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INSIDE

Calcium Qubits–Trapping Ions for Quantum Computing

Duality and the Promise of String Theory

Matter of Wonder

Physics 111 Advanced Lab–Real-World Hands-On Physics for Undergraduates

Undergraduate and Graduate News

Alumni News and more!

Fa

ll 2011

@ BERKELEY

Physics at Berkeley 2011

Published annually by the Department of Physics

Frances Hellman: ChairClaudia Lopez: DirectorCarol Dudley: Assistant DirectorMaria Hjelm, Development Officer

Devi Mathieu: Editor, Senior WriterTom Colton: Photography

Meg Coughlin: Design

Department of Physics 366 Le Conte Hall #7300 University of California, Berkeley Berkeley, CA 94720-7300

Copyright 2011 by The Regents of the University of California

Cover:Top left, Professor Bob Jacobsen with student Guillermo Fong (p.11) and Alan Kubey’s sleep-directed alarm system eyeglass frames (p.13); top right, Nobel Prize winner Saul Perlmutter (p.14); center, M.C. Escher Verbum 1942 (p.7) and Mina Aganagic with graduate student Kevin Schaeffer (p.6); bottom center, Sketch of two ions trapped below a wire which studies how quantum information can be transmitted (p.5); bottom left, Sketch of a graphene-based optical modulator (p.9)

Table of Contents

F E A T U R E S

4 Calcium Qubits–Trapping Ions for Quantum Computing A Berkeley physicist leads the way in quantum information science

Assistant professor Hartmut Häffner’s inventive approaches to understanding and controlling quantum phenomena are bringing quantum computing closer to reality.

6 Duality and the Promise of String Theory Berkeley physicist Mina Aganagic probes synergies between string theory and mathematics

Associate professor in math as well as physics, Aganagic’s expertise as a theorist opens up new avenues of inquiry in both fields.

8 Matter of Wonder Optical spectroscopy reveals graphene’s extraordinary properties

Through novel experimental methods, assistant professor Feng Wang is making huge strides in understanding a material with unsurpassed potential for super-fast, super-small electronics.

11 Physics 111 Advanced Lab–Real-World Hands-On Physics for Undergraduates The Physics 111 course, required of every physics major, has become a lynchpin in the well-rounded physics education Berkeley offers its undergraduates.

D E P A R T M E N T S

2 Notes from the Chair

14 Department News

25 Physics in the Media

31 Undergraduate Affairs

34 Graduate Affairs

39 Alumni Affairs

2P H Y S I C S A T B E R K E L E Y / F A L L 2 0 11

What a perfect day to write this

letter! Just yesterday,

our department celebrated–with

champagne, standing ovations, and

loud cheers–the news that professor

Saul Perlmutter has received the

2011 Nobel Prize in Physics. The award is for the discovery

“of the accelerating expansion of the Universe through

observations of distant supernovae”. For more details on

the award, turn to page 14.

Perlmutter, along with the other researchers who

share the prize, has caused all of us to view the universe,

its expansion, and its fate in radically new ways. The source

of the mysterious “dark energy”, a term coined to explain

this accelerating expansion, is currently generating

approximately one theory paper every three days, and

has had tens of millions of hits on Google.

Perlmutter’s research and Nobel Prize are testaments

to the fact that the University of California, Berkeley and

the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory are great

partners. Together they provide an incredible place to do

paradigm-shifting research.

As Chancellor Birgeneau said, “One of the great

aspects of Saul, of course, is that he’s a great researcher,

but he’s also a great teacher. And I, like all of you, feel

blessed to have colleagues like Saul who cannot be bought

by rich, private universities.” To this I add “and a great

colleague whom I feel privileged to know.”

MORE GOOD NEWS

Exciting and happy news is most welcome, especially

when the hum of media coverage about UC’s precarious

funding situation is the norm. While the realities of

state budget shortfalls, tuition increases, and operating

efficiencies affect us deeply, they should not eclipse all

of the positive news that comes out of Cal and the

Department of Physics on a daily basis.

Physics has had yet another great year, filled with

remarkable discoveries and a new faculty hire–Gabriel

Orebi Gann, a particle/nuclear experimentalist special-

izing in neutrino physics–as well as searches for new

faculty in condensed matter theory, astrophysics experi-

ment, biophysics theory, and quantum materials.

We’ve also had some successful fundraising

campaigns, including the Charles H. Townes Graduate

Fellowship, which is ahead of schedule and nearly com-

pletely funded. And our $1.5 million campaign for the

Physics 111 Advanced Lab includes a $500,000 match

from the Chancellor.

Perlmutter, along with the other researchers who

share the prize, has caused all of us to view the

universe, its expansion, and its fate in radically

new ways.

THE NEXT TEN YEARS

Acknowledging the accomplishments of the past year

leads me into planning the next 10 years for this depart-

ment. We have just started our decadal review, an academic

tradition in which all aspects of the department are

assessed by both internal and external reviewers. “What

opportunities exist and what challenges face us in making

this department the best in the world?” is the question

that frames this assessment. While the recent ranking

from the National Research Council suggests that we

already are one of the top programs in the world, we

know better than to rest on those laurels.

October 5, 2011

DEAR ALUMNI AND FRIENDS,

N O T E S F R O M T H E C H A I R

FRANCES HELLMAN


So, we will be looking at all sectors of the Department

of Physics: research, teaching, students, staff, alumni,

facilities, and space. Over the past two years, the faculty

has made a big effort to consider the most exciting and

significant research directions for the department–in

other words, defining the intellectual agenda. The prior-

ities of the department, in a very general sense, are

determined by this agenda.

At the heart of our strategic plan is attracting the

best young faculty in the burgeoning fields of physics,

ranging from experimental astrophysics, particle physics,

and biophysics, to condensed matter physics and atomic,

molecular and optical (AMO) physics. And while strate-

gically-determined research areas are important, we will

always keep our eyes open for excellent candidates who

may take us in unanticipated directions.

Other focus areas for the decadal review are, of

course, teaching and students. Along with attracting the

best faculty, we must continue to attract the best graduate

and undergraduate students to the department. Endowed

graduate student fellowships are key to the former, a

strong major program to the latter, and great research

opportunities apply to both.

NEW APPROACHES TO THE PHYSICS MAJOR

We have surveyed our graduate and undergraduate

students and learned that there is a need and desire for

more electives and a more diverse approach to the phys-

ics major. How do we address these wishes while main-

taining our tried and true classes and teaching methods?

The Physics 111 Advanced Lab, both the Experimentation

and Instrumentation sections, is a perfect example. A

great Berkeley tradition, and the “capstone” class for the

major, this course requires constant reassessment in order

to stay current with modern times and keep up with state-

of-the-art experiments. This is where students apply

their primarily classroom-based knowledge of physics to

real-life experiments, get their hands dirty by making

experiments work, design and create their own projects,

and figure out that equations are not just mathematical

abstractions but represent physical, measurable properties.

For many students, the Advanced Lab sequence

offers their first exposure to a wide variety of experiments,

and it is in the Advanced Lab where many discover their

passion for physics. For more details, read the article

that begins on page 11.

State funding for this class has gradually evaporated,

and we are now embarking on a campaign to add new

experiments and make enhancements to the rooms,

desks, and learning areas. Chancellor Birgeneau has put

up a $500,000 match for this campaign, and we are

hoping to raise $1.5 million to make these significant

changes, all in line with the forward-looking decadal

review taking place right now.

As a part of the decadal review, faculty , staff, and

students are also considering other areas of priority. I

am excited to see where this review takes us and how we

can make this department, YOUR department, even better.

Nobel Prizes are one way to tell us that UC Berkeley’s

Department of Physics is thriving, and I consider it a

great privilege as Chair to ensure that we continue to do

so, always aiming to be the best. ■

Frances Hellman has been a member of the physics faculty

since 2004, and was named Chair in 2007. Her research is

in experimental condensed matter and materials physics.


One of the new laboratories in renovated Old LeConte Hall features a high-precision apparatus that uses laser light and electromagnetic forces to trap and manipulate chains of highly charged calcium ions.

These trapped ions make particularly good candidates for qubits–quantum analogs of the data bits used in classical computers. The ion trap apparatus was designed and built by Hartmut Häffner, UC Berkeley assistant professor of physics, and his colleagues.

Häffner is an award-winning, internationally recog-nized experimental physicist. He came to Berkeley in 2009 from a post as senior scientist at the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information in Innsbruck, Austria. His inventive approach spans the disciplines of quantum information processing, atomic and molecular physics, and condensed matter physics. His research group aims to bring about a better understanding of quantum mechanics and, along the way, develop new computing technologies that take advantage of quantum phenomena.

QUANTUM COMPUTING

Understanding quantum systems holds potential for many advances in computing technology. For example, it will be key to the continued downsizing of computer components. “Classical computing is coming to its natural limits,” Häffner points out. “Right now, we’re storing information in billions of atoms. At the current rate of miniaturization, it’s pretty clear that around 2020, only ten years away, we

would reach the point of storing information in single atoms.” At that scale, quantum effects take over and classical algo-rithms no longer work. New technologies will be required.

A vast increase in the speed and volume of computa-tion and data storage could be achieved using quantum mechanical systems for information processing. Classical computer bits exist in either of two states, 1 or 0. Qubits, on the other hand, can exist in more than one state at a time. This condition, known as superposition, enables qubits to hold far more information and process it far more quickly, even compared to huge parallel arrays of classical computers. As Häffner explains it, certain computations that could be performed in a matter of seconds by a 300-qubit quantum computer, “would require every atom in the universe if you wanted to do that same computation with a classical computer.”

A LEADER IN THE FIELD

Häffner has already been involved in important quantum computing breakthroughs, including development of a quantum information processor made of eight ions. While at Innsbruck, he successfully demonstrated fundamental quantum gates (qubits operating together to perform logic functions) and implemented quantum algorithms–two very challenging aspects of development in this arena.

He also succeeded in creating large-scale entangled states, in which the quantum properties of each particle are inextricably interwoven with all other particles in the system. “Learning something about one particle,” he explains, “not only destroys its entanglement with other particles but also, in most cases, destroys entanglement among the other particles. This makes the entangled state very susceptible to decoherence–if one bit of infor-mation leaks out of the system, the wave function of the whole quantum register collapses. Entangled states have no classical counter-part. They are the reason why quan-tum computers can be so powerful and why it is so hard to calculate the evolution of quantum systems.”

Häffner not only managed to entangle ions, but also has begun finding ways around the challenge of decoher-ence. He demonstrated a quantum error correction protocol that permitted information storage and manip-ulation even in the presence of decoherence.

Calcium QubitsA Berkeley

physicist

leads

the way in

quantum

information

scienceT R A P P I N G I O N S F O R Q U A N T U M C O M P U T I N G

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR HARTMUT HÄFFNER


EXPERIMENTS AT BERKELEY

Since arriving at Berkeley, Häffner and his colleagues have begun assembling chains of trapped ions intended to serve as building blocks for quantum information systems. These collections of trapped ions are also being used in experiments designed to reveal how–and whether–the quantum characteristics of a system change as it scales up to include dozens or hundreds of subatomic particles. “We want to know at what complexity and size scale the quantum effects disappear,” he says.

Another of the group’s investigations involves using quantum information processing to simulate the behavior of complex quantum mechanical systems–a feat that ranges from challenging to impossible with classical computing. “Every quantum system is explained by the same formalism,” Häffner notes, which means that algorithms describing the behavior of a well-understood quantum system can be used to get insight into another, less-understood one.

The laboratory setup Häffner’s group has designed includes several high-precision components, from lasers and electrodes to a state-of-the-art vacuum chamber. “We need a vacuum apparatus because we want to isolate the ions from the environment,” he explains. “Then we apply laser cooling to slow their motion. The ions are cooled to temperatures on the order of microKelvins.”

The mirrors used to stabilize the laser light have to be extremely stable. “It’s as though we have to stabilize to one micron in the distance between the Earth and the Moon,” he notes. “They have to move less than the diameter of a proton.”

The cooled ions are trapped with electrical potentials applied through an electrode structure made of gold. “The ions are very well isolated from the rest of the world because they sit in vacuum inside a trap,” Häffner continues. “And we manipulate their electronic states by giving them very well-defined kicks with laser pulses to implement the quantum gates.”

WIRING THE SYSTEM

Another quest “is to prove that you can send quantum information through a wire,” Häffner says. “It’s foreseeable that ion-trap quantum processors will have a size limit of maybe 50 qubits or so. It’s hard to say where the develop-ment will stop. So the question becomes how to connect them.” For this, he has borrowed the notion of using wires from classical computing.

“This is very exciting,” he continues, “because it’s a very unusual electronic system. We have great control over each ion. We can cool each one to the ground state, so that

it is at rest as much as quantum mechanics allows. We can put it in quantum superpositions, and we can deter-mine its quantum state. Next, we want to make it part of the electrical circuit so we can control the quantum currents in that circuit in a novel and very precise way.”

A wire is positioned about 50 microns above the ions–essentially incorporating it into the electrode trap that controls the particles. The primary challenge at the moment has to do with electric field noise. “The metals do not behave the way we expect them to behave,” he explains. “There is unexplained noise in the electrodes and nobody knows where it comes from or how to prevent it. We know the noise is greatly reduced if the vacuum chamber is at very low temperature, but we don’t know why. That’s an interesting physics question and also a technological question.”

In the search for answers, he is collaborating with surface scientists at Berkeley, including physics professor Michael Crommie, and colleagues in the Department of Electrical Engineering. “Our conjecture is that we do not clean the surfaces properly,” Häffner says. “It’s hard to get a surface very clean. That’s something the surface scien-tists have known but the atomic physics community has not appreciated. I think that we can get good ideas what is going on within the next year, at least some first insights.”

PROSPECTS FOR THE FUTURE

“When do I think there will be a quantum computer?” Häffner muses. “You might see a reasonable prototype of a thousand qubits maybe 15 to 20 years from now. I don’t expect a quantum computer sitting on my desk for at least 30 years. But who knows what we will discover.”

“There’s currently a huge effort going on, trying to understand what you can do with such a machine,” he continues. “Part of the problem is that humans lack the intuition for quantum mechanics, so it’s harder to come up with algorithms. By building quantum proces-sors we hope to get more insight as well as solve known problems.” ■

SKETCH OF TWO IONS (DOTS) TRAPPED BELOW A WIRE (TOP) TO STUDY HOW

QUANTUM INFORMATION CAN BE TRANSMITTED


String theory continues to be hailed as the most promising

candidate for combining gravity with quantum mechanics.

One of its enthusiastic practitioners is Mina Aganagic,

UC Berkeley associate professor in the Department of

Physics and the Department of Mathematics. Aganagic,

a member of the Berkeley Center for Theoretical Physics,

describes herself as a string theorist whose research is very

close to math. In a recent conversation with Physics@

Berkeley, she characterizes the relationship between these

two disciplines and describes some of her own work.

WHAT DO YOU FIND MOST EXCITING ABOUT STRING

THEORY?

String theory provides a unified framework for describing all forces, thus realizing Einstein’s dream of a unified the-ory with gravity and quantum mechanics included. While string theorists still struggle to make predictions testable in accelerators, string theory has had a huge impact on more theoretical branches of physics, such as condensed matter theory and, especially, mathematics. String theory has led, on many occasions, to the unifica-tion of different branches of mathematics.

Perhaps the most exciting aspect of string theory is the notion of duality. This is the idea that there can be different mathematical descriptions of the same theory. Dualities tend to make something that’s complicated in one language very simple in another language. A com-

plicated mathematical problem gets related to a simpler one that looks completely different but describes a differ-ent facet of the same physics. I search for dualities in string theory and explore their consequences in both string theory and mathematics.

In general, dualities in string theory show equiva-lencies between phenomena with weak interactions and those with strong interactions, and between phenomena at large distance scales with phenomena at small distance scales–a primary basis for the hope that string theory will lead to understanding quantum gravity.

CAN YOU SAY MORE ABOUT DUALITIES AND THEIR

IMPORTANCE IN STRING THEORY?

Dualities are familiar in the context of condensed matter systems. For example, there is a duality in a two-dimen-sional model of ferromagnetism called the Ising model. The duality relates a system at high temperatures with a system at low temperatures. Similarly, in the equations of electromagnetism, one can trade electric fields for magnetic fields, while inverting the coupling constant. These are examples of dualities that relate a weakly interacting to a strongly interacting system.

String theory has not one, but many dualities that relate different corners of string theory to each other. A duality that made a splash in the early 1990s is a type of mirror symmetry that relates strings propagating on entirely different manifolds. Mathematically, mirror sym-metry led to a striking prediction. It rephrased very intri-cate computations involving quantum and stringy geome-try of one manifold to very simple, classical geometric properties of another manifold. Since then, many other string dualities have led to sharp and striking mathemati-cal predictions.

Another example involves a duality relating gravity to gauge theory. A version of this duality has been fueling recent interactions between the condensed matter and string theory communities. Another version of it has played a role in mathematics. String theorists have come to make very precise predictions for previously intractable problems in algebraic geometry–which answer questions in gravity–in terms of quantities familiar in knot theory–which correspond to gauge theory.

MINA AGANAGIC AND GRADUATE STUDENT KEVIN SCHAEFFER.

