OSU Physics Newsletter, Volume 1, Issue 2

NSF Invests Millions in New Ohio State Physics Projects

Computing technology took an enormous leap in the 1990s, fueled by faster microchips and better software. Now, physicists are taking advantage of that increased computer power to design new and improved materials. Recently, the National Science Foundation (NSF) allocated over $5 million for three Ohio State physics projects that benefit materials research.

Len Brillson (pictured above), Professor of Physics and Electrical Engineering, and Center for Materials Research Scholar, received a Major Research Instrumentation award from the NSF totaling more than $1.3 million over two years. The funding will help him develop a state-of-the-art instrument to probe the chemical and electronic structure of materials on a nanometer scale.

Most recently, Brillson and three colleagues - John Wilkins, Ohio Eminent Scholar and Professor of Physics; Jonathan Pelz, Associate Professor of Physics and Steven Ringel, Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering - received a three-year NSF Focus Research Group award for more than $960,000 to study the morphological, chemical, and electronic properties of lattice-mismatched heterojunctions.

Meanwhile, NSF's Division of Materials Research will support John Wilkins and Hamish Fraser, Professor of Materials Science, in studying ways to reduce the amount of time required to develop new metallic materials for aerospace and automotive applications. This grant of nearly $3 million will aid education as well: the researchers intend to develop educational materials that can be used by P-12, undergraduate and graduate students to better understand the development of new materials.

Collaborators include researchers in materials science and engineering at Ohio State as well as UC Berkeley, Northwestern, and the University of Wisconsin.

Thomas Scaife, winner of the first Physics Academic Achievement Award.

Edward R. Grilly Scholarship Fund

Ed Grilly has established the Edward R. Grilly Scholarship Fund in Physics, which will provide support for the Department of Physics' Academic Achievement Scholarship for the next five years. The scholarship pays the equivalent of the full cost of in-state tuition for four years to one student who majors in physics or engineering physics at Ohio State and is open to any high school senior applying to Ohio State with plans for one of those majors. Ed has two degrees from the Department of Chemistry at Ohio State, and has spent much of his career as a low-temperature experimentalist. He is retired from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico.

Three Physics Faculty Named APS Fellows

The American Physical Society (APS) has recognized three faculty in The Ohio State University Department of Physics for their contributions to research and education. The following Ohio State professors of physics were named fellows of the APS:

• Gordon Aubrecht, for his many contributions to physics education over the years, including his work with high school teachers, his work with the Contemporary Physics Education Project, and his book Energy.
• Eric Braaten, for his contributions to the understanding of finite temperature and heavy quark quantum chromodynamics, and in particular, for the development of hard thermal loop resummation techniques and nonrelativistic quantum chromodynamics.
• Junko Shigemitsu, for her contributions to determining properties of the Standard Model using the methods of Lattice Gauge Theory.

The American Physical Society elects as fellows only such members who have contributed to the advancement of physics by independent, original research or who have rendered some other special service to the cause of the sciences. Each year, up to only 0.5 percent of all APS members may be elected fellows.

See the full story at www.osu.edu/osu/newsrel/Archive/01-01-24_ Faculty_receive_honors.html

Supernova 1987a, fourteen years later.

Supernovae, Black Holes Offer Clues to Subatomic Particles

An Ohio State University astrophysicist and his colleagues have devised a way to use the speed of material streaming outward from a supernova to measure the mass of an elusive subatomic particle known as the neutrino.

Knowing the mass of this particle may help scientists better under-stand stellar collapse and core coding processes as well as provide data for testing models of particle physics, said Richard Boyd, professor of physics and astronomy at Ohio State. He and his coauthors wrote a description of this research in a recent issue of Physical Review Letters.

