A team of UNL physicists led by Aaron Dominguez has been selected to lead a five-year, nearly $11.5-million research collaboration involving eight universities to improve the effectiveness of a critical component of the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest atom-smasher. Chancellor Harvey Perlman and Prem Paul, vice chancellor for research and economic development, celebrated this research success in Jorgensen Hall on July 8, 2014. UNL Today reported on the news.
Anthony Starace received an honorary D.Sc. degree from Voronezh State University, Russia, on Friday, June 20, 2014, and presented an invited talk. More information and photos can be found in an article on the university's website (the text is in Russian, but if you open the link in the Chrome browser, Google will translate the page into English).
Donna Kunkel won the prestigious Nottingham Prize at the Physical Electronics Conference in June 2014. The Nottingham Prize is awarded to one student each year and recognizes the best student paper presentation at the conference. Kunkel presented part of her thesis research, which focuses on organic nanomaterials that possess useful electronic properties. This is the first time a UNL student has received the award, which comes with a $1,000 stipend.
"Particle Fever" continued for a second week at the Mary Riepma Ross Media Arts Center, and ran through May 8, 2014. It opened April 25. The documentary follows scientists during the launch of the Large Hadron Collider. UNL faculty and graduate students who work on the project participated in an April 27 movie talk, including Gregory Snow, Aaron Dominguez, and graduate students Ekaterina Avdeeva and Rami Kamalieddin.
Donald Umstadter's work with Diocles was featured in the first annual report of the University of Nebraska’s National Strategic Research Institute. The report highlights the early successes of the STRATCOM partership. A summary was provided in an article in UNL Today.
NSF's Science 360 News Service posted a video featuring Xia Hong. It was produced when she received the NSF CAREER Award. Hong's grant investigates Interface Engineered Multiferroics and Nanoscale Phase Modulation in Complex Oxide Heterostructures. More information about her research can be found here.
Professor Emeritus Gordon A. Gallup died on March 26, 2014. He came to UNL in 1955, becoming a full professor of chemistry in 1964. In 1993 he retired from teaching and spent time as a courtesy research professor with the Department of Physics and Astronomy. His obituary appeared in the Lincoln Journal Star.
Roger Bach, Sy-Hwang Liou, Damian Pope (Perimeter Institute, Canada), and Herman Batelaan published a paper, "Controlled double-slit electron diffraction" in the New Journal of Physics. It is now included in the “most read” papers published in journals by the Institute of Physics (IOP).
Professors Evgeny Tsymbal and Alexei Gruverman, and Dr. J. D. Burton, report energy efficient ferroelectric oxide tunnel junctions in Nature Materials.
The 2013 Department Picnic was a huge success! About 140 faculty, staff, students, and family members shared great food and a pretty serious soccer game.
Visiting professor, Arti Kashyap, along with friends Shawn Langan and Verona Skomski were interviewed in the Lincoln Journal Star when a reporter saw Arti learning how to ride a bike with their help.
Semiconductor Research Corp. and the National Institute of Standards and Technology awarded a UNL physics team (Alexei Gruverman, Peter Dowben, Kirill Balashchenko, Xia Hong, Christian Binek, and Evgeny Tsymbal) a five-year contract to lead a new Center for NanoFerroic Devices as part of the Nanoelectronics Research Initiative.
Haidong Lu recieved an Outstanding Graduate Research Assistant Award. Lu is a doctoral student working as a research assistant with professor Alexei Grouverman. He is from Haining, Zhejiang, China.
Evgeny Tsymbal co-edited a book written by world-recognized scientists working in the field of complex oxides, "Multifunctional Oxide Heterostructures", published by Oxford University Press.
Obituary: Professor Robert Fuller (06/07/35-04/09/12) served 35 years at UNL developing a nationally recognized program in Research in Physics Education. He served as the national president of AAPT (1979-1981) receiveing an AAPT Distinguished Service Citation in 1986 and the Robert A. Millikan Medal for Outstanding Contributions to the Teaching of Physics in 1992. He was recognized at UNL by an 1993 ORCA and admitted into the UNL Academy of Distinguished Teachers in 1995.
Professor Alexei Gruverman and graduate student Haidong Lu have demonstrated the polarization of nanoscale areas of ferroelectrics by the applied force of a scanning microscopy probe, and reported their findings in Science. The news has also been featured in Today@UNL and in the Lincoln Journal Star. You can also listen to Gruverman's interview on the April Sixth Science podcast.
Professor Donald Umstadter has published an article in Nature Photonics.
Xi He has been recognized as winner of the 2011 MRS Spring Meeting Student Award "Silver". Xi He is the first Nebraska student receiving this prestigious award. A photo taken during the award ceremony was printed in MRS Bulletin 36, 650 (2011). The award honors graduate students "whose academic achievements … display a high level of excellence and distinction." MRS recognizes students of "exceptional ability who show promise for significant future achievement in materials research." Xi He is a graduate student in Christian Binek's group.
Professors Greg Snow, Ken Bloom, Dan Claes, Aaron Dominguez, and Ilya Kravchenko are in a News Release regarding the Large Hadron Collider experiments and Professor Snow is in an N the Know video talking about the LHC.
Obituary: Professor John Hardy (01/09/1935 - 05/05/2011), APS Fellow, 1982 Sigma Xi Distinguished Scientist, 1989 ORCA recipent and pioneer in crystal lattice dynamics, co-authored "The Lattice Dynamics of Alkali Halide Crystals."
Obituary: Professor Robert Katz (7/17/1917 - 3/12/2011), author of "Physics", a popular textbook, and "An introiduction to the Special Theory of Relativity" conducted cosmic ray balloon experiments, and developed the Katz Theory to model cancer risks from radiation exposure.
J.D. Burton and Evgeny Tsymbal's work on electrically controlled spin-valve effect made the front web page of Physical Review Letters with the synopsis of this article being featured by the PRL editor.
Evgeny Tsymbal and his group members Yong Wang, Karolina Janicka, and Manish Niranjan were involved in research on complex oxide heterostructures that was published in Science and Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences. This research is featured at UNL News Releases and Lincoln Journal Star.
Anthony Starace and graduate student Hua-Chieh Shao have modeled a 4-dimensional imaging technique with future medical imaging potential (click HERE for the press release). Their interview with NET Radio's Grant Gerlach can be heard at (NETradio).
