UC SAN DIEGO PHYSICS
From The Chair
Spring 2012
Professor Dimitri N. Basov
Department News
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Dear Alumni and Friends of the UC San Diego Department of Physics,
It is my pleasure and distinct honor to welcome you all to our inaugural Newsletter!
With this newsletter, my faculty colleagues and I hope to give you a panoramic view
of groundbreaking science in the Department, along with the latest news, personal
accomplishments, and educational initiatives from the Physics Department.
Physics at UC San Diego is thriving! Research carried out by our students,
postdoctoral fellows and faculty is in the vanguard of astrophysics, contemporary
particle and condensed matter science, and cutting-edge biophysics and plasma
physics. Students, faculty and alumni continue to amass prizes and awards. These
stellar achievements have occurred despite challenges thrust upon us by stringent
budget cuts over the last several years. At the core of the Department's success in a
bitter fiscal climate is the uncompromising dedication to excellence of our faculty
and staff. Their indefatigable effort has allowed us to maintain a full schedule of
class offerings. Our undergraduates begin attractive careers upon graduation, and
they are recruited by the most prestigious graduate programs in the nation. Our own
graduate program continues to grow, and it has increased by more than 50% over
the past decade in terms of the number of students. During the same period, three
of our faculty were elected to the National Academy of Sciences. Two recent
graduates, Drs. Willie Padilla and Eric Bauer, are recipients of the Presidential Early
Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). This is the highest honor for
scientists in the United States at the beginning of their independent careers.
Physics at UC San Diego is changing! During the last decade we have appointed
nearly 20 new faculty members, which exactly compensates for the same number of
colleagues who separated from the University. The UC-wide hiring freeze of 2009,
an unavoidable consequence of severe cuts in State support for the University of
California, was the major reason for the static size of the Department. Yet in 2011,
the Department submitted a strategic hiring plan to the campus administration that
requested the appointment of nine new faculty members over the next three years.
Our aggressive hiring plan, closely coordinated with Chemistry, Mathematics,
Biology and Engineering, was enthusiastically received. We are now recruiting for
five new faculty positions, and several additional searches are slated for next year.
Our forward-looking stance turned a static situation into an exciting program for
departmental growth. This ensures an expanded role of UC San Diego Physics for
global intellectual leadership in the 21st century.
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Appointments
Tenure Decisions
Awards
Physics in the Community
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Graduate Women in Physics
Physics hosts students from
Morehouse and Spelman
colleges
Thomas Murphyʼs “Do the
Math” blog
Young Physicists Program
Faculty Spotlight:
Brian Keating & Hans Paar
Alumnus Spotlight: Don Eigler
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Milestones: Marvin Goldberger 12
Physics in the News
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Antarctica Service Medal
Patterns in new state of
matter
Hints of the Higgs boson
A simple genetic circuit for
stripes
Gordon Supercomputer
David Kleinfeld interview in
Cell
As we move forward, we need more than ever to enlist help from our esteemed
alumni and friends. We invite you to share your thoughts and successes with us,
and to continue to be passionate advocates of this Department. Please drop me a
line (dbasov@ucsd.edu), take 20 seconds to subscribe to our Newsletter, or browse
our website for the latest updates and events announcements
(http://physics.ucsd.edu/). We look forward to hearing from you and to your
participation in the UC San Diego physics community in the years to come.
Connecting with UCSD Physics 15
Dmitri Basov, Chair
This newsletter was written, edited and
designed by science writer Bruce Lieberman.
(www.blieberman.com)
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Alumni Contact
Thank you for your support!
Giving Opportunities
Donation Form
Department News
Appointments
Dusan Keres earned his doctorate from
the Univ. of Mass. at Amherst in 2007.
He researches the formation and
evolution of galaxies, their halos and the
IGM. He employs simulations of structure
formation in the universe to understand
the cycling of baryons between galaxies
and their surroundings.
Tenure Decisions
Alison Coil (2012) earned her doctorate
at UC Berkeley in 2004 and was a
Hubble Postdoctoral Fellow at the
University of Arizona before joining UC
San Diego in 2008. Coil research focuses
on galaxy evolution, observational
cosmology, and large-scale structure.
Michael G. Anderson (2012) earned his
doctorate at UC Davis in 2006. He focuses
on the best way to incorporate different
teaching methods into a university setting.
His goal is to help students realize their
misconceptions about the physical world
and help them construct models to explain
the universe.
Adam Burgasser (2011) earned his
doctorate at Caltech in 2001. He focuses
on the properties of the lowest mass stars
and coldest brown dwarfs. He uses
observational techniques to infer the
properties of cool stars, examine
magnetic activity, search for multiples,
and measure population statistics.
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Congjun Wu (2011) earned his
doctorate at Stanford in 2005. He
studies novel phases and properties in
condensed matter and cold atom
systems, including unconventional
generalization of magnetism, orbital
physics in transition metal oxides, and
superconductivity.
Awards
Patrick Diamond shared the European
Physical Society's 2011 Hannes Alfvén
Prize for outstanding contributions to
plasma physics with Akira Hasegawa
and Kunioki Mima, both of Osaka
University in Japan. They were
recognized “for laying the foundations of
modern numerical transport simulations
and key contributions on self-generated
zonal flows and flow shear decorrelation mechanisms
which form the basis of modern turbulence in
plasmas.” Diamond leads the plasma fusion group at
UC San Diego. He founded the group with Marshall
Rosenbluth, who won the prize in 2002.
Alison Coil was awarded a 2011 NSF
Career Grant. Her studies aim to
uncover the physical processes behind
the dramatic evolution observed in
galaxies and active galactic nuclei in the
latter half of cosmic history.
