Article by Beth Miller Photo by Kathy F. Atkinson November 02, 2023

More than 200 physicists, researchers and students will converge on the University of Delaware campus this weekend as UD hosts the annual meeting of the American Physical Societys 2023 Mid-Atlantic Section.

A wide range of topics is on the agenda, including studies in astrophysics, astroparticle physics, atomic and molecular and optical physics, biophysics, machine learning, solid-state physics, magnetism, quantum and 2D materials, physics education and much more.

UD researchers faculty and students will participate in scores of presentations during the three-day event and several are invited speakers, including Associate Professor Federica Bianco (machine learning), Assistant Professor Chitraleema Chakraborty (two-dimensional and quantum materials), Associate Professor Anderson Janotti (quantum materials), Professor Chaoying Ni (magnetism and spintronics) and postdoctoral researcher Quang To (magnetization dynamics and spin-transport phenomena).

The opening plenary session at 3 p.m. Friday in 120 Smith Hall is open to all. Prior registration was required for the rest of the meeting. Speakers at that plenary session are Professor Peter N. Armitage of Johns Hopkins University on Isings Model of Ferromagnetism and Professor Eun-Suk Seo of the University of Maryland on Recent Progress in Direct Measurements of Cosmic Rays.

The meeting was organized locally by Associate Professor Frank Schroeder of UDs Bartol Research Institute and by Associate Professor Benjamin Jungfleisch, his colleague in the Department of Physics and Astronomy. Schroeder is chair-elect of the APS Mid-Atlantic Section and Jungfleisch also serves on the sections executive committee. Other colleagues, students and department and college staff assisted as well.

The APS Mid-Atlantic Section, which marks its 10th anniversary this year, includes Delaware, New Jersey, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Washington, D.C., and West Virginia. It is the first time UD has hosted the annual event since 2016.

The Mid-Atlantic Section was established in 2013 to engage and strengthen the physics community in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States, as well as to aid APS in its mission to advance and diffuse the knowledge of physics at the regional level, according to its website.

The American Physical Society has about 50,000 members, including physicists in academia, national laboratories and industry throughout the world.

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Hundreds of physicists to converge on UD campus | UDaily - UDaily

Physicists embarking on a hunt for proof of theoretical particles known as axions are preparing to go into a deep underground laboratory for the next six years.

Part of the DarkQuantum effort, which recently received a 12.9 million grant from the European Research Council to conduct the search, the research team hopes to find evidence that dark matter is actually made up of previously undetectable axions.

If successful, the discovery would solve the longstanding mystery around dark matter and dark energy that has haunted physicists for decades, an accomplishment the researchers involved believe could rival the discovery of the elusive Higgs boson in 2010.

Deep under the mountains spanning the border between Spain and France, the Canfranc Underground Laboratory is the perfect place to search for axions. Thats because the natural rock layers above the lab help protect the ultra-sensitive equipment the team will employ to hunt for the elusive particle from cosmic radiation and other forms of electromagnetic interference.

Previous efforts to find axions have explicitly failed because of the difficulty separating the signal from the noise. In fact, the equipment and methods used by previous research teams have often been the cause of such noise, something The Debrief previously reported on, making the actual sensors and equipment just as important as the deep underground laboratory itself. For the researchers from Aalto University and the University of Zaragosa who will undertake the hunt, a well-shielded location is critical for their new sensors to work.

Our high-frequency sensor will be 10-100 times more sensitive than previous iterations, and it will be able to scan on the scale of a few microelectron volts, explained Sorin Paraoanu, Aalto University Senior Lecturer, Docent, and the team leader on the research effort. Paranou also says that their specially designed sensor will take advantage of brand new techniques in quantum physics by using superconducting qubits, which are the same qubits used in quantum computers.

However, the researcher says their superconducting qubits will serve in a different role as detectors on this sensor, called a haloscope, allowing the team to probe the depths of the galactic halo for signs of axions.

The theory suggests that, in an ultra-cold environment, we can introduce a magnetic field that will cause any axions present to decay into photons, the professor explains. If we detect any photons in the cavity, then we can conclude that axions are present in the system and that they do indeed exist.

