On the afternoon of May 3, about 25 local Girl Scouts and some of their siblings visited the Department of Physics and Astronomy to attend presentations by faculty members Gabriela Canalizo, Laura Sales, and Nathaniel Gabor. Associate Professor Vivek Aji, whose daughter is a Girl Scout, arranged the visit. Professor Canalizo and Assistant Professor Sales...
Barry Barish, a distinguished professor of physics at UC Riverside, has been elected a foreign member of the Royal Society for his exceptional contribution to science. Barish was awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics “for decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves,” along with American physicists Rainer Weiss and...
NASA has awarded the University of California, Riverside a grant of $320,000 to launch a research and training program in STEM fields aimed at enhancing K-12 students’ experiences outside school hours. Titled “Launch Pad from High School to NASA: A Research and Training Program in STEM Fields,” the program has received funding for two years...
UC Riverside physicist Igor Barsukov, who specializes in experimental condensed matter physics, is being honored by the journal Communications Physics as an outstanding reviewer of manuscripts for the month of March 2019. Outstanding referees are those who “have gone above and beyond what is expected of a reviewer in terms of the value of their...
tudents from Hemet High School and Corona’s Centennial High School visited UC Riverside’s Department of Physics and Astronomy this week to participate in the International Particle Physics Masterclass, an annual program of the European Particle Physics Outreach Group. The Masterclass is an interactive two-day exercise in which high school students analyze specific particle physics data...
A research team comprised of scientists at the University of California, Riverside, and the University of Washington has for the first time directly imaged “edge conduction” in monolayer tungsten ditelluride, or WTe 2, a newly discovered 2-D topological insulator and quantum material. The research makes it possible to exploit this edge conduction feature to build...
Astronomers at the University of California, Riverside, have teamed with teachers at the California School for the Deaf, Riverside, or CSDR, to design an astronomy workshop for students with hearing loss that can be easily used in classrooms, museums, fairs, and other public events. The workshop utilized a sound stage that allowed the CSDR students...
By bombarding an ultrathin semiconductor sandwich with powerful laser pulses, physicists at the University of California, Riverside, have created the first “electron liquid” at room temperature. The achievement opens a pathway for development of the first practical and efficient devices to generate and detect light at terahertz wavelengths — between infrared light and microwaves. Such...
An international research team, co-led by a physicist at the University of California, Riverside, has discovered a new mechanism for ultra-efficient charge and energy flow in graphene, opening up opportunities for developing new types of light-harvesting devices. The researchers fabricated pristine graphene — graphene with no impurities — into different geometric shapes, connecting narrow ribbons...
An undergraduate student at the University of California, Riverside, has an extraordinary opportunity to do hands-on work in one of the most famous centers for scientific research in the world. Sergio Garcia, 21, of Perris, Calif., is the first UCR student to participate in the University of Michigan Semester Abroad program, allowing him to spend...
Thomas Kuhlman, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy who came to UC Riverside from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in July 2018, is the lead author on a study that attempts to explain how advanced life may have emerged billions of years ago. The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy...
John Barton, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy and an expert in statistical physics and evolutionary dynamics, is a coauthor on a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that examines how latent HIV viruses – viruses that are inactive and “hiding” within cells – relate to the viruses that...
When two atomically thin two-dimensional layers are stacked on top of each other and one layer is made to rotate against the second layer, they begin to produce patterns — the familiar moiré patterns — that neither layer can generate on its own and that facilitate the passage of light and electrons, allowing for materials...
A virus, the simplest physical object in biology, consists of a protein shell called the capsid, which protects its nucleic acid genome — RNA or DNA. The capsid can be cylindrical or conical in shape, but more commonly it assumes an icosahedral structure, like a soccer ball. Capsid formation is one of the most crucial...
Galaxy clusters are rare regions of the universe consisting of hundreds of galaxies containing trillions of stars, as well as hot gas and dark matter. It has long been known that when a galaxy falls into a cluster, star formation is fairly rapidly shut off in a process known as “quenching.” What actually causes the...
The University of California, Riverside, and the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena have established a UCR-Carnegie Graduate Student Fellowship program that will greatly benefit students in the university’s Department of Physics and Astronomy. At any given time, the program will support two graduate student fellows. The fellowships will be offered each year. Each fellowship is for...
Boerge Hemmerling, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at the University of California, Riverside, has received a five-year grant of nearly $1 million from the National Science Foundation to study “Nonlinear Optical Properties and Novel Quantum Phases of Polar Molecules in Optical Lattices.” Hemmerling is the grant’s principal investigator. Shan-Wen Tsai, an associate professor...
On Aug. 28, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN, announced that two experiment teams at the Large Hadron Collider discovered decay in the Higgs boson particle, an integral component of our universe, that was found by scientists at the center in 2012. UC Riverside physicists Gail Hanson, Robert Clare, Stephen Wimpenny, Bill...
Physicist, whose contributions enabled the first observation of gravitational waves, is the university’s second Nobel Prize winner RIVERSIDE, Calif. – Physicist Barry C. Barish, who won the 2017 Nobel Prize in physics for the discovery of gravitational waves, will join the faculty of the University of California, Riverside, on Sept. 1. Barish, the Linde Professor...
RIVERSIDE, Calif. ( www.ucr.edu) — A team of astronomers led by George Becker at the University of California, Riverside, has made a surprising discovery: 12.5 billion years ago, the most opaque place in the universe contained relatively little matter. It has long been known that the universe is filled with a web-like network of dark...