B E R K E L E Y P H Y S I C I S T M I N A A G A N A G I C P R O B E S S Y N E R G I E S B E T W E E N S T R I N G T H E O R Y A N D M A T H E M A T I C S

D U A L I T Y A N D T H E P R O M I S E O F

S T R I N G T H E O R Y


WHAT IS THE NATURE OF THE RELATIONSHIP

BETWEEN MATH AND STRING THEORY, AND HOW

DOES THIS RELATE TO YOUR WORK?

Traditionally, mathematics is the language we use to describe physical phenomena. Physics that involves quantum theory can provide deep insights for pure mathematics. A famous example has to do with knot theory–mathematical descriptions of ordinary knots, like those that mess up shoelaces and water hoses.

In attempts to understand how to distinguish knots in three-dimensional space, mathematicians were using a construction invented in 1984 by Vaughan Jones, a Fields medalist who is presently a Berkeley math professor. To distinguish different knots, Jones associated a poly-nomial to a knot, with the property that different poly-nomials correspond to different knots.

In 1989, mathematical physicist Edward Witten, of Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Theory, explained how the Jones polynomial arises. He did so by looking at a gauge theory very much like electromagnetism, but with one less dimension. The knots represent paths of charged particles, and the Jones polynomial represents the quan-tum amplitude needed for the paths to arise. Quantum mechanics really plays the central role in Witten’s work. Structures that had seemed to mathematicians to arise out of thin air could now be more easily understood, provided you understood quantum physics.

There are some very deep, highly hidden, nontrivial equivalencies of entirely different mathematics, which become manifest if you understand string theory and not at all if you don’t.

YOUR MOST RECENT PAPER, PUBLISHED IN MAY, IN

A WAY PARALLELS WITTEN’S WORK WITH THE JONES

POLYNOMIAL. COULD YOU BRIEFLY DESCRIBE IT?

This paper was co-authored with Shamil Shakirov, a graduate student in mathematics in my group. Since Jones’ work, mathematicians have devised better ways of distin-guishing knots, refining the Jones polynomial, and explain-ing a mysterious feature, namely that the coefficients of the Jones polynomial are integers–it’s as if the polynomial is counting something. We were hoping for a physical way to shed light on these mathematical constructions.

We were originally interested in questions having to do with knot theory. What we found is that string duality relates knot theory to an entirely different piece of math-ematics, more closely related to the theory of groups and their representations. While both pieces of mathematics were discovered at about the same time, in the 1990s, we were surprised to find that no one had connected them.

Our work trans-lated something that was quite mysterious and very difficult in mathematics into something that is easy to calcu-late in string the-ory. What is most striking is that this could not be formulated with-

out string theory. With string theory, in a very easy way, we make very strong predictions for mathematics.

Something else that’s really fascinating in string theory is the number of connections between different physical systems, even if they are in a different number of dimensions. Whenever you understand one corner of string theory, as we did in the context of this work, it implies a host of connections with other corners, which we then want to understand. We’ve barely scratched the surface of the possible predictions you can get from this one corner of string theory.

IN ADDITION TO YOUR RESEARCH, YOU MENTOR GRAD-

UATE STUDENTS AND POSTDOCS AS WELL AS TEACH

UNDERGRADUATE PHYSICS AND MATH COURSES.

HOW DO YOU KEEP EVERYTHING IN BALANCE?

I enjoy it. It’s satisfying and it’s incredibly important. My calculus class in the math department has close to 400 students. Calculus is a language these students need to be able to speak. If they don’t learn it, they can’t have a career in the physical sciences.

I also teach a large lecture course in the physics department, Physics 7C. It’s a hard class to teach, because it combines so many topics, including optics, special rela-tivity, general relativity, and quantum mechanics. But you get a lot of enthusiastic students, and I enjoy being in touch with so many young people. With big classes, you have to be in it 100 percent. With hundreds of students, you will not capture their attention unless you are completely there.

What’s striking is how motivated Berkeley students are, how academics are in the forefront of their minds, what a great atmosphere one has in the classroom. It is a joy to teach at Berkeley.

Also, I have a family. My son is three. Life can be physically intense, but pressure can actually be a good thing. It’s sometimes better to have less time to think about something, because it makes your thinking crisper. ■

M.C

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STRING THEORISTS OFTEN USE THE WORK OF MC

ESCHER TO ILLUSTRATE THE CONCEPT OF A DUALITY.

Matter of


Graphene has so much potential for revolutionizing technology that it’s being called a wonder material. Graphene could make it possible to extend the

miniaturization of computer chips beyond the limits of silicon, achieve a tenfold increase in the speed of data communications, and bring electronics into new frequency ranges. Not to mention it’s inexpensive and easily available. Applications already being imagined range from nanoscale transistors and LEDs to super-fast optical switches, tiny chemical sensors, and improved touch-screen technologies.

Graphene’s structure couldn’t be simpler. A carbon lattice the thickness of a single atom, it’s as thin as any material can get. Even so, it’s one of the strongest mate-rials ever measured. It has extremely high thermal con-ductivity and, at room temperature, conducts electricity faster than any other known material. Because it’s virtu-ally two-dimensional, graphene’s electrons behave as though they have no mass. They act more like photons than electrons.

Graphene could make it possible to extend the

miniaturization of computer chips beyond the limits

of silicon, achieve a tenfold increase in the speed of

data communications, and bring electronics into

new frequency ranges.

“Graphene’s novel physics and exotic materials properties have made it one of the most active areas in condensed matter physics these days,” says Feng Wang, UC Berkeley assistant professor of physics. “And Berkeley is a world leader in this research.”

Wang heads one of seven research groups in Berkeley’s Department of Physics that are exploring fea-tures of graphene. His Ultrafast Nano-Optics Group uses nanoscale optical spectroscopy to probe not only graphene, but also carbon nanotubes and nanoscale metallic structures. Wang initially came to Berkeley as a Miller Fellow in 2005. He joined the physics faculty in 2007 and holds a joint appointment in Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory’s (Berkeley Lab) Materials Science Division.

“We are condensed matter experimentalists who are interested in new phenomena that emerge from novel materials, and their potential use in technologies,” Wang explains. “Our group works mostly with optical spectroscopy, which means we use photons to study materials. In particular, we use very broadly tunable light that covers all the different colors, as well as so-called ultra-fast lasers, which pack high energy intensity into very short, femtosecond pulses.” The group has already made some momentous discoveries, from giving graphene a bandgap to controlling its light-scattering properties.

A TUNABLE BANDGAP

Although single-layer graphene shows enormous promise for innovations in electronics, it lacks a crucial asset–it has no bandgap, the gap in electron energy levels that makes it possible to switch the f low of electrons on and off.

In 2009, Wang’s group not only succeeded in opening a bandgap in a two-layer stack of graphene, but also discovered they could continuously tune that band-gap across a range of frequencies, something that has never been achieved with any other material. They used bilayer graphene to construct a nanoscale field-effect transistor (FET) with two voltage gates. In FETs, an elec-tric field shaped by a gate electrode controls the f low of

SKETCH OF A DEVICE THAT USES GATE VOLTAGE TO CONTROL RAMAN LIGHT

SCATTERING IN MONOLAYER GRAPHENE. DEVELOPED BY BERKELEY’S

ULTRAFAST NANO-OPTICS GROUP, LED BY ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF

PHYSICS FENG WANG, IN COLLABORATION WITH RACHEL SEGALMAN,

BERKELEY ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF CHEMICAL ENGINEERING.

OPTICAL SPECTROSCOPY

REVEALS GRAPHENE’S

EXTRAORDINARY

PROPERTIESWonder


electrons through a material. The experimenters found that by varying the gate voltages they could achieve a continuously variable bandgap.

“We demonstrated that we can arbitrarily change the bandgap in bilayer graphene from zero to 250 milli-electron volts at room temperature,” Wang said in a Berkeley Lab press release, “which is remarkable, and shows the potential of bilayer graphene for nanoelectronics.”

Further improvement could lead to optical modula-

tors that could transmit data at speeds ten times

faster than today’s technologies.

Graphene could also enable new kinds of optoelec-tronic devices for generating, amplifying, and detecting infrared light. The bandgap in bilayer graphene is smaller than that of silicon or gallium arsenide. “Mostly it’s in the infrared frequency range,” Wang explains. “That’s important, because right now there are very few good infrared light sources.”

Important applications for infrared frequencies include compact chemical sensors. “Infrared is in the molecular fingerprint range,” Wang says, “where different molecules have a different characteristic vibration. If you see a particular vibration frequency, you know what kind of molecule you have.”

CONTROLLABLE OPTICS

Electrons in monolayer graphene interact more strongly with photons than almost any other material. A simple manifestation of this high coupling strength is the fact that a graphene monolayer, even though only a single angstrom thick, can easily be observed with a light microscope. Moreover, a graphene layer with a large enough area can be seen with the unaided eye–samples as wide as 30cm have been fabricated.

In 2008, Wang demonstrated that the strong opti-cal absorption in graphene can be controlled through electrical gating. Earlier this year, Wang and colleague Xiang Zhang, UC Berkeley professor of engineering, announced an achievement that takes advantage of gra-phene’s tunable optical absorption. The researchers con-

structed a graphene-based optical modulator that turns light on and off. The device demonstrates the basic function of an optical network modulator. Further improvement could lead to optical modulators that could transmit data at speeds ten times faster than today’s technologies.

For this device, the researchers positioned a single layer of graphene on top of a silicon waveguide that served as an optical fiber through which light was transmitted. By controlling the electric current applied through voltage gates at the sides of the assembly, they could control the number of photons absorbed by the graphene.

With voltage gates closed, the graphene absorbs photons, making it opaque and switching the light OFF. With voltage gates open, photons f low freely and the graphene becomes transparent. The light switches ON.

Such devices have the potential for graphene optical modulators with switching speeds of up to 500 gigahertz. And it’s small enough–about 25 square microns–to be incorporated into silicon-based integrated circuits. Optical modulators in use today are measured in square millimeters. Also, because it absorbs a wide range of light frequencies, from ultraviolet to infrared, graphene represents an enormous expansion in bandwidth.

SKETCH OF A GRAPHENE-BASED OPTICAL MODULATOR. A LAYER OF

GRAPHENE (FISHNET) IS PLACED ON TOP OF A SILICON WAVEGUIDE, WHICH IS

USED AS AN OPTICAL FIBER TO GUIDE LIGHT. ELECTRIC SIGNALS SENT IN

FROM THE SIDE OF THE GRAPHENE THROUGH GOLD (AU) AND PLATINUM (PT)

ELECTRODES ALTER THE AMOUNT OF PHOTONS THE GRAPHENE ABSORBS.

(MING LIU GRAPHIC)


QUANTUM INTERFERENCE

In another of this year’s accomplishments, Wang’s group made the first-ever direct observation of controlled quantum interference in Raman scattering–a type of inelastic light scattering.

Inelastic scattering occurs when the light that scatters from a material has a different wavelength than the incident light. Raman scattering occurs when an electron that has been excited by a photon generates a lower-energy photon plus a phonon. Phonons are vibra-tions in a crystal lattice. Like photons, they can be con-sidered as both waves and particles, which means they can create interference pathways.

Wang’s group built a device consisting of mono-layer graphene placed on a silicon dioxide substrate and covered with an ion gel. They used a gate electrode to control the electric charge in the graphene, and a near-infrared laser to supply incident light. By controlling gate voltage, they could remove some of the quantum excitation pathways responsible for Raman scattering.

Surprisingly, removal of scattering pathways didn’t dim the scattered light. Instead, the intensity of the light increased. As Wang explains, this result indicates that different quantum pathways had been canceling each other out. Removing some of those pathways reduced the interference, and more light was scattered off the material.

“What we’ve demonstrated is the quantum-interfer-ence nature of Raman scattering,” Wang said in a Berkeley Lab press release. “It was always there, but it was so hard to see it was often overlooked.” Gaining the ability to manipulate quantum interference offers a new way to study graphene’s properties and opens up new possibilities for nanoscale materials research.

TERAHERTZ ELECTRONICS

Today’s high-frequency electronics, such as cell phones, use microwaves for data transmission; higher frequencies are extremely difficult to attain. Optical systems begin at frequencies much higher than the speediest electronics, in the range of hundreds of terahertz. Wang would like to push electronics into the realm of 10 to 12 terahertz, an intermediate range that lies between conventional electronics and optics.

“Because graphene’s electrons move so fast,” Wang explains, “it’s the material of choice for coupling to the terahertz range of electromagnetic waves. We’d like to show we can modulate, perhaps even generate, wave-lengths in this range.” Potential applications include advanced chemical sensors and improved security screening devices.

COLLABORATIONS AND STUDENT CONTRIBUTIONS

Though Wang is still in the early years of his career–he just received a five-year Early Career Research Grant from the US Department of Energy–he already mentors a sizeable group of up-and-coming scientists. In addition to seven Berkeley graduate students, several visiting students, and two postdoctoral fellows, he guides at least five undergraduate researchers.

How does organizing so many individuals, espe-cially undergrads, affect his research program? “It has been very fruitful,” he says. “One of the undergraduate students even has a first-author paper. It’s a win-win situation for all of us.” ■

Obama Selects Feng Wang for 2011 PECASE

On September 26, 2011,

the White House

announced that Feng

Wang, Berkeley assistant

professor of physics, was

chosen by President Barack

Obama to receive a

Department of Energy

Presidential Early Career

Award for Scientists and

Engineers (PECASE). Wang

is one of 94 young scientists nationwide selected for this

year’s awards. Also selected was Christian Bauer, a phys-

ics graduate student advisor, member of the Berkeley

Center for Theoretical Physics, and physicist at the

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Physics

Division. All the recipients were honored at a White

House ceremony on October 14, 2011.

According to the award citation, Wang received the honor

for “pioneering research on ultrafast optical characteriza-

tion of carbon nanostructures that has advanced the fun-

damental understanding of the electronic structure of

graphene and is expected to enable the development of

advanced-energy-relevant technologies.”

“For a young scientist the first years are the most critical,”

Wang said. “The Presidential Early Career Award provides

not only financial support but encouragement, letting us

know that we’re doing well. I am extremely happy and hon-

ored by this award. It will have a huge impact on my

work.”


The first semester of Physics 111, formerly called Basic Semiconductor Circuits, is now dubbed Instrumentation. This half of the course guides students through the design and construction of analog and digital electronic circuits. Topics range from basic instrumentation to transistors, operational amplifiers, and computer programming. The semester ends with an independent final project that gives students the opportunity to design and build an electronic device of their own imagining.

The second semester, formerly known as Advanced Lab, is now called Experimentation. During this part of the course, students recreate some of the legendary experiments in atomic, nuclear, and solid-state physics, including several that have led to Nobel prizes. Experiments cover topics like spectroscopy, holography, nonlinear dynamics, optical pumping, atom trapping, laser tweezers, and nuclear magnetic resonance.

REAL-WORLD PROBLEM SOLVING

“These two classes are different from everything else we teach at Cal,” says Berkeley physics professor Bob Jacobsen, a particle physicist who teaches the second semester. “They cover a kind of knowledge and experi-ence you just don’t get in a regular classroom. This is the only class where these students have a chance to work with their knowledge in a physical real-world way.”

Berkeley physics professor Joel Fajans adds, “We’re trying to give students a glimmer of what real physics is like.” Fajans is a plasma physicist who teaches the first semester. He notes that much of the challenge for students in either semester of the course involves getting their experimental setups to work properly. “They have to puzzle their way through,” Fajans continues, “and develop the skills that are needed when there doesn’t appear to be an obvious way to get to a solution. They

Physics 111 REAL-WORLD

HANDS-ON

PHYSICS FOR

UNDERGRADUATES

PROFESSOR BOB JACOBSEN HELPS GUILLERMO FONG TROUBLESHOOT THE

OPTICAL PUMPING EXPERIMENT.

A FIRST-SEMESTER PHYSICS 111 STUDENT BUILDING A PLASMA SPEAKER FOR

HIS FINAL PROJECT.

The second floor of LeConte Hall is home to a physics course with a reputation as the most

terrifying, labor-intensive–and profoundly rewarding–experience shared by all who have earned a

degree in physics from Berkeley. Known for many years as the Physics 111 Lab, it was recently

rechristened the Physics Advanced Laboratory. This two-semester series, taken in an undergraduate’s

junior or senior year, pulls students out of book-learning and lecture-listening and plunges them into

the challenges and excitement of real-world physics.


learn how to say, ‘If this part of the circuit isn’t working, what are the likely problems I need to fix?’ They learn how to parse a big problem into chunks, find some part of the problem they can address and get working. Then they can go on and build the next section and, once that’s working, put the sections together and get them to interact.”

Fajans emphasizes that understanding how to divide a large project into subsets small enough to tackle is crucial, not only for physics, but also for almost any career path a physics graduate is likely to pursue. “It’s a skill they’re going to need, but it’s not a skill that can very easily be taught in a typical undergraduate class.”

SPECIAL PROJECTS AND LEGENDARY EXPERIMENTS

Probably the most famous component of the Instrumentation semester is the final project. Students spend the last few weeks designing and building a device of their own choosing. Past projects have ranged from remotely operated model cars, to computer games controlled with brain waves, to a pulse-oxygen meter that calculates the level of oxygen in the blood by shining two different wavelengths of light through a finger and measuring their relative absorption. A REM-sleep activated alarm clock developed in the class a few years ago has since been awarded a US patent and looks to be on its way to commercialization (see page 13).

