Duke PHYSICS
http://www.phy.duke.edu
WHAT’S INSIDE
Department Happenings......... 1
Graduate News....................... 2
Graduate Student
Organization News.................. 5
Undergraduate News.............. 6
New Faculty Profile................. 8
Faculty Awards....................... 9
Outreach.............................. 10
Alumni Profiles:
John Koskinen...................... 11
Nathan Kundtz...................... 12
Chip Watson......................... 13
Erif Yff................................. 14
Faculty Research:
Curtarolo’s Group
Won MURI Competition.......... 15
Gao and Collaborators
Received an NSF MRI Award ...15
Gauthier and Kim
Won MURI Competition.......... 15
KamLAND-Zen Reports
Neutrino Mass Limit.............. 15
Smith’s Research Highlighted
in New York Times................ 16
Visualizing
Meteoric Impact................... 16
Does a Dissipative Environment
Always Destroy Quantum
Tunneling?............................ 16
Life and Death of Stars......... 18
News................................... 19
Editors: Haiyan Gao, Cristin
Paul, Mary-Russell Roberson and
Christopher Walter
Annual Newsletter 2013
Department Happenings
– by Haiyan Gao
This has been another hectic, exciting and
productive year.
There will be an important upcoming change in
the departmental leadership. Prof. Henry Greenside
will step down on January 1, 2014 as the Director
for Undergraduate Studies (DUS) in Physics and
Biophysics and Prof. Kate Scholberg will take over
this important leadership role. Prof. Greenside
has been working tirelessly as DUS and has been
extremely effective in his interactions with majors
and potential majors. I’d like to thank Prof. Greenside
for his willingness to stay on as DUS in the fall 2013
semester in order to have a smooth transition.
We thank Prof. Greenside for his service to the
department and look forward to working with Prof.
Scholberg in her new role. I am also happy to share
the good news that Prof. John Mercer from Biology
has agreed to be the inaugural Associate DUS in
our department and he will work closely with Prof.
Scholberg, particularly in the area of biophysics
major.
The commencement weekend has always been
the happiest time for the university. We graduated
nineteen physics and biophysics majors, seven
Ph.D. and two Master’s students this May, and we
were thrilled. Everyone had a great time at the
commencement and the graduation ceremony - Even
the weather cooperated! You will read more in the
section on undergraduate studies in this newsletter,
contributed by Prof. Henry Greenside, and graduate
studies by Prof. Shailesh Chandrasekharan, Director
of Graduate Studies.
We had the first group of visiting students
from Taishan College of Shandong University this
past academic year and you can read about their
experience also in this newsletter. With the support of
Arts and Sciences and the university, our department
signed another agreement on student exchange from
Wuhan University. In the fall of 2013, we will have
students from Shandong and Wuhan. We also signed
an agreement with Shanghai Jiao Tong University
(SJTU) and a student from SJTU will join us this fall as
a transfer student.
We are very happy that Dr. Phil Barbeau from
Stanford University will join us this August as a
tenure-track Assistant Professor in Experimental
Nuclear Physics. You will meet and learn about Dr.
Barbeau and his research in the new faculty profile
section. Prof. Jianfeng Lu, an Assistant Professor
in Mathematics will join us as a secondary faculty
member in our department on July 1, 2013. Profs.
Gleb Finkelstein and Ying Wu have been promoted
to the rank of Full Professors, and Prof. Ayana Arce
has been reappointed as a tenure-track Assistant
Professor. Congratulations to them all for these
important milestones. Prof. Berndt Muller became
the Associate Lab Director for Nuclear and Particle
Physics at the Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL).
During the period of January 2013 to December
2015, Prof. Mueller holds a joint appointment between
Duke and BNL. We were sorry to see Prof. Matt
Hastings’ departure from
our department and we
wish him all the best in
his future endeavors.
We were saddened by
the passing of Edward
Bilpuch, Henry Newson
Professor Emeritus,
on September 15,
2012. You can read the
obituary in this newsletter. We were also very sad to
lose one of our most distinguished and accomplished
alumni, Robert C Richardson, a Nobel Laureate, who
passed away on February 19, 2013. You can read the
obituary written by Prof. Horst Meyer, Fritz London
Professor Emeritus, who was Bob Richardson’s Ph.D.
thesis advisor.
On the staff side, Donna Ruger, Staff Assistant to
DGS retired at the end of May after more than twenty
years’ service and dedication to the department and
all the graduate students she helped throughout
the years. We wish Donna a very happy retirement
and we hope she will enjoy all the time she will be
able to spend with all her wonderful grandchildren.
After many years of great service in the machine
shop, Bill Peterson left our department on April 19
to take a medical disability leave initially, which will
transition into retirement. We wish Bill and his family
all the best. We were very happy to welcome Dr. Yuriy
Bomze on board as a Lab Administrator in the fall of
2012. We also welcome Nancy Morgans to join our
staff as the new Assistant to DGS.
In the last year faculty and students have
published many exciting research results and you
can sample some of them in this newsletter. We are
very proud that several of our students and faculty
have received awards, which are also listed in this
newsletter. Members in our department have also
been very active in outreach activities, and you can
read some of them in this newsletter. Thanks to
the generosity of an anonymous donor, the London
Postdoctoral Fellowship was created in 2012 to
support an outstanding scientist in experimental
condensed matter physics, broadly defined, and to
honor the lifetime achievements of Professor Fritz
London, who was active at Duke University between
1939 and 1954.
In closing, I would like to thank you for your
support of our news program by contributing
your stories and sharing with us the joy of your
achievements. Our students are particularly
interested in the stories of our alumni. Please
continue to share and contribute to the departmental
news program. In last year’s newsletter, I talked about
the crucial need for a new Physics Building and the
urgency and importance for raising funds. While many
people have been working very hard on this in the
last year, I regret to report no major breakthrough
yet with the funding situation. If you have great ideas
about how to make this happen, we will be extremely
happy to hear from you. We look forward to the 20132014 academic year and hope it will bring new hope
for a new physics building.
Graduate News
Graduate News
- by Director of Graduate Studies, Shailesh Chandrasekharan
Last year was another exciting year for me as the Director of Graduate Studies (DGS) with many new graduate
accomplishments to report. Here I will focus on the period from July 01, 2012 – May 31, 2013.
Degrees Awarded
Nine students passed their PhD examinations. Seven of them received their degrees in May while two will
receive degrees in September. Two students graduated with a terminal Masters degree. The table below lists
the names of all degree recipients along with the names of their advisors. After their education at Duke, these
students are taking up positions in academia or industry. I congratulate all of them on their accomplishments and wish them success in their
future endeavors.
Student
Advisor
Student
Advisor
Seth Cohen*
Prof. Gauthier
Jie Ren
Prof. Behringer
Somayeh Farhadi
Prof. Behringer
Junyao Tang
Prof. Behringer
Xinwei Gong
Prof. Socolar
Yingyi Zhang
Prof. Thomas
Kyle Kalutkiewicz (M.S.)
Prof. Mehen
Yujing Zhang (M.S.)
Prof. Kruse
Baolei Li
Prof. Warren
Huaixiu Zheng*
Prof. Baranger
Abhijit Mehta
Prof. Baranger
* September Degrees
Photo by Robert Palmer
Graduation Photograph (left to right): Harold Baranger, Shailesh Chandrasekharan (DGS), John Thomas, Yingyi Zhang, Baolei Li, Jie Ren,
Abhijit Mehta, Haiyan Gao (Chair).
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Duke
PHYSICS
Preliminary Exams
This year thirteen third year students took the preliminary exam and I am glad to report that all passed. Their names along with their advisors
are listed in the table below. I extend my very best wishes to these students and look forward to an exciting PhD thesis from each of them in
the next few years.
Student
Advisor
Student
Advisor
Venkitesh Ayyar
Prof. Chandrasekharan
Meizhen Shi
Prof. Gauthier
Marco Bertolini
Prof. Plesser
Chris Varghese
Prof. Durrett
Arunkumar Jagannathan
Prof. Thomas
Jun Yan
Prof. Wu
Chung-Ting Ke
Prof. Finkelstein
Hao Zhang
Prof. Chang
Lei Li
Prof. Arce
Yang Zhang
Prof. Gao
Chao Peng
Prof. Gao
Chen Zhou
Prof. Kruse
Bonnie Schmittberger
Prof. Gauthier
Arman Margaryan
Prof. Springer
Fellowships, Awards and Accomplishments
Many students received fellowships and awards this year. Graduate student Kristine Callan received the 2013 Dean’s Award for Excellence in
Teaching. Kristine completed her PhD this summer under the guidance of Prof. Dan Gauthier. Kristine has accepted
a position as a Teaching Associate Professor of Physics at the Colorado School of Mines (CSM), which was recently
selected as one of four 2013 recipients of the “Improving Undergraduate Physics Education Award.” Kristine is looking
forward to starting her new position this August.
Taritree Wongjirad, a fifth year student working with Professor Kate Scholberg, won the Block Award as a
promising young physicist, based on his poster contribution at the Aspen Winter Conference titled “New Directions in
Neutrino Physics.” First year student, Anne Watson, received the GPNANO fellowship for Spring 2013. This fellowship
is awarded to outstanding students associated with the Nano-Science initiative at Duke. Anne is working on a research
project with Professor Finkelstein in the summer of 2013.
Every year Duke University gives fellowships to outstanding continuing students who are nominated by the
Kristine Callan
department. This year Shanshan Cao, a fourth year student working with Professor Steffen Bass on the physics of
heavy ion collisions, received the Katherine Goodman Stern fellowship to complete his PhD thesis during the 2013-14 academic year. This
fellowship pays for tuition
and fees along with a stipend
for the entire year. Miaoyuan
Liu, another fourth year
student and a member of
the ATLAS collaboration and
working under the guidance
of Professor Alfred Goshaw
toward uncovering the physics
beyond the Standard Model,
won the International Research
Taritree Wongjirad
Anne Watson
Shanshan Cao
Mia Liu
Yang Yang
Travel Fellowship and the PreDissertation and Dissertation Research Travel Fellowship. These fellowships will allow Mia to travel to CERN to complete her research work.
Two students, Yang Yang a sixth year student and Hao Zhang a third year student, received summer research fellowships. These fellowships
pay tuition and fees along with a stipend for the summer. Yang is a joint student of Professors Henry Everitt and April Brown. He is expected
to complete his PhD during the summer of 2013. On the other hand Hao, who is Professor Albert Chang’s student, will use the fellowship to
complete an important experiment in Professor Chang’s lab.
Graduate students also play an important role in the teaching mission of the department. This year, second year
student Catherine Marcoux and third year student Hao Zhang were nominated as Outstanding Teaching Assistants for
2013 of the American Associate of Physics Teachers, while first year students Reggie Bain and Anne Watson received
the Mary Creason Memorial Award for Undergraduate Teaching in Duke Physics for the 2012-2013 academic year. These
awards will be distributed at the annual departmental picnic, scheduled on August 25, 2013.
Sixth year student Baolei Li and fifth year student Huaixui Zheng, both of whom obtained their PhD this year, re ceived the 2012 outstanding graduate student award from the Ministry of Education of China. This award is dedicated to
Chinese graduate students studying abroad and is given out each year. A total of 489 students received this award this
year worldwide. Two students from our department also received the same award last year.
Fifth year student Min Huang was awarded the Jefferson Sciences Associates (JSA)/Jefferson Laboratory Gradu Min Huang
ate Fellowship for the 2012-2013 academic year. Min is a student of Professor Haiyan Gao and this is the second time
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Graduate News
continued from page 3
she has received this award in two
years.
Every year the Physics Department awards fellowships to
outstanding graduate students in
specific fields of research through
the support of various endowments.
Jie Ren, a student of Professor Bob
Behringer, won the Fritz London
Fellowship given to outstanding stuHao Zhang
Catherine Marcoux
Reggie Bain
Baolei Li
Huaixiu Zheng
dents in condensed matter physics.
Jie graduated this year. Sean Finch
and Jonathan Mueller, both fourth
year students, won the Newson
Fellowship given to outstanding
students in the field of experimental
nuclear physics. Sean is a student of
Professor Werner Tornow and Jon is
a student of Professor Henry Weller.
Yang Yang, Yingyi Zhang and Yunhui
Zhu won the Gordy Fellowship given
Jie Ren
Sean Finch
Jonathan Mueller
Yingyi Zhang
Yunhui Zhu
to outstanding students working in
atomic, molecular and optical physics. Yang featured earlier in this article, Yingyi graduated this year as a student of Professor John Thomas,
and Yunhui is a sixth year student completing her thesis work with Professor Dan Gauthier.
