News
Penn Team Making Waves
A team of Penn researchers, including Prof. Randy Kamien, have shown that they can manipulate defects at the top of a stack of layers of liquid crystals using a physical template at the bottom of the crystals. Their template sheet might be used as a template to assemble other molecules or use heat to modify the template sheet and hence the pattern of defects in a subtle way rather than the use of electrical fields to modify the pattern of defects as is typically done.
Charlie Kane nominee for Fundamental Physics Prize
On Tuesday, Dec. 11, the Fundamental Physics Prize Selection Committee announced that a group consisting of Charlie Kane, Laurens Molenkamp of the University of Wuerzburg in Germany, and Shoucheng Zhang of Stanford have won the 2013 Physics Frontier Prize. This makes them automatic nominees for the 2013 Fundamental Physics Prize of $3M to be announced on March 20, 2013 at CERN. The nomination is for work on "topological insulators".
Andrea Liu elected to AAAS
Andrea Liu is one of five Penn faculty members to be named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Andrea was elected for distinguished contributions in theoretical physics, particularly for demonstrating that slow relaxation in many different systems can be viewed within a common framework called “jamming.”
Postdoctoral Fellow for Academic Diversity
Dr. Natalie Arkus has been selected for a Postdoctoral Fellowship for Academic Diversity to work in the department with Prof. Randy Kamien. This selection comes with the strongest support of the review and selection panels that went through the many well-qualified applications to the program.
Science Verification Images from DES
View of the big spiral galaxy NGC 7689 taken during the science verification stage of testing of the Dark Energy Survey telescope and DECam.
Charlie Kane - Class of 1965 Term Professor
Prof. Charlie Kane has been named the Class of 1965 Term Professor of Physics and Astronomy.
DES in Science Verification stage
The Dark Energy Survey and DECam were formally dedicated in Chile on Nov. 9. The DES project is now accumulating data for Science Verification (SV) wherein images from the telescope are being transported to the National Center for Supercomputing Applications in Illinois, processed through the DES Data Management system and evaluated for utility in producing front-line science by the SV team. The SV team is co-lead by Prof. Gary Bernstein.
NBIC Graduate Research Award for Mitchell Lerner
Physics graduate student Mitchell Lerner, a member of the Johnson research group, received the 2012 Graduate Student Award for Excellence in Research from the Nano/Bio Interface Center, Penn's NSF-funded Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center (NSEC). The award was in recognition of Lerner's research on nano-enabled sensors based on hybrid structures of carbon nanotubes or graphene and biomolecules, such as DNA or proteins.
Solving a Cosmic Mystery
Penn physicists and the Center for Particle Cosmology are featured in an article in The Philadelphia Inquirer in Monday's Health and Science section.
Alison Sweeney featured in Penn Current
Asst. Prof. Alison Sweeney's research is featured in the October 18 issue of the Penn Current. The article emphasizes Alison's interests in "The biology questions ...