Kleinfeld and then also his postdocs and students?
Is there something special that happens when
someone as experienced as yourself works across
generations?
SUHL: Yes, I really think those connections are very
important. An experienced theorist can help what is
happening on the experimental side. Let me put it this
way: really successful experimentalists like David
Kleinfeld do not absolutely need a theorist. But they
would still like to have theorist, because it does clarify
their appreciation for what they are doing. So,
experimentalists don't absolutely depend on us
theorists for their daily bread, so to speak. But if
theorists can help them, they can only appreciate that
help. Sometimes we make it easier for them to come to
a conclusion in their work. I think this in particular
happened to some extent in the case of myself and
Kleinfeld.
LIEBERMAN: What was, say, one
clarified for Dr. Kleinfeldʼs group?
thing you
SUHL: Let me give you one example. Networks consist
of connections between so-called nodes or vertices,
and networks can be classified according to the
number of strands connected to a particular node or
vertex. There is a theorem in network theory that says
that if each and every node has only a fixed number of
connections, then the network will not split up into a
large number of sub-networks. By splitting up into subnetworks, I mean smaller networks that are not
connected to the majority of the primary networks. I'm
only giving you a rough version of that theorem.
LIEBERMAN: Why wonʼt the network split up into a
large number of sub-networks?
12
SUHL: That requires a moderately elaborate argument.
Practically every node in the vascular network has just
three connections coming out of it, and so it cannot
split up into a significant fraction of smaller networks.
Now, the theorem is a quite difficult proof; however, I
was able to give them a still rather elaborate heuristic
argument. In the end, if there are just three connections
per node there can only be an infinitesimal number of
sub-networks that have split off. Itʼs a vanishingly small
number compared with the overall number of network
connections.
LIEBERMAN: As we talk here about your work in
neuroscience, it reminds me that physics is really
the foundational science of everything – in that it
informs all other sciences. Or maybe thatʼs
mathematics.
SUHL: Yes, certainly physics is the foundation, and the
most important toolbox of physics is really
mathematics. Without that we would really be in
trouble.
LIEBERMAN: For the general public, that important
role of physics and mathematics is not always
obvious.
SUHL: I wish everyone would understand that. The
general public, in my experience, has been lumping
together physics and mathematics as the single subject
that they were not very good at in school.
LIEBERMAN: But itʼs worth trying, because both
physics and math is at the heart of so much of the
physical world we see around us.
SUHL: This would really help in many ways. It would
remove people's illusions in many ways, and make
them much more reasonable.
LIEBERMAN: In what areas of society today do you
think a more complete understanding of physics
could help things?
SUHL: Philip Anderson, a famous colleague of mine
whoʼs a Nobel laureate, says that economics is
presently in the state that biology was in before the
discovery of DNA. It means that a true deconstructive
quantitative understanding of economics, in his opinion,
is totally lacking in the same way that genetics was
lacking in the dark ages before the discovery of the
double helix.
LIEBERMAN: So what is this connection between
physics and economics?
SUHL: You mean how can economics benefit from
physics? It couldn't immediately benefit from
experimental physics, but theoretical physics could
certainly be an enormous help. What would be
particularly important is developing a statistics for rare
events – the black swan events. In other words,
someone will find out the actual occurrence rate of rare
events, and today that is not understood in any way.
For example, the concept of risk management. The
very phrase, “risk management,” is a contradiction in
terms because if it is manageable it isn't a risk. And if
it's a risk it is not manageable. I'm making an extreme
statement here, but the science of risk management is
not yet a true science. That I'm sure was Anderson's
point when he said that we are in the “pre-DNA” stage
of economics.
LIEBERMAN: Do you think that some of the same
tools physicists use to solve problems can be applied
to our understanding of economics?
SUHL: I would not go as far as to say that the existing
state of physics would be helpful in economics.
However, inspired individuals and people having
random thoughts may one day turn the tables and
make physics highly relevant. Right now, it is not too
relevant because we do not understand the statistics of
rare events.
LIEBERMAN: What other areas of society could
benefit from a more complete understanding of
physics?
SUHL: Society could benefit from a better
understanding of limitations in the information
revolution. Let me just give you an example: there is
Moore's law that talks about information storage
capacity doubling every two years using existing
technology. But that runs into a limit that is set by
quantum mechanics. Therefore, an appreciation by the
public of the limitations on our developments, as
dictated by quantum mechanics, is important. Now, that
doesn't mean that those limitations won't be overcome
one day by totally unexpected insights into the nature
of things. But for the time being, an understanding of
the limitations would be very valuable.