In addition to the above awards many students have published important research articles in various journals, have given research presentations at various conferences and have become recognized in the world through their research work at Duke. We refer the reader to the web
site http://news.phy.duke.edu/topics/graduate-studies-news/ for detailed information about these other graduate student accomplishments.
Congratulations to all graduate students on their accomplishments over the past year.
Graduate Admissions
This year our target goal was to recruit 15 students for the Fall 2013 class. The Graduate Admissions Committee (GAC) reviewed 244
applications during the winter break and made 52 offers to students all over the world. The department held an open house on March 7th
and 8th so accepted applicants could get a better perspective of our graduate program. Senior students were extremely helpful during the
whole process, and I thank them for all their time and effort in the recruitment process. In the end I am glad to report that we were successful
in recruiting exactly 15 students this year. The incoming class contains students from Bangladesh (1), China (4), India (1), Iran (1), Russia (1),
Taiwan (1) and USA (6). There are 13 male and 2 female students in the incoming class. We expect the new class to arrive in mid August and
have planned a variety of orientation activities for the incoming students including a departmental picnic on August 25, 2013.
Farewell to Donna Ruger
On May 31, the assistant to the DGS, Donna Ruger retired from Duke after 28 years of service. Donna
joined Duke in July 1985, but began working in the Physics Department only from March 1993. However, since
then she was one of the most dependable staff members of the department. She served as the assistant to
the DGS for many years under different faculty members and played a key role in the lives of graduate students
when they were at Duke. The department threw her a farewell party on May 22. The event was attended by
faculty, staff, students, Donna’s family as well as past co-workers who returned to bid her adieu. Although
Donna will be missed by many department members, I will miss her personally as the DGS, since over the past
two years I had come to rely on her for keeping me informed of important deadlines and taking care of many
important tasks for me in a timely manner. All of us wish her a very happy retirement with more time to spend
with her grandchildren.
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Graduate Student Organization News
–by GSO Presidents, Chris Pollard and Bonnie Schmittberger
Annual Picnic
The annual department picnic, which each year welcomes the new
graduate students to Duke and returning faculty, staff, and graduate
students back for the fall semester, was again a success! Thanks to
the graduate class of 2011 for organizing such a nice outing for the
rest of us. The hard work of Chung-Ting Ke and Jonah Bernhard was
rewarded with teaching assistant awards at the picnic.
Grad-Chair meetings
This year, the graduate student body held three meetings with the
department chair. These meetings facilitated a constructive dialogue
in which the students were able to ask questions or voice concerns
related to the department and the graduate program. The graduate
students were very appreciative of Professor Gao’s time and consideration, and they found these meetings to be quite beneficial.
Oak Ridge Trip
In October, twelve graduate students spent their fall breaks at Oak
Ridge National Laboratory and were introduced to the wide range of
research opportunities that it has to offer. Laboratory staff members
and users gave the visitors guided tours of Oak Ridge’s many facilities,
including its computing center, the Spallation Neutron Source, the
High Temperature Materials Laboratory, the High Flux Isotope Reactor,
and the Center for Nanophase Materials Science.
Department Tea
Every Thursday, graduate students volunteer to organize an afternoon
tea. Members of the department congregate to enjoy conversation over
everything from breakfast cereal and crepes to Chinese desserts. This
popular weekly tradition will continue into the summer and next year.
Graduate Student Seminar
Twenty graduate student seminars have taken place since last
September, with more on the way over the summer. These talks give
graduate students and post-docs opportunities to both present their
current research projects and learn about the recent results of their
peers. Several students gave graduate student seminars in preparation
for conference presentations, preliminary exams, and thesis defenses.
Open House Week
The graduate students played an important role in this year’s Open
House for prospective students. They organized a Q&A panel to
answer questions about graduate student life, and they took the
prospective students on a tour of Duke’s campus. Many others
volunteered to present posters at the poster session, which granted
the prospective students an opportunity to hear about a variety of
research topics within the department. Current graduate students also
took the prospective students out to dinner at Tyler’s Restaurant and
to explore downtown Durham.
A Message to Our DGSA
On behalf of all graduate students, the GSO would like to extend congratulations and best wishes to Donna Ruger on her retirement. Donna
has been the only Duke Physics Mom we’ve ever known, and we’re
very sad to see her go. Thank you for all you’ve done for us, Donna!
Thanks!
The Physics GSO would like to thank all the committee members
whose efforts made the events of this past year so successful. The
GSO Executive Committee consisted of Chris Pollard (Co-President),
Bonnie Schmittberger (Co-President and Newsletter), Kevin Claytor
(Vice President and Graduate Student Seminar Chair), Margaret
Shea (Secretary/Treasurer and Ombudsperson), Ben Cerio (5+ year
Class Rep), Sean Finch (4th year Class Rep), Meizhen Shi (3rd year
Class Rep), Kristen Collar (2nd year Class Rep and Social Activities
Co-Chair), and Scott Moreland (1st year Class Rep). Many thanks
also to our subcommittee chairs Marco Bertolini and Chris ColemanSmith (Curriculum Committee), Kristine Callan and Huaixiu Zheng
(Colloquium Committee), Chung-Ting Ke (Ombudsperson), Jonah
Bernhard (Web Chair), Kevin Finelli (Technical/Computing Chair), Chris
Varghese (GPSC Rep), Mauricio Pilo-Pais (Social Activities Co-Chair),
and David Bjergaard (Election Commissioner).
Photo by Kevin Claytor
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Undergraduate News
Photo by Robert Palmer
2013 Physics B.S. graduates l-r: Spencer Fallek, Mary Rolfes (biophysics), Colton Brown, Zach Epstein, Will DiClemente, William Weir,
Stephen Jones, Jay Krishnan (biophysics), Zongjin Qian, Timothy Noe, Joshua Loyal, Paul Dannenberg, Jervis Besa (biophysics), and Physics
Chair Haiyan Gao. There are physics and biophysics majors not pictured.
Undergraduate News
– by Director of Undergraduate Studies, Henry Greenside
At this May’s graduation, there were eleven primary physics majors
and five primary biophysics majors for a total of sixteen students
who received their degrees through the Physics Department. There
were also two physics double majors and one biophysics double
major so the total number of students graduating with a physics
or biophysics degree was nineteen students. While the number
of physics majors continues to be roughly steady from year to
year, this year was only the second year in which Physics awarded
biophysics degrees, and the number of biophysics majors continues
to increase towards a steady state likely to be about ten majors per
year, comparable to the number of physics majors.
Download the 2013 graduation program here:
http://tinyurl.com/n5afgvc
This year’s undergraduate physics and biophysics theses
can be read here: http://tinyurl.com/ktl7v6u
As in previous years, about sixty percent of our physics
majors are going on to graduate school in physics, with the other
physics majors pursuing a variety of interests including software,
economics, technology, and medical school. About two thirds of the
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biophysics graduates are going directly to medical school, with the
others doing biophysics-related research, attending a biophysics
PhD program, or taking a gap year to gain research or other
experience before continuing on to medical school or to graduate
school. The biophysics program continues to be attractive especially
to Duke’s premeds, with about 80% of the biophysics majors
expressing an interest in going to medical school or entering into an
MD/PhD program.
Despite the relatively small number of majors compared to other
science departments, the Physics Department is fortunate to continue
to attract many students who are strong academically. Two of our
seniors (Paul Dannenberg and Zongjin Qian) were nominated to Phi
Beta Kappa and junior Kushal Seetharam, who is double majoring in
Electrical Engineering and Physics and who is the current president
of Duke’s Society for Physics Students, won a prestigious national
Goldwater award for academic excellence and promise for a future
career related to science and technology. Five seniors wrote and
successfully defended honors theses with four of these students
achieving high distinction and one student achieving distinction.
Seniors Will DiClemente and Zongjin Qian shared the Daphne Chang
Memorial Award of $1000 for excellence for undergraduate physics
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Duke PHYSICS
Undergraduate News
continued from page 6
research, and their theses (related respectively to LHC physics and
to condensed matter theory) were indeed impressive. Overall, about
eighty percent of our majors did undergraduate physics or biophysics
research, with most of these students doing research for more than
one semester or one summer.
The Physics faculty continue to be heavily involved with improving
and innovating physics education. This last year Professors Daniel
Gauthier and Roxanne Springer taught undergraduate courses
using a so-called Team Based Learning (TBL) approach, which has
been attracting national attention for its ability to improve student
understanding and appreciation of course material. In this approach,
traditional lectures are eliminated, students learn material on their
own through online videos or via assigned reading, and all class
lectures are replaced with individual and group problem solving, in
which students spend most of their time in active collaboration with
classmates or with the instructors. Based on the success of this
effort in these two classes and based on similar successes by Duke
professors in other majors, there is now underway an effort to use
TBL for the large intro physics courses for life science majors (now
numbered 141L and 142L). If successful, this has the potential to
greatly improve the learning experience in these intro courses and
to free up physics faculty who could then teach new upper-class
electives or teach new graduate courses.
Another major effort underway is to restructure what physics
and biophysics majors learn about experimental physics. For many
years, our majors learned experimental physics via labs that were
rather closely aligned to course content or that replicated some
rather famous historical physics experiments, but little attention
was made to identify key experimental skills or to teach these
skills early enough that they would benefit students interested in
doing experimental research. A committee led by Dan Gauthier
recommended this last year that this arrangement be changed
substantially, e.g., by splitting off the lab components of the
intro physics and Modern Physics courses into new 1/2-credit
courses that would only loosely be connected to the courses, by
adding a few additional upper-level 1/2-credit courses, by more
systematically teaching skills that are common to many Duke
experimental labs, and especially by teaching students how to be
creative and independent when doing experimental physics. These
changes are at an early planning stage with the goal of implementing
some first stages by fall of 2014. The Department is hopeful that
these changes will lead to a substantial improvement in our majors’
abilities to carry out and enjoy experimental physics research.
Another educational advance this last year was represented by
Professor Ronen Plesser being the first physics professor to produce
a so-called Massive Open Online Course or MOOC, based on his
introductory astronomy course Physics 134 that he has been teaching
for many years at Duke with great success. (See the Coursera course
entry: http://tinyurl.com/ktrhgy2.) Professor Plesser’s course was
taken by over ten thousand people world wide and was received
with great enthusiasm by these people; it is worth noting that these
MOOC students for Professor Plesser’s course represent many more
students than Professor Plesser would be able to teach at Duke even
if he taught the same course each semester over a professional
career spanning about 40 years. Professor Plesser’s course is one
of nearly 20 MOOCs taught through Duke, and Duke has aggressively
become one of the leaders of MOOC courses during the last two
years. Based on Professor Plesser’s success, the Physics Department
plans to offer further MOOCs in the future.
The teaching and mentoring efforts of the Physics Department
were recognized this last year by several of our faculty receiving
prestigious awards from Duke University. Professor Plesser is the
winner of the inaugural 2012-2013 Dean’s Teaching and Technology
Award for his many efforts and innovations, especially for creating
the Duke Observatory for introductory astronomy in the Duke Forest,
for his recent efforts with his MOOC course, and for his overall
excellence over many years as an undergraduate physics instructor.
The High-Energy Physics ATLAS group (staff and faculty) is the
winner of the inaugural 2012-2013 Dean’s leadership award for its
outstanding contributions to discoveries made at the Large Hadron
Collider (LHC) and for their successes over many years in attracting
undergraduates (including many freshmen) to do physics related to
the LHC. Not only has this group’s efforts been able to send many
students each summer to CERN to work at the LHC, these efforts
have encouraged students to come to Duke to major in physics, to do
research that led to writing and defending a thesis, and to continue on
with graduate research in experimental high energy physics.
During the next several years, the Physics faculty will explore
further improvements to undergraduate physics education. One will
be to try to restructure the introductory physics course for potential
physics and biophysics majors (currently numbered 161L and 162L)
to move away from a traditional encyclopedic textbook and instead
organize the course content around a few key questions related
to current frontiers of physics. Another will be to introduce more
computational components to upper-level physics and biophysics
courses, so that our majors can solve a richer variety of scientific
problems and understand better the interplay of theory, experiment,
and simulation. A third effort will be to introduce 1/3-credit upperlevel modules on specific research themes such as astrophysics,
nanoscience, quantum computing, computational physics,
biophysics, and neutrino physics. These modules will address a
shortcoming in the current physics major, which is that students
have a difficult time finding out about the many exciting frontiers of
physics, there is not enough time in the current curriculum to take
many elective courses.