Lu Jeu Sham was one of nine UC San
Diego professors named a 2011 AAAS
Fellow. Prof. Sham is a theoretical
condensed matter physicist whose
research focuses on the optical control
of electron spins in semiconductor
nanostructures for quantum information
processing and spintronics.
Dimitri N. Basov won the 2012 Frank
Isakson Prize of the American Physical
Society for Optical Effects in Solids. He
has developed infrared techniques to
investigate novel electronic and
magnetic phenomena in a variety of
materials that include high-Tc
superconductors, transition metal
oxides, ferromagnetic semi-conductors, organic
materials, and grapheme.
Christopher M. Smith was the
recipient of a 2011 Equal Opportunity/
Affirmative Action and Diversity
Award in February. Twenty-five
individuals, units and departments
were recognized for contributing to
diversity and equal opportunity at UC
San Diego and in the community.
Sunil Sinha was chosen as a 2012
Outstanding Referee by the American
Physical Society. Sinha was among the
149 people chosen as Outstanding
Referees of the Physical Review and
Physical Review Letters journals.
The first Harold Ticho Award winner is
Martin Navaroli. He is graduating
from the Physics honors program in
the College of Creative Studies at UC
Santa Barbara. He has an excellent
academic record and outstanding
letters of recommendation. His
interests include low temperature detectors and their
applications in astronomical instrumentation. Working
with Dr. Ben Mazin at UCSB, he did two years of
undergraduate research on the development of a new
type of low temperature detector technology called
Microwave Kinetic Inductance Detectors (MKIDs),
which are capable of determining both the energy and
arrival time of individual photons in the near infrared,
optical, ultraviolet, and X-ray ranges. Beginning in the
fall of 2012, Martin plans to pursue his doctorate in
physics at UC San Diego working with Dr. Brian
Keating on POLARBEAR, a Cosmic Microwave
Background telescope located in northern Chile.
Alexander Swinton McLeod has
received the Department of Energy
Office of Science Graduate Fellowship
(DOE SCGF) award. He is one of 50
awardees selected from more than
1,300 applicants who applied to the
program this year. This selection is in
recognition of his outstanding
academic accomplishments, graduate education and
research preparedness – all of which reflect his
potential for important professional contributions to the
mission of the DOE Office of Science. The award is
$50,000/year for 3 years. Alex is working in Dimitri
Basovʼs group.
Stephanie Moyerman has won a
2012-2013 American Association of
University Women Graduate
Dissertation Fellowship in recognition
of her work in detector technology for
measuring the polarization of the
Cosmic Microwave Background
radiation with Prof. Brian Keating.
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UCSD Physics – In the Community
Graduate
Women in
Physics
The Graduate Women
in Physics group fosters
a sense of community
among female graduate
students
When Assistant
Professor Alison Coil
arrived at UC San
Diego, she saw how the
small fraction of
graduate and
postdoctoral women in the department was having a
negative effect on morale and the overall recruitment
and retention of graduate students. Seeing a clear
need to increase the representation of women in the
department, she created the Graduate Women in
Physics group. The goal of the group is to instill a
sense of community and support among the women
physics graduate students and postdoctoral
researchers, and to create a safe space to openly
discuss career and life issues.
Through monthly lunch meetings, the Graduate
Women in Physics group has discussed academic
coursework, strategies for successfully navigating
graduate school, career advancement, the two-body
problem, racism and sexism on campus, and personal
and professional balance. Visitors from national labs
and the community have also come to talk about career
paths and education research (meetings are open to all
members of the department). The group has had a
positive impact on our graduate women, with regular
attendance through the summer. Coil was also honored
last year with a campus-wide Equal
Opportunity/Affirmative Action and Diversity Award for
her creation of the group. You can learn more about
Graduate Women in Physics at
http://www.physics.ucsd.edu/womeninpysics/.
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Physics Dept. hosts students from
Morehouse and Spelman colleges
On March 5th, the department hosted a contingent of
science and engineering students and their advisors
from Morehouse and Spelman colleges, historically
black colleges (HBCs) located in Atlanta, GA. The
students were there as part of a four-day tour of
universities in southern California, and their visit to UC
San Diego was facilitated by the Office of Graduate
Studies and the Black Graduate Student Association.
Students took tours of the labs in condensed matter,
biophysics, astrophysics and high energy physics;
heard a mini-lecture on brown dwarfs by Associate
Professor Adam Burgasser; and spoke with faculty and
graduate students about research and campus life at
UC San Diego.
“It is extremely important for students from HBCs, who
may not have the same exposure to major research
programs, to see physics in action,” said Burgasser,
who helped to organize the day-long tour. “We hope
these traditionally underrepresented students will
seriously consider pursuing a Physics Ph.D., and
hopefully here at UC San Diego.”
Consectetuer:
Physics faculty Adam Burgasser discussing stellar kinematics with a
Morehouse College Physics major at a reception for visiting students.
Credit: Christopher Murphy, OGS.
Thomas Murphyʼs “Do the Math”
makes a big splash on the
blogosphere
This past July, Physics professor Thomas Murphy
started up a blog called “Do the Math” to demonstrate
how physics and estimation techniques can paint a
picture of the challenges our society will face in the
coming decades as we transition away from fossil
fuels. Motivated by the UC San Diego Physics 12 class
on Energy and the Environment, as well as his own
interests in sustainable energy use, Murphy hopes his
blog can teach laypeople how to use physics and
quantitative analysis in everyday life, emphasizing
“estimation over exactness.”
The site has quickly gone viral, being featured on highprofile aggregators such as The Huffington Post,
Scientific American and the Energy Bulletin. Earlier this
year, the website passed a million unique page views.
In popular posts such as “Why Not Space?” and “Can
Economic Growth Last?” Murphy challenges our basic
assumptions about the future of energy and growth.
