News

Randall Receives Klein Medal

December 13, 2019

Prof. Lisa Randall is this year's recipient the Oskar Klein medal and the Oskar Klein Memorial Lecturer.

The Oskar Klein Memorial Lectures are sponsored by The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences through its Nobel Committee for Physics and by Stockholm University.

Nelson Awarded Niels Bohr Medal of Honour

December 10, 2019

Prof. David R. Nelson has been awarded the Niels Bohr Institute Medal of Honour for 2019. He is a world-renowned theoretical physicist of remarkable breadth and he has made seminal contributions to the field of statistical mechanics and what became known as soft condensed matter.

The Niels Bohr Institute Medal of Honour was established in 2010 to mark the 125th anniversary of Niels Bohr’s birth. The medal is awarded annually to a particularly outstanding researcher who is working in the spirit of Niels Bohr: International cooperation and exchange of knowledge.

To...

A schematic figure of the quantum Rydberg central spin model. Credit: Ashida et al.

A New Theoretical Model to Capture Spin Dynamics in Rydberg Molecules

November 30, 2019

Rydberg molecules are giant molecules made up of tens or hundreds of atoms bound to a Rydberg atom. These molecules have a permanent dipole (i.e., a pair of oppositely charged or magnetized poles), as one of their atoms is in a highly excited state.

Physicists have been studying Rydberg molecules both theoretically and experimentally for several years. Most studies investigating these molecules, however, have only focused on situations that do not involve quantum spins, as the many-body nature of Rydberg molecules makes analyzing their spin dynamics particularly...

Mundy Awarded ETH Zurich Materials Research Prize

November 26, 2019

Prof. Julia Mundy has been awarded 2019 Materials Research Prize for Young Investigators by ETH Zurich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology). The biennual prize, which recognizes outstanding contributions of young investigators that advance materials, from fundamental to applied research, has been established in order to emphasize the fundamental role...

Preceptor in Physics Needed!

November 20, 2019

The Department of Physics at Harvard University seeks applications for a Preceptor in Physics. Working closely with faculty and staff in the Department of Physics, the preceptor will oversee all aspects of small-group instruction in both the laboratory and discussion section components of essential introductory Physics courses, targeted to a wide range of students and including applications in physical sciences,...

Loeb Lectures in Physics: Zhi-Xun Shen

November 4, 2019

ZHI-XUN SHEN
Paul Pigott professor of Physical Sciences, Professor of Physics and Applied Physics, Stanford University
Professor of Photon Science, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

Monday, November 4, 2019, @4:30pm
Jefferson Lab 250
Colloquium: "Angle-Resolved Photoemission – a Many-Body Spectroscopy for Quantum Materials"

Complex phenomenon in quantum materials is a major theme of physics today. As better controlled model systems, a sophisticated understanding on the universality and diversity of...

Schittko's Essay Runner-Up in Nature's Competition

November 4, 2019

In May of 2019, as part of Nature's 150th anniversary, its editors asked readers aged between 18 and 25 to enter an essay competition. The task was to tell, in no more than 1,000 words, what scientific advance they would most like to see in their lifetimes, and why it mattered to them.

Grad Student Robert Schittko's essay, Power Play, which proposes that nuclear fusion could offer a solution to the climate crisis, was one of the two runners-up in the competition....

Enhanced Thermal Hall Effect in the Square-Lattice Néel State

October 31, 2019

Common wisdom about conventional antiferromagnets is that their low-energy physics is governed by spin–wave excitations. However, new experiments on several cuprate compounds have challenged this concept. An enhanced thermal Hall response in the pseudogap phase was identified, which, remarkably, persists even in the insulating parent compounds without doping.

In a recent paper by Rhine Samajdar, Mathias Scheurer, Haoyu Guo and Prof. Subir Sachdev at Harvard, together with collaborators...

An artist’s drawing of Google’s quantum computer chip, called Sycamore

Riding the Quantum Computing 'Wave'

October 19, 2019

The computing world was abuzz last week after Google scientists announced they’d passed a key threshold in which an experimental quantum computer solved a problem in just minutes that a classical computer would take years —10,000 by Google’s count — to solve. The pronouncement, later disputed by scientists at rival IBM, was widely hailed as proof that quantum computers, which use the mysterious properties of matter at extremely small scales to greatly advance processing power, can — as theorized — exhibit “quantum supremacy” and vastly outperform even the world’s most powerful classical...

Conference Encourages Women of Color to Pursue Doctorates in Physics

October 7, 2019

If there’s one thing LaNell Williams wants women of color interested in studying physics at top institutions to know, it’s this: You can do this.

Williams is a Ph.D. student in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences working in the lab of Wagner Family Professor of Chemical Engineering and Professor of Physics Vinothan Manoharan, and just the third African American woman to pursue a doctorate in physics at Harvard. When she graduates she will join a cohort of fewer than 100 African American women who have received doctorates in the field since 1973.

“When I tried to apply to...

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