Cross Sections DEPARTMENT OF PHYSICS AND ASTRONOMY UNIVERSITY OF ROCHESTER SPRING 2000 Physics and Astronomy SPRING 2000 Message from Our Chair —Arie Bodek tive programs. A step in this direction Finally, a committee consisting of The previous issue of Cross Sec- is the shift of part of the nuclear faculty members from the department tions (only 10 years ago!) featured a physics program into relativistic and from The Institute of Optics is in story about Okubo Fest, a symposium heavy ions that is leading to the for- the process of searching for an exper- to honor Susumo mation of a combined high energy imenter in the field of atomic physics Okubo’s 60th birthday nuclear and particle physics effort and quantum optics. and to celebrate 40 in the department. Two new faculty This past fall, the department years of Rochester members. Steve Manly and Kevin admitted 33 graduate students, its Conferences in High McFarland joined this broad area largest entering class in 20 years. Energy Physics that this past year. Also, the astrophysics Although we overshot our planned were initiated in the group has initiated a collaboration goal by about about 50 percent, we 1950s by Bob Marshak. This year’s with mechanical engineering and the are certainly pleased with the quality feature story is about Adrian Fest, a Laboratory for Laser Energetics on of the class, and are working on symposium to honor Adrian two programs, one being in high- matching the research interests of the Melissinos’s 70th birthday. energy dense plasmas and the other students with those of advisors inside During the past two years the de- in plasmas in the domain of astro- and outside the department. partment formulated a strategic plan physical phenomena, an area of par- In addition to the resumption of the for faculty recruitment within the ticular interest to our new faculty publication of Cross Sections, to keep University’s Renaissance Plan, which member Eric Blackman, who joined our alumni and friends informed, we provides a reduction in size to 26 the theoretical astrophysics group in have a new and user-friendly Web faculty members in physics and as- January 2000. The condensed matter page, which we urge you to visit at tronomy. As part of this transition, group has a newly appointed faculty www.pas.rochester.edu. the faculty has recognized that, in member, Wenhao Wu, who is expert You can even contribute items to order to maintain excellence, we will in experimental low-temperature the Alumni News by sending a note have to interact more closely and physics, and is maintaining strong to [email protected]. leverage resources in more collabora- collaborative ties with Kodak and Xerox and with chemical engineering. Cross Sections future directions in particle physics. Editors: Tom Ferbel and Kevin McFarland “Adrian Fest” The proceedings of the symposium Published by the Department of Physics and As- will be published by World Scientific. tronomy of the University of Rochester, and distrib- Honors Adrian was born in Thessaloniki, uted to alumni and friends free of charge. Copies Greece, attended the Greek Naval Acad- may be obtained by writing to CROSS SECTIONS, Career of emy, and then joined Department of Physics and Astronomy, University the Royal Hellenic of Rochester, P.O. Box 270171, Rochester, NY Melissinos Navy in 1948. When 14627-0171; phone (716) 275-4344. his tour of duty was It is hard to imagine that Adrian up, Adrian left the has turned 70! He is vigorous and Greek Navy for the Cover Photo enthusiastic and as impossible to Charles River and MIT, Numerical simulation of a magnetized keep up with as ever. This past Sept- where he earned his master’s degree protostellar jet. Young stars drive high- ember 24–25 we gathered together in 1956 and his Ph.D. in 1958 in the speed beams of plasma into their sur- his former students and colleagues Francis Bitter Lab. He then immedi- roundings. This simulation followed to celebrate his remarkable career. ately joined Rochester, where he worked the evolution of a jet with an embedded More than 125 physicists and col- on problems ranging from cosmic rays, magnetic field. Here we see the jet be- leagues attended the Adrian Fest dynamics and spectroscopy of the ing peeled apart by the interaction of Symposium on Probing Luminous strong interactions to tests of the CPT the magnetic field with the surround- and Dark Matter. Nobel laureate Leon theorem in kaon decay. With Leon ing medium. Simulation performed Lederman, who worked closely with with code written by Tom Gardiner, Adrian, was among the physicists Continued on page 5 a graduate student in Adam Frank’s from around the world who discussed research group. 