“We need to shake the religion of growth,” he states in
his guide to the blog site. “We simply canʼt continue
growing indefinitely. Either we use our brains to plot a
trajectory into steady-state and hope itʼs smooth, or we
let nature decide how to deal with us.” Check out his
blog at http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math.
Do the Math
Using physics and estimation to assess energy, growth, options
Young Physicists Program
The UC San Diego Young Physicists Program brings
middle and high school students from across the San
Diego region together with physics graduate students
and professors from UC San Diego to learn about
fundamental topics in the quantifiable world via
simplified college-level laboratories and interactive
demos. Children of Physics Department alumni are
also welcome to participate.
With help from several graduate student volunteers,
Asst. Prof. Oleg Shpyrko organizes the Young
Physicists Program on campus. Special efforts are
made to recruit students from schools with large
numbers of underrepresented minorities and students
from financially disadvantageous backgrounds.
Students participating in the program meet on
Saturdays once a month for hands-on experimental
demos, lectures by invited speakers (typically faculty
members in physics department at UC San Diego),
laboratory tours, and face-to-face interactions with
undergraduate and graduate physics student
volunteers.
The YPP series culminates with a “liquid nitrogen ice
cream” dessert, which is very popular with students.
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Faculty Spotlight
microwave background. What exactly are these
signals?
Let me start with a little background. There are three
properties of any type of radiation, including the CMB.
You have its anisotropy or isotropy – that is, whether its
properties change from one direction in the sky to
another (anisotropy) or whether its properties are
identical no matter which direction you look in the sky
(isotropy); it has its spectrum, that is, where on the
electromagnetic spectrum the thermal radiation can be
detected (the CMB is strongest in the microwave
portion); and it has its polarization, which describes the
oscillations of the waves with respect to the direction in
which the CMB photons travel.
Prof. Brian Keating at the South Pole, 2008
Searching For Signs Of
The Beginning
High in Chileʼs Atacama Desert, UC San Diego
astrophysicists Brian Keating and Hans Paar co-lead a
multi-national team of scientists that has built
POLARBEAR, a telescope finely tuned to the faint echoes
of the Big Bang. Hidden in the cosmic microwave
background (CMB) could be the ghostly signature of
Inflation, the theoretical epoch during which the universe is
thought to have expanded faster than the speed of light,
carrying with it initial perturbations in energy that later
would form the seeds of galaxies and large-scale
structure. Here, Professor Keating talks about the teamʼs
quest to detect this faintest of primordial signals
embedded in the CMB.
You were just in Chile this past January, working
on the POLARBEAR telescope. What were your
goals for that that trip, and what is the latest status
of the observatory?
The goals were to get “First Light,” or really “First
Microwave,” where we get our first signals from the
universe. Up until now, we had only been getting
signals from laboratory sources, and this is really the
first time that we can introduce photons from the early
universe into the telescope. Another goal was to
confirm whether or not the telescope is working
properly. And it is, so itʼs been observing since we got
First Light in January, and weʼve been gathering data
from the CMB since about late March. This is only six
months after the telescope arrived in Chile, which is a
pretty amazing accomplishment.
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One of the primary goals of POLARBEAR is to
search for these very faint signals known as Bmode signals, which are embedded in the cosmic
The spectrum was detected by Arno Penzias and
Robert Wilson for the first time in 1965, and they won
the Nobel Prize for this discovery in 1978. This
spectrum was later measured with exquisite precision
by the COBE FIRAS instrument, for which John Mather
won the Nobel Prize in 2006. Anisotropies in the CMB
were detected in 1992 by the COBE satellite, and
George Smoot won the Nobel Prize for that discovery
in 2006 as well. So Nobel Prizes have gone to four
different scientists for characterizing the spectrum and
the anisotropy of the microwave background. The
polarization of the CMB is relatively unexplored, and in
particular the B-modes at large angular scales on the
sky are a type of polarization that can only be produced
by gravitational waves. Cosmological gravitational
waves can only be produced, we believe, by Inflation,
the ultra-rapid expansion of space-time hypothesized to
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occur 10 seconds after the Big Bang. At those
epochs, at those high energies and high temperatures
in the early universe, space-time itself was quantized
and those quantum fluctuations inflated and expanded
to enormous scales, giving rise to these expected
gravitational waves. So if Inflation occurred, it should
have produced gravitational waves that are still around
to this very day. However, they are most concentrated
– and therefore most detectable, if they can be
detected – in the CMB.
Why would the imprint of these B-mode signals on
the CMB tell you that they were created by the
gravitational waves predicted by Alan Guthʼs
theory of Inflation?
Only gravitational waves can produce these B-modes
at large angular scales. This very particular polarization
pattern corresponds to the fluctuations of space-time
itself. Gravitational waves will cause a stretching and
shearing of space-time, and we expect that these
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effects were produced in the early universe at 10 of a
second after the Big Bang and survived until the CMB
was produced about 380,000 years later – leaving an
imprint on the CMB photons. So we expect that this
imprint on the pattern of polarization will have a shear
or swirl-like quality to it. That's never been measured,
but if it is measured that will provide strong evidence
for an inflationary origin of the universe.
How faint are these B-mode signals?
Letʼs start with something we know. Room temperature
is about 300 Kelvin, or equal to about 80 degrees
Fahrenheit. The temperature of the CMB is 100 times
lower than that, or about 2.7 Kelvin (about -454 F). The
anisotropies in the CMB – that is, the temperature
fluctuations discovered by Smoot and the COBE
satellite – are found at a few 100,000ths of the CMB's
temperature. The E-mode polarization of the CMB,
which doesn't correspond to the gravitational waves
predicted by Inflation, are detectable at temperatures
that are about one part in a million of the CMB
temperature. And the B-modes will be about a tenth of
that. So were talking about needing instruments that
can detect variations in temperature at a scale of
hundreds of nano-Kelvin – a few parts per billion of the
CMB temperature and a few parts per hundred billion
of room temperature. These are exquisitely miniscule
signals.