While many possible explanations have been proposed for what makes up dark matter, something physicists know exists because of its gravitational effects but have never been able to observe directly, none have yet been proven. Nonetheless, the researchers on the team think that if dark matter is indeed made up of these theoretical axions, their ultra-sensitive equipment, novel quantum methodology, and the remote location of their deep underground laboratory should be just enough to find them.

The nature of dark matter is one of the biggest mysteries in modern science, explains University of Zaragoza Professor Igor Garcia Irastorza, who heads the DarkQuantum consortium. If dark matter is made of axions, we have a real chance of detecting it with this project.

The team says the six-year hunt will be divided into two distinct phases. The first four years, or the scaling up phase, will include building, fine-tuning, and ultimately transporting the haloscopes to the underground lab. The final two years, the experimental phase, will involve using the sensors to gather data.

We are peering into a deep, dark pit, said Paraoanu of the potential significance of their work. If it exists, the axion goes beyond the standard model of elementary particles,

Such an observation would be comparable in significance to the Higgs boson discovery in the early 2010s, the researcher adds. But at least with the Higgs boson, they knew where to start looking!

Christopher Plain is a Science Fiction and Fantasy novelist and Head Science Writer at The Debrief. Follow and connect with him on X, learn about his books at plainfiction.com, or email him directly at christopher@thedebrief.org.

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A Six Year Search for Purely Theoretical Axions is Going Deep ... - The Debrief

In 2018, Canadian physicist Donna Strickland received the Nobel Prize for physics, alongside French scientist Grard Mourou, her doctoral supervisor.

Her contribution was related to successfully increasing the power of brief pulses of laser light without destroying the laser in the process.

To do so, she stretched the wavelength of the laser beam and increased its amplitude (energy) before shortening the beam to its original wavelength.

In a sentence, it all sounds so easy, but as with most scientific and engineering ventures, the devil was in getting the details right.

Almost a hundred years earlier, Werner Heisenberg was awarded a Nobel for his uncertainty principle as a fundamental property in quantum mechanics.

He showed it was impossible to determine both the position and momentum of an electron at the same time because the energy of any illuminating beam designed to determine those properties would destroy the electron.

Since 1927, Heisenbergs uncertainty principle has been widely accepted as one of the core properties of quantum mechanics.

His theorem was at the heart of last years Nobel in physics. It was awarded to John Clauser, Alain Aspect and Anton Zeilinger for their work that proved entangled particles, such as electrons, remain entangled, whatever the distance between them.

This marked the triumph of quantum mechanics over Albert Einsteins challenge to this field of study: more than five decades prior, Einstein made his strongest claim that uncertainty and other weird properties of quantum mechanics made no sense, even if the practical applications of quantum mechanics worked brilliantly.

This years Nobel might well challenge Heisenbergs uncertainty principle, for if single electrons can be tracked in atoms and molecules, what was uncertain might prove to be certain.

But thats not why this years laureates launched their studies.

Their goal was to develop illuminating beams with wavelengths short enough to identify and understand the behaviour of electrons, and hence the bonding properties, which bind atoms together to form molecules.

Until their studies, that goal seemed impossible.

The 2023 Nobel in physics was awarded to Anne LHuillier, Pierre Agostini and Ferenc Krausz for creating ultra-short wavelength light beams, brief enough to illuminate electrons in atoms and molecules.

Success came first with LHuilliers discovery in 1983 that an infrared laser light illuminating a noble gas, excited electrons in the gas, generating short wavelengths, which corresponded to harmonic frequencies of the laser lights fundamental frequency.

The trick was to combine those harmonic frequencies in such a way that wavelengths as short as several hundred attoseconds in length were created short enough to study electrons.

That goal was reached independently by Pierre Agostini and Ferenc Krausz, with similar results.

(One attosecond is a millionth of a trillionth of a second in duration the number of them in one second is the same as the number of seconds since the universe began staggering and numbing numbers.)

Summing up the reasons for this prize, the Nobel committee stated that LHuillier, Agostini and Krausz demonstrated a way to create extremely short pulses of light that can be used to measure the rapid processes in which electrons move or change energy.

LHuillier discovered a new effect from laser lights interaction with atoms in a gas. Agostini and Krausz demonstrated that this effect can be used to create shorter pulses of light than previously were thought possible, the committee concluded.

