Harvard University Department of Physics

The Lawrence Golub Fellowship is a newly established prize postdoctoral fellowship designed to attract and support outstanding postdoctoral researchers across the physical sciences. We are soliciting applications for the inaugural class of Lawrence Golub Fellows through the Department of Physics at Harvard University. We are seeking recent PhD recipients with a demonstrated record of success who will take full advantage of the Department's rich intellectual climate to undertake at Harvard a research program of their choosing. Both experimental and theoretical physicists are invited to apply. Experimentalists should identify an existing group within the Department with whom they intend to work. Please submit (as a single PDF file) a statement of research interests, a CV, and a record of publications to golub_fellow[at]physics.harvard.edu. Also please arrange for three confidential letters of recommendation to be sent to the same address. The applicant's name should appear in the subject line of all email submissions. The deadline for applications is December 15, 2009. The normal duration of the Lawrence Golub Fellow appointment is two years, with a potential extension to a third year, at an annual salary of $60,000. In addition, Lawrence Golub Fellows receive an annual allocation of $5,000 for research and travel expenses. Applicants to other Harvard Physics postdoctoral positions will automatically be considered for the Lawrence Golub Fellowship. Harvard University is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity employer. We encourage applications from women and minorities.

Prof. Markus Greiner, grad students Waseem Bakr, Jonathon Gillen and Amy Peng, and post doc Simon Foelling published a letter in Nature describing a quantum gas 'microscope' realizing a system in which atoms of a macroscopic ensemble are detected individually and a complete set of degrees of freedom for each of them is determined through preparation and measurement. By implementing a high-resolution optical imaging system, single atoms are detected with near-unity fidelity on individual sites of a Hubbard-regime optical lattice. Nature 462, 74-77 (5 Nov. 2009) | doi:10.1038/nature08482. See also the Crimson article, "Physicists Create Microscope".

Prof. David Weitz and colleagues from DEAS, Columbia University, University of North Texas, and Chalmers University of Technology (Sweden) described a new way to model the formation of glasses, a type of amorphous solid that includes common window glass. Nature 462, 83-86 (5 November 2009) | doi:10.1038/nature08457

2:45-3:30 Reception in the Physics Library, 4th Floor
3:30-3:45 Tribute to Norman Ramsey: Jefferson 250
3:45-4:30 E. Norval Fortson (U. Washington), "A Permanent Electric Dipole Moment The Quest Continues".
4:30-5:15 David Wineland (NIST), "Microwave Masers to Optical Clocks Perspectives on Five Decades".

Colloquium: A New Decade of Cosmic Structure
Monday, Oct. 5, 4:15PM

Lecture I: Baryon Acoustic Oscillations: A Robust and Precise Route to the Cosmological Distance Scale
Tuesday, Oct. 6, 3:00PM J

Lecture II: Observational Probes of Dark Energy
Thursday, Oct. 8, 2:30PM
Please note special time!

All events will be held in Jefferson 250

The work, titled Hypermusic Prologue: A Projective Opera in Seven Planes, was presented at the Pompidou Center in Paris on June 14-15, 2009. Watch a performance video at dailymotion.com; also read an article in the Gazette and a review in Nature (460, 177, 9 July 2009 | doi:10.1038/460177a)