What kind of engineering goes into detecting
them?
The analogy that I use is that we are not trying to
detect light, we are trying to detect heat. And so just
like the Palomar telescopes were not built in the middle
of San Diego to avoid stray, man-made light, we donʼt
want to be contaminated by heat. We need to build
detectors that are very, very cold so they are sensitive
to the extremely tiny signals weʼre looking for. We cool
them down to a quarter of a degree above absolute
zero, which is ten times colder than the temperature of
the CMB. We build detectors called bolometers, which
are devices that have a temperature-dependent
resistor coupled to an optical detector, which is then
coupled to a 3.5-meter diameter POLARBEAR
telescope. The bolometers are made of aluminum, a
superconducting material that transitions between a
finite resistance to zero resistance at what's called the
critical temperature of the superconductor.
When we cool the bolometers down to 200-250 microKelvin, they behave as the most sensitive detectors of
thermal energy that have ever been produced. They
are incredibly sensitive, and weʼve built a lot of them.
POLARBEAR has 1,274 of these bolometers, each of
which is cooled down to 0.25 Kelvin. And thereʼs one
designed to detect each type of polarization – vertical
or horizontal polarization.
These signals, which come in as light from the CMB
but are analyzed as electrical signals, must be
amplified from 0.25 Kelvin to 300 Kelvin, and that
happens using very specialized wiring in a vacuum
chamber. These special transducers take signals from
the bolometer and amplify them, and then we sample
these signals hundreds of times per second. Weʼre
really sampling their electrical resistance, which is
related to the temperature of the CMB photons that are
coming in. From that, we make a map of the CMB's
polarization as the telescope slews across the sky.
The search for B-mode signals is one goal of
POLARBEAR, but not the only one. Tell me about
the other science goals, and how challenging
those will be to achieve.
So, there are two different types of B-modes. There are
B-modes from gravitational waves, which we talked
about, but there are B-modes that also are produced by
gravitational lensing. Gravitational lensing, like
gravitational radiation or gravitational waves, is a
consequence of Einstein's 1915 theory of General
Relativity. It says that mass can bend space-time,
which then affects the trajectory of light as it
propagates throughout the universe. This includes the
light of the CMB. So, matter in the universe, in
particular dark matter – which makes up most of the
matter in the universe – deflects the trajectory of CMB
photons. We expect that dark matter converts the Emode polarization of CMB photons to B-mode
polarization, and by analyzing that process we can
learn about the properties of dark matter. In particular,
it can tell us about the nature of the only known form of
dark matter that's ever been detected: the neutrino.
Neutrinos are not expected to be the dominant source
of dark matter, but they are the only source that's
known. Right now we donʼt know the mass of the three
known types of neutrinos. Itʼs a huge mystery.
These observations of the gravitational lensing of
the CMB will help you place constraints on the
mass of neutrinos?
Yes. We know that neutrinos have mass, but we only
have a lower limit.
Your goal is to have more than one telescope to
gather data down in Chile. How many do you hope
to have and when, and what are the advantages of
having more than one instrument?
POLARBEAR is a major technological achievement,
but it is sensitive to just one single frequency.
Unfortunately, the signal weʼre looking for in the CMB
can be contaminated by other radiation in the Milky
Way galaxy as well as other foreground galaxies. The
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only way to get rid of this contamination is to measure
the CMB signal at different frequencies, which then
allows us to subtract out the contaminating radiation.
Our plan, therefore, is to build telescopes that can
measure the CMB signal at multiple frequencies. We
need more telescopes, with as many detectors as
possible that have better frequency coverage. We canʼt
just keep adding more detectors to the telescope we
have, so the only way to add more detectors is to have
more telescopes. That will give us sensitivity to both
smaller gravitational wave signals and smaller
gravitational lensing signals – which will allow us to
calculate smaller neutrino masses. If we can raise
funding, we would like to have three telescopes down
there in Chile, so that means weʼd like to build two
more. Each one would have enhanced frequency
coverage, which again would allow us to discriminate
against foreground contamination. Together, these
instruments would have the same or better capabilities
as a $1 billion satellite, and with NASA's budget so
constrained there are no space-based missions for this
job on the horizon. The current POLARBEAR
telescope, including all the back-end instruments, as
well as salaries for the 40-plus scientists working on it
for five years, costs about $10 million.
How long do you expect to gather and analyze data
before you feel confident enough to draw some
conclusions? How will you know that you have
something significant, or that these theoretical Bmode signals in fact do not exist?
Weʼre currently devising an observation strategy. As
scientists, we often have to choose between going for
high-risk but high-reward science, like the inflationary
signal, or lower risk but still very good reward science.
The gravitational lensing signal that would allow us to
calculate the mass of the neutrino would fall into that
second category. Itʼs known to be there, while the
gravitational wave signature may not be detectable.
The gravitational lensing signal is detectable if we can
spend enough time to go out and look for it, and weʼve
estimated it will take about a year of observations. We
plan to begin these observations in June, when the
atmosphere above the Atacama is coldest and there is
less water vapor in the atmosphere. Once we gather
the data, it will then take at least a year to analyze it.
So we expect to report results in early 2015.
Detecting the lensing signal itself requires a year of
good-weather observations by one POLARBEAR
telescope. Additional observations that will allow us to
calculate the mass of the neutrino, however, will require
the three telescopes I talked about. So, that search
can't begin until we raise the funds to build two more
telescopes.
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And what about the B-mode signal as a signature
of Inflation?
If we can find it, we expect it will take two to four years
of observations to gather enough data to make a strong
case for its detection. This search will require all three
telescopes, each observing at three different
frequencies.