The committee was less forthcoming about what practical results might come from these discoveries, except to measure the tightness of bonds in molecules.

Beyond the official comments on the achievements of the laureates is the potential to study, what for almost a century, was considered uncertain by Heisenberg.

That, for me, is the big but unstated story with this prize.

Will frame-by-frame resolution at the subatomic level ever reach a level at which two or more properties of electrons can be studied?

If that happens in the future and the tools are getting better and better perhaps what was uncertain may become certain with much better tools for observing electrons in real-time.

The seventh annual review of the Nobel Prizes began Nov. 1 with the physics prize. Chemistry, medicine, economics, peace and literature will follow.

Sign up with Debbie Krause (dkrause@notlpl.org) at the Niagara-on-the-Lake Public Library.

Dr. William Brown is a professor of neurology at McMaster University and co-founder of the InfoHealth series at the Niagara-on-the-Lake Public Library.

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Dr. Brown: Tracking electrons: The Nobel Prize in physics - Niagara Now

When Shohini Ghose was growing up, the only woman in science she knew of was Uhura, the fictional communications officer on Star Trek. Only as an adult did she learn that a woman from her home region of Bengal, India, Bibha Chowdhuri, had made massive contributions to modern physics.

Bibha was involved in discovering two fundamental particles in nature, the neutrino and the pion, says Ghose, a professor of Physics and Computer Science at Wilfrid Laurier University. Shes Bengali, Im Bengali, and yet I never heard her name. We didnt celebrate those stories.

Ghose is hoping to change that with the release of her new book, Her Space, Her Time: How Trailblazing Women Scientists Decoded the Hidden Universe. It chronicles the inspiring stories of women physicists and astronomers, like Chowdhuri, who made indelible scientific contributions, yet have remained unsung in history.

Ghose, founder of the Laurier Centre for Women in Science and a Natural Sciences and Engineering Council of Canada Chair for Women in Science and Engineering, shares the inspiration for her research and why she hopes readers of her new book are left feeling hope, inspiration and outrage.

Science is my inspiration. The universe is full of wonder and excitement, and I feel the same feelings when I read about these women who followed their goals and passions no matter what challenges they faced. In physics and astronomy classrooms, I didnt have many other women or people from my own background to turn to. It could be quite lonely and I felt like I didnt belong, to the point that I almost quit. With this book, I want to change the idea that women are not part of the scientific story. Its empowering to feel connected to women of that caliber.

When I began teaching astronomy many years ago, I wanted to incorporate human stories into my lectures that the students could connect to. It grew from there. At the Laurier Centre for Women in Science, we spend a lot of time thinking about these issues. Whenever Im studying a particular area of science, Ive learned that there is probably more to the story than I know of. I now make a point to find out about the hidden women who were likely involved in each discovery.

Someone who is close to my heart is Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, an astronomer and astrophysicist who was based at Harvard University during the 1920s. In her PhD thesis, she was one of the first people to use a new theory at the time, the theory of quantum physics. She used the mathematics of that theory to understand the composition of all stars and show that they were made of hydrogen and helium, which we take for granted today. This was a transformational discovery, yet she went unrecognized for many years. She didnt have an official role at Harvard until much later, when she was finally made a faculty member. Then she became the first woman to ever chair a department at Harvard.

Cecilia is a role model because of her arc of discovery and resilience. No matter how little recognition she got, she kept doing amazing research and eventually left an incredible legacy. And she did it using quantum physics, which is my field, so shes very special to me.

Yes. Often, the men they worked with got awards for their work. A male scientist used the same techniques as Bibha Chowdhuri to confirm her discoveries and won the Nobel Prize. Another woman, Lisa Meitner, was nominated for the Nobel Prize 48 times and never won. She is basically the one who discovered nuclear fission, which led to nuclear energy, the atom bomb, nuclear physics, and so on. She never won, yet she kept going. How do you continue in the face of such obvious resistance? These women were so resilient. Its amazing, and its also infuriating. I hope readers feel outrage for what these women had to deal with just to do what they love.

In addition to their legacies of cutting-edge science, these women addressed challenges and biases that they faced to break glass ceilings. They were rule breakers. They earned leadership positions. They set up awards for young women to be recognized in their fields. They started women in physics committees, which we have everywhere today. These women used their voices to support other women, which is how change happens.

