Stony Brook Physics & Astronomy: News

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Nature lists T2K paper #1 remarkable discovery in 2020

Nature highlights T2K publication as first of 10 remarkable discoveries from 2020.

The paper reports possible findings of the violation of particle-antiparticle mirror symmetry (also known as CP symmetry) by particles from the lepton group. Leptonic CP violation can be searched for using neutrinos. The results exclude CP conservation at a 95% confidence level, and could be the first indications of the origin of the matter-antimatter asymmetry in our Universe. Original research: Nature 580, 339-344 (2020).

2020-12-14

Stony Brook Physics receives 5+ Club Award

Department of Physics and Astronomy is among the 2019-2020 Awardees of the "The 5+ Club"

Every year the Physics Teacher Education Coalition (PhysTEC) awards institutions that graduate 5 or more physics teachers membership in the 5+ Club. In 2019-2020 our department is one of 8 recipients among more than 300 member institutions of PhysTEC. Our MAT program is one of the few regular awardees nationwide. We collaborate closely with the Institute for STEM Education (iSTEM) to continue to provide Long Island with outstand physics teachers. More details can be found at PhysTEC or SBU news.

2020-12-08

Axel Drees and Peter Stephens rised to rank of SUNY Distinguished Professor

Axel Drees and Peter Stephens from the Department of Physics and Astronomy have been elevated to the rank of Distinguished Professoer - a prestigious honor bestowed upon professionals of the highest caliber by the State University of New York Board of Trustees. More details can be found here.

2020-12-04

Three Physics and Astronomy Faculty named 2020 APS Fellows

American Physical Society (APS) has elected Fellows for the year of 2020. APS Fellowship is a distinct honor for APS members and is a prestigious recognition by their peers.

Physics and Astronomy would like to congratulate:

Essig, Rouven - Particles and Fields
Physics & Astronomy and YITP
For broad and innovative contributions to the search for hidden sectors and low mass dark matter, and for developing and realizing new detection concepts both for fixed target and for sub-GeV dark matter direct detection experiments.

Fernandez-Serra, Marivi - Computational Physics
Physics & Astronomy
For extending density functional theory in groundbreaking work on the structure and dynamics of complex materials, and especially for improving understanding of the electronic structure of water, including ice and interfaces.

Schneble, Dominik A. - Atomic, Molecular & Optical Physics
Physics & Astronomy
For groundbreaking work in ultracold atomic physics, and simulation of quantum electrodynamic systems with cold atoms in optical lattices.

2020-09-28

Rouven Essig Receives 2021 New Horizons Prize in Physics

Rouven Essig of the YITP was named a winner of the 2021 New Horizons Prizes in Physics, "For advances in the detection of sub-GeV dark matter especially in regards to the SENSEI experiment." Three New Horizons prizes are awarded annually for work by junior scientists, by the Breakthrough Prize organization. Rouven's co-winners for this prize are our former postdoc, Tien-Tien Yu, now on the faculty at Oregon, together with Tomer Volansky of Tel Aviv, and Javier Tiffenberg of Fermilab.

The novel dark matter detection concepts and theoretical calculations by Rouven Essig, Tomer Volansky, and Tien-Tien Yu have had a significant impact in our quest to detect dark matter with masses below the proton. The major advance of the Skipper-CCD technology demonstrated by Javier Tiffenberg has subsequently turned this theoretical work into an experimental reality. This combined effort has led directly to the SENSEI experiment, as well as several other ongoing and proposed experimental efforts.

The SENSEI experiment is already taking data in a preliminary stage at Fermilab,and will move eventually to SNOLAB in Canada. SeeFor more infromation see here.

For more details have a look at the SBU News article

2020-09-10

Virtual Department Convocation 2020

Dear Graduates,

It is my great pleasure to congratulate you and wish you all the best for your future. The last two months were extremely difficult, and most of you were counting on spending them with your friends at StonyBrook to bring your time at college to a proper closure. I am sure all of you had very different plans for graduation. But, despite the difficult times and challenges, you have every reason to cherish your accomplishments and celebrate!

You are one of the 75 new Bachelors of Science, 28 Masters, or 18 Ph.Ds. ! You completed a degree from one of the best departments in the country. That is an outstanding achievement that only few are able to attain. Let me tell you, graduates, we - the faculty of your department - are really proud of you!

I would also like to thank and congratulate all parents and friends who have helped and supported you.

Last but not least, I hope that I can congratulate you in person at our December Convocation for the class of 2020. For now enjoy the faculty congratulating you in this video and look up your fellow graduates and there achievements in our Virtual Convocation Program.

Congratulations!

