Assistant Professor of Physics, Division of Astrophysics

Size: px

Start display at page:

Download "Assistant Professor of Physics, Division of Astrophysics"

Jody Barrett
5 years ago
Views:

(JANUARY 2012) Walter Breitinger Anna Frebel Assistant Professor of Physics, Division of Astrophysics Professor Anna Frebel s broadly cover the chemical and physical conditions of the early Universe,

1 (JANUARY 2012) Walter Breitinger Anna Frebel Assistant Professor of Physics, Division of Astrophysics Professor Anna Frebel s broadly cover the chemical and physical conditions of the early Universe, and how old, metal-deficient stars can be used to obtain constraints on the first stars and initial mass function, supernova yields, and stellar nucleosynthesis. She is best known for her discoveries and subsequent spectroscopic analyses of the most metal-poor stars and how these stars can be employed to uncover information about the early Universe. By now, she has expanded her work to include observations of faint stars in the least luminous dwarf galaxies to obtain a more comprehensive view of how the Milky Way, with its extended stellar halo, formed. She carries out her observational research on old stars through high-resolution optical spectroscopy, using the 6.5m Magellan telescopes in Chile. Recently, Frebel also started a large supercomputing project to simulate the formation and evolution of large galaxies, like the Milky Way, in a cosmological context. The N-body dark matter halos will ultimately help her trace the cosmological path of the oldest stars from their birth in the early Universe until their arrival in the Milky Way halo through various merger events. This huge data set will also enable her to quantify the breadth of galaxy formation and the abundance of substructure of large galaxies, among many other things. After studying physics in Germany, Anna Frebel received her PhD from the Australian National University s Mt. Stromlo Observatory in 2006, advised by Prof. John E. Norris. For her work on Abundance analyses of bright metalpoor stars from the Hamburg/ESO survey, Frebel was awarded the 2007 Charlene Heisler Prize for the best Australian astronomy PhD thesis of She then received the W. J. McDonald Postdoctoral Fellowship, which took her to Austin, TX ( ), before taking up the Clay Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in early She was awarded the 2009 Ludwig-Biermann Young Astronomer Award of the German Astronomical Society, as well as the 2010 Annie Jump Cannon Award of the American Astronomical Society. In early 2012, Frebel joined the MIT physics faculty as an Assistant Professor. For a list of Prof. Frebel s selected publications, please visit her faculty web page at 6 ) new faculty mit physics annual 2012

Liang Fu Assistant Professor, Division of Atomic, Biophysics, Condensed Matter, and Plasma Physics Professor Liang Fu s main are novel electronic phases in solidstate materials and the various

2 Liang Fu Assistant Professor, Division of Atomic, Biophysics, Condensed Matter, and Plasma Physics Professor Liang Fu s main are novel electronic phases in solidstate materials and the various quantum phenomena they exhibit. In the past few years, he has developed the theory of topological insulators a new class of materials whose universal electronic properties are governed by certain sharplydefined topological quantities. Potential applications of topological insulators range from spin-based electronics to fault-tolerant quantum computation and are currently being pursued. More recently, Fu has been interested in a class of unconventional superconductors in which strong spin-orbit coupling promotes a novel odd-parity pairing symmetry; such superconductors provide a solid-state realization of the long-sought Majorana fermions. He has also worked on mesoscopic superconductivity, coherent optical phenomena in semiconductors, and electron fractionalization in strongly correlated materials. Liang Fu joined the MIT Physics Department as an Assistant Professor in January He obtained a bachelor s degree in physics from the University of Science and Technology of China in 2004, and a PhD in physics from the University of Pennsylvania in Before coming to MIT, he was a Junior Fellow at Harvard University. For a list of Prof. Fu s selected publications, please visit his faculty web page at mit physics annual 2012 new faculty ( 7

Paolo Zuccon Assistant Professor of Physics, Division of Experimental Nuclear and Particle Physics Professor Paolo Zuccon s main activity concerns the study of particle physics through the

