Carolyn Porco, a Stony Brook alumnus (B.S. 1974), is Cassini Imaging Team Leader and Director, Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for Operations, Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colorado. She gave a Provost's Lecture titled "In Orbit! The Voyage of Cassini to Saturn" on Oct.1, 2004 at the Charles B. Wang Center Theatre, where she shared her experiences from the past year when Cassini went into orbit around Saturn and returned the best images of Saturn we have to date.

The Second Simons Workshop in Mathematics and Physics was held at Stony Brook from July 26 to August 27, 2004. The workshop focused on the intersection between physics and mathematics, particularly in the context of string theory, and are made possible by the generous support of the Simons Foundation. The emphasis of this Simons Workshop was "Superstrings and Topological Strings". About 60 participants from the U.S. and many other countries attended this Simons workshop, which featured daily talks and discussion sessions.

At a reception held at the C.N. Yang Institute for Theoretical Physics on May 3, 2004 colleagues of Distinguished Professor Peter van Nieuwenhuizen celebrated on the occasion of his receiving one of his home country's highest honors, Ridder in de Orde van de Nederlandse Leeuw, or member of the Order of the Netherlands Lion.

The Orde van de Nederlandse Leeuw is the oldest honorary civil society in the Netherlands, dating from 1815. It was created to recognize exceptional achievement and service in all professions. The list of each year's inductees is published by the government of the Netherlands on the Queen's birthday (April 30), and Peter was presented with the medal of the Order in New York City on that day by the Consul General of the Netherlands. At the Institute, his colleagues presented him with a stuffed lion in the spirit of light-hearted congratulations.

In his over twenty five years on the Stony Brook faculty, Peter has maintained close links with science in the Netherlands. The influence of his physics research, his students and former associates is strong in the Netherlands, in America and throughout the world community of theoretical physics.

On March 31, 2004, Cumrun Vafa (Donner Professor of Science, Harvard University, and Scientific Advisor, Simons Workshops in Mathematics and Physics, Stony Brook University) gave a lecture in Charles B. Wang Center Theatre about "Strings, Crystals, and the Fabric of Space and Time".

Five Intel Science Talent Search semifinalists (out of 300 nationwide) were supervised by members of our department. They are: Yiyi Deng (Metcalf/Noe), Maanit Desai (Metcalf/Noe), Ahmed Mallik (Zahed), Oleg Polyakov (Metcalf/Noe), and Eduard Reznik (Lattimer). Reznik was subsequently chosen as one of 40 finalists for his paper "New Exact Solutions to Einstein's Equations") that gives astronomers a better understanding of a star's internal structure.

On January 30, Barbara Jacak gave a 20 minute interview to the NPR program "Talk of the Nation: Science Friday" hosted by Ira Flatow on the recent studies of ultra dense and high temperature collisions of heavy ions at RHIC. This interesting review can be heard here.

Hal Metcalf has been elected as vice chair of the American Physical Society Division of Laser Sciences. Hal will succeed to the chairmanship in 2006.

Mike Marx is serving as project manager for the KOPIO experiment that as part of the RSVP (Rare Symmetry Violating Processes) initiative that has now been slated for funding by the NSF. KOPIO is a $50M experiment that seeks to measure the very rare decay of the K long meson into a pizero and two neutrinos, which can cleanly determine the nature of CP violation in the K meson system. The KOPIO summer interns invented a 'save the world' game found at http://www.phy.bnl.gov/~millerc/KOPhome.html

"The Peter B. Kahn Library of Mathematics, Physics and Astronomy is named to commemorate Peter's many contributions to the library, his belief in the power of books to transform lives, and his generosity to those who have studied here."

Stony Brook has joined with Yale, American Museum of Natural History, Ohio State, Johns Hopkins, and Georgia State as operators of the new SMARTS consortium that operates three 1 meter class telescopes in Cerro Tololo Chile, bringing about 100 nights per year of observations for Stony Brook astronomers.

The forward preshower detector built by graduate student Abid Patwa with colleagues at Stony Brook and Brookhaven Lab was selected for inclusion in the Museum of Modern Art in New York exhibit on Art and Science for summer 2003.

George Sterman (Professor and Director of the C.N.Yang Institute for Theoretical Physics) is co-winner, with Al Mueller of Columbia, of the 2003 American Physical Society J.J. Sakurai prize. The citation is:

"For developing concepts and techniques in QCD, such as infrared safety and factorization in hard processes, which permitted precise quantitative predictions and experimental tests, and thereby helped to establish QCD as the theory of the strong interactions."