“When students come into the first semester of Physics 111,” says Fajans, “They expect to learn skills associated with electronics and programming. But they don’t realize they will also gain confidence in taking an idea, starting from scratch, and building something that works. That’s a great experience.”

In the second semester, students take concepts and mathematical abstractions learned in earlier courses and apply them to phenomena they observe and measure in the lab. “Students are forced to confront their book learning with what is happening right in front of them.” Jacobsen explains. “For example, we ask them to do an experiment called optical pumping, a classic experiment in optical physics that makes quantum mechanics come alive. Almost every student knows the equations, but actually conducting the experiment helps them really understand what those equations mean and how they affect the world.”

Physics alumnus Alexander Jacobsen (class of 2011) former head of the Society for Physics Students, calls Physics 111 the most important class he took at Berkeley. “It was exciting to implement things that I had only seen on paper before, and actually have them work,” he says. “Beyond that, I’ve never had so much fun in a class. I got to turn the building’s electrical wiring into a radio transmitter, and some friends of mine made an electric hoverer.”

In these labs, students are working with the lab

apparatus, and you’re there to help them over the

hard parts. You’re more of an advisor, and that

can make it a lot more fun.

MEASURING SUCCESS

Professor Bob Jacobsen (no relation to Alexander) points out that the experience of teaching Physics 111 is also very distinct from typical lecture courses. “It’s a different style,” he says. “In these labs, students are working with the lab apparatus, and you’re there to help them over the hard parts. You’re more of an advisor, and that can make it a lot more fun. It can also be challenging, because there are certain ideas that are hard to grasp, and you’d like to just sit the students down and say, ‘This is the way it is.’ But you can’t lecture them, you have to guide them through figuring it out for themselves.”

Physics 111 is so critical to an undergraduate physics education at Berkeley that it’s being used as an assess-ment point in the University’s Undergraduate Student Learning Initiative (USLI). The USLI is a campus-wide endeavor to establish educational goals and evaluation procedures for all undergraduate programs. The aim is to make certain that students are actually getting the knowledge and expertise a degree program sets out to teach them.

BERKELEY PHYSICS PROFESSOR JOEL FAJANS TEACHES THE FIRST SEMES-

TER OF PHYSICS 111.


Sumner P. Davis

Physics 111 has long been a part of every Berkeley

physics major’s education–no one in the department

today can remember when it wasn’t a required

course. But it wasn’t until the early 1990s that the

late Berkeley physics professor Sumner P. Davis

turned it into the lynchpin of a well-rounded physics

education.

“Sumner Davis transformed Physics 111 from

a sort of rote, ‘cookbook’ lab to the incredibly rich

educational experience we have now,” Jacobsen

recounts. “And he did it himself, basically by force

of his own will. Now, through this new fundrais-

ing campaign, we’re trying to take it the next step

forward, to solidify its value as the high point of an

undergraduate education in physics at Berkeley.”

Jacobsen explains that, since all physics majors take Physics 111 at or near the end of their undergraduate coursework, “we can use this class to tell whether they are able to put their book-learning into real use. Physics 111 is a lot more like what students are going to be doing after they graduate than the average lecture hall. So here’s a chance, by watching what they can do in the lab, for us to learn whether we have taught them to use this knowledge.”

CHANCELLOR’S MATCHING FUNDS

Continuing advancements in physics and technology have transformed the structure of research experiments. To keep up with these changes, ongoing improvements to the lab are essential. The Department of Physics recently began a capital campaign that aims to stabilize funding for the Physics 111 Laboratory facility. The goal is to raise $1.5 million, and UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau’s office will match the first $500,000 in donations. (For more details, see the insert at the center of this issue of Physics@Berkeley.)

“The lab contains millions of dollars of equipment we’ve built up over the years,” Jacobsen notes. “We have to find a way to keep modernizing these experiments. Just as this class teaches in a different way, it also requires support in a different way. That presents a fun-damental fundraising challenge.”

“We’re trying to put the funding for this course on a more stable long-term footing,” he continues. “So far, we’ve been working in an ad hoc way–but instead of ‘feast and famine’, we want to create an upward spiral for ongoing improvement that will better enable the lab to stay up-to-date.” ■

REM-Sleep Directed Visual Alarm System and Method

ALAN KUBEY’S SLEEP-DIRECTED ALARM SYSTEM USES EYEGLASS FRAMES

WIRED WITH SENSORS.

Berkeley physics alumnus Alan Kubey (BA ’07) created

a first-semester Physics 111 project that not only led to

an invention recently awarded a US patent, but also led

him along a fascinating career path.

Kubey built an alarm clock that detects sleep cycles and

wakes the sleeper at an optimal time to avoid the “sleep

drunkenness” that can result from awakening from deep

sleep. The alarm uses an infrared LED and photocell

mounted on eyeglasses to detect rapid eye movements

(REM) during part of each sleep cycle. Kubey analyzed

the pattern of eye movements during the night with a

novel computer algorithm that can activate the alarm at

the optimal time after the sleeper’s final REM cycle, or

turn on the lights to shift the sleeper’s circadian rhythm.

In an ecstatic email to his Physics 111 instructor Joel

Fajans, Kubey wrote, “I never in my wildest dreams

would have thought that this little project would lead to

working… with my boyhood scientific/inspirational hero:

NASA. It has been a thrill of a ride, one that I hope will

continue well into the future, and it would not have been

possible without you.”

Since graduation, Kubey has been involved with the

Stanford and UCLA sleep medicine communities, held

a summer job at the Harvard Division of Sleep Medicine

studying astronaut sleep, and spent a summer working

at NASA designing lighting for the International Space

Station. He is now a second-year medical student at

Jefferson Medical College, where he is involved in

research with a leader in sleep/performance biology.

He reports being excited about the prospects for the

positive impact his invention might provide for shift

workers, pilots, on-call doctors, and others who face

sleep challenges.


Saul Perlmutter Wins Nobel Prize

Saul Perlmutter, a professor in the Department of Physics at UC Berkeley and an astrophysicist at the US Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, has won the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics. The award was given “for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe through observa-tions of distant supernovae.”

Perlmutter heads the International Supernova Cosmology Project, which pioneered the methods used to discover the accelerating expansion of the universe, and he has been a leader in studies to determine the nature of dark energy.

Perlmutter shares the prize with Brian Schmidt, leader of the High-z Supernova Search Team in Australia, and Adam Riess, first author of that team’s analysis, which led to their almost simultaneous announcement of accel-erating expansion.

On learning of the award, Perlmutter said, “I am delighted, excited, and deeply honored. It’s wonderful that the Nobel Prize is being awarded for results which reflect humanity’s long quest to understand our world and how we got here. The ideas and discoveries that led to our ability to measure the expansion history of the universe have a truly international heritage, with key contributions from almost every continent and culture. And quite appropriately, our result–the acceleration of the universe –was the product of two teams of scientists from around the world. These are the kinds of discoveries that the whole world can feel a part of and celebrate, as humanity advances its knowledge of our universe.”

“I offer my congratulations to Dr. Perlmutter and the entire Berkeley Lab team for their extraordinary contribu-tions to science, which are being recognized with the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics,” said Energy Secretary Steven Chu, former director of Berkeley Lab and himself a winner of

the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1997. “His groundbreaking work showed us that the expansion of the universe is actu-ally speeding up rather than slowing down. Dr. Perlmutter’s award is another reminder of the incredible talent and world-leading expertise America has at our National Laboratories. On a more personal note, I am delighted about this well-deserved recognition, and to have worked with Saul during the time I spent at Berkeley Lab.”

The accelerating expansion of the universe was discovered after years of work by the Supernova Cosmology Project, an international collaboration of researchers from the United States, France, Sweden, the United Kingdom, Chile, Japan, Spain, and other countries, based at Berkeley Lab. The Supernova Cosmology Project was cofounded by Perlmutter in 1988 to devise methods of using distant supernovae to measure the expansion rate of the universe.

“It’s wonderful that the Nobel Prize is being awarded

for results which ref lect humanity’s long quest to

understand our world and how we got here.”

Another group of astronomers and physicists began a similar search in the mid-1990s, reaching the same conclusion at nearly the same time as the Supernova Cosmology Project. The independent findings of the Supernova Cosmology Project and the High-Z Supernova Search Team, led by Schmidt and of which Riess was a prominent member, were jointly named the “break-through of the year” by the journal Science in 1998.

The accelerating expansion of the universe implies the existence of so-called dark energy, a mysterious force that acts to oppose gravity and increase the distance among galaxies. The nature of dark energy is unknown and has been termed the most important problem facing 21st century physics.

The 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics recognizes this profound shift in the paradigm of modern physics and cosmology. The Physics prize consists of a diploma, a gold medal, and 10 million Swedish kroner (about 1.5 million U.S. dollars) with one half to Perlmutter and the other half jointly to Schmidt and Riess. The Nobel award ceremony and banquet will be held December 10 in Stockholm, Sweden.

From a Lawrence Berkeley Lab press release by Paul Preuss, October 4, 2011

D E P A R T M E N T N E W S


PERLMUTTER WINS EINSTEIN MEDAL

The year 2011 has been replete with honors for Berkeley cosmologist Saul

Perlmutter. In addition to receiving the Nobel Prize in Physics, he was awarded a 2011 Einstein Medal for “discovering the acceleration of the universe.” He shared the honor with

Adam Riess of the Space Telescope Science Institute and John Hopkins University. Both scientists received medals at an award ceremony in Bern, Switzerland on May 27.

Perlmutter leads the international Supernova Cosmology Project (SCP), which he co-founded in 1988. Based at Lawrence Berkeley Lab, the SCP was established to develop ways of using distant supernovae as standard candles to measure the expansion rate of the universe. In January of 1998 the group announced their discovery that the expansion of the universe is not slowing, as almost all scientists expected. It has been hailed as one of the top astronomy discoveries of the 20th century.

The cause of the acceleration was at first assumed to be the cosmological constant originally proposed by Einstein in his theory of general relativity but has since been labeled ‘dark energy’. The nature of dark energy is still a mystery, and it is now thought to constitute almost three-quarters of the known universe.

The Einstein Medal is an annual honor that was first presented to theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking in 1979. It has been awarded to many distinguished scientists whose work is closely related to Einstein’s theories, including Berkeley physicist George Smoot in 2003, three years before he won the Nobel Prize in Physics.

From a Berkeley Lab news release posted by Paul Preuss, February 2011

PERLMUTTER GIVES FACULTY RESEARCH LECTURE

On April 7, Berkeley cosmologist Saul Perlmutter gave the 98th annual Faculty Research Lecture. UC Berkeley Chancellor and physics professor Robert Birgeneau gave the introduction, noting that this lecture series honors faculty members “by offering a celebrated public forum for presentation of scholarly research of the highest caliber. These public lectures give the campus community an opportunity to hear from some of our very finest faculty.”

Perlmutter’s lecture was titled “Stalking Dark Energy and the Mystery of the Accelerating Universe.” He covered the history of his research group’s ground-breaking discovery of the accelerating expansion of the

universe through measurements of distant supernovae. He also discussed recent experiments designed to obtain more detailed measurements that will help shed light on the mystery of dark energy.

Perlmutter began his talk by emphasizing the collab-orative nature of today’s scientific endeavors and recog-nizing the many students and colleagues whose contri-butions have been crucial to his group’s accomplishments. He made special mention of his thesis advisor Rich Muller, Berkeley emeritus physics professor, acknowl-edging his guidance in passing on not only the tradition of experimental physics but also the idea of using super-novae to do cosmology research. “We were just working in his group,” Perlmutter said, “and followed through on ideas he had begun.” Perlmutter also acknowledged the many contributions of Berkeley physicist Gerson Goldhaber, who died last year.

Perlmutter described how his group managed to obtain the telescope time they needed to find and observe distant supernovae, which involved developing cameras that could produce images of wide swaths of the sky as well as computer software to analyze those images. He recounted how the group initially thought their unexpected results came from analytical errors. “We kept recalibrating to get rid of this unexpected effect,” he said, “but the more we studied it, the more it didn’t go away.”

The discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe was announced in 1998. Since then, Perlmutter noted, “a new theoretical paper trying to explain what’s going on has been published roughly every three days.” Of these thousands of ideas, none stand out as being especially compelling. When talking with theorists about the situa-tion, he said, “They turn it back to the experimentalists, saying ‘You have to give us something more to go on.’”

He went on to describe new experimental methods that are beginning to provide more detailed data, including the proposed Supernova Acceleration Probe, a space mission that was listed as the highest priority in the Astro2010 survey published by the National Academy of Sciences last year. Perlmutter also described the recent identification of ‘twin’ supernovae–supernovae that exhibit identical spectral characteristics as they brighten and fade–which will contribute to significant improve-ments in the way supernovae can be used as cosmological ‘standard candles.’

“I’m very optimistic that we are going to be able to make these measurements to improve standard candles,”



he concluded, “and that we’re going to be able to bring the next step forward with a much better constrained history of the expansion of the universe.”

BREAKTHROUGH OF THE YEAR: ANTIHYDROGEN

Berkeley physics professors Joel Fajans and Jonathan

Wurtele are part of a team chosen by Physics World as the Top Breakthrough of the Year for 2010. The Berkeley physicists are members of the ALPHA experiment at CERN–an international collaboration that, for the first time, successfully trapped antihydrogen atoms long enough to study their spectroscopic properties in detail. ALPHA stands for Antihydrogen Laser Physics Apparatus. The group’s aim is to study the symmetries between matter and antimatter by comparing antihydrogen with ordinary hydrogen.

Fajans and Wurtele will also share the 2011 John Dawson Award for Excellence in Plasma Physics Research with other members of the ALPHA collabora-tion for this research.

The Physics World announcement, published December 20, 2010, explained that the Top Breakthrough award went “to two international teams of physicists at CERN who have invented new ways of con-trolling antiatoms of hydrogen.” The other award-win-ning team is ASACUSA, which stands for Atomic Spectroscopy And Collisions Using Slow Antiprotons.

In November 2010, the ALPHA collaboration had announced successful trapping of 38 antihydrogen atoms for about 170 milliseconds, long enough to study the energy levels in antihydrogen in detail. According to Physics World, “Any slight differences in the levels compared to ordinary hydrogen could shed light on one of the biggest mysteries in physics–why there is so much more matter than antimatter in the universe.”

Subsequently, in June of this year, ALPHA reported

even greater success–the trapping of 309 antiatoms for as long as 1000 seconds. “This is long enough to be certain that the atoms are in the ground state,” says Fajans, “and more than long enough to begin testing the properties of antihydrogen and comparing them to that of hydrogen.”

The ASACUSA team announced in December 2010 that they had produced a focused beam of antihy-drogen “suitable for making spectroscopic measure-ments at microwave energy levels.” Those studies could provide evidence for charge-parity violation, which would also help solve the matter-antimatter mystery.

ROSENFELD WINS GLOBAL ENERGY PRIZE

Art Rosenfeld, Emeritus Professor of Physics at UC Berkeley and Distinguished Scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, has been awarded the Global Energy Prize in recognition of his contributions to the field of energy efficiency. The Global

Energy Prize was established by Russian scientists in 2002 “for outstanding scientific achievements in the field of ener-gy which have proved of benefit to the entire human race.”

In announcing the prize, the organization said, “Arthur Rosenfeld is known for his innovation and tech-nological research in the field of construction of energy-efficient buildings. Arthur Rosenfeld has been honored by fellow scientists by giving his name to a unit of energy savings equaling three billion kilowatt-hours.”

With a decades-long career in energy analysis and standards, Rosenfeld is often credited with being personally responsible for billions of dollars in energy savings and is viewed by many as “the godfather of energy efficiency.”

He began his career in the 1950s as a particle phys-icist in the Nobel Prize-winning research group of Luis Alvarez. In 1974 he switched his focus to energy and the environment. He founded the Center for Building Science at Berkeley Lab in 1975, where a broad range of energy efficiency standards and technologies were devel-oped over the next 20 years. Last year he completed two five-year terms on the California Energy Commission and then returned to Berkeley Lab to continue champi-oning scientific solutions for society’s most urgent envi-ronmental problems. Rosenfeld was also chosen last year by US Energy Secretary Steven Chu to serve on the Secretary of Energy Advisory Board.

From a Berkeley Lab news release posted by Julie Chao, April 2011


JOEL FAJANS (LEFT) AND JONATHAN WURTELE


NEW CAMPBELL HALL UPDATE

We are excited to report that construction on the Campbell Hall Replacement Building Project is about to start. Demolition of the existing building is expected to begin at the start of 2012, and New Campbell Hall should be ready for occupancy mid-year 2014.

New Campbell Hall will be devoted to Integrated Physics and Astronomy. In addition to offices, the building will contain modern astronomy teaching and research facilities, including a roof-top observatory. The basement will house The Center for Integrated and Precision Quantum Measurement, a high stability, low-noise research facility funded by the National Institute of Science and Technology. A bridge connecting New Campbell Hall to Old LeConte will facilitate interaction among students and faculty in both astronomy and physics.

