PHYSICS ANNUAL NEWSLETTER Volume IV 2152 Hillside Rd. Issue 8 The University of Connecticut Storrs, CT 06269- August 2017 3046 Pet College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Department of Physics News Professor Takaaki Kajita Katzenstein Distinguished Lecturer Monday, March 26, 2018 The University of Connecticut’s Department of Physics is proud to announce that on March 26, 2018 Professor Takaaki Kajita of the Institute for Cosmic Ray Research at the University of Tokyo will be presenting the 2018 Distinguished Katzenstein Lecture. In 2015 Professor Kajita shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Professor Arthur McDonald for providing the first direct evidence that the masses of neutrinos were non-zero, something that physicists had been trying to ascertain for more than half a century. Professor Takaaki Kajita received his doctorate in 1986 at the University of Tokyo. Since 1988 he has been at the Institute for Cosmic Radiation Research at the University of Tokyo, where he became an assistant professor in 1992 and professor in 1999. He became director of the Center for Cosmic Neutrinos at the Institute for Cosmic Ray Research in 1999. As of 2015, he is at the Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe in Tokyo and Director of the Institute for Cosmic Ray Research. In 1998, Professor Kajita's team at the Super-Kamiokande neutrino facility in Japan found that when cosmic rays hit the Earth's atmosphere, the resulting neutrinos switched between two flavors before they reached the detector buried under Mt. Kamioka. This discovery helped prove the existence of neutrino oscillations and show that neutrinos have mass. In 2015, Professor Kajita shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Canadian physicist Professor Arthur McDonald, whose Sudbury Neutrino Observatory discovered similar results. The work of Professors Kajita and McDonald solved the longstanding solar neutrino problem, which was a major discrepancy between the predicted and measured solar neutrino fluxes, and indicated that the standard model of elementary particle physics, which required neutrinos to be massless, had weaknesses. In a news conference at the University of Tokyo, shortly after the Nobel announcement, Professor Kajita said, "I want to thank the neutrinos, of course. And since neutrinos are created by cosmic rays, I want to thank them, too”. Professor Kajita is currently the principal investigator of another Institute for Cosmic Ray Research project located at the Kamioka Observatory, the KAGRA gravity wave detector. 1 | Page PHYSICS ANNUAL NEWSLETTER Professor Kajita has received numerous awards including: The Asahi Prize 1987; The Bruno Rossi Prize 1989; The Asahi Prize 1998; The Nishina Memorial Prize 1999; The Panofsky Prize 2002; The Yoji Totsuka Award 2010; The Japan Academy Prize 2012; The Julius Wess Award 2013; The Nobel Prize in Physics 2015; The Fundamental Physics Prize 2016. Leon N. Cooper, 2016 Katzenstein Distinguished Lecture The Katzenstein Distinguished Lectures series continued in Fall 2016 for its 19th year, with an October 28, 2016 lecture by Professor Leon N. Cooper of Brown University, entitled “On the Interpretation of the Quantum Theory: Can Free Will And Locality Exist Together In The Quantum Theory?” Professor Cooper shared the 1972 Nobel Prize in Physics with Professors J. Bardeen and J. R. Schrieffer. The Nobel Prize was awarded for the first microscopic theory of superconductivity, now known as the BCS Theory. Superconductivity as evidenced by the disappearance of electrical resistivity was first observed in Mercury by Kamerlingh Onnes in 1911. Immediately, many theorists including Albert Einstein, set out to explain this newly observed phenomena. However it was not until 1933 that the essential property of magnetic flux exclusion was observed by Meissner and Ochsenfeld. No successful microscopic theory was developed until the 1957 Physical Review Paper that developed the BCS theory. A crucial element for the theory was published in a short letter to the Physical Review in 1956 by Leon Cooper, entitled ‘Bound Electron Pairs, in a degenerate Fermi Gas’. These pairs are now commonly referred to as ‘Cooper Pairs’. The 2016 lecture took place in Physics Building Lecture Room P-36, and an excellent attendance included physics undergraduates, graduate students, faculty from Physics and other departments, and a number of UConn Physics alumni. Prior to the lecture, Professor Cooper met informally with Physics students in the Physics Library, and then met people at a reception that preceded the lecture. Following the lecture, Professor Cooper joined with Henry Katzenstein’s son David, a Professor at Stanford Medical School, along with faculty, staff, alumni and guests for a gala dinner at the University