The work recognized by this prize makes it possible to calculate systematically the probabilities for events like the one shown here, from the ongoing Run II at the Tevatron. In this figure, the histograms show two ``jets" emerging in the D0 detector, due to the scattering of quarks or gluons within a proton and an antiproton that collide at high energy. The same methods are at the basis of many searches for projected signals, and backgrounds, for the Higgs boson and for new physics beyond the standard model. A general-interest discussion of the physics behind these events is given at this web page.

Stony Brook is establishing a Center for Environmental Molecular Sciences with a $5.7M, five-year grant from the National Science Foundation along with an additional, similar amount from the Department of Energy to Brookhaven National Laboratory. The Center will be directed by Prof. Richard Reeder of the Geosciences department, and includes Prof. Chris Jacobsen of Physics & Astronomy as one of the six Stony Brook P.I.s and Prof. Janos Kirz as an associate member (several Brookhaven Lab scientists are also associated with the center, along with Penn State and Temple University). The scientific theme of the Center will be the study of the fundamental molecular basis for sequestration and remobilization of hazardous contaminants in soils and near-surface geomaterials, both natural and engineered. These studies will be carried out in large part using x-ray absorption spectroscopy and microprobe experiments at the National Synchrotron Light Source at Brookhaven National Laboratory. The Center will include a strong outreach component, including educational resources for the university and the community, and a Certificate program for graduate students (including those from Physics & Astronomy) who participate in the research of the Center and take a certain number of classes.

Ken Lanzetta held a press conference at NASA on Jan. 8 to discuss the recent finding of his group indicating an unexpected burst of bright galaxy appearances/star formation a few hundred million years after the big bang. The story featured in the NY Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, CNN and in an NPR story. The NASA story is at http://oposite.stsci.edu/pubinfo/pr/2002/02/pr.html

These results have been published by Jewitt (U of Hawaii), Aussel (U of Hawaii), and Evans (SUNY, Stony Brook) in Nature, volume 411, pages 446-447. The official (20000) Varuna webpage can be accessed here.

Stony Brook is part of the largest university group within the PHENIX collaboration (http://www.phenix.bnl.gov), searching for the Quark Gluon Plasma at the new Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (http://www.bnl.gov/RHIC). A Quark Gluon Plasma is thought to have existed for the first few microseconds after the big bang, but its properties remain rather mysterious.

RHIC's first run was in fall of 2000, and PHENIX has found some exciting first results! Many thousands of particles are created when RHIC collides two gold ions at very nearly the speed or light. We see evidence for very energetic scattering between the quarks and gluons contained inside these heavy nuclei (Phys. Rev. Lett. 86, 3500 (2001)). The energy density reached in the collisions is more than 50% higher than has ever been seen before. At more than 4.6 GeV per cubic femtometer, the energy density at RHIC is above that needed to melt hadrons into quarks and gluons, and create a quark-gluon plasma (Phys. Rev. Lett. 87, 052301 (2001)).

PHENIX observes a depletion of particles with high momentum (nucl-ex/0109003). Such a depletion has been predicted to occur when quarks and gluons lose large amounts of energy as they traverse the plasma. This effect offers the chance to measure, for the first time, the plasma's energy transport properties. We are also investigating, together with the Stony Brook nuclear theory group, how explosive the collisions at RHIC really are. The second run of RHIC goes from August - December of 2001, and we will be able to look at electron pairs and photons radiated from the plasma to determine its temperature, as well as the bound state of charm quarks (the J/psi), which should be broken up by the plasma.

Intriguing nuclear structure effects related to spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking have been observed in the Nuclear Structure Laboratory at Stony Brook for odd-odd nuclei having triaxial shapes in the A130 region. To minimize energy, the angular momenta of the h_11/2 valence proton, the h_11/2 valence neutron, and the core rotation R tend to align along the perpendicular axes of the triaxial core. This occurs when the Fermi level is low within the h_11/2 proton subshell, but high within the h_11/2 neutron subshell resulting in their angular momenta oriented along the short and long axes, respectively. The angular momentum R is oriented along the intermediate axis because it has the largest moment of inertia. These three mutually perpendicular angular momenta can be arranged to form two systems which differ by intrinsic chirality, a left- and a right-handed system as shown in the figure below; the two systems cannot be transformed into each other by rotation or space inversion, but are related by the chiral operator, which is a combination of time reversal and rotation by 180, TR. When chiral symmetry is thus broken in the body-fixed frame, the restoration of the symmetry in the laboratory frame is manifest as a doubling of states, namely, for these configurations, as degenerate doublet =1 bands. The observation of these doublet bands in four A130 nuclei, just reported in K. Starosta, et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 86 (2001) 971, document these important symmetry properties in nuclei, which provide the first direct evidence for stable triaxial shapes in nuclei. (see Phys. Rev. Focus)

The 2001 King Faisal International Prize for Science will be shared by C. N. Yang, Einstein Professor Emeritus, with Prof. Sajeev O. John of the University of Toronto. The announcement (see http://www.kff.com/winners/2001/Science-English.htm) states: "Professor Yang is one of the most eminent contemporary physicists. Among his many fundamental contributions to the field of physics, Professor Yang proposed a theoretical framework which later became the basis of the present theory of the structure of matter at the smallest scales and highest energies".