The other thing that would be useful to understand is
that there is an outside chance that the very limitations
that quantum mechanics imposes on existing
computing may be turned into an advantage in
communications. For example, you can have
essentially unbreakable codes for communications
purposes if they use quantum mechanical principles.
That is still a long way from general application, maybe
20 to 50 years from now, but eventually it will probably
happen.
LIEBERMAN: Unbreakable codes?
SUHL: Unbreakable communications. Communications
that can be kept totally secret either from enemies or
13
from competitors. That's an obvious application. This
could also have consequences for the preservation of
privacy, at least what is left of privacy, for individuals.
But that's a long way off.
LIEBERMAN: The human mind can think up all
kinds of experiments, and the true limit is not the
human mind but the resources available to act on
big ideas.
LIEBERMAN:
Now
that
this
project
on
neuroscience is behind you, what are your
interests looking forward?
SUHL: On the other hand, I do believe it's possible that
the human mind will never have limitations. It will
eventually find some answers without involving vast
expenditures.
SUHL: Iʼll return to some of Kleinfeld's problems and
work some more on network questions related to blood
flow in the brain. Eventually Iʼd like to get into the
architectural structure of the brain computing system,
which is another project in Kleinfeldʼs laboratory and
many other laboratories on campus.
LIEBERMAN: What do you think of big projects like
the recently announced brain mapping project
heralded by President Obama?
SUHL: I remember in 1970 or ʻ71 President Nixon had
a similar scheme for conquering cancer. Of course, it
hasn't conquered cancer. Certainly, throwing money at
a project helps; it sets the stage and raises the
possibilities of making substantial advances. But to
hope that these large projects will lead directly to cures
or some other solution – that is a little bit fanciful. It isn't
all a question of money.
LIEBERMAN: What are the other key ingredients? I
would imagine a focused goal and expected
outcomes.
SUHL: It helps to develop a focus. I'm sure that the
money thrown at cancer research certainly has
improved the survival chances, even if it hasnʼt totally
cured cancer.
LIEBERMAN: In general, what you think of these
big science projects that have broad goals, for
example mapping all connections in the human
brain?
SUHL: I do believe that any civilized society should
devote a fraction of their efforts toward undefined
goals. But they just should not raise expectations too
high.
LIEBERMAN: The Large Hadron Collider in Europe,
where the discovery of the Higgs boson made such
big news last year, is certainly an example of big
science alive and well.
SUHL: The current LHC experiments will not be the
end of it. It will just generate new questions. At some
point, the available resources of these science
experiments will run against a limit. Already some
people are dreaming about a particle accelerator in
outer space.
LIEBERMAN: Through theoretical advances?
SUHL: Yes, yes. Einstein thought up relativity. That did
not immediately cause huge expenditures for
experiments. I imagine there will be future theoretical
advances that may or may not be outside of what we
can experimentally verify. It's very hard to predict
things.
LIEBERMAN: Do you think the public investment in
physics and science today is adequate? At the
University of California, for example? Certainly the
level of investment in physics pales today in
comparison to the second half of the 20th century.
SUHL: I feel that certainly it is not a good idea to curtail
funding for projects that have implications for other
branches of science. For example, you do not want to
curtail research in x-ray crystallography – the kind of
research that has enormous implications for biology
and human health. If you have to curtail science for
economic reasons, don't curtail it in areas which are
instrumental for very broad areas of human existence.
Whether you want to curtail it, for example, in
cosmology or the search for dark matter in the
universe, that is a more delicate question.
LIEBERMAN: You might be getting yourself in
trouble here with a few of your colleagues.
SUHL: I know. I know. Everybody has to make the best
judgment they can think of. I'm not saying my opinion
should prevail, but if you have limited resources you
have to make choices. Let me make one more
comment about cosmology: the advances made in
areas of great importance to other fields, like
communications, the semiconductor industry, and so
on have also made it possible to make measurements
in cosmology that were totally out of the question a few
years ago. Thus, there have been advances in
cosmology that are a direct result of advances in
physics generally. To the extent that you want to
continue work in cosmology, which is something to
remember.
OK, that's all I have to say.
14
LIEBERMAN: Tell me about your routine during the
day. How many days a week to go to the University?
SUHL: I go about two to three days a week. When I'm not
at the University – I donʼt have many hobbies – Iʼm
working from home on the computer. I don't know, I don't
really have many interests outside of physics.
LIEBERMAN: What book are you working on right
now?