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New Faculty Profile
New Assistant Professor
Phil Barbeau Searches
for Rare Events
–by Mary-Russell Roberson
Physicist Phil Barbeau builds detectors to look for rare events
in nuclear and particle physics. He says, “We use very standard
particle-detection techniques that are taken to the extreme. In
general, all of these experiments are so sensitive that a single
fingerprint left behind on the detector can blind it.”
Barbeau, currently a post-doc at Stanford, will be joining the
Duke Physics faculty and the Triangle University Nuclear Laboratory
(TUNL) on August 1. He searches for neutrinoless double beta
decay, coherent-neutrino nucleus scattering, and dark matter. “It
can be difficult to get all three topics into one conversation,” he
says, “until you realize that the underlying connection is really about
innovative detector technology and development.”
Barbeau thrives on the creative thinking necessary to design
and build new detectors, and is looking forward to sharing that
with Duke students. “Wherever I’ve been I’ve enjoyed teaching
physics in the laboratory and doing research with the students,”
he says. “Detector development allows you to employ students
at all levels—high schoolers, undergraduates, graduate students,
postdocs—such that they can all have impact on the final results of
the experiment.” An added benefit: “If you do a good job teaching
students they become very powerful researchers in their own right
and start to benefit your research in a very positive way.”
All of Barbeau’s experiments take place underground to shield
them from cosmic radiation. He’s put detectors in a variety of
places—including in the salt mines of New Mexico where nuclear
waste is stored, within 25 meters of the core of a nuclear reactor,
and in the sewers of Chicago. “All of them were interesting in their
own way,” he says. Then he adds: “Sewers were less interesting.”
At Duke, Barbeau intends to use the Kimballton Underground
Research Facility (KURF) in a limestone mine near Blacksburg,
Virginia, which he considers “very close.” He says, “It’s much easier
if we don’t have to travel across country to go underground.”
Neutrinoless double beta decay is a particular kind of
radioactive decay that has been predicted but not observed. If it is
observed, it would prove neutrinos to be Majorana particles—that
is, particles that serve as their own anti-particles. It would also
provide information that would help physicists calculate the mass of
neutrinos and maybe help explain why they have so much less mass
than any other type of particle.
The detectors used by Barbeau and his colleagues on the
8
EXO experiment (Enriched Xenon Observatory) are filled with more
than 100 kilograms of liquid xenon enriched with xenon 136, which
decays to barium 136. The xenon 136 serves as a source for the
decay and as the medium with which to detect decay. “Ultimately,
we would like to marry that particle physics technique with an atomic
physics approach to tag the barium daughter ion, which would
give us a paradigm-shifting zero-background experiment,” Barbeau
says. “That’s an example of how you take standard particle physics
experiment to the extreme.”
Another rare event Barbeau looks for is coherent neutrinonucleus scattering. “The process is predicted as part of the Standard
Model of particle physics—it was predicted 40 years ago, but so far
it’s been unobserved because we haven’t had adequate detection.”
Barbeau hopes to help change with his large-mass (about 1.2
kilograms), low-background, ultra-low threshold detectors. “Measuring
the strength of this process will allow us to perform some very
sensitive tests of physics beyond the Standard Model,” he says.
Barbeau also uses the coherent scattering detectors to search
for dark matter, such as hypothetical particles called axions and
WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles). The same type of
detectors may one day have applications for homeland security as
well, in an area called nuclear reactor safeguards. The detectors
could be used to look for illicit diversion of nuclear fuel rods by
keeping track of nuclear fuel in reactors through neutrino detection
and monitoring.
Of the driving force behind his work, Barbeau says, “I’m
interested in searches of rare events in neutrino and astroparticle
physics because oftentimes these rare events can have a big impact
on our understanding of physics and the world around us.”
He says, “To be in this field you have to be a little bit crazy,
because of the extreme nature of a lot of what you have to do—to
make sure that you don’t leave any fingerprints on the detector, to
get rid of all the dust. Sometimes you have to grow copper for your
experiment underground so it doesn’t get activated by radiation at
sea level.”
But for Barbeau, any tedious aspects of building these
detectors are far outweighed by the enjoyment he gets from the
creative process of designing them, and the chance to extend the
experimental reach of physics. “The goal,” he says, “is to perform
measurements not previously possible.”
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Faculty Awards
ATLAS Group Won Inaugural Dean’s Leadership Award
The ATLAS group (staff and faculty) is the winner of the inaugural 2012-2013 Dean’s leadership award. The
group consists of the following faculty and staff (present and past) members: Profs. Ayana Arce, Al Goshaw,
Ashutosh Kotwal, Mark Kruse, and Seog Oh, researchers Doug Benjamin, Andrea Bocci, William Ebenstein,
Jack Fowler and Chiho Wang.
ATLAS Experiment © 2013 CERN
Kotwal Earned Fellowship and New Appointment
Prof. Ashutosh Kotwal has been elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Kotwal was cited by the AAAS Council for performing “a series of high precision, world-leading
measurements of the mass of the W boson, and for stringent tests of the standard model of fundamental
particles.” Each year the Council elects members whose “efforts on behalf of the advancement of science or
its applications are scientifically or socially distinguished.”
In addition, Prof. Kotwal has been appointed the Physics Advisor of the US contingent on the ATLAS
Experiment at the Large Hadron Collider. In this role he will be providing leadership on physics issues to US
collaborators on ATLAS, numbering about 500 scientists and students from 44 institutions. One of the priorities is preparations for physics
analysis of the new data starting 2014-15, to be collected at the substantially higher energy of 13 TeV compared to 8 TeV in 2012. Prof. Kotwal
is also leading physics studies to motivate an upgrade of the LHC accelerator and detectors to collect ten times more data starting in 2022.
Petters Named in NC’s Top 20
Prof. Arlie Petters, along with Prof. Mohamed Noor in Duke’s Biology Department, has been named as one of
the top 20 Science & Technology Professors in North Carolina.
View the story online here: http://tinyurl.com/ls4lnfw
Plesser Won Dean’s Teaching & Technology Award
Prof. Ronen Plesser is the winner of the 2012-2013 Dean’s Teaching and Technology Award and was featured in
the DukeToday article “Teaching Excellence In and Outside the Classroom” on April 24, 2013.
Smith Awarded 2013 McGroddy Prize for New Materials
Prof. David Smith has been awarded the 2013 James C. McGroddy Prize of APS for New Materials sponsored
by IBM together with Drs. John B. Pendry, Imperial College and Costas M. Soukoulis, Ames Laboratory and Iowa
State University.
The Prize was established to recognize and encourage outstanding achievement in the science and application of new materials. It consists of $10,000 (divided equally) and a certificate with the appropriate citation. The
citation that will appear on the certificate for Prof. Smith reads as follows: “For the discovery of metamaterials.”
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Faculty Awards / Outreach
Thomas and Weller Awarded APS
Outstanding Referees
Profs. Emeritus John E. Thomas and Henry Weller were awarded 2013 Outstanding Referees for the American Physical Society. From the website: The
Outstanding Referee program was instituted in 2008 to recognize scientists
who have been exceptionally helpful in assessing manuscripts for publication
in the APS journals. By means of the program, APS expresses its appreciation
to all referees, whose efforts in peer review not only keep the standards of
the journals at a high level, but in many cases also help authors to improve the quality and readability of their articles – even those that are not
published by APS.
Outreach
Physics Outreach
Featured
in Duke Today
Profs. Calvin Howell and Ronen Plesser along
with graduate student Kristine Callan and staff
member Derek Leadbetter were featured in
the Duke Today article “Fun With a Rocket-Propelled Faculty” for their outreach efforts. Read
the feature here: http://tinyurl.com/koyua7k
Photo by Duke University Photography
Kruse Hosted LHC Outreach Event
Prof. Mark Kruse, with graduate students David Bjergaard and Kevin Finelli, hosted an LHC Outreach
event on March 16, 2013. It was well attended and DukeToday writer Ashley Yeager wrote about it in
an article “Local high-schoolers analyze real LHC data at Duke.”
Read the story at: http://tinyurl.com/kmmr7c2
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Alumni Profiles
Distinguished Alumnus John Koskinen
Looks Back Over Varied Career
— by Mary-Russell Roberson
“As a general matter, I’ve always liked organizing people and institutions.” So says John Koskinen, a Duke alumnus and the recently
retired non-executive chairman of Freddie Mac. Over the years, he’s
held an array of diverse positions, including being the Year 2000 czar
(his favorite position) and the city administrator of Washington, DC
(the toughest one).
He has also been president of a corporate turn-around company,
the deputy director of President Clinton’s Office of Management and
Budget (OMB), the president of the United States Soccer Foundation,
and the chair of the DC Host Committee that brought the 1994 World
Cup to Washington. It’s an unexpected career path for anyone, but
perhaps especially so for someone who majored in physics (Duke,
1961) and then earned a law degree (Yale, 1964).
Koskinen sees a common thread throughout the positions,
however. “They really required you to step into the middle of a set of
challenges, sort out the issues, and get people to work as a team,”
he says. Some of the challenges were enormous. When asked by
President George W. Bush in 2008 to become the leader of a new
board of Freddie Mac, the government-backed mortgage company, he
says he found “5500 people and $2.5 trillion in assets in the middle of
a collapse.” He was City Administrator of DC during the bursting of the
dot-com bubble, the 9/11 attacks, the anthrax scare, and the Beltway
sniper attacks. At OMB, he ran the government shutdowns in 1995.
While coordinating the United States’ response to the Year 2000
problem (Y2K), he ended up helping the entire world get ready.
Koskinen says, “President Clinton gave me an office and an assistant and said, ‘Don’t let the world stop,’ and left me alone.” Koskinen
set up working groups to address different sectors in the United
States, and invited all 50 states’ Y2K coordinators to a meeting, which
motivated those governors who had not yet done so to appoint a Y2K
coordinator. After he spoke about his work at the UN, the chair of the
UN working committee on “informatics” asked him to do something to
help other countries prepare. So he divided the world along continental lines, appointed a steering committee of 12 global coordinators,
and ran worldwide teleconferences and meetings. “The art form was
to harness all the organizations around the country and world and
facilitate their information-sharing and working together, because
there was no way I could hire enough experts to run around and fix
everything,” he says.
In the end, a few systems went down for a day or two at the dawn
of the 21st century, but, because there was no injury or loss of life,
the public remained largely unaware of all the work that went into preemptively fixing computer codes around the world.
Looking back over his varied career, he says, “They were all
turnaround opportunities. What you learn is to rely on experts and
keep asking questions.” To Koskinen, experts include not only leaders
but also the rank and file. “The people who know the most about
what’s going on in an organization and what the challenges are, are
the people on the front lines,” he says. “So I’ve spent my career trying
to organize institutions so that you get feedback from people actually
doing the work, and that information gets fed into the decision-making
process.”
Koskinen came to Duke from Ashland, Kentucky, already planning
to major in physics. His father had recently died, and a scholarship
from Duke made attending college possible. He remembers enjoying his classes with William Fairbank and Harold Lewis. “Everybody
knew both Fairbank and Lewis were
established physicists, so to have
them as instructors was an honor
and exciting,” he says.
Even while majoring in physics,
Photo by Duke University Photography
Koskinen was trying to decide between a career in science versus one
John and Patricia Koskinen
in the public sector. He made up his
mind one day while visiting a fellow physics major in his room. “He had
a blackboard with equations all over it and Scientific American on the
table and I thought, I don’t have a blackboard, let alone one with equations. If I’m going to be good at something where would I rather spend
my time? While I enjoyed math and physics, I decided it would be more
rewarding for me personally to be involved and engaged in the public
sector—to be engaged more with people than with electrons.”
All the same, he says his physics major contributed to his success. “Physics taught me to concentrate and pay close attention to
details,” he says. “You get used to being very thorough and careful
and analytical. Throughout my career, both in the private and public
sector, being able to analyze and understand the principles behind
what was going on—the forces at work—was always very helpful.”
And of course his science background came in handy working on
the Year 2000 project and working on science- and research-related
issues in the President’s budget while at OMB.
Koskinen chose physics partly as a patriotic reaction to the Russians sending up Sputnik in 1957. Although the United States faces different challenges today, he says science is more important than ever.
“The world is becoming more technically complicated and challenged,
so science—and physics in particular—are always going to be critical.
My concern about where the country goes is whether we continue to
have the capacity to develop the intellectual capital that brought us to
where we are. I hope people will understand and remember this, even
in the budget crunch we presently face.”
