The donation will be used to establish the "Chen Ning Yang - Deng Wei Endowed Chair in Physics and Astronomy" in the YITP. Dr. Deng made the gift to honor Dr. Yang, the founding Director of of the Institute that now carries his name. The YITP encompasses the full range of theoretical physics, including elementary particles, string theory, statistical mechanics, and quantum information. Its former students and postdoctoral scholars hold leadership positions in science and education in the United States and around the world.

The Distinguished Professorship is conferred upon individuals who have achieved national or international prominence and a distinguished reputation within a chosen field. This distinction is attained through significant contributions to the research literature or through artistic performance or achievement in the case of the arts. The candidates’ work must be of such character that the individuals’ presence will tend to elevate the standards of scholarship of colleagues both within and beyond these persons’ academic fields.

All distinguished faculty are also members of the SUNY Distinguished Academy, established in March 2012.

Jim is an internationally recognized expert in the properties of hot dense matter that is found in neutron stars and other astronomical objects. His research spans the fields of nuclear physics and astrophysics, and he has significantly contributed to both. Perhaps his most important work is the development of models for the properties of dense nuclear matter. His models have been widely accepted and used by researchers in the astrophysical community, leading to the solution of a host of astrophysical problems. Most recently, he and his former students discovered superfluidity in a neutron star.

Jim received his Ph.D. in 1976 from the University of Texas at Austin. He was Research Associate at the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign before coming to Stony Brook in 1979. He is the recipient of the Benfield Fellowship, the Sloan Foundation Fellowship, the Ernest F. Fullam Award, the Guggenheim Fellowship and most recently the Yukawa Professorship. He is Fellow of the American Physical Society.

Leonardo received his Ph.D. in 2000 from MIT. He was postdoc and Assistant Professor at Princeton before joining the Yang Institute for Theoretical Physics and our Department in 2006. He works on string theory and quantum field theory and he is/was advisor to several graduate students.

Rouven received his Ph.D. in 2008 from Rutgers University and joined the Yang Institute for Theoretical Physics and our Department in 2011. He is a theoretical particle physicist, but often works closely with experimentalists to address open research questions at the cosmic, intensity, and energy frontiers. His goals are to develop the theoretical implications of the data being collected at dark matter detection experiments, at high-intensity beam experiments, and at the Large Hadron Collider and to generate new ideas for experiments that can further our understanding of the fundamental constituents of Nature.

In 2012 Rouven was the recipient of a Department of Energy Early Career Award. He is co-spokesperson of the A' Experiment (APEX) at Jefferson Laboratory. He is also a member of the Heavy Photon Search Collaboration, and he is an Affiliated Scientist with the Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope.

The project was supported by the Simons Foundation. The statue was built in Baltimore over the last two years by a team led by the artist. The construction involved, among other things, the creation of a robot that shaped the sandstone forms for the casting of the silicon bronze structure. Photos about the installation and the dedication ceremony are here, username: public, password: photos.

Of all the twisty shapes that one can imagine, this one is special, because it relates to the solutions of the cubic equation, x³+bx²+cx+d=0. Here is a physicists interpretation of the math behind the satutue. (Thanks to John Morgan, who gave an excellent lecture about the subject. Apologies for the oversimplifications and missing some of the beautiful math. --LM)

If we pick the parameters b, c and d randomly, and we solve the eqaution, chances are that we have either one solution or three solutions (assuming we look at real numbers only). For example x³ - 3x² + x - 3 = 0 has only one solution, x=3. On the other hand, x³ - 6x² + 11x - 6 = 0 has three solutions: x=1, x=2 and x=3.

We can imagine that the the parameters b, c and d are the axes of a Cartesian coordinate system. In this three-dimensional space every point has well defined b, c and d, and therefore every point corresponds to a cubic equation. We solve the equation, but we do not care about the actual values of x. All we care about is the number of solutions: either one or three, as we have seen above. Now we color each point in the space of b, c and d according to the number of the solutions. For example, we give "blue" color to the points where there are three solutions, and we color "red" the points that yield one solution.

