Columbia-Physics is invited to participate in a Team-Up Project focused on “Building and implementing a framework and action plan that focuses on African American physics and astronomy undergraduate student outcomes”. The Columbia-Physics Team consists of graduate students Emily Caitlin Tiberi and Colin Adams, the President of Spectra Anjali Reena Verma, and faculty Rachel Rosen, Gustaaf Brooijmans, and Dmitri Basov.
Columbia News crunched the numbers to take a look back at the most-read stories on their website for every month of 2020. Their January 2020 story pertains to research in quantum materials in Physics.
Jack Steinberger, who served on the Columbia faculty between 1951 and 1971 and was known for his pioneering research into elementary particles, passed away on December 12 at the age of 99. Professor Steinberger shared the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physics with Leon M. Lederman and Melvin Schwartz "for the neutrino beam method and the demonstration of the doublet structure of the leptons through the discovery of the muon neutrino”. A brief autobiography is posted here and an obituary here.
Brian Greene, a Professor of Physics at Columbia who is renown for his research in superstring theory, has recently been recognized as one of the Top Influential Physicists Today by AcademicInfluence. AcademicInfluence is a new site that uses artificial intelligence to scan the internet's largest databases to map lines of influence. AcademicInfluence has created a profile for Brian Greene which can be inspected for more information.
New findings suggest enigmatic object in our Galaxy was formed during an ancient two-star collision that eventually led to one merged star.
See Full Article here
The US Postal Service announced that they will issue a postage stamp in honor of Chien-Shiung Wu this year. Chien-Shiung spent most of her career in the Columbia Physics Department.
For more details, please check out the USPS website.
Professor Sebastian Will has been awarded a $1M National Science Foundation (NSF) Convergence Accelerator award, leading a collaboration to develop a next-generation quantum simulator. The project team includes collaborators from Columbia University, principal investigator Sebastian Will, co-principal investigators Alex Gaeta and Nanfang Yu, and others; Brookhaven National Lab, co-principal investigators Layla Hormozi and Gabriella Carini, and others; City University of New York; Flatiron Institute; and industry partners from Atom Computing, QuEra, IBM, and Bloomberg.
For more details see press…
Professor Brian Metzger is the first Blavatnik National Awards Laureate from Columbia. The awards specifically recognizes Brian’s work on the origin of gold among his many other theoretical discoveries. For more details please click here.
Cory Dean, PhD (Columbia University) – Cory Dean kicked off a revolution in experimental physics. Working with a unique class of two-dimensional materials called van der Waals (vdW) heterostructure materials—very thin materials made of single atomic layers stacked and held together by weak forces—Dean’s breakthrough experimental techniques sparked a completely new field of study known as “twistronics”. His work has enabled the exploration of new areas in quantum physics, including superconductivity, topology, and magnetism.
Brian Metzger, PhD (Columbia University) – Where does…
Scientists from the international XENON collaboration announced today that data from their XENON1T, the world's most sensitive dark matter experiment, show a surprising excess of events. The scientists do not claim to have found dark matter. Instead, they say to have observed an unexpected rate of events, the source of which is not yet fully understood. The signature of the excess is similar to what might result from a tiny residual amount of tritium (a hydrogen atom with one proton and two neutrons), but could also be a sign of something more exciting -such as the existence of a new particle known…