Chair:
Richard Rand
An undergraduate education in physics provides a solid foundation for a lifetime of learning in a variety of disciplines, including science, engineering, math, finance, education, law, and medicine. Find out more .
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Degree Programs
Undergraduate
Graduate - Physics
Graduate - Optical Science and Engineering
News from the Chair How Hot Nanoparticle Collections Cool Down
An international team including grad students Lauren Zundel and Stephen Sanders from UNM, plus LANL and Institute of Optics of Spain scientists led by Assistant Professor Alejandro Manjavacas, recently developed an elegant and efficient approach to calculate radiative heat transfer on the nanoscale level.
Figuring out how materials transfer heat can lead to advances in thermophotovoltaics, in which wasted energy from engines and factories can be converted into usable electricity. Another application could be to build chips with more transistors while preventing computers from overheating.
Read more about this exciting research finding in the UNM Newsroom article.
News from the Chair Easwar Narayanan wins Sigma Xi Award
Easwar Narayanan
P&A graduate student Easwar Narayanan has been selected for this year's Sigma Xi Outstanding Graduate Researcher Award.
Easwar Narayanan is a second-year doctoral student searching for physics beyond the Standard Model in data from the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider. The new processes that he seeks may be revealed in small differences between predictions and observations of decays of B-mesons (bound states that include b-quarks). His particular topic is called CP-violation. To carry out this study, Easwar works on algorithms for triggering the detector, strategies for measuring the lifetimes of very short-lived particles, and predictions and recommendations for the operating characteristics of the detector in the future.
Congratulations, Easwar! There will be a Virtual Awards Ceremony via Zoom on Monday, May 17 at 5 pm .
Research Highlight Laser Waveguide Technology Could Divert Lightning Strikes
Jean-Claude Diels
Professor Jean-Claude Diels was interviewed for Medium.com on diverting lightning strikes with lasers.
Lightning strikes start over 9,000 US wildfires and cause $5 billion in damages
every single year. Professor Jean-Claude Diels has spent over three decades studying laser-induced lightning
discharges with the goal of safely redirecting this powerful force of nature. Read more about this electrifying technology in the Medium.com interview .
News from the Chair UNM Receives Award to Increase Computing Power for Radio Telescopes
The National Science Foundation (NSF) has made an award to UNM and Long Island University for the project: A CPU/GPU Pipeline Framework for High Throughput Data Acquisition and Analysis. This award comes from NSF's Cyberinfrastructure for Sustained Scientific Innovation program.
A team led by Greg Taylor and Jayce Dowell is developing software, known as Bifrost, which provides a collection of software building blocks that can be put together to process streams of data in a highly parallel fashion.
Read more about this remarkable collaboration and the NSF award .
News from the Chair Post Doctoral Fellow Position Available
The Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of New Mexico (UNM) invites applications for a postdoctoral fellow position in optical imaging instrument development in the Chakraborty Lab . For best consideration apply by July 31, 2021.