Back to the observatory itself. After more than a
year of assembly and tests in California, you
disassembled the telescope and shipped it to Chile
in September – right after one of the toughest
winter seasons in the Atacama in decades. Did the
weather set you back?
It did set us back. Building the observatory – grading
roads to the site, pouring a concrete pad and so on –
was delayed because last summer (wintertime in Chile)
we couldnʼt get concrete trucks up to 17,200 feet. The
roads were just impassable and there were very high
winds. Long before we were finally able to prepare the
site and assemble the telescope last fall, we had to
consult with the Chilean government and get a Chilean
lawyer involved so we could get permission to deploy
the telescope. There were a lot of logistical hurdles,
and that was before the weather turned bad. Only
recently have we gotten very good weather, and now
itʼs actually much better than anywhere else on Earth.
Why is the Atacama such a great place for your
project?
Water absorbs microwaves, just like water in food in
your microwave absorbs that energy and heats up. So,
we donʼt want photons that have been traveling for 13.7
billion years to get absorbed in a water molecule in the
Earthʼs atmosphere. Thatʼs why we put the telescope at
a very dry site. We prefer to be in space, but as I said
the toll to get an instrument up there is at least $1
billion. So instead we go just above 17,000 feet, and
there we are above about half of the Earth's
atmospheric density. The air pressure is very low,
compared with sea level, and as a consequence
thereʼs very little water vapor and itʼs very dry.
Few of us have been at an altitude that exceeds
17,000 feet, and here you are working with heavy
equipment and extremely sensitive instruments.
What is it like at Chajnantor Scientific Reserve in
Chile where POLARBEAR is situated, and whatʼs it
like to work at that altitude?
The landscape is very similar to what Mars must look
like, with a very reddish hue. Itʼs very desolate. The
area is not terribly far from where those Chilean copper
miners were rescued in 2010. Above about 13,000 feet,
a dirt road ascends steeply, and you need a 4x4
vehicle to go anywhere. For the first couple days there,
you need to acclimate. You only work for a few hours,
and you're pretty much always wearing your oxygen. I
like to say that at 10,000 feet at the South Pole, I get
out of breath walking up a flight of stairs, but at the
Chilean site at 17,000 feet I get out of breath walking
down a flight of stairs. Any exertion becomes very, very
taxing. It's also very dry, so static electricity is a big
problem; you just walk across the room and touch
something and you can produce a shock. Thatʼs very
dangerous for these very sensitive pieces of equipment
that are designed to detect very minute CMB signals.
It's a huge issue, so you have to be very careful to
discharge yourself before you touch anything.
The Chajnantor Plain is an epicenter for
international astronomy. The Atacama Cosmology
Telescope is right next to POLARBEAR, and the
new Atacama Large Millimeter-submillimeter Array
(ALMA) is not far away. You must feel like youʼre in
the center of the universe – for studying the
universe.
There are these wars about what is better for
astronomy – the South Pole or Chile. It's like a religious
war. Each one has its advantages and disadvantages.
At the South Pole, you can't really get package
deliveries the next day, whereas at the Chilean site you
can. It takes at least a week to get to the South Pole,
but there the weather is also a bit more predictable.
However, the best weather at Chile will be better than
the best weather at the South Pole, but good weather
is probably more frequent at the South Pole. For CMB
astronomy, I can't say that one is better than the other.
But the Chilean site is incredible. You feel like you're at
the top of the world, and youʼre surrounded by 20,000foot volcanic cinder cones. You are near the biggest
observatory in the world – ALMA. So this is a very
special place. You are in Chile, which is a wonderful
country. We work very closely with Chilean universities
and engineers, and we build up a lot of camaraderie.
Part of the scientific enterprise includes
communicating the importance and excitement of
your research to the general public. Now, letʼs say
you run into your neighbor on a Sunday afternoon
and he asks what youʼre working on. What do you
tell him?
It's always a challenge. We are trying to understand the
very moments of the origin of the universe. There is
nothing that can possibly be more of a philosophical
curiosity for human beings. Where do we come from?
What is the universe made of? Does the universe have
a finite lifetime? When will it end? We don't understand
what 96 percent of the universe is made of, and what
POLARBEAR deployed on the Chajnantor Plain in
Chileʼs Atacama Desert
weʼre doing will inform our knowledge of the universe in
a way that's never been done before. Along the way,
we will also perhaps detect gravitational waves, which
are a prediction of the theory of general relativity. We
are exploring the very limits of gravity – quantum
gravity, a phenomenon predicted by Inflation, by using
detectors that operate using quantum mechanics. So
we are using these very small and very cold things to
study the universe when it was at its hottest and most
dense, and when the universe was a quantum object
itself.
For us to be able to understand that, and along the way
understand things like dark matter and dark energy,
would be a huge triumph not only for science but
metaphysics, philosophy and theology. I am personally
interested in it because it really encapsulates all of the
fundamental laws of physics. I do it because there is
nothing more fundamental.
***
On May 23, Prof. Keating will present the talk: “Going to the
Ends of the Earth to Glimpse the Beginnings of Time:
Studying the Big Bang from the Worldʼs Extremes.” The talk
will begin at 7:30 p.m. in the Great Hall of the International
House at UC San Diego. Join us for refreshments at 7 p.m.