Project bidding and pre-construction began in September. Pre-construction work will include the removal of furnishings and hazardous materials, and modifications to relocate existing University Drive parking and redirect pedestrian walkways.

We face a few years of disruption, construction noise and dust, but all fades in comparison to the promise of our long-awaited new building and the research and teaching programs it will support.

Contributed by Eleanor Crump, Facilities and Operations Manager for the Department of Physics

UNDERGRADUATE STUDENT LEARNING INITIATIVE

UC Berkeley’s Undergraduate Student Learning Initiative (USLI) is part of a university-wide endeavor to establish educational goals and evaluation procedures for all undergraduate programs. The aim is to give faculty and students a shared understanding of the purpose of each major, the knowledge students are expected to gain, and the skills students are expected to acquire by the end of their studies.

The Academic Senate Committee on Educational Policy and the Vice Provost for Teaching, Learning, Academic Planning and Facilities are responsible for seeing the initiative through to completion. According to the Vice Provost’s office, “The initiative is in keeping with the fundamental principle at Berkeley that the eval-uation of student achievement should be locally defined, discipline specific, and faculty-driven.”

Emeritus physics professor Leroy Kerth, who has taken charge of USLI for the Department of Physics,

says the content of the physics major program was already fairly well docu-mented. It has now been expanded to better articulate educational goals. The document is posted on the Department of Physics web site.

A new approach is being used to assess how well the department is

meeting those goals. “From the students’ performances in the course work and Advanced Laboratory, we have a good measure of their learning,” Kerth explains. “To assess their understanding of the fundamentals and how well they can apply them to new physical situations, we are asking students in the Advanced Laboratory course, Physics 111 (see page 11), to volunteer for a 15- or 20-minute discussion with an instructor who will probe how well the student can make sense of some physical system, hopefully with a minimum of calculations. We want to find out if the student thinks like a physicist. The results of these discussions may give us a deeper understanding of how well we are doing in ‘making physicists’.”

THE END OF SPACE-TIME

Nima Arkani-Hamed, distinguished Berkeley alumnus and former physics faculty member, visited campus earlier this year to take part in a workshop presented by the Berkeley Center for Theoretical Physics (BCTP) from April 29 through May 1. The workshop–Embarking on a New Era of Discovery: LHC, Dark Matter, and Their Interplay–explored connections between dark matter and collider physics by bringing together researchers to discuss recent events in both fields.

Physics professor Lawrence Hall, founding director of the BCTP, was accorded special honor at the work-shop for his leadership as well as his research. Hall took the lead in forming the BCTP and fostering collaborations among some of the world’s leading cosmologists and theoretical and par-

ticle physicists. He has made important contributions to particle physics and offered fascinating predictions of what data from the the Large Hadron Colider(LHC) at CERN in Switzerland might reveal. Hall stepped down from the BCTP directorship earlier this year.

Arkani-Hamed,–one of Lawrence Hall’s PhD students–is one of the leading particle physics phenom-


LEROY KERTH

LAWRENCE HALL


enologists of his generation. He received his PhD in physics from Berkeley in 1997, and is now a professor at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study. He concerns himself with the relationship between theory and exper-iment. His research has shown how the extreme weak-ness of gravity, relative to other forces of nature, might be explained by the existence of extra dimensions of space, and how the structure of comparatively low-energy physics is constrained within the context of string theory. He has taken a lead in proposing new physical theories that can be tested at the LHC.

During the BCTP workshop he gave a public talk titled “The End of Space-Time.” In an abstract describing the talk, he wrote, “The union of quantum mechanics and gravity strongly suggests that space-time is doomed–what replaces it? Violent short-distance quantum fluctu-ations make the existence of a macroscopic world wildly implausible, and yet we comfortably live in a huge uni-verse–what tames these violent quantum fluctuations, and why is there a macroscopic universe?” He described several new experiments, including experiments at the LHC as well as astronomical and cosmological probes, which could shed light on some of these questions, and discussed what we might know by the year 2020.

SALLY RIDE GIVES REGENTS’ LECTURE

Sally Ride–the first American woman in space, President and CEO of Sally Ride Science, and Professor Emeritus of Physics at UC San Diego–gave the 2011 Regents’ Lecture in February. The audience numbered over 400 and included many young people taking advantage of the opportunity to hear from this distinguished mem-ber of the US space program.

Ride received Bachelor’s, Master’s, and PhD degrees in physics from Stanford University. Following her career at NASA, she joined the UC San Diego faculty as a Professor of Physics and Director of University of California’s Space Institute. In 2001 she founded her own company, Sally Ride Science, to pursue her long-time passion of motivating girls and young women to pursue careers in science, math and technology.

In her talk, called “Reach for the Stars,” she described her path into the space program and discussed needed improvements to science and math education. In an abstract of her talk, she wrote, “Future rocket scientists aren’t the only ones that need a good foundation in sci-ence and math. In today’s world, all students do–but our education system is failing them. Nearly two-thirds

of 18 year-olds are showing up for college of career unprepared. Fully 80 percent of the jobs in the next decade (including basic living wage jobs) will require technical and analytical skills–and without a grounding in science and math, today’s students will not be pre-pared to compete for these jobs.”

LISA RANDALL GIVES OPPENHEIMER LECTURE

This year’s J. Robert Oppenheimer Lecture was presented by Lisa Randall, the Frank B. Baird, Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard University. Randall, one of the world’s most influen-tial physicists, studies the-oretical particle physics and cosmology. Recipient of many scientific awards and honors, she has also authored two popular

books, the recently published Knocking on Heaven’s Door: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World and Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe’s Hidden


PHYSICIST AND FORMER ASTRONAUT SALLY RIDE


Dimensions. She has written the libretto for an opera, Hypermusic: A Projective Opera in Seven Planes, and co-created an art exhibit, Measure for Measure, that explores the concept of scale.

In her lecture, titled “What’s Small to You is So Large to Me,” Randall explored the nature of experi-ments underway at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, and commented on dark matter searches taking place at the LHC and elsewhere. In an abstract describ-ing her talk, she wrote, “New developments in physics have the potential to radically revise our understanding of the world: its makeup, its evolution, and the funda-mental forces that drive its operation. The Large Hadron Collider… contains the most extensive and elaborate experiments ever built.”

She explained that the LHC will produce particle collisions at energies seven times higher than previous colliders and achieve a luminosity–number of colli-sions–one hundred times greater than other experi-ments. These characteristics will make it possible to observe the Higgs boson.

Discovery of the Higgs, she said, “would constitute experimental evidence that the Higgs mechanism explains how particles acquire mass.” She went on to describe the theory behind the Higgs mechanism, saying, “The Higgs field prevents particles from moving unimpeded through the vacuum. How big a particle’s mass is depends on how big its interaction with the Higgs field is.”

Randall also described how theories of supersym-metry and theories of extra dimensions of space could reveal the nature of dark matter and perhaps uncover a connection between gravity and subatomic forces. “If supersymmetry is true, the LHC will see some fraction of supersymmetric particles,” she noted, adding that the LHC might also make it possible to test the idea of extra dimensions.

She concluded by saying, “Every time we’ve explored smaller or larger length scales, we’ve found new phenomena. It’s hard to guess what will be there. There could be a much richer world out there than what we’ve seen before.”

Berkeley’s J. Robert Oppenheimer Lectureship celebrates Oppenheimer’s contributions to science by bringing some of the brightest minds in physics to the Berkeley campus. It was established in 1998 with support from Berkeley alumni Steve and Arlene Krieger, the Jane and Robert Wilson Endowment in Physics, and other Friends of Physics.

ARTHUR MACDONALD PRESENTS SEGRÈ LECTURE

Neutrinos were the focus of the 2010 Segrè lecture, presented last October by Arthur B. McDonald, Director of the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO) and the Gordon and Patricia Gray Chair in Particle Astrophysics at Queens University, Ontario.

In his talk, titled “Understanding Neutrinos Using Deep Dark Science,” McDonald surveyed the last 100 years of neutrino research, including experiments featuring substantial leadership from the UC Berkeley Department of Physics. Throughout his remarks, he noted that Berkeley has excelled at neutrino physics for many years and con-tinues to contribute to important international collabora-tions in the field, including SNO in Canada, KamLAND in Japan, the Daya Bay Neutrino Experiment in China, Ice Cube at the South Pole, the Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory (DUSEL) in South Dakota, and the CUORE experiment in Italy.

McDonald explained that neutrino experiments are located deep underground to avoid contamination from atmospheric neutrinos produced by cosmic rays. He sum-marized the highlights of what is presently known about these enigmatic particles: they have mass; they rarely interact with other particles; and they oscillate among three forms, or flavors, as they travel through space.

“Now that we know something about neutrinos and how they behave,” he said, “let’s try to use them as astronomical probes.” Doing so could help reveal what happened to the antimatter that must have been pro-duced in the Big Bang, and perhaps shed light on the composition of Dark Matter.

“The universe appears to begin with a vast amount of energy that is converted to equal parts of matter and antimatter,” McDonald explained. “These largely annihi-late, leaving only a small residue of matter. The small asymmetry between matter and antimatter could arise from neutrino properties.” Experiments designed to explore the role of neutrinos in this asymmetry include ongoing observations of neutrinos produced by nuclear reactors and particle accelerators.

Although experimental data indicate that neutrinos have mass, the exact value is still unknown. McDonald pointed out that detection of a rare process called neu-trino-less double beta decay could answer this question, and experiments designed to do that are now underway.

He also explained that neutrino observatories could



help identify constituents of Dark Matter. “The best candidates for Dark Matter are supersymmetric particles that might be observed at the Large Hadron Collider,” he said, “but also, we think these particles were pro-duced in the original Big Bang and we hope to observe those in our deep dark experiments as well.” He described several new experiments being constructed at SNO, some of which could detect the supersymmetric partners of neutrinos.

The Emilio Segrè Lectureship enables the Department of Physics to bring some of the world’s most important and influential scientific figures to the Berkeley campus. It was established by an endowment from the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Foundation to honor Segrè, who shared with Owen Chamberlain the 1959 Nobel Prize in physics for the discovery of the antiproton.

FALCONE PRESENTS CHUPP LECTURE

Roger Falcone, award-winning Berkeley physics professor and Director of the Advanced Light Source at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, delivered the Fifth Annual Warren W. Chupp Distinguished Lecture November 17,

2010 at Lawrence Hall of Science. In his talk, “Light Speed: X-rays, Molecular Movies,

and Advances in Revealing the Unseen” Falcone offered an inside look into some of the extraordinary cutting-edge research taking place at Berkeley Lab. He described Berkeley Lab’s synchrotron, a piece of equipment that produces ultra-fast pulses of x-ray light, explained how it works and how it is enabling some of the world’s best scientific minds to study the behavior of atomic matter.

At the beginning of his lecture, Falcone reviewed a recent talk at Berkeley Lab that was given by Michigan Representative and Berkeley alumnus Vernon Ehlers. Falcone also relayed some of the comments he heard from community focus groups, including a request that Berkeley Lab help get kids excited about science and technology, because “they’ll need this to get good jobs.”

The rest of Falcone’s talk covered current research at the Advanced Light Source X-ray synchrotron, including■ experiments with bilayer graphene that could lead to

transistors less than a nanometer thick,■ studies of combustion chemistry and chemical dynamics

of new fuels,■ extreme ultraviolet lithography of silicon microchips,

■ tomography and radiography of cell organelles,■ x-ray absorption studies for identifying atoms and

chemical species,■ detection of trace metals in soil and sediments, and■ the atomic structure of biological proteins.

He concluded by describing the Linac Coherent Light Source, an X-Ray Free Electron Laser at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. The apparatus produces ultra-fast ‘movies’ of atomic motion, leading toward advanced computer simulation of processes such as defect forma-tion in solids, understanding of ultrafast energy and information f low in molecular systems, new revelations about electron dynamics, and high-resolution imaging of biological molecules.

“X-rays are an enabling technology for energy, health, and information technology,” Falcone said. “Large x-ray facilities that serve thousands of scientists and engineers from universities, labs, and industry are inherently dem-ocratic and a great way to discover transformational ideas.”

The Warren William Chupp Distinguished Lectureship recognizes outstanding contributions in sci-ence education. It commemorates Chupp’s life and work as a Berkeley Lab physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project under Ernest O. Lawrence and was instrumental in the building and operation of the Bevatron particle accelerator. Chupp earned his undergraduate and doctoral degrees at Berkeley. Sponsored jointly by Lawrence Hall of Science (LHS) and the UC Berkeley Department of Physics, the lecture is funded by the William Warren Chupp Endowment at LHS.

CAL DAY 2011

Cal Day, UC Berkeley’s annual open house, took place Saturday, April 16. The day featured a variety of physics events, from lectures on cutting-edge physics to guided tours of research labs to demonstrations and lab experiments.

Visitors enjoyed “Hands-On Physics”, interactive exhibits and demonstrations for all ages, hosted by physics graduate and undergraduate students in the second-floor labs of LeConte Hall.

Guided tours titled “Dark Matter Search” and “The Quantum Nanoelectronics Lab” were offered throughout the day.

Visitors were treated to several lectures. Professors Howard Shugart and Bob Jacobsen offered the perenni-ally popular lecture-demonstration “Fun with Physics: Why Should Students Have all the Fun?” Professor



Hitoshi Murayama talked about “Conquering the Dark Side of the Universe,” and Emeritus Professor Rich Muller presented “The Instant Physicist.”

Potential physics majors were invited to meet with the undergraduate advisor, who answered questions about the physics program, academic requirements and opportunities, and life as an undergraduate. Tables for Physical Science Majors were set up in the Information Marketplace on Sproul Plaza, along with a Society of Physics Students table that featured startling physics demonstrations.

Cal Day 2012 is set for Saturday, April 21.

WONDERFEST 2010

The 2010 edition of Wonderfest, the Bay Area Beacon of Science, took place November 6 and 7 at Stanford University and UC Berkeley.

On November 6, the festivities were held at Stanford University’s Hewlett Teach Center. Offerings included an amateur science forum as well as the Bechtel WonderCup “Innovation Challenge” Championship–two top high schools facing off in a science quiz. There were three dialogs between expert researchers: “Does 10,000 Hours of Videogaming have Side Effects?” “Is Mathematics More Art than Science?” and “Will Synthetic Biology Make Industrial Chemistry Obsolete?” The 2010 Carl Sagan Prize for Science Popularization was awarded to Donald Kennedy, Emeritus Professor of Environmental Science at Stanford.

On November 7, Wonderfest moved to UC Berkeley’s Stanley Hall, where visitors enjoyed a Bay Area Science Expo full of art, books, and crafts for science lovers. “Dare We Try to Engineer Earth’s Climate?” “How will Evolution Shape Human Behavior?” and “Do We Understand the Structure of the Universe?” were the dialogs presented that day.

Wonderfest has been an annual event since 1998. Its Director, Berkley alumnus Tucker Hiatt, reports that the organization and its activities are growing. As of this year, Wonderfest is merging with the new Bay Area Science Festival, which will incorporate key elements of Wonderfest’s popular activities. The 2011 Bay Area Science Festival takes place this fall.

For more information and a schedule of upcoming events, visit www.bayareascience.org.

MAXWELL EQUATIONS T-SHIRT CONTEST

Emeritus physics professor J.D. Jackson, shown on the right, has again awarded t-shirts to the Berkeley physics undergraduates who demonstrated the highest excellence in their study of electricity and magnetism. The 2010-2011 winners were Matthew Nichols, shown above left, Monica

Jin Woo Kang, second from left, and Eugene Kur.The t-shirts have the four Maxwell equations printed

on the front and a portrait of James Clerk Maxwell on the back. The Maxwell equations describe electric and magnetic fields as they relate to charge density and cur-rent density. They are used to show that light behaves as an electromagnetic wave.

FACULTY AWARDS AND HONORS

Dmitry Budker was named a Distinguished Visiting Researcher by the Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia.

John Clarke received a Berkeley Citation, University of California, 2011.


BERKELEY STUDENTS KRISTIN SCHIMERT AND ALEXANDER JACOBSEN


Marvin Cohen is a Visiting Member, Institute for Advanced Study, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, 2010–2013. He also received a Berkeley Citation, University of California, 2011.

Michael DeWeese received a Special Initiative Grant from the McDonnell Foundation.

Joel Fajans received a 2011 John Dawson Award for Excellence in Plasma Physics Research. Citation: “For the introduction and use of innovative plasma techniques which produced the first demonstration of the trapping of antihydrogen.”

Stuart Freedman was awarded a Lady Davis Fellowship to visit Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 2011. He is also Chair Elect for the American Physical Society’s Topic Group on Precision Measurement and Fundamental Constants 2011.

Stephen Leone received the Irving Langmuir Prize “For his pioneering use of soft x-rays in probing ultrafast dynamics in atomic and molecular systems.”

Holger Müller was elected as an executive committee member of the American Physical Society’s Topic Group on Precision Measurements and Fundamental Constants.

Hitoshi Murayama was elected as a member of the Science Council of Japan, an organization established for the pur-pose of promoting and enhancing the field of science.