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Laurier researcher Shohini Ghose documents the untold legacies of ... - Wilfrid Laurier University

Is the book for non-scientistsas well as scientists?

To be my endemically curmudgeonly self, Im not sure I can accept thepremise of the question. Every 5-year-old is a scientistthey insistently ask questions about, and do experiments on, the natural world. Somehow, our educational system and the larger culture convince people by the time they get to college that humankind is divided into two subspecies: scientists and non-scientists. Ive been working for decades to try and demolish this notion, albeit with limited success.

Temporarily suspending my objection to the question, the book is written for non-scientists. It assumes no prior knowledge whatsoever about atoms. The book does use numbers (e.g., it takes 15 milliontrillion atoms to make a poppy seed), but gives helpful analogies to visualize such numbers (e.g., if those atoms were marbles, theyd fill a warehouse 25 stories tall and the size of New York State).

Read my books (and others like them)! Professional journal articles are indeed filled with jargon and require specialized knowledgethey are designed as an efficient way for scientists dedicated to one field to talk to their colleagues in that same field; such articles are not even very accessible to scientists from other fields.

But this is not the only way scientists communicate. They give public talks, write articles and books for a general audience, produce You Tube videos, and work with science museums. Science is a crowning intellectual achievement of humankind, and, in a technology-saturated world, it is essential that its methods, as well as its results, be shared widely.

Uncharacteristically, I have had time to read several books lately. The first was Big Rock Candy Mountain by Wallace Stegner, who is my favorite American author (and hugely under-appreciated in my humble opinion). He has, simultaneously, both piercing insight into, and generous empathy for, the human condition. The second book was Michael Ondaatjes The Cats Table, a wonderful, semi-autobiographical tale of a 10-year-old boy alone on a ship from Sri Lanka to prep school in Englandtranscendent writing.

Then there was A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles which, after the first few pages, I thought was too arch, but which evolved into a charming tale populated by a marvelous collection of characters. In oneday, two different people on two different airplanes noticed what I was reading and said great book. I also found it highly unusual that Towles says on the book jacket flap that the success of his first novel (Rules of Civilitynext on my list) allowed him the luxury of retiring from investment bankingperhaps the first time in literary history that career switch has happened.

I also read The Primacy of Doubt by Tim Palmerheavy-going, but with some interesting speculations connecting chaos theory with climateforecasting, quantum mechanics, geopolitical instability, pandemics, and human consciousness.

In addition to Rules of Civility, next on my stack is Philip Kitchers On John Stuart Mill, one of the first in a series put out by Columbia University Press on the Core Curriculum. I have this fantasy that one day before I retire from Columbia (or perhaps after I retire), I will teach Contemporary Civilization, and I figure Philip is a good first tutor for me.

A course called Frontiers of Astrophysics, which is designed to introduce our undergraduates from CC, SEAS, GS, and Barnard to the hot topics in our discipline. We showcase a lot of the research being done here at Columbia to illustrate the kind of work in which they might participate. I will also give lectures in Frontiers of Science, which, I am pleased to say, will celebrate its 20th anniversary as part of the Core this year.

Ive just started my next book, Somewhere Under the Rainbow (with apologies to Music Professor Walter Frisch, whose book on Over the Rainbow I also read this summer, come to think of it). Its an exploration of the sea of electromagnetic radiation in which we are all immersed, and for which we have detectors (our eyes) that can sense just one out of the 60 octaves the universe sends us. From warming yesterdays pizza, to using your cell phone, to finding Mayan cities hidden in the jungle, to medical imaging, to the astonishing applications in biology, geology, physics, and, of course, the symphony of waves the universe sends us, it is all just light of different wavelengths. I plan to lift the narrow veil our eyes impose.

Scientifically, with my colleague Frits Paerels, Im still pursuing a problem I was working on when I got to Columba 46 years agotrying to understand the densest matter in the universe: the cores of neutron stars. If we could just measure both the mass and the diameter of one star, wed have a very interesting constraint on both the structure of the atomic nucleus and the first microsecond of the Big Bang. Were tantalizingly close, but Im not sure well succeedas usual, we need more data!

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How Many Atoms Does It Take to Trace the History of the Universe? - Columbia University