The theoretical framework referred to is generally known as Yang-Mills theory. Provost Robert McGrath's nominating letter states: "The work has become in the 20th century what Maxwell theory became in the nineteenth century".

Prof. Yang has graciously donated the proceeds of his prize to the fund which is being created to establish a chair in his name at Stony Brook.

Hubble Space Telescope observations of the isolated neutron star RX J185635-3754 have now revealed its distance and its motion across the sky. This object, the brightest isolated (non-pulsing) neutron star known, was discovered in 1992 from its intense X-ray emission (Walter, Wolk, & Neuhaeuser, Nature 379, 233, 1996). The optical counterpart, a faint blue star, was discovered in Hubble Space Telescope images obtained in October 1996 (Walter & Matthews, Nature 389, 358, 1997; image and press release available at http://oposite.stsci.edu/pubinfo/pr/97/32.html). Two additional images obtained in 1999 wave show that the neutron star is located at a distance of 61 parsecs (200 light years), and that it is moving through space with a velocity of 108 km/s. This is the closest known neutron star to the Earth. The direction of motion suggests that it was ejected from the Upper Scorpius association about 900,000 years ago, about the same time when a supernova is known to have gone off there (neutron stars are created in supernova explosions). This work will appear in the Astrophysical Journal (March 2001), and the press release is available at http://oposite.stsci.edu/pubinfo/PR/2000/35/index.html.

Neutron stars are the densest form of matter known in the universe, and provide a testbed for theories of matter at high densities. Stony Brook astronomers will continue to observe RX J185635-3754 with the Hubble Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory, in order to further study the composition and equation of state of this neutron star.

Four members of the Physics Department at the University at Stony Brook have been named the winners of prestigious awards from national or international physics societies. Paul Grannis, Gerald Brown, Emilio Mendez, and Igor Aleiner have been honored by a variety of organizations.

Brown has earned the 2001 Hans A. Bethe Prize, which is awarded by the American Physical Society (APS) for outstanding work in theory, experiment or observation in the areas of astrophysics, nuclear physics, or closely related fields. Brown was cited for his "insightful analyses of the effects of various nuclear constituents on nucleon interactions and nuclear structure, and his contributions to new viewpoints on supernovae, neutron stars, and black hole formation." Brown joined the Stony Brook faculty in 1968 and is a resident of Setauket, N.Y.

The APS also awarded the 2001 W.K.H. Panofsky Prize to Paul Grannis. The award recognizes outstanding achievements in Experimental Particle Physics and is being given to Grannis for "his distinguished leadership and vision in the conception, design, construction, and execution of the DO experiment at the Fermilab Tevatron proton-antiproton collider." Grannis, who has been a member of the Stony Brook faculty since 1966, is a resident of Stony Brook, N.Y.

The APS is the primary professional organization for physicists in the U.S. and conducts activities related to international affairs, education, women and minorities, demographics trends, and public policy issues. Brown and Grannis will receive their awards at the annual APS meeting in Washington in April.

Mendez was honored with the 2000 Quantum Devices Award last week at the International Symposium on Compound Semiconductors in Monterey, California, sponsored by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE). He was recognized for "pioneering work in electric-field induced optic effects in quantum wells and superlattices." The IEEE, the major international organization of electrical and electronic engineers, promotes the creation, diffusion, and application of knowledge about electrical and information technologies and sciences. Mendez joined the Stony Brook faculty in 1995 and resides in Setauket, N.Y.

Aleiner is the recipient of the 2000 William L. McMillan Award given by the University of Illinois for outstanding contributions in the field of Condensed Matter Physics. The honor, which will be presented October 19 at the Illinois campus in Urbana-Champaign, is given to an outstanding scientist in Condensed Matter Physics within four years of receipt of the Ph.D. He joined the Stony Brook faculty in 1998 and lives in Port Jefferson, N.Y.