9
Pursuing new questions
Alumnus Spotlight
Don Eigler, B.A. ʻ75, Ph.D. ʻ84, is best known for his pioneering
work in nanoscience. In 1989, he became the first person to
manipulate individual atoms, famously writing the letters “IBM”
with 35 xenon atoms. This achievement was made possible due
to the capabilities of a first-of-a-kind low temperature ultra-high
vacuum scanning tunneling microscope that he had designed and
built for the purpose of studying atomic-scale surface
phenomena. Eigler and colleagues went on to develop “Spin
Excitation Spectroscopy” a technique for measuring the
energetics and dynamics of the spins of individual atoms on
surfaces. Winner of the Davisson-Germer Prize, Kavli Laureate
and U.C. San Diegoʼs Outstanding Alumnus of the Year in 1998,
Eigler recently resigned his position as an IBM Fellow at the IBM
Almaden Research Center in order to pursue the next phase of
his career.
Don Eigler at a TEDx talk at Caltech in Jan. 2011
What are you working on these days?
I'm at the world-famous Wetnose Institute for Advanced
Pelagic Studies, which nobody has ever heard of
before (laughs). The Wetnose Institute came about in a
funny way. I was scheduled to give some talks last fall
when it turned out that several of my hosts were a tad
perturbed because I was no longer affiliated with an
institution they could reference when introducing me.
So as a personal courtesy to them I just created my
own little institute. Right now I am in the midst of
exploring new areas of physics – well, at least new for
me. It was time for a change.
objectʼs distance from you is made to oscillate, you
would expect to experience an oscillating gravitational
force, but changes in the force should not be
instantaneous. They should be retarded by an amount
determined by the “speed of gravity,” which we
presume to be the same as the speed of light. The
problem is that it has never been measured.
So, simply put, the question is, “What is the retardation
of the gravitational field?” Itʼs a very simple question.
Designing an experiment that stands a chance at
answering this question is the challenge. I think a lot
about it.
Any ideas so far?
Why do you think youʼre drawn to this particular
question?
To my surprise, my most recent interests are in gravity
and general relativity. There are two questions for
which Iʼm interested in seeing if I could design
experiments to answer. One question is: “What is the
retardation of the gravitational field?” There is good
evidence from the decay of pulsars indicating that the
speed of gravitons, the presumed radiated component
of the gravitational field, is the same as the speed of
light. But that's a model-dependent conclusion. The
model however, is a pretty damn good model – general
relativity.
The speed of gravity, though not yet directly measured,
is not a very contentious issue. Everybody expects it to
be the same as the speed of light. I'm drawn to this
question not so much because I think the question is
important, but because of the challenge of making the
measurement. Call it an “ego thing” if you like, but I
really like tough challenges, even challenges that beat
me instead of me beating them. They are an awful lot
of fun. And after all, the greatest joy of doing physics is
the process.
So you're talking about the speed of gravitational
waves traveling through space?
Not exactly. As with the electromagnetic field, the
gravitational field of accelerating masses should have a
retarded component. The simplest way of thinking
about it is to imagine a massive object in front of you
exerting a gravitational force on your body. If the
10
What is the second experiment you want to do?
It's a test of the equivalence principle. The equivalence
principle tells us that the inertial mass of any object is
the same as its gravitational mass. There are many
tests of the equivalence principle for ordinary matter,
but as far as I know, it hasn't yet been tested for a
single kind of elementary particle. Iʼd like to measure
the acceleration of an electron due to a gravitational
field. This experiment was tried back in the 1960s by
William Fairbank, but without success. What makes this
such a difficult experiment is that the gravitational force
is so much weaker than the electromagnetic forces. So
again, Iʼm drawn to the very difficult experiment. The
good news is that if you can do the measurement on an
electron, it should be a comparatively simple thing to
follow that up with a measurement on a positron,
allowing you to answer the question whether antimatter
(at least in the form of a positron) falls up or down.
Looking back on your career, youʼve obviously
experienced great success as a physicist. Any
advice for young people just starting out in their
careers?
Without doubt there are many paths. In my case, hard
work and the luck to have a few very special people
create opportunity for me were the most important
ingredients. That was a good combination, a damn
good combination. The hard-work part one has some
control over, but the great fortune to have people care
for you and create opportunities for you – that is
perhaps beyond oneʼs own control. The primary reason
Iʼve had my career is because people created
opportunities for me: my parents, my mentors, and the
people of California who created a great research
university that I could afford to attend. It is indisputable
that the success Iʼve had was due in large part to the
vision of the people of California when they created
UC. It is beyond a mere imperative that we continue to
create such opportunities for the next generation – it is
a sacred obligation.
As for my own achievement back in 1989, it's not
something that I planned. It happened in the course of
pursuing the physics I was interested in. As it turns out,
I was just in the right place at the right time. As a
graduate student, I became one of the few people who
really knew how to do experiments on clean surfaces at
low temperatures. Fortune would have it that the
scanning tunneling microscope (STM) was invented
just as I was completing my Ph.D. work. Like so many
other people, I was fascinated by the STM. But given
my background in low-temperature surface
experimentation, I started making a list of the
experiments one might do with a low-temperature STM.
The list kept growing. I knew that an STM working on
clean surfaces at low temperatures would be a gold
mine. So with a few doors held open for me, and an
awful lot of hard work, I got to create the first STM that
could do experiments on clean surfaces at low
temperatures. It happened that such an instrument was
just what was necessary to make atom manipulation
possible. Once you have the instrument, manipulating
atoms is as easy as breathing. Well, almost.
So, today youʼre still living in the Santa Cruz area
with your wife, Roslyn, thinking about new physics
questions and new challenges. About that Wetnose
Institute for Advanced Pelagic Studies – does it
really exist?
Yes (laughs). Well, yes and no. It's kind of a tongue-incheek thing. The institute is named after my sailboat,
Wetnose, which we really do use for pelagic
adventures. My colleagues (who will remain nameless)
and I are having a lot of fun with it. At this point the
institute has about twenty fellows organized into three
divisions: a division of scientists, a division of
explorers, and a division of rogues. Certain members
have been cross-appointed to more than one division.