of Connecticut’s Foundation Building. The Katzenstein Lectures are made possible by an endowment established by the late Dr. Henry S. Katzenstein and his wife Dr. Constance A. Katzenstein. Cornell Professor David Lee (1996 Nobel Laureate in Physics and 1956 M. S. alumnus of UConn) gave the first lecture of the current series of annual lectures by Nobel Laureates, in 1997. Henry Katzenstein received the very first Ph.D. in physics from our Department in 1954 after only three years as a graduate student here. The 2017 Edward Pollack Memorial Lecture The annual Edward Pollack Memorial Distinguished Lecture will be presented in 2017 with invited speaker Professor Matthias Weidemueller of the University of Heidelberg. Prof. Ed Pollack began as a faculty member in the Physics Department at UConn in the early 1960’s, immediately after finishing his Ph.D. in experimental AMO Physics at NYU under Prof. Benjamin Bederson. Previously Dr. Pollack had served in the U.S. Army and taught physics at both NYU and The City College of 2 | Page PHYSICS ANNUAL NEWSLETTER New York (CCNY, his alma mater). He served as a mainstay on the faculty of the Physics Department here for over 40 years. These lectures are funded by an endowment established in his memory by members of the Pollack family and friends of the late Prof. Pollack. Approximately once a year we use the Pollack Lecture endowment to bring in a distinguished speaker on a topic related to experimental atomic, molecular and optical (AMO) physics, Ed’s main research interest. In 2014, the Pollack Lecturer was Prof. David Pritchard of MIT who spoke on his recent efforts in developing software for physics teaching based on physics education research; Pritchard is also a highly-recognized researcher in AMO physics, who mentored four Nobel Laureates in the field. Prof. Pollack also had strong interests in physics teaching, especially to undergraduates, as a popular teacher who taught most of the general education and physics-major courses in the Department during his long career here. In 2016, Prof. Thomas Gallagher, Jesse W. Beams Professor of Professor of Physics at the University of Virginia was Pollack Lecturer, discussing some of his extensive research with Rydberg atoms (highly-excited H-like atoms). The Pollack lecture series continues to be an inspiration to our faculty and students, particularly in the AMO field. Other previous Edward Pollack Distinguished Lecturers were - 2015: Deborah Jin, Mac Arthur Fellow and Professor at the University of Colorado, JILA; 2011: Michael Drewsen, University of Aarhus, Denmark; 2010: Thomas Cravens, University of Kansas; 2008: Claude Cohen-Tannoudji, Nobel Laureate, College de France, Laboratoire Kastler-Brossel, Ecole Normale Superieure; 2007: Ara Chutjian, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology; and 2006: Lewis Cocke, Kansas State University. 2016 Charles Reynolds Lecture The Reynolds Lecture, held in honor of the late UConn Professor Charles Reynolds (a co-discoverer of the isotope effect), was given by Dr. Peter Littlewood in October, 2016. Peter was the director of Argonne National Laboratory as well as a Professor at the James Franck Institute, University of Chicago. The title of his lecture was "Bose Condensation of Polaritons: A Superfluid of Light." Macroscopic phase coherence is one of the most remarkable manifestations of quantum mechanics, yet it seems to be the inevitable ground state of interacting many-body systems. In the last two decades, the familiar examples of superfluid Helium and conventional superconductors have been joined by exotic and high temperature superconductors, ultra-cold atomic gases, both bosonic and fermionic, and recently systems of excitons, magnons, and exciton-photon superpositions called polaritons. Engineering of optical microcavities make use of the mixing of electronic excitations with photons to create a composite boson called a polariton that has a very light mass, and recent experiments provide good evidence for a high-temperature Bose condensate. Polariton systems also offer an opportunity to use optical pumping to study quantum dynamics of a many body system outside equilibrium, in a new kind of cold atom laboratory. Dr. Littlewood completed his PhD under Professor Volker Heine at the University of Cambridge. Beginning in 1980, he worked at Bell Labs, finishing his time there as the head of the theoretical physics research. 3 | Page PHYSICS ANNUAL NEWSLETTER In 1997, he became a professor at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge and, in 2005, was promoted as the head of the Cavendish Laboratory, before being named the Associate Laboratory Director for Physical Sciences and Engineering at the Argonne National Laboratory in 2011. In 2014, he was named the Director of Argonne National