• lowering

    Geneva, Switzerland: Lowering of a completed segment of the CMS detector into its underground cavern. The completed instrument is now recording collisions at the Large Hadron Collider.

  • condensedmatter

    High-temperature superconducting YBCO levitating above a magnetic track due to vortex pinning

  • astrogroup

    Image credit: J.C. Howk, K. Rueff (Notre Dame), NASA/ESA, LBTO

    Notre Dame astronomers are using images of the spiral galaxy NGC 4302 to study the impact that exploding stars have on gas and dust in spiral galaxies.

  • vacuum

    Ultra-high vacuum load-lock of low-temperature, high magnetic field scanning tunneling microscope.

Faculty Spotlight

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Margaret Dobrowolska

Professor of Physics

Dobrowolska, a member of the Notre Dame faculty since 1988, was recently named an AAAS fellow. She was cited for “seminal experimental studies of semiconductor materials and tireless contributions to undergraduate education and outreach to local communities on energy conservation.”

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Peter Garnavich

Professor of Physics

Notre Dame astrophysicist Peter Garnavich has been invited to the Nobel Prize Award Ceremony in Stockholm, Sweden when Nobel Laureates Brian Schmidt, Adam Riess, and Saul Perlmutter will receive the 2011 the Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the Universe through observations of distant supernovae. Garnavich, who wrote the team’s first paper that included supernovae data from the Hubble telescope, was a part of the High-Z Supernova Search Team led by Schmidt. More details.

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Christopher Howk

Associate Professor of Physics

The Milky Way will have the fuel to continue forming stars, thanks to massive clouds of ionized gas raining down from its halo and intergalactic space. This is the conclusion of a new study by Nicolas Lehner and Christopher Howk. Their report, “A Reservoir of Ionized Gas in the Galactic Halo to Sustain Star Formation in the Milky Way,” was published in Science on August 26. Full story here.

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Zoltan Toroczkai

Professor of Physics

Professor Toroczkai and postdoctoral research associate Maria Ercsey-Ravasz have proposed an alternative approach to solving difficult constraint satisfaction problems. Their paper, “Optimization hardness as transient chaos in an analog approach to constraint satisfaction,” was recently published Nature Physics. Full story here.