Through the years, Koskinen has stayed involved at Duke, beginning as a local fundraiser and then participating on many boards and
committees, including as president of the Alumni Association and
chair of the Board of Trustees. “While I have spent a large percentage
of my spare time working for Duke, it’s never been a burden,” he says.
“There’s a feeling on my part that I should give back to the university
since I would not have been able to attend without the scholarship
assistance that I received.” In 1999, he and his wife Pat gave a gift
of $2.5 million to Duke to support female student-athletes and to
enhance Duke’s recreational and athletic facilities. Duke’s Koskinen Stadium for soccer and lacrosse is named in their honor. He’s
received three Duke awards: the University Medal for Distinguished
Meritorious Service, the Distinguished Alumni Award, and the Charles
A. Dukes Award for Outstanding Volunteer Service. He also received
the Distinguished Service Award in Trusteeship from the Association
of Governing Boards as the nation’s top trustee in 1997.
In February, upon turning 72, he retired from Freddie Mac as
required by regulatory policies. He’s keeping busy reading, playing tennis, and spending time with his family—including four grandchildren—
and he’s still on the boards of directors for two public companies.
But is he retired for good? “Most of the things I’ve done in the last 20
years have been unexpected and unplanned,” he says. “I’m happy to
have free time, but if somebody calls, I’ll probably listen.”
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Alumni Profiles
Duke Alum Nathan Kundtz Invents New Satellite Antenna
—by Mary-Russell Roberson
“I’ve always wanted to work on something that had a real-world
applicability,” says Nathan Kundtz, PhD ’09. “I was looking for ways
to take what was fundamental science research and turn it into
something which could be of value.”
Only three years after earning his PhD in physics at Duke with
Prof. David Smith, Kundtz has already designed a new type of satellite antenna that can supply internet connectivity to people in farflung locales—such as relief workers, journalists, military personnel,
and scientists—as well as to passengers on planes, trains, buses
and trucks.
The new antenna, called mTenna, is about the size of a laptop.
It’s thinner and lighter than what’s currently available, and uses less
power, takes less time to set up, and is less expensive. It also gives
higher performance than a conventional satellite antenna of similar
size because almost its entire surface is available for sending and
receiving signals via satellite.
Kundtz used technology from the meta-materials field to design
the mTenna, which points a beam in an entirely different way than
conventional satellite antennas, such as satellite dishes (which point
a beam physically) or phased array antennas (which point a beam by
manipulating the phases of different signals).
The mTenna uses some of the materials and technology used in
David Smith’s so-called invisibility cloak, but in a novel way. “Rather
than trying to use the materials in a refractive context, we could
implement the same design concepts in a diffractive context, where
you are using the material as a diffractive aperture and allowing energy to pass through in a small opening. You can think of the antenna
as a diffraction grating or a reconfigurable hologram,” Kundtz says.
Different diffraction gratings can be created by switching elements on the surface of the mTenna on or off. Voltage applied to the
elements adjusts a built-in dielectric that controls the resonance of
each element. If the frequency of an incoming signal matches the
resonance of an element, that element is “on” or “open,” and if the
frequency does not match, that element is “off” or “closed.”
“You have a traveling wave underneath some resonant elements,” Kundtz explains. “You can change the pattern of which
elements are on and off, and when you do, those elements have
a different phase offset between them so you end up with a beam
going off in different directions.” This means the mTenna can “find”
a communications satellite overhead without the user having to
precisely aim the device toward the satellite.
A laptop sized version of the mTenna called the Portable Satellite Hotspot is designed for people going places where 3G or 4G
coverage doesn’t exist or has been destroyed by war or a natural
disaster. The current options for connectivity in such situations are
slow and expensive, or awkward to carry and difficult to set up. The
mTenna can also be installed atop an airplane or other modes of
transportation to provide internet service to passengers.
Kundtz came up with the idea for mTenna while working at
12
Intellectual Ventures, an “invention capital company” headquartered
in Bellevue, Washington. His job was to provide technical insight for
various inventions and technologies the company was looking into,
but he also suggested some ideas of his own. “One of those turned
out to be something we felt there was a significant market for, so we
decided to invest in bringing that to maturity,” he says. Intellectual
Ventures spun out Kymeta Corporation to develop the mTenna, which
should be available commercially in 2015. Kundtz is founder and
chief technology officer at Kymeta Corporation.
When Kundtz first arrived at Duke, he worked with Prof. Albert
Chang on quantum electronics. Funding for that project dried up
after three years, and Kundtz considered leaving Duke with a MS in
electrical engineering. “I went to the DGS of the engineering department, which happened to be David Smith,” Kundtz says. “David was
looking for someone with an interest in electrical engineering but
who also had experience with general relativity, specifically with
differential geometry. I fit the bill and he invited me to come work
with his team on ideas related to meta-materials. So I finished my
PhD with David Smith.” David Smith holds appointments in both the
engineering and physics departments.
Kundtz says his path to inventing the mTenna was paved not only
with the knowledge he gained at Duke about solid state electronics
and meta-materials, but also the culture of physics, which helped
him look at the goal of improving the performance of satellite antennas from an entirely new angle. “The value [of a physics background]
is two-fold,” he says. “In doing hard experiments in the way they are
typically done in most physics departments, you develop a level of
scientific rigor and discipline that’s required to really carry something out that’s novel. At the same time, you’re encouraged to not
be restricted to a set of design tools that already exists, but you’re
taught to develop your own design tools.”
Photo by Kyle Johnson
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Duke PHYSICS
Duke Physics is a Family
Tradition for Chip Watson
— by Mary-Russell Roberson
Like father, like daughter. Both Chip Watson and his daughter Anne
Watson love physics and computer science and don’t like having
to choose between the two. They both love traveling to China to
teach English to high school students. And they both chose Duke for
postgraduate work in physics. Chip earned his PhD in 1980 working
with Prof. Emeritus Bilpuch and Anne began her graduate studies at
Duke this fall.
Chip is the manager of the High-Performance Computing Group
at Jefferson National Lab in Newport News, Virginia, where he has
been since 1988. He decided to pursue a career in computing while
he was a postdoc. “While I was at Duke doing my physics research
I was also picking up a lot of useful skills in computing, working
on data acquisition systems and analysis,” he says. “When I did a
postdoc at Stony Brook I found the computing was more enjoyable
and I engaged my fellow researchers more with my computing than
with physics so I abandoned the publish-or-perish rat race and took
on a supporting role in being a staff member working on computer
systems. But I didn’t take those skills out into industry—I very much
enjoy the physics research environment.”
The high-performance computers that Chip oversees are used
to analyze experimental physics data and perform calculations
for theorists who are studying quantum chromodynamics—how
quarks and gluons interact—using a lattice approach to manage the
incredible array of necessary calculations. At each point on a grid,
a discrete equation represents the environment around that point.
“Lattice QCD is a numerical approach to pulling predictions out of
that fundamental theory,” Chip says. “It’s incredibly difficult and very
demanding on the processors.” Right now, the theorists are simulating areas slightly larger than a nucleon, but they hope to soon be
able to model a small nucleus.
In 2009, Chip directed a major overhaul: “I built a system big
enough and powerful enough that if users would take the effort to
rewrite some code they would get a enormous benefit,” he says.
The lab used funds from a $5 million economic stimulus grant to
purchase graphic processing units (GPUs), which were originally
designed for video games. GPUs can handle all the calculations
needed to keep track of thousands of objects in a video game and
provide realistic images of those objects falling, bouncing off each
other, spinning, and shattering. “It did require considerable rewriting of code to take advantage of these things,” he says. “It was a
major effort, but it was too compelling to ignore.” He says the GPUs
provide about 10 times the performance on the dollar compared to
more conventional platforms.
Chip Watson, PhD ‘80, and his daughter Anne Watson, a current Duke Physics graduate
student, pose for a picture in the Guangxi province of China after playing a game with
students at a summer camp where they were teaching English. Chip has spent 11 summers teaching English in China, and Anne has accompanied him on six of those trips.
“We have over 500 GPUs,” he says. “It’s not the biggest in the
world, but it’s a pretty good size. Ours in unusual in that it’s dedicated to a particular science domain.”
As a child, Anne visited Jefferson Lab during open houses
and she also went with her dad to work on sick days or teacher
workdays. (Her mom is a professional violinist, and Anne also plays
violin.) Her middle-school and high-school science fair projects were
always related to either physics or computers—or both. She says,
“My dad in the true science spirit would say, ‘I’ll help you set it up,
but you’re doing all the experiment yourself.’” He also connected her
with other mentors at Jefferson Lab.
In her last two years of high school, she attended a regional
public school called New Horizons Regional Education Center that offered advanced science classes. “What really made me love physics
was a great teacher there,” she says. After high school, she was a
Park Scholar at NC State, where she double majored in physics and
computer science.
While her dad ended up at Duke primarily because his advisor at
Georgia Tech recommended it, Anne applied to and was accepted at
a number of graduate programs.
“I ended up choosing Duke not just because of the feel of the
place but because of the opportunities I have at Duke,” she says.
“I’m not married to a particular subspecialty of physics and Duke
has four or five different professors I would like to work with—
they are very encouraging about exploring all those opportunities
versus other schools that would only offer me the opportunity to do
research in a particular kind of condensed matter. Another thing I
like about Duke is that it’s interdisciplinary.” The Free Electron Laser
was also a major draw, since she has some familiarity with the FEL
at Jefferson Lab. Before arriving in Durham, Anne spent one week
at Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee, meeting with some of the
physicists there and investigating whether there might be a project
she could collaborate on during her time at Duke. “Working at one
of the Department of Energy National Labs is something I could see
myself doing for a career,” she says.
If Duke Physics runs in your family, let us know: news@phy.duke.edu.
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Alumni Profiles
Duke Alum Yff
Teaches Science
in Malawi
—by Mary-Russell Roberson
Picture yourself trying to teach high-school science to 80
students in a classroom with no equipment besides a blackboard
and some desks. Then imagine that these students don’t understand
English very well. That’s the situation Eric Yff (’10) found himself
in as a Peace Corps volunteer. Yff recently returned home after a
two-year stint in Malawi, a small country in sub-Saharan Africa near
Mozambique and Zambia.
Faced with designing experiments for his students in a school
with no scientific materials, Yff had to improvise. “If I was doing a
titration experiment,” he says, “we didn’t have graduated cylinders
or burettes so I’d go to the nearest health clinic and borrow syringes
there to measure liquid.” To get magnets or electrical components
he would take apart old speakers and radios that he bought at local
markets.
Creating the experiments was Yff’s favorite part of the job, and
his students enjoyed the results. “They weren’t used to seeing a lot
of experiments and they really enjoyed the experiments I did,” he
says.
Yff taught math and physical science to students in forms 1-4
(analogous to grades 9-12) at the Msenjere Community Day Secondary School in Msenjere Village, near the shore of Lake Malawi. The
school consisted of four classrooms. Each grade stayed in one
classroom, while teachers moved from room to room. There was no
electricity, no running water, and no break for lunch. There were also
no administrators or support staff—teachers were responsible for
speaking to parents, managing finances, overseeing maintenance,
and anything else that came up during the school day.
At the beginning of the school year, the classrooms would be
crowded with as many as 80 or 90 students. As the year progressed, classes shrank to 50 to 60 students in the younger grades
and 30 to 40 in the upper grades. “During the rainy season, which
is from late December up until April, the roads become really muddy
and it’s difficult to travel either on foot or bicycle,” Yff says, “so the
students are very late to school or don’t come at all.” Students also
dropped out of school to help their parents farming or fishing, or
14 due to pregnancies. The earlier grades had equal number of girls
and boys, but by the upper grades, the ratio of boys to girls was
about 3 to 1.
Yff completed two months of teacher training before being
assigned to his school. “Once you get to the village, it’s a matter of
building confidence and finding out what works for the students and
what doesn’t,” he says.
At first, just communicating with the students was a challenge.
The national exams are conducted in English, which is the official
language of Malawi, so high school classes are conducted in English.
But most Malawi people speak Chichewa. “It’s difficult to teach the
younger students because they don’t understand much English,”
Yff says. “They were supposed to have learned it in primary school,
but a lot of times they weren’t adequately prepared. To get through
to them, you have to talk very slowly, use simple English, enunciate
very carefully, and write on the board. The upper grades understand
English quite a bit better although you still have to speak more
slowly and enunciate things somewhat differently because people
are accustomed to English accents.” He adds, “I would occasionally mix in the local language but that was mainly to entertain the
students.”