Connecting the Wave and Particle Aspects of Light The nature of light is a topic that has animated discussions in physics since the time of Isaac Newton. The argument of wave versus particle is resolved in quantum electrodynamics by a formalism that combines both of these aspects. The formalism is fundamentally statistical, and as with quantum phenomena in general, it is through the statistical uncertainty/fluctuations that the wave and particle natures of light sit self-consistently side by side. Two lines of experiments have been followed: those measuring the particle aspect of light (correlations between pairs of photon detections) and those studying the wave aspect of light (squeezing experiments that measure the fluctuation variance of the wave amplitude). No attempt had been made previously to draw on the particle and wave aspects together by correlating a photon detection with fluctuations of the electromagnetic wave amplitude. Gregory Foster and Luis Orozco from Stony Brook in collaboration with Howard Carmichael and Hector Castro Beltran from the University of Oregon have done this, using a cavity quantum electrodynamic (QED) system as a source. They observe the fluctuation of the wave amplitude of light underlying these measurements by exploiting the conditioning on a photon detection to catch the fluctuation as it occurs. Through the wave-particle correlation function they have measured the conditional time evolution of the field of a fraction of a photon. [Foster et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 85, 3149 (9 October 2000) (Article in PDF format)].

The seeming conflict between the strange predictions of quantum mechanics and our everyday observations of the behavior of macroscopic objects in the world around us has lead many to question whether quantum mechanics can be expected to describe the behavior of such macroscopic objects at all. This quandary was vividly illustrated in the early days of quantum mechanics by the strange behavior of Schrödinger's cat, which - supposedly -- could be simultaneously in states of death and life as long as no one looked. Recent experiments at Stony Brook in the group lead by Prof. James Lukens have demonstrated this sort of coherent superposition of states in a system many orders of magnitude larger than those in which it had previously been observed. In this case the states were flux states of a superconducting loop 200 microns across. This loop appeared to be in a coherent superposition of states having currents of several microamps simultaneously flowing clockwise and counterclockwise. [J. Friedman, et al., Nature 406, 43, (July 2000)]

X-Ray Crystallography of Non-Crystals has been carried out by Jianwei Miao, David Sayre and their collaborators at the National Synchrotron Light Source. X-rays have long been used to determine the structure of crystalline objects: when the waves strike periodic arrays of atoms or molecules the waves diffract into discrete Bragg patterns. A map of the sample's structure can be determined from the intensities in the pattern to approximately Angstrom resolution by the methods of crystallography. In the new experiment, X-rays were directed onto a micrometer-sized specimen built up with 100-nm gold nanoparticles (fabricated by Pambos Charalambous at Kings College). That manifestly noncrystalline object produced a continuous (rather than discrete) diffraction pattern, which was then phased and reconstructed into a high quality image with a resolution of about 65 nm. That reverse process employed a new technique based on oversampling the diffraction pattern. The team believes that this approach will open the door to high resolution 3D imaging without the need for high resolution optics. (Jianwei Miao, Pambos Charalambous, Janos Kirz & David Sayre, Nature 400, 342-344 (1999). News articles in Science 285, 509-511 (1999), Physics Today (October 1999, Physics Update), The Scientist vol 13, 17 (August 30, 1999) ).

Members of the groups working on superconducting device physics, lead by Profs. Konstantin Likharev and James Lukens have recently demonstrated simple digital circuits which perform the divide-by-two operation with input bit rates as high as 770 gigabits/s. These results are over 10 times faster than comparable semiconductor circuits. This work was made possible by the combination, in the dept. of Physics & Astronomy, of the RSFQ (Rapid Single Flux Quantum) design group of Prof. Likharev -- the inventor of the RSFQ superconductor logic family -- and the fabrication laboratory of Prof. Lukens, which has unique capabilities for the fabrication of superconductor circuits whose active elements (Josephson junctions) can be as small as 0.01 sq. micron.

To particle physicists, the electron is truly an elementary particle: experiments to date have revealed no internal structure, no evidence that an electron is made up of some more fundamental components. To condensed matter physicists, the rules may appear different. Collective excitations in systems of many interacting electrons were theoretically predicted to carry a fractional charge. Recent Stony Brook experiments, led by Vladimir Goldman, indeed have observed such fractionally charged quasiparticles.

At the Neutrino 98 conference (XVIII International Conference on Neutrino Physics and Astrophysics) held in Takayama, Japan, June 4 - 9, 1998, the Super-Kamiokande collaboration has reported an evidence for massive neutrinos. A group of experimental particle physicists from Stony Brook led by Prof. Chang Kee Jung is part of the US team in the Super-Kamiokande collaboration which is composed of about 120 physicists including graduate students from 23 institutions from Japan and US.

Using Van de Graaff and superconducting linear accelerators, and laser-driven optical traps, Stony Brook scientists have captured enough of the element Francium for it to be observable with the naked eye for the first time in human history.

With the discovery of the top quark in 1995 (with Stony Brook leadership) the elementary particles of matter envisioned by the Standard Model, and the carriers for the strong, electromagnetic and weak forces, had all been observed. Our D0 group has recently made new advances in measuring the properties of the top quark, exploring the strong force at very short distances, studying the unified electroweak force, and searching for new particles that could signal the unification of all forces.