Chair:
Richard Rand
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Degree Programs
Undergraduate
Graduate - Physics
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News from the Chair Gary Harrison wins Gerald May staff award!
Gary Harrison
Gary Harrison, our Facilities Operations Manager, won the Gerald W. May Outstanding Staff Award. Faculty, staff and students nominated Gary and the President of the University made the final award selection.
Gary will receive a monetary award and a plaque, and his name will be added to the perpetual plaque at Hodgin Hall. The awards are presented at a public ceremony in December.
Congratulations Gary! This is a well-deserved recognition for years of outstanding service to the department.
Read more about the Gerald May award .
News from the Chair Alejandro Manjavacas Highlights Nanophotonics Research on Podcast
Assistant Professor Alejandro Manjavacas talked about recent Theoretical Nanophotonics Lab research in a well-known podcast about photonics. The interview starts at the 37:52 mark, check it out!
News from the Chair Diana Dragomir Leads Team Exploring Exoplanet Atmosphere
An international team of scientists recently measured the spectrum of the atmosphere of a planet orbiting a Sun-like star located 260 light years away from Earth.
"This ultra-hot 'medium-sized' exoplanet orbits very close to its star but its low density indicates that it has an atmosphere weighing at least 10 percent of the planet's mass," explained Assistant Professor Diana Dragomir, who is leading the work which involved more than 25 institutions.
The research, Spitzer Reveals Evidence of Molecular Absorption in the Atmosphere of the Hot Neptune LTT 9779b , was published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters and supported in part by NASA through a Caltech/Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) grant.
Read the UNM Newsroom article .
News from the Chair 2020 Four Corners (Virtual) Sectional Meeting of the APS
The 2020 Four Corners Sectional (Virtual) Meeting of the American Physical Society concluded late Saturday afternoon with an awards ceremony at which two P&A graduate students, Andrew Forbes and Anupam Mitra, won awards in the outstanding student talks category.
Andrew Forbes' presentation was entitled, Study of the rare decays of \(B^0_s\) and \(B^0\) mesons into muon pairs using data collected during 2015 and 2016 with the ATLAS detector .
Anupam Mitra's presentation was entitled, How tractable is the simulation of open quantum system dynamics of Ising models?
Our congratulations to both! Read the event write up .
News from the Chair Alexandre Mills recognized by DOE's Science Graduate Student Research Program
The SCGSR Program provides supplemental funds that will allow Mills to conduct part of his thesis research at Los Alamos National Labs. Mills specializes in Particle Physics, specifically working on projects related to the direct search for dark matter. He grew up in Los Alamos and getting this grant to work at LANL "feels a lot like going home."
Congratulations Alexandre and thesis advisor Dinesh Loomba! Read more details in the UNM Newsroom article .