The Umbilical Torus is related to (topologically equivalent to) the surface that separates the blue and the red regions in the three dimensional space of b, c and d. The surface of the Torus itself correspond to the parameters when two of the three solutions happen to be equal. The "rim" or "edge" that runs around and performs a 120^o twist (coming back to itself after three full rotations) correspond to the special case when all three solutions are equal (for example, in x³ - 6x² + 12x - 8 = 0).

The animated gif images on the right hand side were created with the free softwares K3DSurf and Cropper. Here are links to the parametric equations describing the forms: umbilic1.k3ds, umbilic2.k3ds and umbilic3.k3ds

In a recent paper (Phys. Rev. Lett. 109, 067601 (2012)) they describe results on combining a ferroelectric material, lead titanate, and a material that is normally metallic, strontium ruthenate. As the strontium ruthenate layers are very thin, the conductivity in the new artificial material is very low in the direction of the ferroelectric polarization. The new material thus behaves like a ferroelectric, but one that has a strong preference for one polarization direction over another. This effect is driven by a breaking of symmetry across the interfaces of the material. In addition to the polarization effect, the symmetry breaking also has the potential to allow coupling between ferroelectricity and magnetism. Compounds with this property are called "multiferroic" materials. An essential part of this work was a strong collaboration with the theory group of Marivi Fernandez-Serra , also in the Dept of Physics and Astronomy at Stony Brook.

Even more recently another publication from the group (Phys. Rev. Lett. 109, 167601 (2012)) showcased a different material system with quite different properties. Although the ferroelectric component in this system was again lead titanate, the other material was calcium titanate, chosen because it was hoped that it would induce polarization rotation and an associated enhancement of the piezoresponse and dielectric constant. By a detailed experimental study, this was shown to be the case, and a new pathway to piezoelectric materials has been opened by this work.

Both projects made extensive use of user facilities at nearby Brookhaven National Laboratory, particularly the National Synchrotron Light Source, which was used to identify structural changes in the materials by x-ray diffraction, and the Center for Functional Nanomaterials, where Dong Su performed electron microscopy which was critical to the success of both projects.

More than 1,700 people from U.S. institutions - including 89 American universities and seven U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) national laboratories - helped design, build and operate the LHC accelerator and its four particle detectors. The United States, through DOE’s Office of Science and the National Science Foundation, provides support for research and detector operations at the LHC and also supplies computing for the ATLAS and CMS experiments. Stony Brook University is represented at ATLAS by P&A faculty members Rod Engelman, John Hobbs, Robert L. McCarthy, Michael Rijssenbeek and Dmitri Tsybychev, together with posdocs and graduate students from the Department.

The CMS and ATLAS experiments announced last year seeing tantalizing hints of a new particle in their hunt for the Higgs. Since resuming data-taking in March 2012, the experiments have more than doubled their collected data, leading to the latest announcment. The result is consistent with the limits on the Higgs boson mass reported on July 2 by another large collaboration at Fermilab's Tevatron. Faculty from our Department, led by Paul Grannis, played a key role in the DZero experiment at Fermilab and more than 25 Ph.D. students did thesis research there .

The Standard Model of particle physics has proven to explain correctly the elementary particles and forces of nature through more than four decades of experimental tests. But it cannot, without the Higgs boson, explain how most of these particles acquire their mass, a key ingredient in the formation of our universe.

See the group's WEB page or the Nature Physics paper, or read the press release by the University.

All four authors of the Physical Review Letters paper have significant ties to Stony Brook University. Dany Page, of the National Autonomous University in Mexico, received his Ph.D. from SBU in 1989. Co-author Madappa Prakash, of Ohio University, is a former SBU faculty member. Andrew Steiner, of Michigan State University, received his Ph.D. from SBU in 2002.