Scientists currently believe that three types of neutrinos exist, each with a different mass, roughly 100,000 times less than the mass of an electron, explained Boyd. What is needed, though, is a timing signal that would tell scientists when the neutrinos began their journey to Earth. What Boyd and his collaborators discovered is that, if the supernova core collapsed to a black hole, the abrupt termination of the neurtrino emission would provide thatsignal. Boyd's collaborators include John Beacom, a research fellow at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory; and Anthony Mezzacappa, head of the Supernova Theory Group at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Boyd heads a group that is planning a large underground neutrino observatory to detect the neutrinos from the next galactic supernova. See full story at www.osu.edu/units/research/archive/neutrino.htm

Bunny Clark

Clark Wins Fowler Award

Bunny Clark, an Ohio State faculty member in the Department of Physics since 1981, received the Fowler award from the Ohio Section of the American Physical Society (OSAPS) for distinguished research in nuclear physics. OSAPS concurrently honored Clark for her tireless efforts to promote research among undergraduates and to encourage underrepresented groups to pursue a career in physics.

The William Fowler Award for Distinguished Research in Physics honors those members of the American Physical Society with appreciable connections to the State of Ohio, and who have done outstanding research in physics. OSAPS created the award in honor of William Fowler, an Ohio State graduate in Engineering Physics, who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1983 for his work on stellar nucleosynthesis.

According to Clark's nomination for the award, her "contributions to physics ... affect the research of many individuals and changed the direction of research work in her area."

Central to her nomination was her success at proving that the Dirac equation, which is used to describe electron scattering from the atomic nucleus, and can also be used for the same type of reaction with protons or neutrons.

She overcame fierce opposition to her approach, and convinced the international community of its merit by precisely fitting experimental data that had withstood all previous efforts to explain, her nominator wrote.

Clark and her collaborators have laid part of the groundwork of relativistic treatments of nuclear systems. The nuclear physics group continues to work on relativistic models which play a central role in understanding how the underlying theory of the strong interaction, quantum chromodynamics, can be used to understand atomic nuclei.

Hiring Continues with Three New Faculty

Ohio State's Department of Physics continues to expand, spurred by the university's Selective Investment Award the department won two years ago.

This year's hires included Ulrich Heinz, a professor in nuclear theory; Lei Bao, an assistant professor in physics education research; and Ralf Bunschuh, an assistant professor in condensed matter theory.

Heinz, who joined the faculty in early December 2000, comes from Germany s University of Regensburg, and from CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. His research focuses on the physics of that elusive state of high density, high temperature hadronic matter known as the quark-gluon plasma, created in relativistic heavy ion collisions. ( See article below.)

Bao moved to Ohio State from Kansas State. An important aspect of his work concerns quantitative modeling of student understanding.

Bunschuh will join the Ohio State faculty this summer, following his postdoctoral work at the University of California at San Diego. His research involves a strong focus on biophysics and bioinformatics.

Currently the Department of Physics includes 52 faculty, up from 48 in 1998. The department plans to reach a full complement of 59 faculty. The department continues to search for new faculty in another thrust area -- experimental particle astrophysics. Last spring, the department created a group in experimental biophysics and began looking for a leader for this group, as well. Other faculty hires are planned in condensed matter experimental physics and atomic, molecular, and optical physics, in coordination with Ohio State's Spectroscopy Institute.

First images from the STAR detector

Ohio State's Nuclear Experimental Group Celebrates First Successful Experiments

Professors Tom Humanic, Mike Lisa, and Evan Sugarbaker are members of the STAR collaboration at Brookhaven National Laboratory. Ohio State collaborators have spent the past several years working as an integral part of the teams designing hardware and software to measure the first collisions of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) - the "R" in STAR. The first run began on June 12, 2000, when the operators in the main control room of the RHIC announced that the STAR detector captured the first spectacular images of particles streaming from a head-on collision point.

These spectacular subatomic collisions are the culmination of many years of hard work, and they mark the beginning of a new era of discovery in nuclear physics. These high-energy collisions will fur ther enhance our understanding of the fundamental nature of matter as experimentalists attempt to re-create the matter that first existed in the early universe - the quark-gluon plasma.

The 15th Annual Conference in Quark Matter recently held at Stony Brook featured plenary talks by Ohio State contributors and was reported as the most exciting of QM conferences thanks to STAR data.

For more information and to follow RHIC's progress, go to: www.rhic.bnl.gov

For conference information: www.rhic.bnl.gov/qm2001