message from the head
This year the Department of Physics and the entire physics community celebrated the 50th Anniversary of the BCS Theory—the remarkable microscopic theory of superconductivity developed by John Bardeen, his postdoc Leon Cooper, and his graduate student Robert Schrieffer at the University of Illinois in 1957. This work is arguably the single most important scholarly achievement to ever come out of the Department and the University and earned the authors the 1975 Nobel Prize in Physics. To mark this occasion, we hosted BCS@50, an international conference in Urbana in October. It was truly a memorable event, with more than 250 attendees, including nine Nobel Laureates. We are most grateful to Philip Phillips for organizing this meeting and investing his energy, pass ion, and vision into making it an unforgettable success. Besides being inspirational and fun, BCS@50 reminded us all of how fortunate we are to be associated with such a great Physics department and how grateful we are to our predecessors who established our legacy of excellence. Many people said very nice things about the Department of Physics at this event—we should all be very proud and appreciative and inspired to preserve and enhance the Urbana tradit ion that BCS represents.
As I move through my second year as head of the department, I continue to be motivated by the talents and ideas of my colleagues and the enthusiasm and desire of our students to learn and grow. I also must admit that despite a whole year of experience under my belt, I am finding this year to be rather more of a challenge. I suppose the first year I just continued things the way they were done before—now I am examining more closely how we can maintain and enhance the quality of the department while we deal with the serious financial realities that face the department and the University. We are in a time of unbounded ideas and energy but limited resources. Strategic planning has inspired us to think outside the box to generate innovative plans and creative visions, but the box is presently short of the means to implement all of them. The bottom line is that we are facing tough choices in deciding what to do and what to invest in, and even tougher decisions on what we can no longer continue to do as we move forward. It is a difficult time for our economy at all levels but there is good news ahead, an upcoming national election that will give us an opportunity to move in a new and more productive and compassionate direction and a campus administration at the Dean, Provost, and Chancellor levels that are firmly committed to engaging the faculty and department administrators in following the best path for sustaining and advancing the stature of our great University.
Despite the limitations set by the budget, it has been a very good year so far for the Department of Physics and the University of Illinois. Three faculty were promoted for the 2007/08 academic year, Naomi Makins and Taekjip Ha to professor of physics, and Matthias Grosse Perdekamp to associate professor of physics with indefinite tenure. Nigel Goldenfeld has been appointed a Swanlund Endowed Chair, the most prestigious endowed posit ion on campus, with the formal investiture ceremony scheduled for March. Joint Physics and Astronomy Professor Charles Gammie has been named a University Scholar, one of the highest honors granted by the University of Illinois. Two faculty members have received recognition from the American Physical Society, Russ Giannetta elected as a Fellow and Gordon Baym awarded the prestigious Lars Onsager Prize for Statistical Physics, along with former Illinois Professor Chris Pethick. The campus has also received notable recognition in the form of research support, with UI partnering with UC Berkeley on a $500M grant from British Petroleum to develop biofuel production and winning the $200M Nat ional Science Foundation competition to build Blue Waters, the next generation petaflop supercomputer, on the Urbana-Champaign campus. Physics researchers were instrumental in attracting both of these projects and will be key players in their execution.
The department also continues to grow our research program and start new initiatives, striving always to be a major force and leader in science research and education.
This year we welcome two remarkable young faculty members at the assistant professor level to the department. Mark Neubauer joins the Experimental High Energy group from Fermilab—he will focus on projects designed to search for the elusive Higgs boson and the sources of dark energy and dark matter at the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s highest energy particle accelerator which will be turning on at CERN in Switzerland in the next year. Benjamin Lev is an experimentalist in atomic, molecular, and optical (AMO) physics and arrived in January from NIST Boulder to set up a program in ultracold atomic and molecular physics, quantum optics, and quantum information science. We have also had two departures—Richard Martin, a computational condensed matter physics who is retiring to spend time with his grandchildren in California, and Thomas Junk, taking a research position at Fermilab.
This year also marks the launching of an exciting new venture in the department, the Institute for Condensed Matter Physics (ICMT). This center, made up of theory faculty from Physics and many other departments in the Colleges of Engineering and Liberal Arts and Sciences, will focus on cutting-edge research in condensed matter physics and its intersections with other disciplines. ICMT will organize rapid-response workshops on key issues, sponsor visitors in theory and experiment, support postdoctoral researchers and graduate research students, and serve as center-piece for interdisciplinary theory research on campus. We are currently remodeling the 3 rd floor of the Engineering Sciences Building to house the ICMT, with occupation scheduled for Summer 2008. We are pleased that Paul Goldbart has agreed to serve as the first director of the center, with Tony Leggett as the chief scientist.
Another project underway is to modernize the student-staff machine shop housed in the adjacent Materials Research Laboratory. In a joint venture with MRL, Physics is investing in new equipment for the shop and a new machinist to train students and help research groups with design projects. The ability to make custom parts for innovative instrumentation is crucial for our experimental efforts all areas, particularly condensed matter and atomic/molecular/optical physics. I consider it a high priority of the department to maintain the high level of technical infrastructure that has helped to make our research program productive and vibrant.
When I became head a year ago, one of my goals was to enhance the depth of the academic experience and the quality of life for students, staff, and faculty. This spring semester, we will open two new student lounges, one for the undergraduate Physics majors and one for the graduate research students, on the second floor of Loomis Laboratory. We hope that these lounges will provide a location for students to meet fellow students, relax, exchange ideas, and keep up-to-date on activities in the department. Our next target is create a faculty staff lounge in space being freed up as the library transitions to a more electronic resource and back volumes of journals, now available online, are archived.
ll of these projects require resources, and we are warmly appreciative of the interest and financial support that is generously given by our Physics alumni and friends. One of our objectives is to maintain contact with our extraordinary alumni and make them feel a part of the Physics family and the legacy they helped to build. As you read this newsletter, I invite you to remember your Illinois experience and celebrate with us in how the Department of Physics has evolved and remains a leader in fundamental and applied physics research and education.
Dale J. Van Harlingen, Head and Professor
Department of Physics
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign