Message from Phil Gutierrez
As the Fall 2022 semester comes to an end, there is much to reflect back on. The semester started by welcoming 23 new graduate students to the department. We are also saying goodbye to five graduate students who defended their dissertations this semester.
One of the most exciting events is that the Dodge Family gift is starting to bear fruit. The first six of eight Postdoctorial Research Fellows have been hired along with three of the four Research Faculty. The gift is also being used to expand the research capabilities of the four research groups, which allows us to purchase much needed equipment for our labs and increase in telescope observing time at the Apache Point Observatory. The gift is also providing travel funds for our graduate students to present their work at national and international conferences.
But to not downplay what the faculty have done, during the 2022 calendar year, the Physics & Astronomy faculty have brought in roughly $3.1 M in new grant funding. Combining the external funding with the Dodge Family gift has led to a very productive year in faculty research, which benefits our graduate and undergraduate students.
This is the first year in a while where Covid protocols were not in place. In fact, little was mentioned of Covid throughout this semester. Of course, there are still residual effects of the Covid shutdown such as the tiny desks in some of our classrooms. Hopefully a resolution will be found that both the State Fire Marshal and the Department can live with.
I’m wishing everyone a restful winter break as we look forward to a very busy and productive 2023. I would like to personally invite any of our alumni and friends to visit with me or any of our faculty during the coming year.
On March 8-9th, the Physics & Astronomy Department will be participating in an American Physical Society site visit. This program is overseen by the APS Committees on the Status of Women in Physics and the APS Committee on Minorities, and these visits are intended to help departments better understand conditions and actions that can be taken to improve their environment for everyone.
The APS site visit group will be composed of representatives from academia and/or industry and/or government laboratories as appropriate and selected by the APS Site Visit Subcommittee and the Site Visit Group leader. The in-person visit is preceded by a department climate survey administered by the APS, and during the physical visit, the visiting group will meet with department individuals and various subgroups of faculty, staff, and students.
The goals of this visit are to improve the climate for all, with special attention to women and marginalized groups, and to provide assistance to departments to institutionalize positive climate changes. After the visit, the department will receive a report with recommendations and will create an action plan responding to the recommendations.
APS will follow up with the department a year after the visit to evaluate the impact of the visit and to help improve the site visit program.
Research led by Prof. Mike Strauss and Nathan Grieser and has recently been featured as a Physics Briefing by ATLAS, one of the two main collaborations at CERN. The research concerns the decay of new, high-mass particles decaying into a pair of W bosons.
According to the Briefing, "The ATLAS Collaboration's new search sets valuable constraints on several theoretical models, pointing future researchers towards new areas for exploration."
The models that can be explored by these results include "a heavier version of the Standard-Model Higgs boson; a Georgi-Machacek (GM) model, with five predicted Higgs-like particles; a Radion particle, predicted by Randall-Sundrum gravitational models; a heavy vector triplet (HVT) model, consisting of additional Z and W bosons; and an excited Kaluza-Klein (KK) graviton particle, predicted by certain quantum theories of gravity".
More details are available here: https://atlas.cern/Updates/Briefing/Search-High-Mass-Particles
Congratulations Mike and Nate on these important results!