SUHL: I just finished reading something about a guy who
was instrumental in bringing radar research to the United
States during World War II.
LIEBERMAN: And that of course is something you
were involved in as well.
SUHL: Thatʼs right. During World War II I was a scientist
working for the British Admiralty on radar. So this book
was very interesting to me.
LIEBERMAN: Radar, and the RAF, saved Great Britain.
SUHL: Yes, there is no doubt about that. Radar also
saved everybody from a much longer war.
LIEBERMAN: World War II was one of the defining
events of your life like so many others, wasnʼt it?
SUHL: Yes, I would say that. I was born in Germany, and
we had to leave because of Hitler. I had developed a little
bit of interest in mathematics in high school in Germany,
where I had one rather good math teacher. When we
came to England in 1939, it was obvious that the war was
brewing and I had a strong feeling that science was going
to play a major role in it.
can't allow you to just continue studying until you get a
PhD, but we can put you into a scientific branch of the
services.” And so he got me into the British Admiralty in
their radar research branch. I got to know various older
scientists working for the government, including Fred
Hoyle, the astronomer. Fred Hoyle was, in fact, one of my
thesis examiners at the University of Oxford.
LIEBERMAN: How do think the experiences of young
people from your generation are fundamentally
different from those experienced by young
physicists today at universities and colleges?
SUHL: Well, they are better off, of course. The new
generation is much better off. I also think they are
motivated in a different way than we were. They don't
face the same existential threat. It's not a matter of life
and death for them, that they should do something
important for society, as it was for us. Still, a certain
fraction of them is highly motivated and very ingenious.
They seem to have a greater mental capacity than my
own generation, and that may just be the consequence of
better food and better healthcare. I am serious. I think
that greater physical ease helps you to concentrate on
more important things.
***
Prof. Ivan Schuller conducted a video interview with
Harry Suhl in November 2012. You can see it here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAJeOuS7TlA
I started to get books out of the local library on calculus
and all kinds of things. Then I was interned when France
fell. The British interned all German refugees, at least the
males, in various interment camps. A large fraction of the
German intelligentsia was interned. At the time I was only
about 17 or 18 years old, and they ran lectures for me,
including some physics lectures, and that is where I really
got interested in the subject. You know, when you're 18
years old, the fact that your interned and not getting much
to eat and so on doesn't seem to be all that important.
LIEBERMAN: So that difficult period of time actually
placed you in an environment where you were able
to learn from some of the brightest minds from
continental Europe.
SUHL: When I became interned, I was a student and so I
was allowed to go to the University. My interest in physics
grew there. C.P. Snow (the British scientist and writer),
came around to interview people at the University to
recruit people for war work. He interviewed me, and at
that point I was very close to my so-called bachelor of
science degree at the University of Wales. He said, “We
15
UC San Diego Physics – In the News
Traveling to Chile on the way to the beginning of
space & time
Prof. Brian Keating was profiled recently in UT San
Diego as one of several traveling researchers this year.
Brian plans to travel to Chile in September to work on a
cosmology project called POLARBEAR, which is
studying polarization patterns in light from the cosmic
microwave background in order to search for evidence
for the theorized epoch of inflation. You can read the
UT San Diego story here:
http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2013/may/05/pacificexplore-science/
Paving the path toward quantum computing …
With scotch tape! Work by Ken Burch, PhD 2006 and
now at the University of Toronto, was profiled in the
magazine Wired last fall. His teamʼs studies showed that
two-sided Scotch tape can be used to transfer
superconducting properties to a semiconducting material.
That semiconductor is similar to what is found in todayʼs
microprocessors, and microprocessors engineered with
superconducting properties are on the way toward
becoming quantum computers. Quantum computers,
unlike todayʼs binary computers that store information in
bits, can store multiple pieces of information at the same
time. You can read the Wired story by going to:
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/09/scotchtape/
Ken is also the recipient of the Lee Richardson Ocherof
Prize.
Chasing the Higgs boson
Prof. Vivek Sharma was profiled this past spring in the
New York Times epic feature article and multimedia
package on the hunt for the Higgs boson. Reporter
Dennis Overby gave Vivek top billing, beginning the
article with his name. You can read it here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/05/science/chasing-thehiggs-boson-how-2-teams-of-rivals-at-CERN-searchedfor-physics-most-elusiveparticle.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
You can read more about the involvement of Vivek and
other UCSD physics researchers in the Higgs boson
search in this newsletterʼs Q&A feature.