While itʼs all for fun, the desire to join the institute
seems to be genuine and universally motivated by the
belief, or rather hope, that there is a better way to do
science.
“Wetnose Institute for Advanced Pelagic Studies” –
thatʼs a lot to paint on a sailboatʼs transom.
Right. Sheʼs just “Wetnose.”
***
Don Eiglerʼs sailboat, Wetnose
11
Milestones
were built in Hanford, Washington, specifically for the
production of plutonium – which was in fact used in the
very first bomb that was dropped. There were people in
this division that I was in who had been thinking about
the possibility of a nuclear chain reaction that would
ultimately lead to a very powerful explosive. And we
worked very hard, 8, 10, 12 hours a day and frequently
on weekends. There was a real feeling of importance of
getting this job done. The great fear was that the
Germans might have beaten us to it.
We know now that they didnʼt get very far.
They did make a mistake, a scientific mistake, that
grossly overestimated the amount of plutonium or
enriched uranium that they had to have before they
could make a bomb.
A Conversation With Marvin
Goldberger
The career of Marvin Goldberger, physics professor
emeritus, traces much of the arc of 20th century physics,
from the Manhattan Project during WWII and JASON
defense research to the growth of institutions across the
nation and the development of the Keck Observatory in
Hawaii. We caught up with Dr. Goldberger to chat about
his early days as a physicist and some of his subsequent
milestones.
Your participation in the Manhattan Project really
set the stage for the professional years that
followed. Can you reminisce a bit about those early
days?
I had graduated from Carnegie Tech after three years
of studies and entered the Army in December of 1943.
Frederick Seitz, who was then the chairman of the
physics department at Carnegie Tech, become
involved with the Manhattan project in Chicago. He had
learned that there was a Special Engineering
Detachment there, and he saw to it that I was
transferred to it. So, I was assigned to Chicago and
became part of his group. I arrived on the project
somewhere around June of 1944.
At the time, do you remember having a sense of
how important this project was and what a huge
impact it would have on world history?
We all knew what it was that we were doing. The idea
that it was a secret and only a few people knew – that
was baloney. We knew we were going to try to make it
possible to make what was then called an atomic
bomb. Our responsibility in the Chicago theoretical
physics division was to design the nuclear reactors that
12
But we didnʼt know that, and in America it was just
a tense race against time.
We had to get it before they did. There was a mission
of American scientists that accompanied the troops as
they moved into Germany, to try to find out exactly how
far they had gotten. And they discovered that in fact
they had gotten nowhere. I knew the head of that
group, a man named Samuel Goudsmit. We got a
report of what they had found. They didn't have the
industrial capability of doing this, which was an
immense relief to us.
At that time, to what extent were there discussions
among scientists that this technology could
someday be used to generate electricity?
Oh, that was very much on our minds. In fact, we used
to make jokes that electricity would be so cheap you
wouldn't even charge for it. There was a great deal of
optimism about what could be done.
So the war ended, you studied under Enrico Fermi
at the University of Chicago while you pursued
your Ph.D., and then upon graduation you faced a
fork in the road. You had offers to teach, but Fermi
counseled you otherwise.
I had three assistant professorship offers. Physicists
had all been drafted to work on projects during the war,
and so afterward there was a great competition to
rebuild physics departments. There were lots of jobs
available. Fermi said, “I don't think you should take any
of those offers. You should go to Berkeley and work
with a man named Bob Serber.” He had been a
principal player at Los Alamos, and was a physics
colleague of Robert Oppenheimer. He was a very, very
smart guy, in addition to being an extraordinarily nice
person.
About Fermi: what was he like?
Oh, I could go on for a long time. He was a remarkable,
remarkable man. It was an attitude toward physics, an
intense involvement with the real world. Although he
knew a great deal about mathematics, it was not his
strong suit. His strong suit was solving problems. He
was a theorist, but he was also an experimentalist. He
used to say that experimentalists have this great
advantage: they try to do theory, and if they can't do
that they go down to the shop and build something with
their hands. And he did. I remember him going down to
the shop to build a gyroscope.
amount of time over there, going out to lunch with the
boys and the girls, and going to seminars that I would
ordinarily not bestir myself to go.
Youʼve talked before about how fortunate youʼve
been to have an academic life.
You really get taken care of in a wonderful way. You're
involved with very bright people who are working on
interesting things. You can talk about what theyʼre
doing, and you can share their excitement even if
you're not directly involved in their research activities.
I'm not sure whether I would've survived if I hadn't been
in it. What the hell would I have done? Sell real estate?
Who else had a big impact on your early career?
Eugene Wigner, who was the head of this theoretical
physics group during the war. He made many, many
extraordinarily important contributions to physics. It
was unclear how many Nobel Prizes he should've been
given. In some ways, he thought more deeply about
hard problems than anyone I think I've ever met. He
was concerned about biology long before it became
fashionable among physicists.
***
He also had an absolutely incredible memory. He
thought if you didn't know what the conductivity of
copper was at 20°C, you were some sort of idiot.
Everyone should know that. And he did know it. He
referred to a colleague – he said, “He's actually quite
good, but he has to look up things in books.” He never
had to look up things in books. It was uncanny, really.
So having mentors is important.
I was never actually in a circumstance in which
someone said, “I'm going to take you under my wing
and teach you the ways of the world.” That did not
happen. It was more by example.
Of course, you were an administrator for many
years at Caltech and then at Princeton before
moving in 1993 to UC San Diego where you were a
professor and Dean. Youʼve recalled your years at
Caltech with particular fondness.
Caltech was my finest administrative experience. I did
very well as a fundraiser, and I had fun doing it. It
surely helped my two big coups, one of which was to
raise $50 million to build the Keck telescope in Hawaii,
and to secure $75 million from Arnold Beckman for
research and capital projects.
