Chairs, past and present

Wolfgang Rudolph's term as Chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy ended on Dec 31, 2018, and Rich Rand became Chair on January 1, 2019.

We thank Wolfgang for his ex…

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Physics undergrad Lauren Zundel at the New Mexico State Legislature last month with the UNM contingent, including Garnett S. Stokes, UNM's president. Zundel was recognized for winning a Goldwater Scho…

Thanks to UNM's Society of Physics Students Ivey, Caymen, Nic, Nik, Cameron Z., Cameron L., Dilys, Eric, Samantha, Christine, and Andreas, who demonstrated basic physics principles at the Demo Show o…

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Senior Eric Putney won the Barry Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Program award

The Goldwater Scholarship is a merit award set up by Congress in 1986 in honor of the late Senator Bar…

The Sigma Pi Sigma Honors Society Induction, Research Presentations, Thesis Talks, and Faculty Advisor Intros and Social Mixer on April 26, 2019 at Regener Hall. See the photo gallery

A big thank you to everyone who organized this year's Physics Day on Saturday, our showcase for undergraduate research. Alejandro Manjavacas, Dave Dunlap, the students of SPS, and everyone who gave l…

An alumna from The University of New Mexico is part of an international team of scientists that were able to produce the first-ever image of a supermassive black hole revealed earlier this week.&#160…

Congratulations to physics major Lauren Zundel, who has been awarded a DOE Computational Science Graduate Fellowship, administered through the Krell Institute. 

This is a full, four-year fellowsh…

We note with sadness the death of Murray Gell-Mann on May 24, 2019 in Santa Fe.

Gell-Mann held the unique rank of University Professor in the UNM Department of Physics and Astronomy for several years …

Darcy Barron was awarded $10K for a Women in STEM award from Advance at UNM to implement an initiative to improve retention rates in our undergrad degree programs.

Advance is a five-year National Scie…

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Francisco Elohim Becerra-Chavez Promoted to Associate Professor; Ylva Pihlström and Rouzbeh Allahverdi Promoted to Professor

We have moved into our new building, the Physics & Astronomy and Interdisciplinary Science building (PAÍS)! 

We've begun teaching there and getting our research labs set up again.

The new b…

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Professor Arash Mafi and Associate Professor Rouzbeh Allahverdi recently received an award of more than $580,000 from the Army Research Office for a project named Supersymmetry in Optics: B…

The Metropolitan Museum of Art (The Met) and The University of New Mexico today announced the groundbreaking findings of a two-year study of the plasmonic properties of daguerreotypes. Using atomic f…

In April, 2019, the American Physical Society (APS) awarded Regents' Professor and CQuIC Director, Ivan Deutsch the APS Five Sigma Physicist Award, "a pin awarded to APS members who exhibit outstandin…

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UNM was one of only 25 universities invited to participate at the White House Academic Roundtable on Quantum Information Science on May 31, 2019 in Washington, D.C. to discuss the “significant …

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A team of researchers led by Assistant Professor Victor Acosta recently published a new paper in the journal Science Advances detailing their work in developing a quantum sensor for determining the c…

This "Magnetic Micro-Calorimeter" is a device that can measure the energies of gamma rays with extreme accuracy.

It is important for Nuclear Safeguards and other applications.

Designed by Research …

The following Physics and Astronomy undergraduate students put on an excellent demo show in Regener Hall for a packed audience of about 300! The demos covered a wide range of basic physics concepts a…

The entanglement structure of a large-scale quantum processor made of light.
Credit: Shota Yokoyama 2019

An international team of scientists from Australia, Japan and the United States, including our p…

The UNM attendees gather for a photo at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University

Five physics students took home awards for their research at the annual meeting of the Four Corners Section of the American…

Courtesy UNM Newsroom

October 9, 2019

Controlling the interactions between light and matter has been…

** An image of the "Whale Galaxy" (NGC 4631), made with the National Science Foundation's Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA), reveals hair-like filaments of the galaxy's magnetic field protruding a…

Monday, November 11, 2019 8 am - 11 am

On Monday, November 11, 2019 a rare celestial event occurred.

Mercury, the closest planet to the Sun, passed between the Sun and Earth, visibly crossing the sur…