Saul Perlmutter received the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics, shared with Brian Schmidt of Australian National University and Adam Riess of the Space Telescope Science Institute and John Hopkins University. Perlmutter was also awarded the 2011 Einstein Medal by the Albert Einstein Society of Bern, Switzerland, for “discovering the accelera-tion of the universe via the observation of very distant supernovae”. He shared this award with Adam Reiss.

P. Buford Price presented the James R. Arnold Lecture in honor of Jim Arnold, emeritus professor of chemistry at UC San Diego and founder of the Chemistry Department. The talk was titled “Adventures on an

Ultrasmall Scale: from Nuclear Tracks in Solids to Microbial Life in Polar Ice.”

Zi-Qiang Qiu was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society, Citation: “For outstanding experi-ments to understand the two-dimen-

sional magnetic origin, anisotropy and quantum size effect in magnetic nanostructures, and for the development of novel approaches involving wedged samples, curved sub-stances and the Surface Magneto-Optic Kerr Effect.”

Paul Richards was awarded the Cocconi Prize of the European physical Society with Prof. Paolo de Bernardis of Rome. He also received two additional prizes, the Felice Pietro Chisesi and Caterina Tomassoni Prize from the University of Rome, La Sapienza, and the IEEE Council on Superconductivity Award.

Arthur Rosenfeld wins the Global Energy International Prize along with Dr. Philip Rutberg. The prize is awarded annually to scientists whose work has had a significant impact in addressing global energy and ecological problems.

Bernard Sadoulet was appointed a Miller Professor, Spring 2011.

Charles Townes received Docteur d’Honneur de l’ Ecole Polytechnique 2010 University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Scotland. “By pioneering the maser, and carrying out pivotal work in the development of the laser, he helped to pave the way for technology which has a vast range of uses in today’s world, in medicine, energy, communications and computing. After more than 70 years, he continues to contribute to exploration in physics and to the debate on its huge potential.” He also received 2011 Honorary Doctor of Letters, Texas A&M University.

Martin White has been awarded a 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship. He was also elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society, Citation: “For his numerous contributions to theoretical astrophysics and cosmology in the areas of the cosmic microwave background, evolution of galaxies and

probes of large scale structure, for developments in numerical cosmology and for his investigations of dark energy, dark matter and inflation.”

Jonathan Wurtele received a 2011 John Dawson Award for Excellence in Plasma Physics Research. Citation: “For the introduction and use of innovative plasma tech-niques which produced the first demonstration of the trapping of antihydrogen.”

Ahmet Yildiz is the recipient of the 2011 National Science Foundation Career Award. He is also the recipient of the Hellman Faculty Award.


ZI-QIANG QIU

MARTIN WHITE



Paul Richards Honored in Italy and the US

Berkeley emeritus

physics professor Paul

Richards received three

distinguished awards

this year. He was award-

ed the Felice Pietro

Chisesi and Caterina

Tomassoni Prize from

the University of Rome,

La Sapienza and the IEEE Council on Superconductivity

Award. He also shared the Cocconi Prize of the

European Physical Society with Professor Paolo de

Bernardis of Rome.

The award citation from the University of Rome reads,

in part: “for his fundamental contributions to the mea-

surements of the Cosmic Microwave Background

(CMB), and in particular:

■ the continuous development cryogenic bolometers,

■ the measurement of the anisotropy of the CMB

with the MAXIMA experiment that, along with the

BOOMERanG experiment, first established that the

geometry of the universe is flat (Euclidean).

These experiments provided the first high fidelity images

of the last scattering surface in the early universe, and

demonstrated the existence of oscillations in the

primeval baryon-photons plasma.”

The citation from IEEE reads, in part: “for significant and

sustained contributions in the field of superconductor

high frequency detectors and mixers, in particular:

■ for pioneering the development of SIS devices as

mixers and detectors of microwave and millimeter

wave radiation specifically for radio astronomy,

■ for pioneering the use of superconductor transition

edge bolometers and arrays of these bolometers with

SQUID readout electronics which have been used

for many astronomical applications, and

■ for his many contributions to the mapping of the sky

at millimeter wavelengths using superconducting.”

S T A F F N E W S A N D A W A R D S

CLAUDIA LOPEZ AWARDED COSA FOR 2011

Claudia Lopez, Director of Business Administration for the Department of Physics, received the Chancellor’s Outstanding Staff Award (COSA) this spring. The award was conferred at a campus ceremony held on April 15.

Each year, the COSA is pre-sented to staff members and teams

who have made significant contributions toward the University of California’s mission of excellence in teaching, research, and public service. Administered and presented by the Chancellor’s Staff Advisory Committee, these awards are among the highest honors bestowed upon staff by the Chancellor. They recognize staff members who serve as role models in the workplace, contribute to the campus and community at large, and consistently perform their job at an outstanding level.

Claudia was nominated for this year’s COSA as a member of the Organizational Simplification - Shared Services Design Team. This team of eight staff members from various departments on campus was tasked with developing a plan that would allow our campus to deliver human resources, finance, and information technology services more effectively and affordably.

The team collectively dedicated thousands of hours over a six-month period to the production of their report. This project assignment was in addition to completing the work required by their current campus positions. After interviewing dozens of individuals and groups and leading a series of focus groups across the campus, they delivered recommendations that promise to achieve sig-nificant savings for the campus–savings that can be re-invested in its academic mission.

Claudia’s role was to analyze financial transaction data, and in that role she helped her team develop an ana-lytical approach to work efforts in finance

Congratulations to Claudia and all the members of the Organizational Simplification–Shared Services Design Team on a job well done!



NORMA RIVADENEYRA (June 05, 1973-August 25, 2011)

Norma Rivadeneyra, a beloved mem-ber of the Department of Physics staff, passed away after a long bat-tle with leuke-

mia. Norma had been in remission and was able to return to work for a short period this summer, but a set-back forced her to return to treatment at Summit Hospital. At the time of her death, Norma was surrounded by her family. Services were held at Holy Angels Saint Joseph in San Pablo, California.

Norma was a UC Berkeley graduate who spent her career working on campus. She began in the campus central payroll office in August, 2000. On January 3, 2001 she transferred to the Department of Physics.She received steady, progressive promotions and at the time of her death was the department’s Financial Services Manager.

Norma was respected and appreciated by physics faculty, staff, visitors, and students. Throughout her years of service her contribution to the mission of the depart-ment was always outstanding. Devoted to her family and friends, she was also an avid soccer and music fan. She will be sorely missed.

Norma is survived by her husband Humberto, her 12-year old son Carlos, her 5-year old son Sebastian, her parents Mr. & Mrs. Alvarado, her brother Juan Alvarado, and her sister Nora Alvarado. A memorial fund has been established for each of her children. Donations may be sent to Wells Fargo Bank, 2260 Otis Drive, Alameda CA 94501. The routing number is 121042882. Account num-ber for Carlos Rivadeneyra: 3014317428. Account number for Sebastian Rivadeneyra: 3014317436.

ANGELO GIUSTI (August 1, 1924-March 17, 2011)

Angelo Giusti passed away in Santa Rosa after a short ill-ness. Angelo came to UC Berkeley in the 1970’s as a labo-ratory assistant with the physics instructional labs unit, a posi-tion he held for

20 years. His daughter Ann Marie writes, “My dad dearly loved his co-workers and his job in the physics department.”

Angelo was born in Fort Bragg. He joined the navy in 1943, fighting on the battleship USS Indiana. After retirement, he returned to Fort Bragg and became a com-mercial salmon fisherman on the “Ramona Jean” out of Noyo Harbor in Mendocino County, California.

Angelo is survived by his daughter Ann Marie (Michael) LaRocco of Benicia, grandson Anthony Sloss of Benicia, granddaughter Camille Sloss of San Luis Obispo, and

nephew Walter Burbeck of Fort Bragg.

NORMA RIVADENEYRA WITH HER SON SEBASTIAN

I N M E M O R Y

ANGELO GIUSTI


P H Y S I C S I N T H E M E D I A

EXCERPTS FROM MEDIA COVERAGE OF BERKELEY PHYSICISTS

CARBON FLATLAND: GRAPHENE’S TWO DIMENSIONS

OFFER NEW PHYSICS, NOVEL ELECTRONICS

from Science News August 13, 2011 by Alexandra Witze

… scientists at UC Berkeley and the Lawrence Berkeley Lab recently took a closer look at what happens when graphene and boron nitride meet. Using a scanning tun-neling microscope, which can see at the level of individual atoms, the team compared graphene mounted on silicon dioxide with graphene mounted on boron nitride. The silicon dioxide version turned out to be strewn with ‘charge puddles’, or spots where the electron flow got hung up. In contrast, the boron nitride samples were practically puddle-free. Michael Crommie, Alex Zettl, and colleagues reported the findings this year in NanoLetters.

WHAT THE LATEST ANTIMATTER BREAKTHROUGH

MEANS

From Global Post August 8, 2011 by David Wroe

…scientists at CERN announced recently that they had managed to create, isolate and hold a small quantity of antimatter for over 16 minutes–the longest by far that had been achieved. …explains Joel Fajans, a physicist from the ALPHA project, which made the breakthrough. …

The question of what happened to antimatter is one of the grand challenges of physics,” Fajans told a GlobalPost reporter on a visit to CERN, located just outside Geneva near Switzerland’s border with France. “It is astounding, and it’s also embarrassing, that no one knows why this is the case.

“Matter and antimatter annihilate one another … We shouldn’t be here. But we are here. There is clearly an excess of matter … which means something is likely wrong with the theory of the Big Bang.”

CPT [charge parity] basically says that processes in physics should turn out the same even when you flip the charges, turn everything inside out and run it backwards. Put another way, CPT gives the universe a nice, harmo-nious symmetry. If antimatter contradicts it, other theo-ries may unravel.

“As soon as you open a little crack, your imagination and ability to discover can run wild. Any difference will open up possibilities. It would show that there is some bigger, as yet unknown, set of laws. It would truly be the proverbial Big Deal.”

Fajans, an animated 53-year-old MIT graduate and tenured professor at the University of California, Berkeley, spends about half of his time at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. His work-place is a massive warehouse in the middle of which sits a bewildering array of machinery. It is here that Fajans and the ALPHA team managed to trap 309 anti-hydrogen atoms for up to 1,000 seconds, or just over 16 minutes, an achievement they announced in June’s edition of Nature Physics.

WHEN THE MULTIVERSE AND MANY-WORLDS COLLIDE

From New Scientist Physics & Math June 1, 2011 by Justin Mullins

When [cosmologists] apply quantum mechanics –which successfully describes the behaviour of very small objects like atoms–to the entire cosmos, the equations imply that it must exist in many different states simultaneously, a phenomenon called a superposition. Yet that is clearly not what we observe.

Cosmologists reconcile this seeming contradiction by assuming that the superposition eventually “collapses” to a single state. But they tend to ignore the problem of how or why such a collapse might occur, says cosmologist Raphael Bousso at the University of California, Berkeley. “We’ve no right to assume that it collapses. We’ve been lying to ourselves about this,” he says.

...physicists have in recent years replaced the idea of superpositions collapsing with the idea that quantum objects inevitably interact with their environment, allow-ing information about possible superpositions to leak away and become inaccessible to the observer. All that is left is the information about a single state.

Physicists call this process “decoherence”. If you can prevent it–by tracking all the information about all possible states–you can preserve the superposition.

What Bousso and Susskind have done is to come up with an explanation for how the universe as a whole might decohere. …The new idea is that our universe is just one causal patch among many others in a much bigger multiverse.

…Bousso and Susskind suggest that information can leak from our causal patch into others, allowing our part of the universe to decohere into one state or another, resulting in the universe that we observe.

P H Y S I C S I N T H E N E W S


UNZIPPED GRAPHENE REVEALS ITS SECRETS

From Physics World May 13, 2011 by Belle Dumé

Researchers in the US have made the first precise mea-surements on the “edge states” of graphene nanoribbons. These states have been predicted to have extraordinary properties and the work could help build improved nanoscale devices in the future.

…nanoribbons of this material are strips of graphene just nanometres across. Physicists believe that, depending on the angle at which they are cut, such ribbons should have a range of different–and technologically useful–electronic, magnetic and optical properties.

However, until now, scientists have been unable to test these predictions because they could not study the atomic-scale structure at the edges of cut nanoribbons–and therefore ensure their samples have the appropriate edges.

Michael Crommie’s team at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) and the University of California, Berkeley (UCB) has overcome this problem by looking at specially made nanoribbons with smooth edges using a scanning tunnelling microscope (STM).

The researchers discovered that these ribbons support 1D electronic edge states and that electrons in these states are confined to the nanoribbon edge and have an energy gap. “This kind of behaviour has been predicted for many years but never experimentally verified,” Crommie told physicsworld.com.

GRAPHENE MODULATORS COULD BREAK NETWORK

SPEED LIMITS

From PC World May 8, 2011 by Kevin Lee

Fiber optic networks are at the forefront of record-setting Internet speeds. Now the scientists at the University of California, Berkeley have developed a graphene modulator that could push the curve forward by a ten-fold leap.

“Graphene enables us to make modulators that are incredibly compact and that potentially perform at speeds up to ten times faster than current technology allows,” explained UC Berkeley engineering professor Xiang Zhang, who led the research group.

…Zhang’s colleague Feng Wang, assistant professor of physics and head of the Ultrafast Nano-Optics Group at UC Berkeley, added that the graphene could be tuned to other frequencies. “Graphene can also be used to modulate new frequency ranges, such as mid-infrared light, that are widely used in molecular sensing.”

Q&A WITH RICHARD MULLER: A PHYSICIST AND

HIS SURPRISING CLIMATE DATA

From AAAS Science Insider April 6, 2011 by Eli Kintisch

Richard Muller of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California [and emeritus professor in the UC Berkeley Department of Physics] has gained a solid scientific rep-utation for his work in astrophysics and particle physics.

…But that impressive track record of research, teaching, and service wasn’t why the science committee of the U.S. House of Representatives invited Muller to testify last week. The topic was climate change research and policy, and Republicans wanted Muller to discuss his recent reanalysis of global temperature records. Republicans expected Muller to challenge the accepted wisdom that the earth has warmed 0.7 C since the 1880s. But to the dismay of skeptic bloggers, his prelim-inary analysis supports that canonical view.

“He is a very, very independent thinker. He does not take it for granted when he is told something. His instinct is to go check it out for himself,” says fellow Berkeley physicist Raymond Jeanloz, who has served with Muller as a JASON panelist. …

He also began to question what scientists were saying about the likely impacts of present-day climate change, and in November 2009 he became concerned about what he regarded as the imperial behavior shown by some climate scientists in leaked e-mails released as part of what’s become known as Climategate.


UNZIPPING CARBON NANOTUBES PRODUCES GRAPHENE RIBBONS WITH

SMOOTH EDGES AND DIFFERENT CONFIGURATIONS.


So in 2009, Muller assembled a team of physicists and statisticians and launched the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project.

The project has sought to use new techniques to analyze temperature data to see whether problems like the bad stations could bias the results.

RESEARCHERS MAKE FIRST PEROVSKITE-BASED

SUPERLENS FOR THE INFRARED

From Physics News March 29, 2011 by Lynn Yarris

Superlenses earned their superlative by being able to capture the “evanescent” light waves that blossom close to an illuminated surface and never travel far enough to be “seen” by a conventional lens. Superlenses hold enormous potential in a range of applications, depending upon the form of light they capture, but their use has been limited because most have been made from elaborate artificial constructs known as metamaterials.

The unique optical properties of metamaterials, which include the ability to bend light backwards–a property known as negative refraction–arise from their structure rather than their chemical composition. However, metamaterials can be difficult to fabricate and tend to absorb a relatively high percentage of photons that would otherwise be available for imaging. Now, researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have fabricated a superlens from perovskite oxides that are simpler and easier to fabricate than metamaterials,

“We have demonstrated a superlens for electric eva-nescent fields with low absorption losses using perovskites in the mid-infrared regime,” says Ramamoorthy Ramesh, a materials scientist with Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division [and physics professor at UC Berkeley], who led this research. “Spectral studies of the lateral and vertical distributions of evanescent waves around the image plane of our lens show that we have achieved an imaging resolution of one micrometer, about one-fourteenth of the working wavelength.”

RESEARCHERS FIND ENHANCED MAGNETIZATION

IN BISMUTH FERRITE FILMS

From R&D Magazine March 21, 2011

…there’s little doubt the nation that leads the development of advanced magnetoelectronic or spintronic devices is going to have a serious leg-up on its Information Age competition. A smaller, faster, and cheaper way to store

and transfer information is the spintronic grand prize and a key to winning this prize is understanding and controlling a multiferroic property known as spontaneous magnetization.

Now, researchers with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have enhanced spon-taneous magnetization in special versions of the multi-ferroic material bismuth ferrite. What’s more, they can turn this magnetization “on/off” through the application of an external electric field, an ability for the advancement of spintronic technology.

“Taking a novel approach, we’ve created a new magnetic state in bismuth ferrite along with the ability to electrically control this magnetism at room temperature,” says Ramamoorthy Ramesh, [UC Berkeley professor of physics and] a materials scientist with Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division, who led this research. “An enhanced magnetization arises in the rhombohedral phases of our bismuth ferrite self-assembled nanostruc-tures. This magnetization is strain-confined between the tetragonal phases of the material and can be erased by the application of an electric field. The magnetization is restored when the polarity of the electric field is reversed.”