2 Physics and Astronomy SPRING 2000 Nobel Laureate Chu Joins Koshiba Board of Trustees Wins the As some of you may recall, Steven 1998, and he now honors the Uni- Wolf Prize Chu, Geballe Professor of Physics at versity through his service on the Stanford University, earned his bache- Board of Trustees. The Wolf Prize for physics, awarded lor’s degree in math and physics at Steve is a very relaxed and gener- by the Wolf Foundation of Israel, will Rochester in 1970. He ous individual, and loves to tell how, be shared this year by Raymond Davis, received his Ph.D. in as an undergraduate, he was regu- Jr. of the University of Pennsylvania, physics at the Univer- larly thrown out of Tom Ferbel’s busy and Masatoshi Koshiba, of the Uni- sity of California at office. Tom recounts that on a recent versity of Tokyo. “Toshi” received his Berkeley with Eugene visit, Steve once again showed up at Ph.D. with Mort Kaplon in our depart- Commins in 1976. He Tom’s office for some brain-picking ment in 1955 on studies of high- won the Nobel Prize about the University. After about 20 energy cosmic rays. (He was also our in 1997 for perfecting techniques to minutes, Tom, always in a hurry to Susumu Okubo’s roommate during slow, trap, and study individual atoms, get somewhere, looked at his watch, graduate school.) The prize will be work that he initiated during his affil- and showed Steve out the door. Steve presented at the Israeli Knesset on iation with Bell Labs. Steve received responded with his usual good humor May 21. an honorary degree from Rochester in that some things never change! Since 1978, the Wolf Foundation has awarded the prestigious prizes, second only to Nobel Prizes, to the world’s outstanding scientists and McFarland Wins Outstand- artists for achievements in the inter- est of mankind. The prizes in science ing Investigator Award are in the fields of agriculture, chem- istry, mathematics, medicine, and Assistant Professor Kevin McFarland, and the increase in luminosity of the physics. Each prize carries a $100,000 appointed in the department about a Tevatron. Kevin is leading the con- award, with the winners selected by year ago, has won an Outstanding struction of a system to analyze data international committees of renowned Junior Investigator award from the from collisions in real time. His team experts in each field. Department of Energy. is building and programming a Toshi pioneered studies of proton This award helps tal- “farm,” or cluster of hundreds of per- decay and of detection of neutrinos ented young physicists sonal computers, to make massively from astrophysical sources. He initi- establish research pro- parallel decisions. The project corre- ated the Kamiokande experiments in grams, and will con- sponds to building a tremendous Japan, where he led the design and tribute $400,000 to supercomputer out of equipment that construction of the detectors that Kevin’s five-year pro- can be purchased at your favorite observed neutrinos emitted from gram of research at the CDF detector computer store. The computer farm Supernova 1987a. Subsequently, he at the Tevatron at Fermilab. Kevin’s will analyze and filter the digitized went on to discover what is now main fascination is with the origin data collected by detectors, and then accepted as the oscillation of neutri- of mass, an issue he hopes to clarify select the most interesting 10 percent nos among their different species, through studies of the details of pro- of the collisions for further analysis. implying that neutrinos have finite duction and decay of the massive top Kevin has approximately 500 col- mass. quarks. leagues on CDF, and so he will have Currently, Kevin and his team of to share the limelight if something seven graduate and postdoctoral stu- unusual is discovered about the top dents, including two from our depart- quark. But it’s a small price to pay ment, are participating in preparations for the possibility of gaining greater for the upgrade of the CDF detector Continued on page 9 3 Physics and Astronomy SPRING 2000 Krishnaswami Receives Apker Award The American Physical Society has ence on Undergraduate Research ear- Sproull fellowship, one of the most named Govind Krishnaswami the na- lier this past year. prestigious fellowships held by Ph.D. tion’s best undergraduate researcher Govind is the first student from the students at the University. from a Ph.D.-granting university. University to win the Apker Award, Govind is an extraordinary young Govind is one of two recipients of the which coincidentally is named for a man, passionate about physics, with Leroy Apker Award, the APS’s highest 1941 Rochester alumnus. The Depart- enormous enthusiasm and creativity. award for undergraduate research. ment of Physics and Astronomy nom- He came to Rochester four years ago The $5,000 award ranks him among inated Govind based from Madras, India, knowing some- the brightest young scientists in the on research he con- thing about the University: 35 years nation.