UC San Diego | Physics News Stories

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Fred Kavli Auditorium, Tata Building, Revelle College, UC San Diego 9:00 am – Introduction Melvin Okamura (UC San Diego, emeritus) 9:30 am – Bioenergetics Overview by M arilyn Gunner (CUNY) Richard Debus (UC Riverside) From the bacterial reaction centers to O2 evolution in photosystem II Peter Brzezinski (Stockholm) Supramolecular interactions in the mitochondrial respiratory chain Ana and Thomas Moore (ASU) Proton-coupled electron...

George Feher: Commemorating a life in biophysics Feher Fest Memorial Symposium, Friday, 5 October 2018

Bird and glider in tandem flight. Photo montage courtesy of Phil Richardson, © Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution The words “fly like an eagle” are famously part of a song, but they may also be words that make some scientists scratch their heads. Especially when it comes to soaring birds like eagles, falcons and hawks, who seem to ascend to great heights over hills, canyons and mountain tops with ease. Scientists realize that upward currents of warm air assist the birds in their flight, but they don’t know ...

Physicists Train Robotic Gliders to Soar like Birds

Many of our modern devices—from cell phones to electric cars—depend on charged batteries to operate. But when battery voltage fades, so does the amount of energy a battery can hold. This fading is especially problematic for certain lithium-rich cathode materials used to power things like electric cars; how the fading occurs isn’t well understood. To help remedy the problem, a team of UC San Diego researchers applied heat and X-ray imaging differently to demonstrate for the first time the origins of voltage fade. I...

UC San Diego Researchers Charge Quest to End ‘Voltage Fade’

Currently, information-processing tools like computers and cell phones rely on electron charge to operate. A team of UC San Diego physicists, however, seeks alternative systems of faster, more energy-efficient signal processing. They do this by using “excitons,” electrically neutral quasiparticles that exist in insulators, semiconductors and in some liquids. And their latest study of excitonic spin dynamics shows functional promise for our future devices. In their research, Professor Leonid Butov and recent physics PhD ...

Physicists Practice ‘Spin Control’ to Improve Information Processing

To begin to understand the field of plasmonics, picture the rich colors of stained glass windows in Gothic cathedrals or the pixelation of a digital photo on a laptop screen. In some way, shape or form these are plasmons on display. Basically, plasmons are traveling waves of rippling electrons that can be excited in plasmas, metals or semiconductors. They lie at the heart of plasmonics. In such systems, plasmons bunch up and spread out as a group, enhancing and manipulating electromagnetic energy and concentrating optical...

‘Gold Standard’ Research Presents Promise for Plasmonic Devices

As if taken from a Star Wars or Star Trek movie script, the term “exciton” (pronounced ˈek-sə-tän) comes from condensed matter physics. Excitons are bound states of electrons and electron holes attracted to each other by electrostatic force. They can be created both by light and transformed into light. Electrically neutral, these quasiparticles exist in systems like insulators and semiconductors, but University of California San Diego physicists have established a way that may bring them into future cell phones and laptops.

Physicists’ Room-Temperature Research Leads to ‘Exciting’ Possibilities for Science

University of California San Diego condensed matter physicists noticed something surprising about electrons—they behave like a family. Electrons not only carry electric charge as exhibited in electric currents, but they also possess spins which are responsible for quantum magnetic properties. Electron spins can organize, bond and interact. When excited, one spiraling part impacts the others. This dynamic spin was the subject of breakthrough research by UC San Diego Professor Congjun Wu, physics graduate student Wang Yang, for...

UC San Diego Physicists Apply Pencil, Paper and Sociology to Breakthrough Research

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has named Professors Tongyan Lin, Elena Koslover, and Tenio Popmintchev as 2018 Sloan Fellows. They are three of 126 talented young U.S. and Canadian researchers to receive this distinction. The Sloan Research Fellowships are extraordinarily competitive awards involving nominations for most of the very best early-career scholars from the United States and Canada. The Fellowships seek to stimulate fundamental research by early-career scientists and scholars of outstanding promi...

Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has named Professors Tongyan Lin, Elena Koslover, and Tenio Popmintchev as 2018 Sloan Fellows

University of California San Diego researchers in the Department of Physics have shed light on the formation of supermassive black holes and galaxies. The research by Professor Shelley Wright, graduate student Andrey Vayner and their colleagues outlines the physics surrounding the formation of black holes and galaxies, improving scientific understanding of how the two grow in unison. Their findings, published in the Dec. 20, 2017 issue of Astro...

UC San Diego Researchers Shed Light on Formation of Black Holes and Galaxies

UC San Diego has begun designing a powerful telescope that will be placed in Chile’s Atacama Desert to search for “ancient light” that could help explain how the universe arose from the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago. The $10 million telescope will be the largest of five instruments that are being developed as part of the Simons Observatory, which will be located on a high, arid plateau that’s well-suited for searching the cosmos. UC San Diego will collaborate with a Germany company on the design ...

UC San Diego to design telescope to search for "ancient light" from the universe