Yff applied to the Peace Corps when he was a senior, and he
left for Malawi a month and a half after graduation. “They especially
like people from math and science backgrounds to teach because
there’s a big shortage of teachers of math and science in some of
these developing countries,” he says. At Duke, Yff double-majored in
physics and philosophy. He spent one summer abroad, on the Duke
in Oxford program, which was his only experience outside of the
United States before going to Malawi.
Now Yff is at home in Louisville, Kentucky, applying for jobs and
considering going back to school. Although he’s enjoying seeing
family and friends, driving his own car, and eating American food, he
misses his friends in Malawi. “I was really close to the headmaster at
my school and I had a lot of friendships with the other teachers and
students so it was sad to leave that,” he says.
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Faculty Research
Curtarolo’s Group Won MURI Competition
Prof. Stefano Curtarolo and his group have won the competition for the MURI topic#20 “Replacing Strategic Elements in DoD Materials” for the proposal “Topological decompositions and spectral sampling algorithms for element substitution in critical technologies.” Instead of discovering novel compounds, the group proposed to explore
“mechanisms of phase decompositions” to reproduce functionalities instead of chemistry. Curtarolo is the PI on this
new grant.
Gao and Collaborators Received an NSF MRI Award
Prof. Haiyan Gao and collaborators from Norfolk State University, North Carolina A&T State University and Mississippi
State University have been awarded recently by the National Science Foundation a Major Research Instrumentation
(MRI) grant for the construction of a cryogenic, internal hydrogen gas target for a new experiment on a precise measurement of the proton charge radius, a fundamental quantity important for both atomic and nuclear physics.
The recent development of the “proton radius puzzle’’ refers to the intriguing fact that the proton charge radius
determined from muonic hydrogen Lamb shift with about 0.05% precision is about 7 sigma away than those from
electron scattering experiments and from electronic hydrogen Lamb shift measurements. Before one can determine
whether the difference is due to new physics or not, new experiments both in lepton (electron and muon) scattering
and atomic Lamb shift are crucial. The NSF award allows Prof. Gao and collaborators to carry out a new experiment
at Jefferson Lab on electron-proton scattering using the combined technique of a high-precision electromagnetic
calorimeter, an internal hydrogen gas target, and the well-known quantum electrodynamics electron-electron scattering to achieve a sub percent precision in an unprecedentedly low electron momentum transfer squared region.
Gauthier and Kim Won MURI Competition
On May 31, 2013, the Department of Defense announced the winners of the annual Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) competition. The project, entitled “Fundamental research on wavelength-agile high-rate quantum key distribution (QKD) in a marine
environment,” was selected for funding by the Office of Naval Research. This project is
lead by Prof. Paul Kwiat from the University of Illinois – Urbanna-Champaign and includes
researchers from the University of Arizona and Boston University, as well as Profs. Daniel
Gauthier and Jungsang Kim of Duke Physics and Electrical and Computer Engineering respectively. The Duke efforts will focus on the development of a full quantum key distribution (QKD) system to achieve secure communication of a random string of bits that can be used as a
cryptographic key for encoding and decoding plain-text messages. Their system will use weak pulses of light generated by a laser for distributing the key, and the properties of quantum mechanics to prevent an eavesdropper attack. In the later stages of the project, the system will be
brought to the Duke University Marine lab where its capability for secure communication in free space over the sea will be assessed. Also, the
Duke team will develop a new class of detectors that are capable of sensing single-photons over a broad range of wavelengths and with high
efficiency. The project will last over a five-year period.
The purpose of the MURI program is to support teams of researchers from the sciences and engineering that straddle traditional disciplinary boundaries and provides sustained support at a level beyond that typical of single-investigator grants and for a longer period, with a focus
on graduate student training and infrastructure development.
KamLAND-Zen Reports New Neutrino Mass Limit
The KamLAND-Zen collaboration (with Prof. Werner Tornow) reported in Phys. Rev. Lett. a new neutrino mass
limit of mββ < (120 – 250) meV from a neutrinoless double-beta decay search of 136Xe. This limit is based on
a range of representative nuclear matrix element calculations, and excludes the Majorana neutrino mass range
expected from the neutrinoless double-beta decay claim of 76Ge by the Heidelberg-Moscow Collaboration at more
than 97.5 % confidence level. Read the paper online here: http://tinyurl.com/khhy94c
S i g n u p f o r o u r e - n e w s l e t t e r a t h t t p : // n e w s . p h y . d u k e . e d u ! 15
Faculty Research
Smith’s Research Highlighted in New York Times
The Technology section of the New York Times featured an article highlighting the research of Prof. David Smith. Read
the article “Scientists Develop Device for Image Compression” here: http://tinyurl.com/mjqon7n
Visualizing Meteoric Impact
Prof. Bob Behringer and his graduate student Abe Clark, along with Prof. Lou Kondic of NJIT,
recently had a paper accepted in PRL titled “Particle scale dynamics in granular impact.” The image
at right is a typical image from one of their experiments, where the bright particles are experiencing force.
They are exploring the questions of: How does granular material respond to a high-speed
impact by a foreign object, such as a meteor striking a planetary surface? How do the grains colPhoto by Abe Clark and Bob Behringer.
lectively push back against the intruder, bringing it to a stop?
This work was supported by DTRA.
They answer these questions with novel impact experiments on granular materials made from
a photoelastic substance. This approach has the special property of allowing them to see how
individual grains bear forces, and where the energy of the object goes. High-speed videos reveal rich acoustic activity: as the intruder moves,
lightning bolts of force emerge, traveling along networks of grains. These intermittent acoustic pulses along granular ‘chains’ are responsible
for decelerating the intruder and carrying away energy. This study is particularly novel because it captures the granular behavior in a way that
has not been done previously. It offers a new perspective for a process of considerable importance in natural phenomena and in industry,
which has frequently been studied in the past, but without access to what the grains are doing.
This article has been published as a “Physics” Focus. Please read it online here: http://tinyurl.com/mx2hwat. Additionally, an article has
been written in “Scientific American” here: http://tinyurl.com/c9m5427 and a DukeToday article here: http://tinyurl.com/kdnuzlj.
Does a Dissipative Environment Always Destroy Quantum Tunneling?
— by Harold Baranger and Gleb Finkelstein
following analogy: If one thinks of tunneling as a process of jumping
In an August 2012 Nature paper (Nature 488, p. 61), our team (H.
across a creek, dissipation can be represented as swampy banks.
Mebrahtu, I. Borzenets, D.E. Liu, H. Zheng, Yu. Bomze, A. Smirnov, H.
Baranger and G. Finkelstein) reported unexpected results on quantum- In this case, once cannot just step across the creek – it takes some
energy to push oneself for a jump. Similarly, in a quantum system at
mechanical tunneling with dissipation. Specifically, we showed that
resonant tunneling can survive in the presence of dissipation, which is low temperature, the electron does not have the necessary energy to
yield to the dissipative environment, and tunneling is suppressed.
normally thought to suppress any tunneling events.
In our paper, we investigated the problem of resonant tunneling
The role of the surroundings, or environment, in quantum mechanics has captivated physicists’ attention since the early days of the with dissipation (see Fig. 1), where the single tunnel barrier discussed
theory, resulting in the famous paradoxes at the interface of quantum above is replaced by a resonant level. Quantum resonant levels are
ubiquitous in many branches of science, from chemistry to optics to
and classical worlds. Starting from the seminal paper by Feynman
particle physics, and familiar from quantum mechanics textbooks as
and Vernon (1963), the environment is commonly understood as an
the double barrier problem. In our case, the resonant level is formed
ensemble of oscillators, or a “bosonic bath”. Such a bath is known
to induce dissipation in the classical context; in the case of quantum
tunneling, it is generally known to suppress the tunneling rate.
The effects of dissipation on quantum processes can be readily
tested in electron tunneling across a nanoscale barrier contacted
by resistive leads, which serve as the dissipative bath. The tunneling
rate across the barrier is suppressed, as evidenced by the electrical conductance G = I/V through the barrier which exhibits a power
law dependence on temperature: G ~ T2r. [Here, the dimensionless
quantity r=e2R/h is a rather peculiar combination of the lead resis1:Schematic
Schematic
of thelevelresonant
level
between
Figure 1:
of the resonant
formed between
twoformed
tunneling barriers
inside two tun
tance R, the electron charge e, and the Plank constant h.] Note that atFigure
nanotube. It is coupled to two leads – the source and the drain. The tunneling elecnanotube.
It
is
coupled
to
two
leads
–
the
source
and
the drain.
zero temperature, the electron tunneling across the barrier is totally thethe
tron excites the bosonic modes in the leads (wavy lines). Side gates (Figure 2) allow us
suppressed, G=0. One can visualize this situation in terms of the
to
control
the
relative
transparency
of
the
two
barriers.
excites the bosonic modes in the leads (wavy lines). Side gates (Fig
control the relative transparency of the two barriers.
16 S i g n u p f o r o u r e - n e w s l e t t e r a t h t t p : // n e w s . p h y . d u k e . e d u !
Figure 1: Schematic of the resonant level form
the nanotube. It is coupled to two leads – the so
excites the bosonic modes inPHYSICS
the leads (wavy li
control the relative transparency of the two bar
Duke continued from page 17
in a carbon nanotube – an atomic monolayer of carbon atoms rolled
up to make a long hollow cylinder (see Fig. 2). The nanotube is further
contacted at the ends by two metallic leads, each separated from the
resonant level by a tunnel barrier. An electron occupying the resonant
level travels back and force along the length of the nanotube, forming
a standing wave. The resistance of the leads provides dissipation. In
the general case, we find that resonant tunneling is suppressed by the
dissipative environment, just like for non-resonant tunneling.
There is one important exception however: exactly on-resonance
and when the resonant level is equally coupled to the two leads, the
resonant tunneling is not suppressed at all! (See Fig. 3.) In fact, its
probability grows and at lowest temperatures reaches unity – which
means that despite dissipation, electrons tunnel through the resonant
level between the two contacts with 100% probability. Furthermore,
the width of the resonance level, which is inversely proportional to the
lifetime of the resonance, tends to zero as a power law of temperature. In other words, the tunneling electron spends a longer and longer
time at the resonant level as the temperature is decreased. To summarize the experimental results, we obtain zero conductance (at T=0)
everywhere except at a single special point for which the nanotube is
fully conducting, as if there were no barriers (G=1 in units of e2/h).
Our theoretical analysis shows that this peculiar behavior signals
the presence of a quantum phase transition (QPT) – a sudden change
in the many-body quantum ground state driven by some control
parameter (in our case, the gate voltage). QPTs are currently attracting strong interest in widely different fields of physics, ranging from
quantum magnets and strongly correlated materials to, more recently,
cold atoms, nanostructures, and particle physics. The foremost
remarkable property of QPTs is the possibility to create exotic quantum states of matter at the quantum critical point; these exotic zero
temperature states then cause anomalous physical properties at finite
temperature. Despite the ubiquity of QPTs in contemporary theoretical
physics, obtaining clear experimental signatures has been challenging.
Our experiment provides a rare thorough characterization of all facets
of a QPT in a fully-tunable system.
To analyze the QPT, the quantum electrical properties of the system—that is, the quantum fluctuations of the charge on the capacitor
formed by the tunneling barrier—are recast as a quantum field theory.
Then standard techniques of the renormalization group are brought
to bear. The result is an understanding of not only the two extreme
behaviors of the conductance but also of the approach to these
extremes as a function of temperature.
The peculiar full transmission point does indeed correspond to
an exotic state of matter. The theoretical analysis shows that a natural
way to understand the experiment is to split the fermion corresponding to the resonant level into two “Majorana fermions”. One of these
Majoranas is coupled to the leads, yielding the full conductance, but
the other is decoupled from the system entirely. A decoupled Majorana mode is a strange entity which is the subject of an intense search
world wide in a variety of contexts.
The four graduate students who conducted the theoretical and
experimental research have all graduated. Henok Mebrahtu is now
with Intel Corporation, Ivan Borzenets is a postdoctoral fellow at the
Tokyo University, Dong Liu is a postdoctoral fellow at the Michigan
State University, and Huaixiu Zheng will start an industrial career this
fall at CGG.
Sign up for our e-newsletter at
Nanotube
SG
SG
Source
Gate
Drain
Figure 2: Atomic Force Micrograph of a carbon nanotube (thin diagonal line running
through the figure) on a silicon dioxide substrate. The raised surfaces are gold electrodes
and gates made by electron-beam lithography and metal film evaporation. The nanotube
is contacted by the source and the drain; the number of electrons in the nanotube is
controlled by the main gain on right-hand side; the tunnel coupling to the source and the
drain is controlled by the two side gate. Scale: approximately 1x1 micrometer.