…Ramesh, He, and their co-authors discovered that the enhanced spontaneous magnetization in their special bismuth ferrite films can be controlled through the use of an external electric field without any noticeable current passing through the film.


THE STRUCTURAL ARRANGEMENT OF RHOMBOHEDRAL AND TETRAGONAL

PHASES IN A SPECIAL BISMUTH FERRITE FILM–MAGNETIZATION IS CONFINED

TO THE RHOMBOHEDRAL PHASE. CREDIT: RAMESH GROUP


LIGHT SCATTERING CONTROLLED IN GRAPHENE

From Photonics March 21, 2011

Controlling the way light is scattered in graphene has been achieved, providing a new tool for the study of these single sheets of carbon that may lead to practical applications for controlling light and electronic states in nanometer-scale devices made of the material.

Scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) and the University of California, Berkeley, led by Feng Wang of LBNL’s Materials Sciences Div. [and UC Berkeley’s Department of Physics], made the first direct observation, in graphene, of so-called quantum interference in Raman scattering.

A familiar example of quantum interference in everyday life is antireflective coating on eyeglasses,” said Wang, who also is an assistant professor of physics at the university. “A photon can follow two pathways, scattering from the coating or from the glass. Because of its quantum nature, it actually follows both, and the coating is designed so that the two pathways interfere with each other and cancel light that would otherwise cause reflection.”

“The hallmark of quantum mechanics,” he added, “is that if different paths are nondistinguishable, they must always interfere with each other. We can manipu-late the interference among the quantum pathways that are responsible for Raman scattering in graphene because of graphene’s peculiar electronic structure.”

BUILDING AN ATOMIC GEOMAGNETOMETER FROM

THE GROUND UP

From Physics Today February 28, 2011 by Jeremy N. A. Matthews

Measurements of the geomagnetic field at the smallest scales are used to locate sunken ships and mineral-rich geological formations. Large-scale measurements probe properties of Earth’s core. At length scales of tens to hundreds of kilometers, geomag-

netic maps yield clues about the chemical dynamics in Earth’s outer mantle and the effects of ionic currents on ocean circulation.

To avoid ground-based electromagnetic interference, geomagnetometers are typically placed aboard orbiting satellites, which are deployed sporadically and at a rela-tively high cost. Now, an international team of scientists led by James Higbie (Bucknell University), Domenico

Bonaccini Calia (European Southern Observatory), and Dmitry Budker (University of California, Berkeley) has proposed a lower-cost ground-to-space system that exploits the interaction of beams from ground-based lasers with sodium atoms in the mesosphere, about 90 km above Earth’s surface. The team’s system would har-ness the existing and expanding infrastructure of high-powered lasers that generate artificial stars for optical telescopes by exciting mesospheric sodium.

FIGHTING CANCER ACROSS THE DISCIPLINES

From Physorg February 21, 2011 by Monica Friedlander

Questions … on the cutting edge of modern cancer research, lie at the interface of many disciplines. The answers are increasingly being sought not only by biologists but also by large, multidisciplinary teams that also include physicists, chemists,

mathematicians, engineers, and computer scientists.This approach to research is supported by the National

Cancer Institute, which has recently started a network of 12 Physical Science-Oncology Centers nationwide, including one at UC Berkeley, funded at $15.7 million.

The effort here is being led by Jan Liphardt, an associate professor of physics at UC Berkeley. Its goal, he explains, is not to immediately race to develop new drugs or diagnostic tools, but to step back and try to approach cancer in novel ways.

“Biology is beginning to explicitly consider how physics and mechanics influence what cells and tissue do,” says Liphardt. “… Our center is an example of what question-driven research increasingly looks like”.

Traditional research efforts and universities that are organized strictly according to traditional fields are increasingly obsolete, Liphardt says. “As Richard Feynman said, ‘Nature doesn’t care what you call it!’ It’s either an interesting and important question or it’s not, and it really doesn’t matter if we label it as physics or biology or chemistry. There’s increasing evidence that the way you solve these big problems–whether it’s climate or energy or disease–is by bringing together the right kind of teams with the right talent in a sort of smart-mob-like structure, rather than worrying what to call it or which department it should be in.”



QUEST FOR DARK ENERGY MAY FADE TO BLACK

From The New York Times January 4, 2011 by Dennis Overbye

An ambitious $1.6 billion spacecraft that would investi-gate the mysterious force that is apparently accelerating the expansion of the universe–and search out planets around other stars, to boot–might have to be postponed for a decade, NASA says, because of cost overruns and mismanagement on a separate project, the James Webb Space Telescope. The news has dismayed many American astronomers, who worry they will wind up playing second fiddle to their European counterparts in what they say is the deepest mystery in the universe.

“How many things can we do in our lifetime that will excite a generation of scientists?” asked Saul

Perlmutter, an astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley, who is one of dark energy’s discoverers. There is a sense, he said, “that we’re starting to give up leadership in these important areas in fundamental physics.” ‘

Last summer, after 10 years of debate and interagency wrangling, a prestigious committee from the National Academy of Sciences gave highest priority among big space projects in the coming decade to a satellite telescope that would take precise measure of dark energy, as it is known, and also look for planets beyond our solar system. The proposed project goes by the slightly unwieldy acronym Wfirst, for Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope.

NASA MISSION ASKS WHY MARS HAS NO

ATMOSPHERE

From Physorg October 7, 2010 by Robert Sanders

NASA this week gave the green light to a mission to Mars that will seek to understand why and how the red planet lost its atmosphere 3-4 billion years ago.

Dubbed the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution, or MAVEN, mission… More than half the instruments aboard the spacecraft, with a planned launch in late 2013, will be built at the University of California, Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory (SSL) under the direction of MAVEN deputy-principal investigator Robert Lin. “There’s lots of evidence that in the past, Mars had running water, but to have running water you need a thick atmosphere, and that’s gone now,” said Lin, a UC Berkeley professor of physics and former director of the SSL.

During its planned one-year mission, MAVEN will collect evidence to support or refute the reigning theory that once Mars lost its magnetic field, the solar wind and solar storms scoured the atmosphere away.

“Once you lose your atmosphere, that’s the end of any evolved life,” Lin added. “This mission will also tell us what might happen to other planetary atmospheres, even Earth’s, in the long run.”

ARTIST’S CONCEPTION OF MAVEN MARS ORBITER. (NASA/GODDARD SPACE

FLIGHT CENTER)

BOOKS AUTHORED OR EDITED BY BERKELEY PHYSICISTS

WHAT IS THE UNIVERSE MADE OF?

Hitoshi Murayama, Gentosha, 2010

UC Berkeley physics professor and member of the Berkeley Center for Theoretical Physics Hitoshi

Murayama won a “2010 Paperback Grand Prize”–known as the Shinso Award in Japan–for his book What is the Universe Made of? The book, published only in Japanese, was released in September 2010, and sold more than 264,000 copies the first year.

The book includes a description of the SuMIRe Project–Subaru Measurement of Images and Redshifts. SuMIRe aims to trace the evolution of the universe and elucidate the nature of dark matter and dark energy, using a newly developed Hyper Suprime-Cam & Spectrograph that are to be installed in the Subaru Telescope.

Murayama is Director of Japan’s Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe in Tokyo and Principle Investigator of SuMIRe. He is a popular Japanese-language spokesman for science, appearing frequently on radio and TV whenever he is in Japan.


P H Y S I C S I N T H E N E W S



AN INTRODUCTION TO TENSORS AND GROUP

THEORY FOR PHYSICISTS

Nadir Jeevanjee, Birkhäuser Boston, 2011, ISBN 978-0-8176-4714-8 (hardcover)

Nadir Jeevanjee, a doctoral student in the Berkeley Department of Physics, has written a new text-book, An Introduction to Tensors and Group Theory for Physicists. “I wrote the book to fill a niche I perceived in the literature,” he said. “I taught a seminar based on early chapters of the book

in the spring 2011 semester here at Berkeley, and will likely lead another based on the later chapters in the fall.”

Jeevanjee completed the book during a four-year leave of absence, taken also for the purpose of playing drums professionally. Originally from Los Angeles, he earned BS degrees in mathematics and physics at the University of Southern California in 2002.

According to the publisher, Jeevanjee’s book “ provides both an intuitive and rigorous approach to tensors and groups and their role in theoretical physics and applied mathematics. A particular aim is to demys-tify tensors and provide a unified framework for under-standing them in the context of classical and quantum physics. Connecting the component formalism prevalent in physics calculations with the abstract but more concep-tual formulation found in many mathematical texts, the work will be a welcome addition to the literature on tensors and group theory.”

Berkeley Physics Undergraduate Scholars (BPURS) 2010-2011The BPURS program pairs faculty with physics majors who are ready to engage in advanced research, These scholarships provide a $500 per semester stipend, funded by donations from the Friends of Physics. The program is designed to enhance undergraduate education and to contribute to the growth of the intellectual community on campus.

Fall 2010Janos BotyanszkiKo-Chieh Chang Alexander ChansonRaymond CoJasper DriskoAlexander GeorgesChi-Sing HoEric JinZlatko MinevThibaut MuellerMatthew NicholsUttam PaudelAllic SivaramakrishnanAndrew WongLucas Zipp

Spring 2011Janos BotyanszkiKo-Chieh Chang Raymond CoJasper DriskoChi-Sing HoGriffin HosseinzadehEric JinJinwoo KangZlatko MinevThibaut MuellerMatthew NicholsHyungmok SonDennis WangLucas Zipp

U N D E R G R A D U A T E A F F A I R S


Undergraduates of Distinction

RAYMOND TUNG-MING CO

Raymond Co, Student Speaker for the 2011 Department of Physics commencement ceremony, majored in both physics and applied math. He came to UC Berkeley as a transfer student from De Anza City College in the fall semester of 2009. While

at De Anza, Raymond was part of a Research Experience for Undergraduates program in an astrophysics group at the University of Washington, under the supervision of Professor Leslie Rosenberg. His work involved writing software to simulate images used to tile the sky and study the artificial effects for the Synoptic Survey Telescope.

At Berkeley, Co first joined Professor Stuart Freedman’s neutrino physics group, working on improving the background suppression necessary to detect rare neutrino events in the Kamioka Liquid Scintillator Antineutrino Detector. He was fascinated by how the law of energy conservation predicted the existence and properties of new particles 25 years before their discovery. He presented a poster on his research and was selected as one of four nominees from the entire UC Berkeley campus to advance to the national competition for the prestigious Goldwater Scholarship.

Co was also part of the Science Undergraduate Laboratory Internship at Fermilab, where he studied dark matter under the supervision of Dr. Jonhee Yoo and Lauren Hsu. Upon returning to Berkeley from Fermilab, he began working on his senior thesis under the sponsorship of Professor Wick Haxton. His theoretical physics project involved many-body and effective field theories. He graduated as one of our top seniors and is pursuing his PhD in physics at UC Berkeley

ALEXANDER REID JACOBSEN

Alex Jacobsen, recipient of the 2011 Student Service Award from the Department of Physics, came to UC Berkeley in the fall semester of 2007. He received his AB degree in physics this spring. Jacobsen was one of the first members of COMPASS–

a collaboration among undergraduate and graduate students in the physical sciences that helps students develop the skills needed to succeed in their studies.

An active member of the Berkeley physics commu-nity, Jacobsen consistently volunteered at department events ranging from CalDay and picnics to Job Fairs co-sponsored by the Career Center. He was a member of the Teaching Mad Science Team, an after-school program at Willard Middle School, an academically low performing school in the San Francisco Bay Area with a large number of students from historically disad-vantaged backgrounds. Mad Science’s goal is to develop experiment-based science lesson plans and to inspire students to think about science.

Jacobsen also took leadership of the Society of Physics Students for a year. He completed his degree while negotiating a very busy schedule of academics and volunteer work. The Department of Physics presented him with the 2011 Student Service Award in gratitude and recognition for his leadership and contributions.

Society for Physics StudentsBerkeley’s Society for Physics Students (SPS), founded and operated by undergraduate students, was established to foster a sense of community in the Departments of Physics and Astronomy. SPS sponsors monthly barbecues, helps out with annual Cal Day activities, organizes tutoring sessions for lower division students, sponsors an annual Undergraduate Poster Session, and presents a series of noontime seminars that give students an opportunity to learn about the careers of physics alumni.

UNDERGRADUATE POSTER SESSION

Eighteen research projects were included in the Undergraduate Poster Session held Friday April 8, 2011 in 375 LeConte Hall. This year’s research topics and the students who presented them included:

■ The Palomar Transient Factory, Janos Botyanszki

■ Mu2e Time-to-Digital Converter (TDC) Project, Ko-Chieh (Jessica) Chang

■ Unitary Gas in a Harmonic Trap for Many-Body System, Raymond Co

■ Series-parallel two dimensional arrays of YBa2Cu3O7−δ thin film ion damage Josephson Junctions, Jasper Drisko

■ The Higgs Boson, Alexander Georges

■ Plasmonic Nanostructure for High Harmonic Generation, Chi-Sing Ho

■ Measuring the Index of Refraction of Liquid Scintillator in the Daya Bay Reactor Neutrino Experiment, Griffin Hosseinzadeh




■ Element-specific study of epitaxial CoO/Fe and Jim Son NiO/Ag/CoO/Fe films grown on vicinal Ag(001) using Photoemission Electron Microscopy, Eric Jin

■ Temperature Dependence of Magnetic Properties of Metal-Insulator Hetero-Structures, Monica Jin Woo Kang

■ Packaging of Nicked DNA by the Bacteriophage Phi29, Joseph Magliocco

■ Optimizing the Josephson Parametric Amplifier–A Rajamani Vijayaraghavan numerical study, Zlatko Minev

■ Delta rays in ATLAS silicon, Thibaut Mueller

■ Low-Field Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Matthew Nichols

■ Role of Intramolecular Tension in Kinesin Motility, Kristin Schimert

■ The Dynamics of Ratcheting States of Cellular Flames, Allic Sivaramakrishnan

■ Fragmentation Function Analysis using Multiple Monte Carlo Simulations, Andrew Wong

■ A Technique to Increase the Resolution of the Triplespec Medium Resolution Infrared Spectrometer, Andrew Vanderburg

■ Diamond Magnetometry, Lucas Zipp

SPS Noontime Career SeminarsAt each noontime career seminar, undergraduate students are treated to pizza and a presentation about how a physics education can lead to a wide variety of successful careers. Most presenters are Berkeley physics alumni. The 2010-2011 academic year featured some high-profile offerings, including a visit from astronaut Sally Ride and a request for physics advice from a District Attorney working on a homicide case.

Karen Brockwell is Senior Director of the Cell Culture Manufacturing Facility at Genentech. Her presentation was titled Ref lections on a Career in Engineering and Biotechnology. Recently retired from Genentech, she now mentors young women in science and engineering. Brockman was honored in 2008 with the Woman of Distinction Award from the San Francisco Business Times.

Anton Kast (PhD ’95) is Vice President of Research & Development at Digg.com, a social news site. His talk was titled Abstracting the Real World: Physics is like Computer Programming. An expert in computational mathematics, scientific computing, and user interface design, Kast served as a visiting professor in the UC Berkeley Department of Physics before joining Digg.

Asit Panwala (BA ’96) currently works in the homicide unit of the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office. His talk was titled Physics and the Law: Does Learning Physics Matter? He shared with students a homicide investigation that was making some good use of his physics background.

Bahman Rabii (MA ’99, PhD ’02), former graduate student in Nobelist George Smoot’s research group, is a staff software engineer at Google. He worked on the MAXIMA project with George Smoot, Paul Richards, Adrian Lee, and others.

Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, is CEO of Sally Ride Science and emeritus physics professor at UC San Diego. In her talk, Sally Ride: An Inspiring Career in Space Exploration, Science Education, and Physics, she surveyed her career as an astronaut, physicist, and science educator.

SEGRÈ SUMMER INTERNS 2011

Berkeley’s Emilio Segrè Internships are eight-week summer programs that give undergraduates an opportunity to support and enhance the Physics 111 Advanced Laboratory curriculum (see page 11). This summer, thanks to an increase in the annual donation from

UNDERGRADUATES ZLATKO MINEV AND THIBAUT MUELLER AT THE


ERIC JIN TALKS WITH FELLOW UNDERGRADUATES ABOUT HIS RESEARCH.



alumnus and author Douglas Giancoli (BA ‘60, PhD ‘66), the Department of Physics was able to offer three internships instead of the usual two.

Guillermo Fong, William Morong, and Bennett

Sodergren were selected as Segrè Interns. Additional help came from student assistant David Bauer, retired alumnus Tom Andrade, graduate student Jonathan Ouellet, and several faculty members, including Robert Jacobsen, Hartmut Häffner, and Yury Kolomensky.

Quantum Interference

The summer’s biggest project was a new experiment called Quantum Interference and Entanglement. The experiment is related to professor Häffner’s research in quantum computing (see page 4), and additional support for its development came from Häffner’s National Science Foundation Career Award and a donation from alumnus Hans Mark (BA ’51).