Axel Drees
Professor and Chair
Department of Physics and Astronomy
Stony Brook University

2020-05-22

DOE announce BNL to be future site for Electron Ion Collider

On January 9, 2020, the Department of Energy (DOE) announced that Brookhaven National laboratory (BNL) will host the $1.6 to $2.6 billion Electron Ion Collider (EIC) facility. Under the leadership of Prof. Abhay Deshpande and through the Center for Frontiers of Nuclear Science (CNFS) faculty from Stony Brook's Department of Physics and Astronomy have worked for years to make the EIC a reality. The decision to build the EIC at BNL will put Stony Brook physics on course to play a leading role in nuclear physics for decades to come. Read the announcement from BNL here or follow this link to read the Stony brook University news.

Read on for more details about the EIC:

Understanding protons and neutrons (the nucleons) the building blocks of the nuclei has advanced significantly in the past century. We know that they are made up of quarks and gluons that bind themselves inside the nucleons tightly by their strong color force. Nuclear physicists try to understand the structure and properties of the nucleons emerging from the interactions (quantum chromodynamics, QCD) of the quarks and gluons. These same interactions are also responsible for binding the nucleons inside the nuclei, exactly how? - we don't know. Viewing nucleons and nuclei as complex interactions of many-body systems gives rise to intriguing fundamental questions about the nature of observable matter in the Universe.

The Electron Ion Collider (EIC) will address three important aspects of the above quark-gluon interactions, with a particular focus on the study of role of gluons in QCD. First, it will investigate the detailed mechanism of nucleon's mass generation from these interactions. The intriguing thing here is that the gluons are massless and the quarks are almost massless. Astonishingly the entire man of the nucleons (and hence the visible universe) seems to come from massless gluons and almost massless quarks through there color interactions. Second, the EIC will help us understand how the spin (the angular momentum) of the nucleons comes about as an emergent property from the (same) interacting gluons and quarks that generate its mass!. We only know that the quarks' and gluons' intrinsic spin (alignment) contributes about 50% of the nucleon's spin. The remaining 50% then has to come from their orbital motion & dynamics. The EIC will try to capture images of quarks and gluons in their dynamical motion inside the proton and measure their orbital angular momentum. Lastly, gluons which are far less visible than the valence quarks, play a subtle but very critical role in QCD. The EIC will study the detailed role of the gluons including at the highest energy where they are predicted to form a novel form of matter called the Color Glass Condensate (CGC). If the CGC exists, the EIC will be able to study it cleanly, precisely and unambiguously with ultimate experimental control.

The above compelling scientific investigations can only be addressed by an Electron Ion Collider because it will have polarized beams (electron and hadron), high luminosity (more than two order of magnitude over the previous electron-proton collider) over a wide range in the Center-of-Mass energy, and multiple species of nuclei. These rather daunting requirements on the accelerator operations implies that the EIC will not only push nuclear science to its frontier, but will also do the same to accelerator science & technology.

The proposal for EIC at BNL includes adding an electron beam facility of energy up to 18 GeV colliding with RHIC beam resulting in the desired e-p Center of Mass energy range of 20-140 GeV, with polarized beams, and up to 90 GeV for electron-nucleus collisions. On December 19, 2019 the EIC was given a green light (approval of "mission need" or "CD0") by the US Department of Energy (DOE). On January 9, 2020, the BNL was chosen as the site of the future EIC. Jefferson Lab will work in close partnership with BNL and the EIC Users Group to realize the EIC at BNL. Significant participation from other laboratories and institutions in the US and abroad are also anticipated. The technically driven construction schedule could realize the first collisions of the EIC around 2030.

2020-01-09

Jennifer Cano receives NSF CAREER Award

Assistant Prof. Jennifer Cano receives the 2019 NSF CAREER Award for her work on "Topological crystalline insulators and semimetals: Beyond the bulk-edge correspondence"

Jennifer Cano is a theoretical condensed matter physics. She studies topological phases of matter and is interested in the classification, experimental probes, material realizations of topological insulators and semi-metals, and in the bulk-boundary correspondence. She joined the department in 2018 and holds a joint appointment with the Center for Computational Quantum Physics at the Simons Foundation's Flatiron Institute.

2019-12-23

Stony Brook joins the Simons Observatory

Stony Brook University has joined the Simons Observatory as a partner institution. The Simons Observatory will be a series of telescopes to collect photons from the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), the most ancient light in the universe. The CMB is the relic radiation that began propagating freely shortly after the big bang, nearly 14 billion years ago. Studying these primordial photons will enable Prof. Neelima Sehgal and the Stony Brook Astronomy faculty to answer questions in subjects ranging from cosmology and fundamental physics to the astrophysics of distant objects.

The Simons Observatory will be located in the high Atacama Desert in Northern Chile inside the Chajnantor Science Preserve. At 5,200 meters (17,000 ft) the site hosts some of the highest telescopes in the world. The Simons Observatory will add to these several new telescopes and new cameras with state of the art detector arrays. The result will set the stage for the next generation of CMB experiments. For more details see the video here .

2019-12-20

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Stony Brook University
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