Figure 2: Atomic Force Micrograph of a carbo
through the figure) on a silicon dioxide substra
and gates made by electron-beam lithography a
is contacted by the source and the drain; the nu
controlled by the main gain on right-hand side;
drain is controlled by the two side gate. Scale:
Figure 3: Shape of the resonance peak: conductance vs. gate voltage measured at
several temperatures in the case of symmetric coupling of the resonant level to the two
leads. The peak conductance grows with decreasing temperature, while the peak width
drops. This situation corresponds to the quantum phase transition: in the limit of zero
temperature, the conductance is zero everywhere except for the singular point at the
center of the peak, where it reaches e2/h (perfect transparency).
Figure 3: Shape of the resonance peak: condu
temperatures in the case of symmetric coupli
peak conductance grows with decreasing tem
situation corresponds to the quantum phase tr
is zero everywhere except
fo
h t t p : / / n e w s . p h y . d u k ethe
. e d uconductance
!
17
2
where it reaches e /h (perfect transparency).
Faculty Research
Life and Death of Stars
— by Mohammad W. Ahmed & Henry R. Weller
Late-stage red giant stars produce energy in their interiors via helium burning.
The outcome of helium burning in red giant stars is the formation of the two
elements: carbon and oxygen. The ratio of carbon to oxygen at the end of
helium burning has been identified as one of the key open questions in Nuclear
Astrophysics. Helium burning proceeds through the 3α (three He nuclei)
process to produce carbon, which eventually burns to oxygen via the 12C(α,γ)16O
reaction. For stars in the 10 to 25 solar mass region, the 12C(α,γ)16O reaction
ultimately determines the mass of the iron core. The uncertainty in the rate of
this reaction is still large enough to limit our understanding of the latter stages of
stellar evolution. A higher rate of carbon burning would result in over-production
of heavy-mass nuclei, such as nickel and iron in the core of the stars, and would
tilt the balance towards supernova explosions leading to the production of black
holes. Likewise, an oxygen deficient star would most likely not reach its fate as
a black hole but instead become a neutron star. Hence, the two elements which
are critical for our existence also determine the life of these red-giant stars.
An excited state in 12C, named the Hoyle State after Fred Hoyle who
predicted its existence, plays a central role in stellar helium burning by
enhancing the production of 12C in the Universe- allowing for life as we know it.
It is the first and quite possibly still the best example of an application of the
anthropic principle in physics. Soon after the discovery of this excited state
in 12C, predictions of the rotational band structure of the Hoyle state led to
a fifty year search for an excited state built upon the Hoyle state. An excited
state having the properties of the Hoyle State excitation was unambiguously
identified at the High Intensity Gamma-Ray Source (HIGS) of the Triangle
Universities Nuclear Laboratory (TUNL) and was reported recently in a letter
[Physical Review Letters, 110, 152502 (2013)]. This work was a collaborative
effort which includes TUNL, the University of Connecticut, Yale University,
Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt, Germany, and the Weizmann Institute
of Science, Israel. This discovery was made possible by the use of a state-ofthe-art detector system called the Optical Time Projection Chamber (OTPC) at
HIGS. The OTPC is also being utilized for the measurement of the 12C(α,γ)16O
reaction by studing the inverse reaction 16O(γ,α)12C. In this process, a gamma
ray breaks apart the 16O nucleus into helium and carbon fragments. The OTPC
measures the energy and the angular distribution of these fragments leading
to a complete kinematic description of this reaction. The probability or cross
section of this reaction is extremely small, 10 -43 m2 (or a femtobarn) in the
energy region of interest for nuclear astrophysics. With the world’s highest
intensity polarized gamma ray source, HIGS, it would take us few hundred hours
to carry out this measurement at low enough energies to be able to extrapolate
to the astrophysical energy. Initial studies have begun and an example of a
typical event in which 16O breaks into the helium and 12C fragments is shown in
the Figure 1 through the eyes of the OTPC. These studies will conclude in the
next three years.
18
Figure 1. A gamma ray of 9.5 million electron-volts
(MeV), not seen in the image, breaks apart an Oxygen
nucleus into a helium (α) fragment and a 12C fragment.
A fast, high resolution, and image intensified camera
creates this image. Other components of the OTPC
gather information on the energy of these fragments
and angles with which these are ejected to paint a
complete picture of this reaction.
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Duke PHYSICS
Duke at CERN
with President Brodhead
— by Al Goshaw
The High Energy Physics (HEP) group, in collaboration with the Duke
Alumni Office, hosted an all-day event at the international laboratory
CERN on July 1, 2013. The activities were centered around a visit by
President Richard Brodhead and his staff as part of European tours of
Duke programs in Geneva, London and Berlin. CERN was chosen as
the location in Geneva in order to highlight the Duke HEP group’s participation in elementary particle research with the ATLAS experiment.
This also happened be the one-year anniversary of the announcement
at CERN by the ATLAS and CMS experiments of the discovery of the
particle that has now been identified as the Higgs Boson.
The day’s activities included underground tours of the ATLAS
detector and CERN science demonstrations, followed by a reception
and program in the CERN Council Chamber. The event planned for
50 people eventually attracted about 150 Duke participants, with an
overflow crowd for the evening program which featured recent Duke
University news and a “conversation with the President” about elementary particle physics. The Duke HEP group1 fielded the questions
from President Brodhead and the audience, ranging over the past 50
years of HEP theory and experiment, and in particular discussed the
meaning and significance of the discovery of the Higgs boson. The
lively conversations extended into the evening and established many
new contacts between members of the Physics Department and the
broader Duke community.
David Charlton, ATLAS Spokesperson, and Steve Myers, Director
of Accelerators and Technology at CERN, helped make this event a
success.
The day’s activities were particularly enriched by the attendance
of alumni from all over Europe and the participation of faculty and
students from three Duke summer programs: Duke in Geneva Globalization, the Duke Program on Global Policy Governance and Duke-Geneva Institute in Transitional Law. This event was the largest gathering
ever of Duke people in Switzerland. The enthusiasm of the response
from faculty, alumni and students encourages us to consider offering
a similar program at CERN next summer.
Photo by Jene Goshaw
President Brodhead and Prof. Al Goshaw
at the event of “Conversation with the President”
At CERN the HEP people hosting this event were faculty members Ayana
Arce, and Al Goshaw, senior physicists Andrea Bocci, Enrique Kajomovitz and
Shu Li, and students Lei Li, Mia Liu, Caroline Steiblin and Chen Zhou
1
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News
Dean Katsouleas
Teaches Mechanics
Recitation Section
— by Mary-Russell Roberson
Photo by Cristin Paul
Dean Katsouleas works with PHY 151 student Craig Vincent.
Tom Katsouleas, Dean of the Pratt School of Engineering, is in constant motion as he teaches a Tuesday afternoon recitation section
for Physics 151. One minute he’s scribbling equations and drawing
graphs on the blackboard; the next he’s singing an old Crosby,
Stills and Nash song to help students remember that long waves
travel faster than short ones. Every 15 minutes or so, he assigns a
practice problem and strides out among the tables to interact with
students one-on-one.
Even though this is the last meeting before the final exam, the
mood in the room is one of easygoing collaboration. The students
bring up topics for review, suggest different approaches to problems, point out the origin of a sign error, and laugh when Katsouleas
makes an unintended pun on the word “wavelength.” Near the end of
the recitation, he hands out the midterm and says how proud he is
of the students: the average in this recitation section was 3 points
higher than the overall class average.
Last fall, when students signed up for the Tuesday afternoon
recitation, they didn’t know who would be teaching them. Michaela
Walker, a first-year engineering student from Boston, says, “On the
first day of physics lecture, Dr. Behringer said who the recitation
profs were, and we looked at each other and were like, ‘Wait. Dean
K? Really?’”
At first, Walker was a little worried that a dean might not be the
best professor, but that notion was quickly dispelled. “I feel really
lucky to be in this recitation. Dean K. really does care about teaching. He really likes it when we have ‘ah ha’ moments,” she says. “And
it’s really cool to be able to go to his office for office hours and know
he has time for first-year undergraduates.”
Katsouleas, who has a PhD in physics and a secondary appointment in the physics department, answered the call when the
physics department asked for volunteers to teach recitation sections
for Physics 151, which is Introductory Mechanics for engineers and
other non-physics science majors.
Katsouleas hadn’t taught an undergraduate class in a couple
20
of years and was anxious to get back in the classroom. “I do like to
teach and I feel like it’s so central to the mission of the university
that if I don’t do it some, I feel out of touch with the main activity of
campus,” he says.
Courses in the engineering school were covered, so he decided
to sign up for a physics recitation section. “It’s worked out perfectly
for me because it’s reminding me how much I love physics and how
much fun it is to teach physics,” he says. “At the same time it’s given
me an opportunity to meet a lot of freshmen engineering students,
which is something that’s also important to me. I really enjoy getting
to know them and saying hi on campus.”
Michael Sutton, a first-year engineering student from near
Pittsburgh, says he “thoroughly enjoyed” the recitation and appreciates Katsouleas’s engineering perspective. “Dean K makes sure we
understand that engineering is really involved in what we’re doing,”
he says.
Indeed, when the class was doing estimation problems (Fermi
problems), Katsouleas asked his students how they would respond
to actual requests that he’s received from colleagues or board
members to evaluate the feasibility of an idea. “These are the kinds
of problems engineers get paid to solve,” he says.
Although it’s certainly unusual to find a dean teaching a recitation section, Katsouleas says he would do it again. The less-structured time allowed him to respond to the needs and interests of the
students in a way that’s not easy to do in a large lecture class. “We
didn’t always do what I thought we would do in that two-hour period,
and the same is not true when you are teaching a formal lecture,” he
says. “It was two hours full of learning moments.”
Perhaps more importantly, the less-structured time made it
easy to interact with the students and get to know them. “Even before I came to Duke—after I’d been hired but before I came here—
faculty said, ‘Wait ‘til you get into the classroom—you’re going to
love our students,’” Katsouleas says. “There really is something
special about Duke students.”
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Duke PHYSICS
Looking Back at the
First 50 Years of TUNL
— by Mary-Russell Roberson
Banner headlines—in one-inch tall type—shouted “Duke to Get
Nuclear Lab” and “$2.5 Million Nuclear Lab to be Established at
Duke.” The date was November 23, 1965, and the occasion was the
funding of the Triangle University Nuclear Laboratory (TUNL) by the
federal Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). The news was so big that
an editorial cartoon in the Durham Morning Herald showed two farmers discussing the equipment that would be in the new lab.
Duke professor Henry Newson had succeeded—on his third
try—in securing funding for a 15-MeV tandem Van de Graaff accelerator and a 15-MeV cyclotron. In 1963 and 1964, Newson had
submitted similar proposals to AEC from Duke alone, neither of
which were funded.
What made the third time the charm? Eugen Merzbacher, professor emeritus at UNC, says, “Henry had this brilliant idea to combine
the three universities.” Merzbacher helped write the proposal, as
This cartoon about the funding of TUNL appeared in the November 28,
did Worth Seagondollar, who was chair of the physics department at
1965, Durham Morning Herald. - Courtesy of The Herald-Sun
N.C. State. Each university would supply faculty members and graduate students to conduct research using the equipment.
Henry Newson’s brilliant idea is still fostering collaborations
For many years, TUNL was funded solely by AEC, which later
today among faculty and students from Duke, North Carolina State
became the Department of Energy. Today, DOE’s Office of Nuclear
University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill—and
Physics is still the major funder, but there is support from other
now North Carolina Central University as well.
agencies as well, including the National Nuclear Security Administra
Newson’s other creative twist was the idea of using the
tion, the National Science Foundation, and the Domestic Nuclear
cyclotron to inject a beam into the Van de Graaff to cost-effectively
Detection Office of the Department of Homeland Security.
double the beam energy. Scientists at TUNL called the combination
Originally, the focus of TUNL was nuclear structure. Newson
the cyclo-graaff.
used a high-resolution neutron beam to study the nucleus. Later,
Shortly after the proposal was funded, Newson came up with the Duke professor Edward Bilpuch modified the equipment to produce
idea of naming the lab the Triangle Universities Nuclear Laboratory, or a proton beam, which he and colleagues used in a series of well
TUNL, building on the name recognition of the newly minted Research known experiments to study isobaric analogue states of the nucleus
Triangle Park. Construction of the cyclo-graaff lab, located behind the with ultrafine energy resolution.