The experiment creates entangled pairs of photons and demonstrates the phenomenon Einstein called “spooky action at a distance.” In the Advanced Lab, students will

observe this effect and find that nature violates either the concept of locality or the principle that properties of objects might be ill-defined, such as in quantum mechanics.

William Morong tested the single photon detectors, designed the power supply for them, developed soft-ware to handle the data and, with help from Bennett Sodergren, assembled the optical components.

Compton Scattering

Guillermo Fong led a substantial upgrade of the Compton Scattering Experiment, which had remained virtually unchanged since its creation 37 years ago. He tested a new Cd-Te X-ray detector that replaces the massive old Dewar-mounted detector with a single pocket-sized unit, and designed and fabricated a new apparatus that will allow students to test a variety of scattering targets. The new experiment gives students more options for creative-ly exploring the Compton effect and analyzing results at higher resolution.

Optical Tweezers

Bennett Sodergren began the summer by tearing apart the laser tweezers experiment, down to the bare bread-board. He rebuilt the microscope and beam path in a modular cage system that allows easier alignment and shields the beam without restricting access to the con-trols. He designed and assembled a second laser beam path to add capability for f luorescence microscopy.

Students will use the new equipment to measure the stalling forces of single kinesin motor molecules, an experiment that comes from professor Yildiz’s biophysics research. Students will use the laser tweezers to maneuver a kinesin-coated bead onto a fluorescent-labeled bundle of microtubules, then measure the force developed by the kinesin molecule as it pulls the bead along the microtubules.

The Segrè Internships for undergraduates are made possible with funding from Dr. Douglas Giancoli in memory of Nobel laureate Emilio Segrè. Giancoli is the author of several physics textbooks.

SEGRÈ INTERN BENNETT SODERGREN FINISHES REBUILDING THE

LASER TWEEZERS EXPERIMENT.

WILLIAM MORONG AND GUILLERMO FONG WORK ON THE NEW

QUANTUM INTERFERENCE AND ENTANGLEMENT EXPERIMENT.


COMMENCEMENT CEREMONIES

Officiating were Mark

Richards, Dean of Physical Sciences in the College of Letters and Science, Frances

Hellman, Chair of the Department of Physics, Imke de Pater, Chair of the Department of Astronomy, Geoffrey Marcy, Faculty Undergraduate Advisor for the Department of Astronomy, Robert Jacobsen, Vice-Chair of the Department of Physics, Yury Kolomensky, Head Faculty Undergraduate Advisor in the Department of Physics, and Eliot Quataert, Faculty Undergraduate Advisor in the Department of Astronomy.

For the 2010-2011 academic year, 111 bachelor degrees were awarded in Physics and 44 bachelor degrees were awarded in Astrophysics, Physical Sciences, and Engineering Physics. Master degrees were awarded to 40 students in Physics and six students in Astrophysics. The degree of doctor of philosophy was awarded to eight students in Astronomy and 43 students in Physics.

COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS

Commencement Speaker Richard Muller is Emeritus Professor of Physics and Professor of the Graduate School at UC Berkeley, Faculty Senior Scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and President of Muller Associates LLC. His honors include a MacArthur Prize, the National Science Foundation Alan T. Waterman Award, UC Berkeley Distinguished Teaching Awards, and the Donald Sterling Noyce Prize. Known primarily for his research in astrophysics and geophysics, he has also worked in paleoclimatology. Muller is the author of more than 120 scientific papers and eight books, including Physics for Future Presidents: The Science Behind the Headlines (Norton, 2008).

In his talk, Muller noted that the word commence-ment means ‘a beginning’. He encouraged the new graduates to continue what they started at Berkeley, to continue learning. “The pace at which you are mastering new material can actually increase,” he said, “now that you’ve learned how to learn.”

He exhorted students to never cease embarking on new endeavors, even if uncomfortable or confusing, and even if others don’t approve. He called on students to be adventurous while reminding them that adventures aren’t always pleasant. He recounted experiences of his own that became treasured memories and turning points in his life, although they were uncomfortable or even fright-ening at the time. “… if you relish the con-fusing,” he said, “the things that make no sense, the mysteries–if you relish being lost–then, at least in spirit, you are a scientist.” He pointed out to students that, now they have an edu-cation in physics, they’ve learned how to solve problems they haven’t encountered before.

“ the things that make no sense, the mysteries–if

you relish being lost–then, at least in spirit, you

are a scientist.”

In his conclusion he said, “Keep up that spirit of childhood discovery and wonder through constant learning. …Learn more every year than you did the previous year. … the possibilities are limitless. Work hard at it, accept the challenge, don’t avoid uncertainties and discomfort. Never stop learning and never lose the sense of adventure. Go for it!”

DEAN MARK RICHARDS

The Class of 2011

The UC Berkeley Departments of Physics, Astronomy, and Physical Sciences celebrated the 2011 Commencement

at Zellerbach Auditorium on May 16, 2011. Richard Muller, UC Berkeley Emeritus Professor of Physics, delivered

the commencement address. Carly Anne Chubak was Student Speaker for Astronomy. Raymond Tung-Ming Co

was Student Speaker for Physics.

RAYMOND TUNG-MING CO AND FRANCES HELLMAN

G R A D U A T E A F F A I R S


ASTRONOMY PRIZES AND AWARDS

Department CitationJieun Choi

Dorothea Klumke Roberts PrizeMarin Mallory Anderson

Mary Elizabeth Uhl Prize Daniel Alan Perley

Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor AwardAmber Nicole BauermeisterTherese Marie Jones

PHYSICS PRIZES AND AWARDS

Department CitationRaymond Tung-Ming Co

Student Service AwardAlexander Reid Jacobsen

Lars Commins Memorial Award in Experimental PhysicsVictor Watson BrarErik D. Shirokoff

Jackson C. Koo Award in Condensed Matter PhysicsYi “Frank” Zhang

OUTSTANDING GRADUATE STUDENT

INSTRUCTOR AWARDS

Recipients of the Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor (OGSI) Awards are recognized for their dedication and skill in teaching physics undergraduates. Each recipient receives a certificate of commendation from the Graduate Division, a cash award of $250, membership in the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT), and a subscrip-tion to the AAPT journal from the Friends of Physics Fund. Professor Robert Karplus established the tradition of the AAPT memberships that the Department of Physics continues in his honor.

Bradley Donald AndersonAaron Joe BradleyHung-Chung FanMichele KotiugaDan Mainemer KatzNathan Paul MooreAli Sucipto TanZachary Sebastian TravisPatrick Russell ZulkowskiJoel Leon Zylerberg


ZYLBERBERG WINS HHMI STUDENT AWARD

Joel Zylberberg, graduate student with UC Berkeley biophysicist Michael DeWeese, was named a 2011 International Student Research Fellow by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI). According to the

award announcement, the fellowship is being offered for the first time this year. Its purpose is to support science and engineering students during their third, fourth, and fifth year of graduate school. Zylberberg, who is from Ontario, Canada, is one of 48 students from 22 countries who were selected for this year’s awards.

“There are very few fellowship opportunities for our international students,” says Anne Takizawa, Supervisor of Student Services for the Department of Physics. “It’s really great that Joel received this award! His application was selected by the Graduate Division from a campus-wide competition.”

While attending Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Zylberberg conducted original research at one of Canada’s top laboratories and published peer-reviewed articles in nuclear physics, astrophysics, and materials science. He is also a Fulbright Scholar. According to Fulbrightonline.com his “undergraduate thesis was on the topic of Dark Energy, the as-of-yet unexplained accelerating expansion of the universe. Joel collaborated on computer simulations to determine how well future experiments might probe its properties, and how they might optimize strategies to obtain the maxi-mum amount of information from their observations.”

When Zylberberg first arrived at Berkeley in 2008, his interest in cosmology led him to work with physics professor Saul Perlmutter, leader of the Supernova Cosmology Project. Zylberberg shifted his focus to biophysics last year and describes his current research as “systems neuroscience using mathematical and computational modeling.” He is also an Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor award recipient.



LARS COMMINS AWARD

The 2011 Lars Commins Memorial Award in Experimental Physics was awarded to graduate students Victor Watson Brar and Erik D. Shirokoff.

Victor Brar received his PhD degree in Fall 2010. He was a research student with physics professor Mike Crommie in condensed matter experimentation. One of Brar’s many successes in the lab was to help set up a new spin-polarized scanning tunneling microscope (STM). He led an effort to explore the behavior of atomic adsorbates on graphene, and was the first to perform STM spectros-copy of single atoms sitting on a back-gated surface.

Brar showed that it is possible to charge individual atoms on graphene using a backgate electrode, and to detect this ionization and resulting screening via the STM tunnel current. Crommie, in his nominating letter, wrote, “Victor has a beautiful combination of deep phys-ical insight, profound intuition for choosing the most important problem, tenacity, experimental talent to single-mindedly follow his instincts, and uncanny ability to extract gorgeous physics from a morass of (seemingly) hopelessly complex data.”

Erik Shirokoff, a student with physics professor Bill Holzapfel in astrophysics experimentation, com-pleted his thesis work this summer. In his nominating letter, Holzpafel wrote, “Erik is an extraordinarily tal-ented experimental physicist who has built the world’s most sensitive cosmic microwave background receiver, spent a year the South Pole operating the 10-meter South Pole telescope, and used the resulting data to produce exciting new constraints on cosmological models. In the course of this work, he overcame considerable technical challenges, worked remarkably long hours, and exceeded any reasonable expectations at every turn. In the course of his graduate work, Erik has built state of the art instru-mentation, used it to make groundbreaking observations, and used those observations to confront some of the most interesting questions in cosmology.”

Lars Commins, the son of Berkeley emeritus physics professor Eugene Commins and his wife Ulla, was an accomplished engineer with a deep interest in experi-mental physics. The Lars Commins Award was created in 2004 as a lasting tribute to Lars and to help perpetu-ate the strong tradition of experimental physics that has always existed at Berkeley.

COMPASS VOLUNTEERS RAISE $10,000

The Compass Project, founded in 2006, provides a free, residential summer program of physics exploration and discovery for 15-20 incoming freshmen every year. The summer program is the centerpiece of the Compass Project’s suite of student services, which include continuous mentor-ship with graduate student volunteers throughout a partici-pant’s physics education, along with a special lecture series.

“When you come from a graduating class of maybe a few hundred students to a university where the atten-dance at one of your lectures may eclipse that, you can feel lost and on your own,” says Compass volunteer Josh Shiode. “The Compass Project aims to create and sustain a collaborative, academic community of peers and mentors in which students feel comfortable and confident.”

“This May,” he adds, “we were looking at an account balance closer to zero than the minimum $10,000 needed to put on even a shortened program run entirely by volunteers.” The group responded by launching a one-month fundraising effort, using email and Facebook to contact friends, family, and colleagues.

“The month was a blur of generosity,” Shiode reports. “We vaulted over our original $10,000 fundraising target. Everyone at the Compass Project would like to send their most heartfelt thanks to all our donors for making the summer program a reality for our 2011 class of 16 students.”

JACKSON KOO AWARD

Graduate student Yi “Frank” Zhang received the 2011 Jackson C. Koo Award in Condensed Matter Physics. The award was given in recognition of his research and work in physics professor Ashvin Vishwanath’s group.

In his nominating letter, Vishwanath said Zhang’s research “has focused on Topological Insulators, a recently discovered phase of matter. Usually, these are defined in terms of their unusual metallic surfaces. Frank showed that line defects of a crystal–dislocations–when inserted in a topological insulator, can be metallic. Moreover, these natural `wires’ are perfect metals at low temperatures. Imperfections and disorder do not impede the flow of current. This was an important and unexpected result, published in the April 2009 issue of Nature Physics and featured on the cover. Frank made important contributions to this work, from the first numerical calculations verify-ing this effect, to an elegant proof of the central formula that governs when metallic defects occur, despite being a second year student at that time.”



The Jackson C. Koo Award was created in 2009 in honor of Jackson Koo, a bright and hardworking student who received BS and MS degrees in Electrical Engineering and a PhD in Physics from UC Berkeley under the guidance of Professor Erwin Hahn. He was a member of Phi Beta Kappa and of the Honor Students society of UC Berkeley. After graduating, he worked at AT&T Bell Laboratories then joined Livermore National Laboratory. During his career he published numerous papers and was listed as an inventor on eight patents.

HELMHOLZ AWARD AT I-HOUSE

The Carl and Betty Helmholz Scholarship Endowment and the Kathleen Rosevear Gateway Fellowship for 2012 have granted Gil Young Cho, a graduate student in physics at Berkeley, the 2010-2011 Helmholz Award for full room and board at International House as a Gateway Fellow. The award also pays a stipend of $5000.

Cho, a third-year graduate student from Korea, works with physics professor Joel Moore in condensed matter theory. Cho was nominated for the award by the Department of Physics.

GRADUATE STUDENT POSTER SESSION

More than 50 graduate students shared their research at the Department of Physics Annual Graduate Student Poster Session held October 29, 2010 in the Helmholz room, 375 LeConte Hall. The 2010 session was organized by graduate students Punit Gandhi and Sönke Möller.

Poster exhibits covered a variety of topics in physics and astrophysics, ranging from studies of cosmic micro-wave background radiation and neutrino physics to dark matter, star formation, the search for supersymmetric particles, plasmons, laser trapping, superconductors, graphene, and carbon nanotubes.

The Best in Show honor went to Christopher Smallwood of Alessandra Lanzara’s research group for his poster, titled “Probing Dynamic Excitations of Complex Materials by Pump and Probe Photoemission Spectroscopy.”

Graduate students have an opportunity each year to share their research at the annual poster session. Throughout the academic year they have additional opportunities to talk about their work and practice for oral exams at student-only research seminars, which are open only to physics graduate students.

GRADUATE STUDENT FELLOWSHIPS 2010-2011

Chilean ScholarshipD. Mainemer-Katz

Department of Energy (DOE) Computational Fellowship D. Dandurand*

DOE National Nuclear Security Administration Stewardship Science Graduate FellowshipJ. Renner

DOE Oak Ridge Istitute for Science EducationS. Hoyer, P. Kehayias, M. Ramm, N. Roth, C. Thomas

Helmholz/Rosevear International House Award G.Y. Cho

HERTZ Foundation FellowshipD. Lecoanet*, M. Schwartz*, E. Marti

Howard Hughes Medical Institute FellowshipJ. Zylberberg*

Lam Research Corporation FellowsT. Barter*, S. Lourette*, A. Tan

Mentored Research AwardD. Speller

National Science FoundationN. Antler, J. Brosamer*, J. Burkart, S. Byrnes, N. Carlson, N. Carruth*, K. Cassella*, R. Co*,I. Kimchi, J. Lynn, K. Meaker, K. O’Brien, V. Rosenhaus, J. Schwab, D. Thorpe*, N. Torres Chicon, D. Yu, M. Zaletel

National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship D. Vigil Currey, A. Bradley, E. Levenson-Falk

University of California FellowshipsA. Lee, S. Marzen*,S. Miarecki, D. Qiu*, J. Varela*, D. Wong*

UC Mexus Conejo Nacional de Ciencia Y Tenología Fellowship D. Perez-Becker*

*First-time awardee to this fellowship


FALL 2010

Kam S. Arnold Advisor: Adrian LeeDesign and Deployment of the POLARBEAR Cosmic Microwave Background Polarization Experiment

Mark S. Bandstra Advisor: Steven BoggsObservation of the Crab Nebula in Soft Gamma Rays with the Nuclear Compton Telescope

Lacramioara Bintu Advisor: Carlos BustamanteDynamic Interactions and Molecular Rearrangements Occurring when RNA Polymerase II Meets the Nucleosome

Victor W. Brar Advisor: Michael CrommieScanning Tunneling Spectroscopy of Graphene and Magnetic Nanostructures

David W. Cooke Advisor: Frances HellmanThermodynamic Measurements of Applied Magnetic Materials

Roland De Putter

Advisors: Eric Linder and Saul PerlmutterProbing Dark Energy with Theory and Observation

Daniel R. Garcia Advisor: Alessandra LanzaraExploring Competing Orders in the High-Tc Cuprate Phase Diagram Using Angle Resolved Photoemission Spectroscopy

Martin V. Lueker Advisor: William HolzapfelMeasurements of Secondary Cosmic Microwave Background Anisotropies with the South Pole Telescope

Michael J. Myers Advisor: Adrian LeeAntenna-coupled Superconducting Bolometers for Observations of the Cosmic Microwave Background Polarization

Roger C. O’Brient Advisor: Adrian LeeA Log-Periodic Focal-Plane Architecture for Cosmic Microwave Background Polarimetry

Grigol G. Ovanesyan

Advisors: Christian Bauer and Yasunori NomuraApplying Effective Theories to Collider Phenomenology

Simon M. Rochester Advisor: Dmitry BudkerModeling Nonlinear Magneto-optical Effects in Atomic Vapors

Eric S. Roman Advisor: Ivo SouzaOrientation Dependence of the Anomalous Hall Effect in 3d-Ferromagnets

Yuki D. Takahashi Advisor: William HolzapfelMeasurement of the Cosmic Microwave Background Polarization with the BICEP Telescope at the South Pole

Kevin C. Young

Advisors: Birgitta Whaley and Irfan SiddiqiControlling Quantum Systems for Quantum Information Processing

Liang Yu

Advisor: Robert LittlejohnSemiclassical Analysis of SU(2) Spin Networks

P H Y S I C S P H D D E G R E E S


SPRING 2011

Victor M. Acosta

Advisor: Dmitry BudkerOptical Magnetometry with Nitrogen-Vacancy Centers in Diamond

Kyle H. Barbary

Advisor: Saul PerlmutterHigh-Redshift Type Ia Supernova Rates in Galaxy Cluster and Field Environments

Eric C. Bellm

Advisor: Steven BoggsStudies of Gamma-Ray Burst Prompt Emission with RHESSI and NCT

Sarah E. Busch

Advisor: John ClarkeUltra-low Field MRI of Prostate Cancer using SQUID Detection

Hal M. Haggard

Advisor: Robert LittlejohnAsymptotic Analysis of Spin Networks with Applications to Quantum Gravity

Qing He

Advisor: Ramamoorthy RameshInterface Magnetism in Multiferroics

William L. Klemm

Advisor: Hitoshi MurayamaMass, Spin, and Physics Beyond the Standard Model at Colliders

Stefan Leichenauer

Advisor: Raphael BoussoPredictions from Eternal Inf lation

Jeremy Mardon

Advisor: Yasunori NomuraClues in the Quest for the Invisible Universe

Jesse D. Noffsinger

Advisor: Marvin L. CohenThe Electron-Phonon Interaction from First Principles

Lauren A. Tompkins

Advisor: Beate HeinemannA Measurement of the Proton-Proton Inelastic Scattering Cross-Section at sqrt(s)=7 TeV with the ATLAS Detector at the LHC

Pu Yu

Advisor: Ramamoorthy RameshEmergent Phenomena at Complex Oxide Interfaces

Bradley M. Zamft

Advisor: Carlos BustamanteSingle Molecule and Synthetic Biology Studies of Transcription


A L U M N I N E W S A N D A W A R D SVernon Ehlers (AB ’56, PhD ’60, Research Advisor: William Nierenberg), GOP Representative from Michigan and the first research physicist to serve in Congress, announced in February 2010 that he was retiring and would not seek another Congressional term.

