For several years, physicist John Barton at the University of California, Riverside, has been working on developing models to understand and predict how pathogens, such as HIV, evolve. This research pursuit has just received support from the National Institutes of Health—the first grant from the institutes to the UC Riverside Department of Physics and Astronomy...
As the coronavirus pandemic continues across the U.S., many are finding that discovering and engaging in creative hobbies offers a welcome outlet for stress and anxiety. But sustaining the motivation to create during times of high stress can be challenging. Members of the UCR community share the ways they have been exploring their own creativity...
Eleven UC Riverside faculty members received 2019 National Science Foundation CAREER Awards, more than in any previous year. Seven of these prestigious awards, which support early career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models and lead to the advancement of their organization’s mission, went to women — another record for UC...
The John Templeton Foundation has supported research on a diverse range of subjects including creativity, forgiveness, and free will. Dark matter — nonluminous material in space that is understood to constitute 85 percent of the matter in the universe — can now be added to the list. The foundation has awarded UC Riverside physicist Hai-Bo...
When sunlight shining on a leaf changes rapidly, plants must protect themselves from the ensuing sudden surges of solar energy. To cope with these changes, photosynthetic organisms — from plants to bacteria — have developed numerous tactics. Scientists have been unable, however, to identify the underlying design principle. An international team of scientists, led by...
The popular Summer Physics Academy held each year by the UCR Department of Physics and Astronomy for high school teachers has a different format this year. Because of the coronavirus pandemic, all lectures of the 13th Summer Physics Academy are being delivered to the 25 participating high school teachers via Zoom. Hai-Bo Yu, an associate...
Yunjin Choi, a postdoctoral researcher at UC Riverside, is a recipient of the 2019-20 M. Hildred Blewett Fellowship awarded by the American Physical Society, or APS, to enable women to return to physics research after having had an interruption in their careers. Choi, who works with Shan-Wen Tsai, an associate professor in the Department of...
Last year, physicist Nathaniel Gabor was one of two UC Riverside professors awarded the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government for scientists and engineers at the beginning stages of their careers. The award to Gabor includes a $1 million research budget from the Air Force...
Kenneth Barish, chair of the UCR Department of Physics and Astronomy, has been named one of two deputy spokespersons for the STAR Experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, or RHIC, at the Brookhaven National Lab. The Solenoid Tracker at RHIC, known as STAR, is the only major experiment currently operating at RHIC and tracks...
An international research team led by scientists at the University of California, Riverside, has observed light emission from a new type of transition between electronic valleys, known as intervalley transmissions. The research provides a new way to read out valley information, potentially leading to new types of devices. Current semiconductor technology uses electronic charge or...
A research team led by physicists at the University of California, Riverside, reports tiny satellite galaxies of the Milky Way can be used to test fundamental properties of “dark matter” — nonluminous material thought to constitute 85% of matter in the universe. Using sophisticated simulations, the researchers show a theory called self-interacting dark matter, or...
A team of physicists at the University of California, Riverside; Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology has observed evidence of Majorana fermions — particles theorized to also be their own antiparticle — on the surface of a common metal: gold. This is the first sighting of Majorana fermions on...
Viruses — small disease-causing parasites that can infect all types of life forms — have been well studied, but many mysteries linger. One such mystery is how a spherical virus circumvents energy barriers to form symmetric shells. A research team led by physicist Roya Zandi at the University of California, Riverside, has made progress is...
Nanoscale technology has greatly improved our daily lives with products such as computers, phones, and solar cells. To develop the next-generation nanotechnology, new classes of materials need to be explored. Two-dimensional “valley semiconductors,” such as monolayer molybdenum disulfide (MoS 2) and tungsten diselenide (WSe 2), have remarkable properties and novel applications. When these materials absorb...
The University of California, Riverside, has won a University of California Multicampus-National Lab Collaborative Research and Training Award of $3.75 million that will allow the campus to focus on enabling scalable quantum computing. Quantum computers are expected to greatly outperform the most powerful conventional computers on certain tasks, such as modeling complex chemical processes, finding...
Yanou Cui, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy, is a coauthor on two important research papers on boosted dark matter, a novel type of dark matter model. A member of a flagship next-generation neutrino experiment named the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, or DUNE, Cui is an expert on the interface between particle physics and...
An international team of astronomers led by scientists at the University of California, Riverside, has found an unusual monster galaxy that existed about 12 billion years ago, when the universe was only 1.8 billion years old. Dubbed XMM-2599, the galaxy formed stars at a high rate and then died. Why it suddenly stopped forming stars...
Laura Sales first fell in love with astronomy when she was in middle school in Argentina, her country of birth. Today, she is an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at UC Riverside and the recipient of the National Science Foundation’s prestigious Faculty Early Career Development ( CAREER) Award, one of the most coveted recognitions...
A team of physicists has discovered an electrical detection method for terahertz electromagnetic waves, which are extremely difficult to detect. The discovery could help miniaturize the detection equipment on microchips and enhance sensitivity. Terahertz is a unit of electromagnetic wave frequency: One gigahertz equals 1 billion hertz; 1 terahertz equals 1,000 gigahertz. The higher the...
Earlier this month, the U.S. Department of Energy announced the selection of Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, NY, as the site for Electron Ion Collider, or EIC, a planned major new nuclear physics research facility. The EIC, which will be designed and constructed over ten years, will explore mysteries of the “strong force” that binds...