Physics building on West Campus, was partly supported by a grant
Over the years, TUNL has broadened its focus. The current
from the North Carolina Board of Science and Technology. Newson
director, Duke professor Calvin Howell, says TUNL’s evolution often
served as director of TUNL from 1968 until his death in 1978.
followed the interests and technical innovations of faculty members.
Russell Roberson, professor emeritus and a former TUNL direc- For example, when UNC professor Tom Clegg built a polarized ion
tor, arrived at Duke in 1963. At the time, the Duke Physics departbeam at TUNL in 1986, other faculty members and students caught
ment had two small Van de Graaff accelerators—one rated at an
his enthusiasm and used it for their own experiments.
energy of 4 MeV and another rated at 3 MeV—but Newson wanted
“That’s been the history of TUNL—new people come in with new
a bigger accelerator for bigger experiments. Before coming to Duke ideas and new technology and techniques, and they don’t just hoard
in 1948, Newson had done stints at Oak Ridge, Hanford, and Los
those things for themselves,” Howell says. “The collaboration and
Alamos National Labs, and had worked on the Manhattan Project.
the synergy between faculty members works beautifully. We don’t
“Because of his work on the Manhattan Project, Newson
have institutional boundaries.” Howell did his graduate work as a
understood how many people could effectively use a big facility like
Duke student at TUNL in the 1980s.
the tandem Van de Graaff,” Roberson says. “He knew Duke couldn’t
Today, TUNL physicists are pushing scientific frontiers in
provide that many people. But by dividing it up among the three
several areas, including studying strong interaction physics to betuniversities, we were able to establish a very significant faculty pres- ter understand the structure of nuclei and nucleons (protons and
ence with a large number of graduate students and make it one of
neutrons); modeling nuclear reactions in stars; and delving into the
the top accelerator and nuclear facilities in the country.”
fundamental nature of neutrinos to discover whether these charge-
S i g n u p f o r o u r e - n e w s l e t t e r a t h t t p : // n e w s . p h y . d u k e . e d u ! 21
Looking Back
continued from page 21
less particles serve as their own anti-particles and how they may
have played a role in the processes that generated the visible matter
in the universe.
Parts of the Van de Graaff that arrived in 1966 are still being
used by TUNL physicists, but newer machines have come online as
well. One of these is the free electron laser known as the HIGS (high
intensity gamma-ray source), housed in a separate building behind
the original TUNL building. HIGS is now producing the world’s most
intense polarized gamma-ray beams.
As TUNL approaches its 50th anniversary, both Roberson and
Howell say that one of the most important contributions of TUNL
has been its role in educating the next generation of scientists.
Roberson says, “We’ve continued to be one of the more significant
laboratories in the country in terms of producing students. Many
of our graduate students go in industry and the national labs and
universities. At one time, there were 35 graduates from TUNL working at Los Alamos National Lab, helping provide a significant national
defense to the country.”
Howell says, “The record speaks for itself in the outstanding
scientists we have produced at the PhD level. In the last 15 years,
we’ve put considerable effort into creating opportunities for undergraduates.” The NSF-funded Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program supports 10-12 undergraduates from around the
country each summer to work and learn at TUNL. Last year, TUNL
began collaborating with Duke’s high-energy program to allow some
of the REU students to spend the summer at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland.
There are other examples of universities that tried to create
shared physics laboratories but were not able to work together as
a team to make it happen, according to Steve Shafroth, who came
to UNC and TUNL in 1967. Shafroth says, “TUNL is such a unique
thing, with the three universities collaborating like that and staying
friends.” He adds with a laugh, “You know, with the basketball rivalry
and all so strong.”
Merzbacher agrees, saying, “TUNL is the only tripartite lab in
the country. There’s nothing else like it.”
Note: We are sad to report that Eugen Merzbacher died on June
6, 2013.
On November 23, 1965 and November 24, 1965, the Durham Sun and Durham Herald
announced the funding of the consortium that would become TUNL.
22
S i g n u p f o r o u r e - n e w s l e t t e r a t h t t p : // n e w s . p h y . d u k e . e d u !
Mueller a New Associate Lab Director at BNL
Prof. Berndt Mueller will be the new Associate Lab Director for Nuclear & Particle Physics at the Brookhaven National
Laboratory from January 2013 to December 2015. During this period, he will hold a joint appointment between Duke and
BNL. Below is the news release from BNL. An official news release from BNL is online here: http://tinyurl.com/k9mkvhp
Associate Lab Director for Nuclear & Particle Physics by Sam Aronson, Lab Director
I am pleased to announce the appointment of physicist Berndt Mueller as the new Associate Laboratory Director
Berndt Mueller
(ALD) for Nuclear & Particle Physics (NPP), effective January 1, 2013. Berndt brings world-class experience as both a
Courtesy: Brookhaven
National Laboratory
scientist and program manager to this key leadership position at Brookhaven Lab.
Berndt replaces Steve Vigdor, who retires on December 31 after spending five years as ALD advancing the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider
(RHIC) research program, guiding the Lab’s participation in the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), and further developing
programs in cosmology, astrophysics, and neutrino research. The Laboratory owes Steve a debt of gratitude for his deft and visionary leadership
of these large and complex projects and programs which are so important to our strategy.
Berndt, an active scientist with more than 300 peer-reviewed publications and 9,000 citations, currently serves as James B. Duke Professor
and Director of the Center for Theoretical and Mathematical Sciences at Duke University, a position he assumed in 2008. He will continue his work
at Duke for the remainder of the current academic year, splitting his time there and at BNL for the next five months. During that time, BNL’s David
Lissauer will act as interim ALD to share responsibilities and bring Berndt up to speed on existing operations and new initiatives at the Lab.
Berndt has a long association with BNL, going back many years, and recently co-authored a paper for “Science” reviewing the scientific
achievements of RHIC and outlining the complementary physics opportunities for the next decade of the LHC and RHIC experiments. He has also
served on many physics review panels for both the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation.
Berndt has held several leadership positions at Duke, including Chair of the Department of Physics, Principal Investigator for grants that
expanded and supported research at the Duke Free Electron Laser Laboratory, and Divisional Dean of the Natural Sciences. He received his Ph.D.
in Theoretical Physics from Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, and completed his postdoctoral studies at Yale University and the University
of Washington.
He currently serves as Chair-Elect of the Division of Nuclear Physics of the American Physical Society, and in this role he collaborated with
Steve Vigdor on establishing a white paper writing group for the subfield of hot QCD matter. As a leading member of the nuclear physics community, Berndt will play a crucial role in the coming years at BNL. Please join me in warmly welcoming Berndt to the Laboratory.
Graduate Students Tour
Oak Ridge National Lab —by Chris Pollard
While many in the Physics department were taking a well-earned
respite from studying, teaching, and research during Fall Break, twelve
intrepid graduate students traveled to Oak Ridge, Tennessee for a visit
to the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL).
Together with 17 students from the Chemistry and ECE departments,
they took an extensive tour of the laboratory’s facilities and met with
its staff, who introduced them to the wide range of research opportunities that ORNL has to offer.
The students were greeted with breakfast by Dr. Ian Anderson,
director of ORNL Graduate and University Partnerships, who introduced
them to the lab’s goals for student involvement in its scientific program.
David Dean, Director of the Physics Division, gave an overview of Oak
Ridge’s many areas of active physics research. Georgia Tourassi,
who conducted her graduate work at Duke and is now Director of Oak
Ridge’s Biomedical Science and Engineering Center, presented the
work that is being done at the lab in the biomedical sciences.
There was also an opportunity for the visiting students to speak
with former Duke graduate students Matthew Blackston and Jerry
Parks, both of whom are now researchers at ORNL, about the transition from the University to the national lab.
Laboratory staff members and users then gave the visitors
guided tours of Oak Ridge’s considerable research facilities, including its computing center, the Spallation Neutron Source, the High
Temperature Materials Laboratory, the High Flux Isotope Reactor, and
the Center for Nanophase Materials Science.
Photo by Lynn Kaack
The students also toured the historic Graphite Pile Reactor, the first
nuclear reactor designed for continuous use and only the second ever
built (after Fermi’s Chicago Pile-1).
For the graduate students, it was quite an eye-opening trip,
especially for those who had never considered conducting research at
a national lab.
Several commented on the impressive breadth of research
programs at Oak Ridge.
“I learned a lot by getting to meet so many people with such
diverse scientific backgrounds,” said Kristen Collar, a second year
graduate student.
Many also agreed that one of the highlights of the trip was speaking to Duke alumni who had settled into staff positions at Oak Ridge.
Jon Mueller (entered ’09) said, “I especially enjoyed interacting
with former Duke graduate students who went on to work at ORNL.”
Oak Ridge and Duke recently penned an agreement on Cooperation in
Graduate Research and Education.
Program participants will receive mentoring from the laboratory
staff, access to Oak Ridge’s facilities, and fellowship opportunities
through ORNL.
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Photo by Cristin Paul
l-r: Xiaojun Yao, Xiaqing Li, Yajing Huang, Xiaomeng Jia and Yuchen Zhao
Students from China’s Shandong
University Spend a Year with Duke Physics
— by Mary-Russell Roberson
“Life here is really busy, but colorful,” says Xiaqing Li, one of five
physics majors from Shandong University in China who spent the
2012-2013 academic year at Duke. The students lived on West
Campus and took physics classes, electives, and did independent
study research.
While the five students had five different experiences, they all
agree they enjoyed choosing their own classes and schedules, being
immersed in a foreign culture, and experiencing new ways of learning.
“I think it’s good to study abroad and have a different experience,” says Xiaomeng Jia. “I learned a different culture, a different
kind of lifestyle, and a different way of thinking. And I introduced my
way of thinking to my friends as well. It’s the best experience in my
life up to now.”
This was the first year that Shandong students studied at Duke;
in the fall three more students from Shandong will follow in their
footsteps. In addition, two physics students from Wuhan University
will spend fall term here. Wuhan University is the partner university for
Duke Kunshan University (DKU), Duke’s campus in China.
“As a university, we have a strategy for making new connections
to China,” says Prof. Robert Calderbank, dean of natural sciences and
professor of computer science, math, and electrical and computer
engineering. “Part of that strategy is making good connections with
places like Shandong University that are top-tier Chinese universities.
We’re really excited about this opportunity to bring some of their very
best students to Duke.”
The idea originated at the 2011 U.S-China Hadron Workshop in
China when Prof. Haiyan Gao was approached by a physics professor from Shandong’s incredibly selective Taishan honors college. “He
said they really wanted to provide extraordinary opportunities to their
students and they really wanted to have better connections with prestigious [foreign] universities,” Gao says. “He said, ‘Is this something
you can help with?’”
Gao, who is on the China Faculty Council, talked to Calderbank
and several other deans about the idea of having Shandong physics
students spend a year at Duke, and was met with enthusiastic support. Prof. Lee Baker, dean of academic affairs and associate vice
provost for undergraduate education says, “We wanted to support the
relationship with that university, and support our faculty members like
Haiyan Gao, and bring really smart students in. It all lined up.”
Later that fall, Calderbank visited Shandong’s honors college
and gave a talk to students. “I talked for about 45 minutes and for
the next 45 minutes these students just peppered me with questions
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in perfect English,” he says. “I was just blown away. I was very, very
impressed.”
Turning the idea into reality was, as Gao says, a “complicated
interaction” involving everything from interviewing and selecting the
students to spelling out financial agreements. Gao says key support during the planning phase came from Steve Nowicki , dean and
vice provost of undergraduate education. “In the end, I was just glad
everything worked,” she says. “The provost’s office was very supportive.” The students are funded by Shandong University, Duke, and the
Chinese government.
While at Duke, the Shandong students took three physics
classes a semester including an independent study with a professor
in an area of their interest. Although physics is physics no matter the
language, the students found there’s more than one way to teach
it and learn it. For one thing, the Chinese students say that at Duke
they spent less time in class but more time on homework compared
to Shandong University. And homework here often required creative
problem-solving that led to insights not necessarily presented by the
professor in lecture.
Another difference is how students do their homework.
“Students here have the spirit of studying together and of course our
professors encourage that,” Jia says. “Sometimes you benefit even
more from your classmates because they are all a similar level as you
and may have a breakthrough for how to describe it to you. Actually
the efficiency is higher if you study in a group. . . so long as you don’t
talk about movies!”