What are your latest plans here at UC San Diego?
I am an emeritus professor of physics. I have not made
my contacts as close as I should have, and I am in the
process of repairing that. I've been graciously offered
an office, and I hope to begin to spend a significant
13
UC San Diego Physics – In The News
Grad student receives
Antarctica Service
Medal of the United
States of America
UC San Diego physics graduate
Student Jonathan Kaufman was
recently awarded the Antarctica
Service Medal of the United States of America,
authorized by Congress in recognition of his
contributions to exploration and scientific achievement
under the U.S. Antarctic Program. Jonathan Kaufman,
working under Prof. Brian Keating, recently completed
his third season at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole
Station in Antarctica working on the BICEP2 telescope
The telescope is currently leading the search for
evidence of the inflationary expansion of the early
universe, believed to have occurred in the fractions of a
second immediately after the Big Bang.
UC San Diego
physicists find
patterns in new
state of matter
Physicists at UC San
Diego have discovered
patterns that underlie the
properties of a new state of matter. In a paper
published in the March 29, 2012 issue of the journal
Nature, the scientists describe the emergence of
“spontaneous coherence,” “spin textures” and “phase
singularities” when excitons – the bound pairs of
electrons and holes that determine the optical
properties of semiconductors and enable them to
function as novel optoelectronic devices – are cooled to
near absolute zero. This cooling leads to the
spontaneous production of a new coherent state of
matter which the physicists were finally able to
measure in great detail in their basement laboratory at
UC San Diego at a temperature of only one-tenth of a
degree above absolute zero.
14
Hints of the Higgs Boson seen as
trap set for elusive particle tightens
Physicists announced in December that they may have
caught glimpses of the Higgs boson, but the signals
they see are not yet robust enough to meet the
stringent requirements they have set for announcing an
official discovery. Vivek Sharma, professor of physics
at UC San Diego, leads one of two teams searching for
the Higgs at the Large Hadron Collider in Europe. Both
teams recently
finished
analyzing the
results from a
run of
collisions that
ended in late
October.
Although they
canʼt yet say
whether or not the Higgs boson exists, they have
constrained its range of masses to a narrow band of
possibilities. The Higgs boson is the last missing piece
of physicistsʼ Standard Model of subatomic particles,
which describes the basic elements of matter and the
forces through which they interact. Its existence is
critical to the most widely accepted explanation for how
particles gain mass. Without it, physicists would need
to rethink this central theory.
Physics and Quantitative Biology:
identifying a simple genetic circuit
for stripes
A team of physicists led by UC San Diego has
designed a simple genetic circuit that creates a striped
pattern that scientists can control by tweaking a single
gene. With genes taken from one species of bacterium
and inserted into another, UC San Diego physicist
Terence Hwa and colleagues from the University of
Hong Kong assembled a genetic loop from two linked
modules that senses how crowded a group of cells has
become and responds by controlling their movements.
Their paper appeared Oct. 14, 2011 in the journal
Science.
Gordon ranks among Top 50 fastest
supercomputers in the world
Gordon, a unique data-intensive supercomputer using
flash-based memory that entered production in January
at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), made
its debut as the 48th fastest supercomputer in the
world, according to the latest Top500 list.
SDSC researchers submitted an entry for Gordon using
218 teraflops per second (Tflop/s) and 12,608 cores –
about 75 percent of the system. Built by SDSC
researchers and Appro, a leading developer of
supercomputing solutions, Gordon, the next generation
Appro Xtreme-X™ Supercomputer, now has 16,384
cores and achieves more than 280 Tflop/s.
Gordon is designed to help researchers who work in
the predictive sciences. Data-intensive problems that
require advanced computing power include the analysis
of a personʼs genome to tailor drugs for that individual;
earthquake impact modeling; and studying global
climate change, according to Michael Norman, physics
professor and director of the SCSC.
Prof. David Kleinfeld interviewed in
the journal Cell
We scan with our eyes as we see,
sweep our hands as we touch,
and sniff as we smell. But how do
we extract a stable “picture” of the
world from the blur of inputs
obtained with active sensors?
Prof. Kleinfeld's Neurophysics
Laboratory works with the
sensorimotor system of mice and rats to address this
question; these animals palpate the world around them
with long hairs as they navigate and identify objects.
The underlying computational problem is to combine a
neurological signal of sensor position with a signal of
touch, so that the animal can determine the location of
an object with respect to its body. Hear Prof. Kleinfeld
discuss his laboratoryʼs work in a November 2011
interview with Dr. Katja Brose, Senior Editor at the
prestigious journal Cell :
http://physics.ucsd.edu/neurophysics/publications/1110
cell2011.mp3
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
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.
Friends and Family of Dr. Norman Kroll
The Chancellorʼs Associates
Joel Broida
Anonymous
The Dan Broida Chair in Elementary Particle
Physics, currently held by Prof. Kenneth A. Intriligator,
was established by Dan Broidaʼs son, Joel Broida. The
chair supports a faculty member of the Department of
Physics with a research focus in elementary particle
physics or other field of study to further benefit the
Department. Dan Broida is known for his leadership at
Sigma Chemical Company, a Midwest consultant
subsidiary that manufactured saccharin during the
rationing of sugar during WWII. He successfully
redirected Sigma to manufacture specialty
biochemicals for scientific research, merging with
Aldrich Chemical Company in 1975 to form SigmaAldrich. Broidaʼs son, Joel, is a former faculty member
in the department of physics at UC San Diego.
15
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 world-class 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 highest need 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)
•
POLARBEAR Project Fund: (Fund #57654A)
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
http://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 92093-0940).
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
16
Donation Form
UC San Diego Physics Department
Date: _____________
Fund Name: __________________________________________ Fund Number: __________
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
17