News
Professor Georgia Karagiorgi has been awarded an NSF collaborative grant for the research titled "WoU-MMA: Development of an Advanced Data Selection System for the DUNE Far Detector".
Through this award, which includes support from the NSF Windows on the Universe Program, the Columbia group will initiate the development of trigger and data acquisition strategies that can provide a guide for DUNE detection of low energy electron neutrino interactions in liquid argon. This includes the use of machine learning techniques for triggering, an approach which has recently been demonstrated to be a disruptive…
Professor Cory Dean has been named a recipient of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE).
President Trump announced the recipients of the PECASE, which is the highest honor bestowed by the United States Government to outstanding scientists and engineers who are beginning their independent research careers and who show exceptional promise for leadership in science and technology.
Established in 1996, the PECASE acknowledges the contributions scientists and engineers have made to the advancement of science, technology, education, and mathematics (STEM) education…
Professor Zelevinsky, jointly with Harvard University, has been awarded a $1,000,000 grant from the W.M. Keck Foundation for the proposal "Creation of ultracold exotic gases via laser cooling and precise dissociation of molecules".
The W.M. Keck Foundation was founded with the goal of generating far-fetching benefits for humanity. Following the ideals of the founder, the Foundation's programs support outstanding science, engineering and medical research.
More details on the foundation can be found here.
Associate Professor Brian Metzger has been named a Finalist in the 2019 Blavatnik National Awards for Young Scientists. The Blavatnik National Awards received an unprecedented 343 nominations from 169 academic and research centers across 44 states – a record in all three categories.
The annual Awards, established by the Blavatnik Family Foundation and administered by the New York Academy of Sciences, recognize and support America’s top young scientific innovators in Life Sciences, Physical Sciences & Engineering, and Chemistry. The three National Laureates, to be announced in June…
The 2019 High Energy and Particle Physics Prize, for an outstanding contribution to High Energy Physics, was awarded to the CDF and D0 Collaborations for the discovery of the top quark and the detailed measurement of its properties.
The full citation is available here.
Columbia University was a founding member of the D0 experiment at Fermilab. Professors Gustaaf Brooijmans, John Parsons, and Mike Tuts were all on the D0 experiment and share the prize.
Dmitri Basov has been selected to receive a Department of Defense (DoD) Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship. The highly competitive fellowship is the DoD's flagship single investigator award for basic research, and is named in honor of Dr. Vannevar Bush, the director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development after World War II. This fellowship program aims to advance transformative, university-based fundamental research.
Dmitri is one of 10 distinguished scientists to receive the award this year. Each fellow will receive up to $3 million over the 5-year fellowship term…
The XENON collaboration has just publicly announced the discovery that xenon-124, an isotope of the element Xenon, is fundamentally unstable. Its half-life is a whopping 1.8 × 10²² years: more than one trillion times the present age of the Universe.
More details on the discovery can be found here, and the Nature paper can be found here.
Elena Aprile will give the Donald R. Hamilton Lecture at Princeton University April 11 at 8:00 PM (McDonnell A01)
Details can be found here.
"The Xenon Project: At the Forefront of Dark Matter Direct Detection"
What is the Dark Matter which makes 85% of the matter in the Universe? We have been asking this question for many decades and used a variety of experimental approaches to address it, with detectors on Earth and in space. Yet, the nature of Dark Matter remains a mystery. An answer to this fundamental question will likely come from ongoing and future searches…
Professor Sebastian Will has received a 2019 NSF CAREER award for the creation of a “Two-dimensional quantum fabric of ultracold dipolar molecules”. The five year grant for $780,000 supports the development of a novel experimental platform based on ultracold molecules at nanokelvin temperatures that will be assembled atom-by-atom from ultracold atoms. The platform will allow quantum simulation of complex many-body quantum systems and the exploration of fundamental organizing principles of matter in parameter regimes that were inaccessible so far.
The NSF Faculty Early Career Development…
Columbia Professor Brian Metzger has been awarded the 2019 Rossi Prize by the High-Energy Astrophysics Division (HEAD) of the American Astronomical Society. He shares the prize with Daniel Kasen of Berkeley for “their theoretical predictions of electromagnetic emission from radioactive nuclei produced in neutron star mergers.”
The High-Energy Astrophysics Division (HEAD) of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) awards the Rossi Prize annually for a significant contribution to high-energy astrophysics, with particular emphasis on recent, original work.
More information canbe found…
Jennifer Barnes, a postdoctoral research fellow working with Brian Metzger at Columbia, was awarded the 2019 High-Energy Astrophysics Division (HEAD) of the American Astronomical Society Dissertation prize for her dissertation. Entitled “Radiation Transport Modeling of Kilonovae and Broad-Lined Ic Supernovae”, this work established the "radiative signatures of mergers between two neutron stars or a neutron star and black hole, as well as the radiative signatures of jet-driven supernovae produced by collapsing massive stars."
More information canbe found on the A&S web page …
The next generation in ground-based gamma-ray astronomical instrumentation took a major step forward with the inauguration on January 17, 2019, of a full-scale prototype 9.7m Schwarzschild-Couder Telescope (SCT) as a pathfinder for the Medium Size Telescopes (MSTs) of the Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA), studying gamma rays in the energy range from 100 GeV to 10 TeV via the imaging atmospheric Cherenkov technique. The SCT employs an aplanatic two-mirror optical system to simultaneously increase the field of view to 8 degrees and significantly improve the imaging resolution via reduction of the…
Professor Tanya Zelevinsky has received The American Physical Society 2019 Francis M. Pipkin Award.
Professor Brian Metzger was awarded the 2018 New Horizons Breakthrough Prize in Physics.
Arthur Ashkin (CC 1947) has won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his groundbreaking research in laser physics.