Sunil Sinha study makes the cover of Nature
Materials
Professor Sinha and student Yicong Ma were the
authors of the paper, Long-range interlayer alignment
of intralayer domains in stacked lipid bilayers, which
was featured on the cover of the December 2012
edition of Nature Materials.
The article was published online in October, and you
can read it here:
http://www.nature.com/nmat/journal/v11/n12/full/nmat3
451.html
David Smithʼs work on “invisibility cloaks” profiled
in U-T San Diego
David Smith, who earned his PhD at UCSD and is
now at Duke University, was interviewed by UT San
Diego in February on his work on developing materials
that make small objects invisible to microwave energy.
By cloaking objects in these meta-materials – David
and his team use copper, which can be arranged in a
pattern that causes microwaves to refract – the
materials cause the microwaves to go around the
objects. The article in U-T San Diego can be found
here:
http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2013/feb/24/cloakucsd-edu/
16
Giving Opportunities
The study of physics is special. Physicists strive to understand why our universe exists, how fundamental laws govern
the motion of galaxies as well as everyday encounters, and what the role of intelligence is in the face of harsh physical
reality. Physics informs us of what is possible, from communicating by cell phones to predicting the growth of black
holes, and what is impossible, such as defying gravity. It serves as the foundation of all of science, be it biology,
medicine, or physics per se. Education in physics is also special. It emphasizes how to solve problems. Advances in
physics allow scientists and engineers to formulate new technologies and initiate new industries. This in turn drives
economic growth and leads to a better tomorrow for society. The Physics Department at UC San Diego has a worldclass faculty that attracts some of brightest scholars in the world, but it needs your help to continue to thrive and grow,
especially in the current economic climate in California. Your tax-deductible gift of any amount, whether $50, $500,
$5,000, or $5 million, will make a difference and allow you to create a living legacy.
Our current areas of focus are:
•
Physics Activities Fund: supports a broad range
of instructional and research activities in Physics.
(Fund #42116)
•
Physics Department Memorial Lectureship Fund:
supports public lectures by renowned physicists.
(Fund #37466)
•
Harold Ticho Award: provides an outstanding
incoming graduate student with a stipend during
their first year in graduate school. (Fund #4635)
•
Young Physicists Program: supports outreach to
middle school and high school students. (Fund
#86142)
•
UCSD Experimental Biophysics Endowed Chair:
supports a proposed faculty chair. (Fund #4555)
Connecting with UCSD Physics
UC San Diego has made a significant investment in
alumni relations so that alumni can find meaningful ways
to stay connected to the university. For more information
on how to reconnect with the Department of Physics,
please contact our alumni officer:
Tamika A. Franklin
Assistant Director, Alumni Programs / Division of Physical
Sciences
858.246.0327 (O); 619.358.3338 (M);
t1franklin@ucsd.edu
Contributions to these activities may be made by:
•
•
credit card, electronic funds transfer, or UC San
Diego payroll deduction through our secure
online site (go to
htp://physics.ucsd.edu/visitors/alumni_giving.php
to select a fund and access the secure giving
site); or
check payable to the “UC San Diego Foundation”
(complete the donation form on the next page,
specifying one of the funds listed above, and mail
both to: UC San Diego Gift Processing, 9500
Gilman Drive, MC 0940, La Jolla, CA 920930940).
Additional giving options
For information on additional options, including gifts by
phone, pledges (i.e. a gift paid over 3-5 years), and
planned gifts (e.g., a bequest through a will or charitable
trust), please contact: Ms. Melanie Cruz, Senior Director
of Development, Division of Physical Sciences
phone: (858) 822-3258
email: mbcruz@ucsd.edu
Thank you for your support!
Private support and philanthropy enable the Department
of Physics to continue to recruit and retain the best
scholars and researchers who continue to make our
academic program nationally competitive. Below are
donors who have contributed to the Department over the
past year:
The Simons Foundation
Paul G. Allen Family Foundation
Thank you to other contributors who have generously
helped to establish the Harry Suhl Colloquium Fund!
17
Donation Form
UC San Diego Physics Department
Date: _____________
Fund Name: _____________________________________________
Amount: $____________
In Memory of (if applicable): _________________________________
First Name: __________________________
Last Name: __________________________
Street Address: _________________________________________________________________
City: ______________________ State: ______ ZIP: _____________
Email address: ______________________________________________
Primary Phone: ______________________ ¡ home
¡ cell
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Make your check payable to “UC San Diego Foundation” and mail it along with your completed
form to:
UC San Diego Gift Processing
9500 Gilman Drive, #0940
La Jolla, CA 92093-0940
18