The students also say that asking questions in class or seeking
help from professors outside of class is a bigger part of the learning
process here than in China.
Each student also took a couple of non-physics classes, exploring subjects as varied as Latin, psychology, logic, music appreciation,
tennis, and swimming. Yuchen Zhao says he “accidentally” took a
modern dance class taught by Prof. Barbara Dickinson, which ended
up being one of his favorite experiences. At first he was flummoxed by
theoretical discussions about the meaning and experience of dance,
but he enjoyed learning new dance styles and working with the other
students, many of whom were “excellent” dancers. For the final group
project, Zhao worked with some of his classmates to choreograph an
original four-minute dance. He says,“I didn’t know any dancing steps
so I added martial arts, which I did in my home university.” Zhao found
the group creative process thought-provoking: he says the dance
developed layer by layer as they continually refined the whole thing,
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in contrast to a scientific project, which proceeds step by step with
each step being dependent on the completion—and accuracy—of
the previous one.
“That’s the power of the liberal arts,” says Baker. “We want to
make sure they take a class they couldn’t take back home, not just
math and physics. We’re glad we empower these students to broaden
and stretch their knowledge acquisition.”
While all of the students excelled academically, the year wasn’t
all work and no play. They visited nearby stores and restaurants,
traveled to Washington and New York, and were invited home for
Thanksgiving by Gao and other professors. They also got to know
Duke students. “They are very independent, more independent than I
imagined, but they are really sociable. They really fancy the parties,”
Li says. Yajing Huang says, “When they have fun, they just focus on
having fun, not worry.”
Two of the students returned to China after spring semester,
while the other three will return home after continuing their research
over the summer. One of them—Xiaojun Yao—will be returning to
Duke Physics as a graduate student in the fall.
With the first year a success, Gao is looking forward to welcoming more students from Shandong and Wuhan to Duke Physics in the
fall. She’s also working to set up similar programs with two other
Chinese universities: Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Nanjing
University. And in the future, she hopes there will be opportunities for
Duke students to study in China, as does Calderbank. He says, “There
are more and more students showing up at Duke whose foreign language in high school was Mandarin. They spend time at Duke learning
more Mandarin and they want to spend time in China.”
Prof. Edward Bilpuch, Dead at 85
— by Calvin Howell and Gary Mitchell
Edward George Bilpuch died on September 15, 2012, in Durham, North Carolina. He was the Henry W. Newson
Professor Emeritus of physics at Duke University, and he served many years as the director of the Triangle
Universities Nuclear Laboratory (TUNL). Bilpuch, a gifted experimentalist, used high-resolution spectroscopy to
probe the structure of the nucleus.
Bilpuch was born in 1927 in Connellsville, Pennsylvania, and after a stint in the Navy earned his undergraduate and graduate degrees in physics at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. He joined the faculty at Duke
in 1962.
In the 1960s, perhaps the most exciting topic in nuclear physics was the discovery of isobaric analogue
Edward Bilpuch
states in the nucleus by John Fox and Donald Robson at Florida State University. In revealing this phenomenon, Fox
and Robson were able to achieve an energy resolution of 2 keV in their measurements. While speaking at a symposium in honor of Bilpuch this
November, Robson recalled: “We needed a truly high resolution. Ed wanted to use the high resolution system at Duke to shoot protons.” Henry
Newson, the first director of TUNL, had developed a high-resolution neutron beam, and Bilpuch had the idea to adapt the system to use a proton beam to study isobaric analogue states. In a seminal experiment, Bilpuch and his student George (Jay) Keyworth did just this, achieving an
energy resolution of 0.25 keV—the best resolution achieved in a nuclear-structure experiment in the world. Their groundbreaking experiment
established that within the analogue states observed by Fox and Robson there were many narrow compound nuclear states. “It was beautiful
data,” Robson said.
When this data was presented at a conference in Tallahassee in 1966, the British nuclear physicist Sir Denys Wilkinson, inventor of the
analog-to-digital converter and recipient of the Royal Medal, summarized his reaction as follows: “In describing this Duke work, I would call it
stupendously beautiful. I have never seen such an experiment before. It gave me an immediate sensual thrill.”
Later, Bilpuch shifted his attention to the statistical behavior of the largest collection of proton resonances ever accumulated. Work by
James Rainwater had strongly suggested that random matrix theory could be used to describe the experimental width and spacing distributions. Bilpuch and colleagues proved this was the case by their successful description of the proton resonance data in a different mass region.
Teamwork was an important theme in Bilpuch’s life. He attended UNC on a football scholarship, and played in three major bowl games—
the Cotton, Sugar, and Orange Bowls. As a physicist, he promoted teamwork among scientists, among institutions, and among countries. He
realized that although individual talents are important, much more can be accomplished through collaboration than by an individual.
He helped establish TUNL, a cooperative nuclear laboratory at Duke run jointly by Duke, UNC, and NC State, and helped transform it from
a regional lab into an internationally respected center for nuclear physics. He was deputy director of TUNL from 1966 to 1978, and director
from 1978 to 1992.
Throughout his career, Bilpuch fostered international collaborations. He maintained a friendship and working relationship with Walter
Greiner, professor of physics at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University and founding director of the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies,
who said that the multi-institutional model of TUNL was one of the inspirations for reaching out to institutions in Germany in establishing the
GSI Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion Research in 1969. Bilpuch was also one of the first scientists at Duke to collaborate with physicists in
China. Haiyan Gao, the current Henry W. Newson Professor of physics and department chair at Duke, said that as an undergraduate in China,
she was familiar with TUNL.
According to Bilpuch’s former students, he created an atmosphere of teamwork and possibility in the lab. John Browne, who earned his PhD
at Duke in 1969 said, “Ed would encourage you to take chances. It was a can-do time. I think all of us took that attitude with us when we left.”
Browne was the director at LANL before retiring. “I’ve had a great career,” he said. “And that would not have been possible without Ed’s support.”
Keyworth, who earned his PhD at Duke in 1968 and worked with Bilpuch on the high-resolution spectroscopy experiment, said, “Ed and
[his wife] Marilyn had no children, but an extended family of graduate students. I was Ed’s first graduate student. When I left Duke, I felt ready
to take on the world.” Keyworth was the director of the Physics Division at LANL, and also served as President Ronald Reagan’s science advisor. “Ed made you feel that he believed in you,” he recalled. “What I learned from Ed was the sheer joy of discovery and exploratory research
as well as the patience needed to get there.”
Bilpuch understood deeply the connection between technology and scientific exploration, and he helped create an environment at TUNL
that encouraged scientific creativity and technical innovation. His legacy will be his belief that if you can improve the technology, you can
almost always make new contributions to physics.
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Robert C. Richardson (June 26, 1937 - February 19, 2013)
— by Horst Meyer
Robert Richardson, 1996 Nobel Laureate in Physics, obtained his
PhD degree in our Physics Department in 1965, and in 1997 was
elected member of the Duke University Board of Trustees, where he
served for ten years.
When I arrived at Duke in the fall of 1959, I saw his application for
admission to graduate studies in our Department. I was impressed,
and corresponded with him, and still have the copy of the letter from
the Physics Acting Chair, Harold Lewis, offering him a “Research
Assistantship in Low Temperature Physics under the direction of Dr.
Horst Meyer”. He accepted our invitation, and I was very fortunate
to have him as a graduate student. After initial calorimetric research
on a superconductor, he got involved with the measurement of NMR
relaxation times in solid 3He. Here the purpose was to study the
nuclear spin-spin interaction, which would give information on the
nuclear ordering temperature to take place at temperatures well
below 1 K. The arrival of Earle Hunt, a postdoctoral fellow with experience in pulsed NMR, was crucial in the success of this program. In
this research we competed with a group at Oxford University, and we
were able to obtain significant results leading to several publications.
Bob received his PhD degree in 1965.
Also, in 1963, he was married to Betty McCarthy, the last graduate student of Prof. Hertha Sponer in our Department. In fact, Bob
designed the cryostat where Betty made her optical measurements
at liquid nitrogen temperatures. Their two daughters, Jennifer and
Pamela, were born in Durham. The first picture shows Bob, Betty and
Jennifer at the swimming pool of their residence in Durham in 1965.
In spring 1966, I wrote a letter to my colleague Donald Holcomb
at Cornell University, suggesting Bob for the available position of
26
postdoctoral associate, giving him high praises. Bob left Duke in early
fall of 1966 for Cornell, and, in collaboration with a graduate student,
Douglas D. Osheroff, and a faculty member, David M. Lee, he continued the research on 3He. Using a recently proposed technique, the
“Pomeranchuk effect”, they cooled a mixture of solid and liquid 3He
into the millidegree range. The rest is history: the trio of researchers
discovered by chance the superfluidity in liquid 3He, which had been
the object of many theoretical predictions and speculations. Over the
next twenty years, this momentous discovery gave a tremendous
boost to research, both theoretical and experimental, in superfluid
3He and well beyond, and led to the discovery of several superfluid
phases of 3He. In 1973, with a further improved low temperature
technology, Bob and his graduate student, William Halperin, discovered the long hoped-for nuclear ordering transition in solid 3He. There
followed about twenty years of very productive research by Bob at
Cornell with his graduate students and also while on sabbatical in
Helsinki, Finland. Furthermore he pioneered the design and construction of the Cornell University “millidegree laboratory” where ultra-low
temperature experiments were to be performed.
His honors and in the scientific community were numerous:
in 1976 he, Lee and Osheroff were awarded the Simon Prize of the
British Physical Society, and in 1981 the Oliver Buckley Prize; in1986
he was elected Member of the National Academy of Sciences, in
1993 Foreign Member of the Finnish Academy of Science and letters,
in 1996 he received the Nobel Prize, shared with Lee and Osheroff.
He was a leading member of a large number of domestic and
international scientific organizations, for instance within the American
Physical Society. He served as Vice Provost for Research at Cornell
University from 1998 until 2007, and in 2007 he began a two-year
term as senior advisor to the president and provost at Cornell.
Furthermore he was a co-author of a very popular book “Experimental
Techniques in Condensed Matter Physics” and of “College Physics”,
co-authored with his wife Betty Richardson and Alan Giambattista,
and he helped in the production of instructional videos.
Richardson was also very concerned about issues of national and
international importance: in 2005 he was co-author of a National
Academy of Sciences report: “Rising above the Gathering Storm:
Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future”.
He also wrote articles about the conservation of helium gas, a precious natural resource, an issue he felt strongly about.
In 2012, Richardson received an honorary degree from Duke
University, and the official picture taken before the ceremony shows
him (second from left) together with Duke President Broadhead,
Trustee member David Rubenstein (on the right) , who had nominated
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Robert C. Richardson
continued from page 26
him for the honor, and myself as the faculty member to escort him.
As a person, Richardson was a very congenial one, lighthearted,
and with a great sense of humor. At Duke he made long-lasting friendships with several graduate students of my Low Temperature Physics
group and beyond. I am grateful for the friendship with him ever since
his arrival at Duke, which we maintained through correspondence
after he left for Cornell, and by mutual visits and encounters at scientific meetings. In this way I was kept informed of the exciting events
leading to the discovery of 3He superfluidity, and I treasure these
letters which I have carefully kept. My wife Ruth Mary and I remember
with pleasure the visits of the Richardsons to our home, before and
after Bob was appointed to the Duke Board of Trustees.
The Richardsons were avid travelers, with frequent trips to
interesting and exotic destinations, particularly after the award of the
Nobel Prize. Travels continued even after Bob’s stroke a few years
ago, which limited his speaking ability and where he was immensely
helped and supported by his wife Betty. After 2007, together with
Betty, he still came to Duke University Board meetings as an Emeritus
Board member. He continued to make travel plans under increasing
health issues, and was able to travel thanks to Betty.
Bob’s strong loyalty to Duke extended to enthusiastic support of the
Duke basketball team, and he hardly ever missed watching games
where Duke was playing.
This summer there will be at Duke a reunion of old graduate student friends from the sixties, who remained in touch all these years.
The Richardsons planned to be there. Betty will attend and Bob will be
with them in spirit.
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Department of Physics
Duke University
Box 90305
Durham, NC 27708-0305
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Permit No. 60
David Rosin views a Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) development board. Rosin is a visiting scholar and member of Daniel
Gauthier’s Laboratory in Nonlinear Optics, Quantum Optics, and Nonlinear Dynamics of Physical Systems. Photo by Joel Greenberg.
Cover banner image: “Visualizing
Meteoric Impact” Photo by Abe
Clark and Bob Behringer. This work
was supported by DTRA.