3 Paolo Zuccon Assistant Professor of Physics, Division of Experimental Nuclear and Particle Physics Professor Paolo Zuccon s main activity concerns the study of particle physics through the measurement of the fluxes of cosmic rays. He has been involved in the construction and the qualification of the AMS-02 experiment installed on the International Space Station and currently is working on the data analysis. The AMS-02 goals include the indirect search for dark matter, the search for primordial anti-matter, and the study of the origin and propagation of cosmic rays. He is also interested in direct dark matter detection and neutrino physics. Paolo Zuccon is a native of Italy, where he studied and conducted most of his physics research before joining MIT as an Assistant Professor in January He received his Master s Degree in Physics in 1998 at Padova University, followed by a year working on neutrino physics with Prof. M. Baldo-Ceolin. Zuccon then went to Perugia University, where he worked with the Battiston research group as a graduate student analyzing the AMS-01 data. He received his PhD in 2003 at Perugia University, defending a thesis about a model of the cosmic rays interaction with the Earth s magnetosphere. He has held postdoctoral and research scientist positions for the Perugia branch of the Italian Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN), with a major involvement in the AMS-02 project and an emphasis on silicon tracker data acquisition and reconstruction software. Zuccon is proud to note that he also served as an ambulance driver for the Italian Red Cross in his hometown of Treviso, Italy. For a list of Prof. Zuccon s selected publications, please visit his faculty web page at 8 ) new faculty mit physics annual 2012

(July 2012) Michael Williams Assistant Professor, Division of Experimental Nuclear and Particle Physics Professor Mike Williams is primarily interested in understanding the interactions of

4 (July 2012) Michael Williams Assistant Professor, Division of Experimental Nuclear and Particle Physics Professor Mike Williams is primarily interested in understanding the interactions of fundamental particles. The so-called Standard Model of particle physics successfully describes all of the known interactions of all known particles; however, the Standard Model leaves a number of important fundamental questions unanswered. For example, it doesn t explain the matter-antimatter imbalance observed in our universe. Williams is using data from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN to study differences in the behavior of matter and antimatter. These studies could lead to the discovery of physics beyond the Standard Model and to a deeper understanding of our Universe. Williams is also interested in the structure of strongly interacting systems. By studying the spectra of these systems, he hopes to gain insight into the nature of nuclear matter. Of particular interest is the search for states that are predicted to exist by simulations but have not yet been observed. Mike Williams joined the MIT Physics Department as an Assistant Professor in July He grew up in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, received his undergraduate degree in Mathematics and Physics from Saint Vincent College in 2001, and his PhD from Carnegie Mellon University in He was a postdoctoral researcher at Imperial College London from For a list of Prof. Williams s selected publications, please visit his faculty web page at mit physics annual 2012 new faculty ( 9

(SEPTEMBER 2012) William Detmold Assistant Professor of Physics, the Center for Theoretical Physics Professor Detmold s are in strong interaction dynamics in theoretical particle and nuclear physics.

5 (SEPTEMBER 2012) William Detmold Assistant Professor of Physics, the Center for Theoretical Physics Professor Detmold s are in strong interaction dynamics in theoretical particle and nuclear physics. Detmold uses analytic methods and supercomputers to solve the complex equations of quantum chromodynamics (QCD) that describe the strong interaction, and seeks to understand the emergence of hadrons and nuclei from the underlying Standard Model of particle physics. He aims to determine the properties and interactions of these systems from first principles to confront experiment and to make predictions for regimes, such as in the interior of neutron stars, where experiments are not possible. Professor Detmold obtained his PhD from the University of Adelaide, Australia, and joined the MIT physics faculty in 2012, moving from the College of William & Mary, where he was an Assistant Professor. Prior to that position, he was a Research Assistant Professor at the University of Washington. Professor Detmold is the recipient of a U. S. Department of Energy Outstanding Junior Investigator award. For a list of Prof. Detmold s selected publications, please visit his faculty web page at 10 ) new faculty mit physics annual 2012

Laboratory for Nuclear Science

The Laboratory for Nuclear Science (LNS) provides support for research by faculty and research staff members in the fields of particle, nuclear, and theoretical plasma physics. This includes activities