A CBS news story described Ehlers as “a moderate Republican who sought protections for the Great Lakes and funding for math and science education.” A ranking member of the Subcommittee on Research and Science Education, he had represented Michigan District 3 since 1993, a district that President Gerald R. Ford once represented.

Ehlers was quoted as saying, “Each of us should recognize that the world doesn’t depend just on us and I’ve been there 16 years now and that’s more than enough time for most people and I’ve accomplished a great deal.”

Ehlers also served in the Michigan State Legislature. Before entering politics, he taught physics for 16 years, from 1966-1983, at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. In retirement, he contin-ues to be active with the American Physical Society (APS) and issues of science education.

Clifford Surko (AB ’64, PhD ’68, Research Advisor: Frederick Reif), professor physics at UC San Diego (UCSD), is constructing what he hopes will be the world’s largest antimatter container. Antimatter particles are difficult to store because they are annihilated when they come in contact with ordinary matter.

As explained in a UCSD press release, “physicists have recently developed new methods to make special states of antimatter in which they can create large clouds of antiparticles, compress them, and make specially tailored beams for a variety of uses.”

Surko gave a talk titled “Taming Dirac’s Particle” at this year’s annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In his remarks, he described how electric and magnetic fields are being used to form ‘bottles’ that can hold positrons–anti-electrons–for hours. The positrons are cooled with liquid helium and compressed to very high densities.

“One can then carefully push them out of the bottle in a thin stream, a beam, much like squeezing a tube of toothpaste,” Surko said. “These beams provide new ways to study how antiparticles interact or react with ordinary matter. They are very useful, for example, in understanding the properties of material surfaces.”

“We are now working to accumulate trillions of positrons or more,” he continued, “in a novel ‘multi-cell’ trap–an array of mag-netic bottles akin to a hotel with many rooms, with each room con-taining tens of billions of antiparticles.”

He added that the benefits of trapping large numbers of positrons include improved formation and study of antihydrogen, investigation of electron-positron plasmas, and creation of a gamma ray laser. Surko’s long-term goal is to create portable antimatter traps for situa-tions in which positron sources are difficult to fabricate.

Steven Chu (PhD ’76, Research Advisor: Eugene Commins) was named 2011 Scientist of the

Year by R&D Magazine. The announcement, made on September 29, 2011, said, “Dr. Steven Chu is a familiar face to all, and he brings to the Award a depth of knowledge and ability that is reflected in both his accomplish-ments in science and the influence he now exercises in his role as head of the U.S. Dept. of Energy. …His enduring influence in the scientific world, his ability to exercise thoughtful analysis on a wide range of scientific topics, and his unwav-ering dedication to the advance of scientific knowledge all contribute his selection as Scientist of the Year.”

Chu was a Professor of Physics at Berkeley from July 01, 2004 until January 21, 2009, when he resigned his position and became US Secretary of Energy. From August 2004 until January 2009 he also served as the sixth Director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

The R&D announcement lists Chu’s numerous achievements, including the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics, “earned for breakthroughs in cooling and trapping atoms with laser light at the former Bell Labs in the late 1980s.”

As Director of Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, Chu brought a strong focus to energy research, especially biofuels and solar tech-nologies. “Applying his analytical approach to large-scale energy problems,” said the R&D announce-

A L U M N I A F F A I R S


ment, “he made sweeping proposals, including a low-carbon ‘glucose’ economy, and efforts to help manage global temperatures through reflec-tion and absorption of sunlight.”

Lindley Winslow (AB 2001, PhD 2008, Research Advisor: Stuart Freedman) won a L’Oreal USA for Women in

Science Fellowship Grant last year. She received the $60,000 award in October 2010, and is using it to support her efforts to design and build a particle accelerator based on quantum dots. The new device could improve methods used for monitoring the operation of nuclear reactors and tracking nuclear fuel.

The aim of L’Oreal’s fellowship program is to recognize and reward the most promising postdoctoral female scientists in the United States. “I’m delighted to be a recipient of the L’Oréal for Women in Science Fellowship,” Winslow said in a news release from MIT. “It’s exciting to have a project that I can own and control from beginning to end. This grant will give me the opportunity to prove myself at a point that’s pivotal in my career.”

Winslow is a postdoc in particle physics at MIT, in the Neutrino and Dark Matter Group with professor Janet Conrad. She focuses on answering the question of why there is more matter than antimatter in the universe. Winslow is also an active mentor for several MIT physics students, and has been a teaching assistant for minorities and women in physics and engineering.


C L A S S N O T E S 2 0 1 1

Class Notes are a great way to keep in touch with old friends. Please update us about your activities, both profes-sional and personal. Write to us when you have interesting news or just when you want to update us on what you’ve been doing for the past few years. We will include your message to fellow alums in the next issue of Physics @ Berkeley. Email updates may be sent to [email protected] or by U.S. mail to Maria Hjelm or Carol Dudley, Department of Physics, U.C. Berkeley, 366 LeConte, #7300, Berkeley, CA 94720-7300.

’60Vernon Ehlers (AB ’56. PhD ’60, Research Advisor: William Nierenberg) Republican Congressman, from the state of Michigan, announced his decision to retire after eight full terms in Congress.

’63Barry Barish (AB ’57, PhD ’63, Research Advisor: A. Carl Helmholz) Linde Professor of physics, emeritus, high-energy physics at Caltech, assumed the presidency of the American Physical Society on January 1, 2011. He is also the Director of the Global Design Effort for the International Linear Collider (ILC), and the Ronald and Maxine Linde Professor of Physics Emeritus at Caltech.

’65Robert Armstead (PhD ’65, Research Advisor: Charles Schwartz) is an associate professor of Physics at the graduate school of engineer-ing and applied sciences, Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California. He currently teaches physics and the computer simula-tion of free-electron lasers.

Joseph Yellin (PhD ’65, Research Advisor: Richard Marrus) has retired and is currently a professor emeritus from the Institute of Archaeology, faculty of humanities at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

’70Christopher Quigg (PhD ’70, Research Advisor: J.D. Jackson) is in the theoretical physics depart-ment at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. Chris received the 2011 J.J. Sakurai Prize for Theoretical Particle Physics along with Drs. Ian Hinchliffe, Kenneth Lane, and Estia Eichten, Citation: “For their work, separately and collectively, to chart a course of the exploration of TeV scale physics using multi-TeV hadron colliders.”

’72Michio Kaku (PhD ‘72, Research Advisor: Stanley Mandelstam) is co-founder of a branch of string theory known as string field theory. He has taught physics at the City College of New York for more than 25 years and presently holds the Henry Semat Chair and Professorship in theoretical physics. Kaku has published at least seven popular books about science, including Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100, released earlier this year, and Physics of the Impossible, which appeared on the NY Times bestseller list in 2008. He has appeared in several television documentaries, hosts regular radio programs, and writes for numerous magazines and blogs.


Hadrian R. Katz (MA ’72) is a partner at Arnold and Porter, LLP, Washington, DC, where he special-izes in cases with high technology content.

’75David Berke (AB ’75) writes, “Go University of California/L.B.L. (“Cal”) Physics and Cosmology Department! The best in the World! Continuing to bring teaching, research, and public service to the World! Go Bears!”

’77Ann Parker (AB ’77) is the author of several books, including recent paperback edition of Leaden Skies: A Silver Rush Mystery. Other books include her award-winning Silver Rush and Iron Ties. Ann is a member of several writing groups including the National Association of Science Writers and the Mystery Writers of America.

’80William Rison (MA ’75, PhD ’80, Research Advisor: John Reynolds) is currently a professor of electrical engineering at New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, Socorro, NM. His primary research areas are observations of lightning and thunderstorms, and the design of instrumentation to make such observations.

’85Joseph Siino (AB ’85) is the princi-pal founder and CEO of Ovidian Group, a US-based intellectual property firm that provides IP investment and business solutions to companies around the world.

Previously he was senior vice presi-dent of global intellectual property at Yahoo!

’86Joseph Kahn (AB ’81, MS ’83, PhD ’86, Research Advisor: Leo Falicov) is presently a professor of electrical engineering at Stanford University. In 2000 he co-founded StataLight Communications, Inc. in Campbell, CA. From 2003-2008 he was one of their advisory board members and consultant.

’89Marcus Hertlein (AB ’89) has worked at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory for the past 10 years. He currently works as a synchrotron-laser X-ray beam physicist. On August 29, 2011 he was part of a team of artists and scientists who helped build “The One Mile Clock Project”. An idea created by Jim Bowers, an Auburn multi-media artist. “Marc is building the mechanical contraption at the core of it all: a box in the tower with three 1-watt YAG lasers and syn-chronized rotating mirrors. It will keep time, sundown to sunrise, until the Burners decamp on Labor Day. “I’m responsible for it,’’ he says, with just the slightest hint of panic in his eyes. “I have to design and build it, and make it work.”

Something more is at stake than merely keeping time. Word is that this clock could make it into the Guinness Book of World Records. “Largest timepiece. A new category,” says Marc.”

Excerpted from an article written by Sabin Russell, in “Today at Berkeley lab.”

’94James Bock (MA ’90, PhD ’94, Research Advisor: Andrew Lange) is currently a visiting associate professor in physics at Caltech. He is the recipient of the 2011 NASA Group Achievement Award Planck Data Analysis and Operations Support Team. His research interest is in infrared/millimeter-wave detectors and instrumentation, far-infrared galaxy photometric and spectroscopic surveys, and cosmic microwave background anisotropy and polarization.

Aephraim Steinberg (PhD ’94, Research Advisor: Raymond Chiao) is a professor of physics at the University of Toronto. His research work is in the field of quantum optics.

’95Carl Schroeder (MA ’95, PhD ’99, Research Advisor: Jonathan Wurtele) joined the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) in 2001. He is in the Lasers, Optical Accelerator Systems Integrated Studies (LOASIS) program. He is also one of six recipients of the John Dawson Award for Excellence in Plasma Physics, Citation: “For experiments and theory leading to the demonstration of high-quality electron beams from laser-plasma accelerators.”

’96Sarah Bolton (PhD ’96, Research Advisor: Daniel Chemla) is Dean of the College, professor of physics at Williams College, Williamstown, MA.




’97Jose Menchero (PhD ’97, Research Advisor: Steven Louie) previously was head of Quantitative Research at Thomson Financial. He is pres-ently an Executive Director in the research department at MSCI Barra, where his focus is on factor modeling and portfolio analytics.

’98David Cooperberg (PhD ’98, Research Advisor: Joel Fajans) is an associate at the firm of Kenyon and Kenyon, LLP, New York in Intellectual Property Law. Previously, David was a staff process and modeling engineer at Lam Research Corporation.

’00Ryan Bay (PhD 2000, Research Advisor: P. Buford Price) is currently an associate research physicist at Cal Space Sciences Laboratory. Ryan is participating in the UCB IceCube research group.

John Colton (MA ’97, PhD 2000, Research Advisor: Peter Yu) after graduation joined the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC as a National Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow. Followed by an Assistant Professor appointment at the University of Wisconsin La Crosse University. Since September 2007 John is an associate professor in the physics and astronomy department, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah.

’01Aaron Lindenberg (PhD 2001, Research Advisor: Roger Falcone) is an assistant professor in the depart-ment of materials science and engi-neering at Stanford University. His research is focused on probing the ultrafast dynamics and atomic-scale structure of materials on femtosec-ond and picosecond time-scales.

’04Kyle Dawson (PhD 2004, Research Advisor: William Holzapfel) joined the department of physics and astronomy at the University of Utah in 2009. His work there primarily focuses on observational cosmology and the instrumentation required for astronomical observations.

Jonathan Levine (PhD 2004, Research Advisor: Richard Muller) is currently an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Colgate University, New York.

’05Cameron Geddes (PhD 2005, Research Advisor: Wim Leemans and Jonathan Wurtele) is a staff scientist in the Lasers, Optical Accelerator Systems Integrated Studies (LOASIS) program of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He is also one of six recipients of the John Dawson Award for Excellence in Plasma Physics, Citation: “For experiments and theory leading to the demonstra-tion of high-quality electron beams from laser-plasma accelerators.”

’10Lacramioara Bintu (PhD 2010, Research Advisor: Carlos Bustamante) was selected for a Harold M. Weintraub Graduate Student Award to recognize outstanding achievements in Graduate Studies.

’11Victor Acosta (PhD 2011, Research Advisor: Dmitry Budker) is work-ing at Hewlett Packard Laboratory. He is the recipient of a Silver Award from the Materials Research Society in Warrendale, PA.


I N M E M O R YLeon Kaufman (PhD ’67, Research Advisor: Victor Perez-Mendez), a pioneer in the development of mag-netic resonance imaging (MRI), died on December 8, 2010, at the age of 70.

Kaufman was Professor Emeritus of Physics, University of California at San Francisco (UCSF). He established UCSF’s MRI program in 1975 and over the next 24 years was responsible for key breakthroughs, including the first commercially successful MRI scanner and the launching of open MRI technology. His developments set the stage for MRI standards still in use today.

Kaufman left UCSF in 1994 to serve as Chief Scientist and Vice President of Engineering at Toshiba. In 2001 he became CEO of AccuImage Diagnostics Corp., a company that develops scanners for producing 3D images of the heart, coronary arteries, and other areas of the human body.

Leon J. (Lee) Schipper (PhD ’85, Research Advisor: Eugene Commins), energy efficiency expert and former scientist in Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Environmental Energy Technologies Division, died August 16 of pancre-atic cancer. He was 64.

Schipper gained prominence early in his career for a paper pub-lished in Science in 1976 showing how Sweden, an aff luent country, had an energy intensity far lower than that of the U.S. “This became a very famous paper,” said Mark Levine, who was Schipper’s super-visor for most his career at LBNL and now leads Berkeley Lab’s China Energy Group. “By the mid-1970s he was one of the most highly regarded energy analysts in the US,

known and widely respected in energy circles around the world.”

Schipper broke new ground by analyzing energy data in various countries and comparing them. He demonstrated that energy intensity did not correlate with GDP in any simple way and was able to show why.

In the early 1970s he joined UC Berkeley’s Energy and Resources Group where he worked with John Holdren, now President Barack Obama’s science advisor. He first worked at Berkeley Lab as a graduate student in 1972 and joined as a scientist in 1978. He went on leave in 1995 to work as a visiting scientist for the International Energy Agency in Paris.

After leaving LBNL in 2001, Schipper helped found EMBARQ at the World Resources Institute Center for Sustainable Transportation. He had appoint-ments at Stanford University’s Precourt Energy Efficiency Center and UC Berkeley’s Global Metropolitan Studies. He contrib-uted to the Second and Third Assessment Reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007.

“Lee’s unbridled enthusiasm for his work and music was both engaging and stimulating and lit a fire in his colleagues for not only working harder but also for making sure that our conclusions were based on solid research,” said Berkeley Lab scientist Ed Vine. …“we always looked forward to Lee’s latest jokes and humor, as a way to lighten our day.”

(excerpted from a Berkeley Lab press release written by Julie Chao, August 2011)


LEE SCHIPPER WITH ENERGY ENVIRONMENT SIM-

ULATOR. (Berkeley Lab photo archives, 1974)

START OF FALL SEMESTER 2011

Thursday, August 18th

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