Tag: Physics

  • Campus & Community

    NHGRI/NIH awards Harvard researchers $6.5M

    The National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), awarded a $6.5 million grant (over four years) to a team of Harvard University researchers to further develop electronic sequencing in nanopores. The grant is part of more than $20 million in total funding given by NHGRI/NIH to spur innovative…

  • Science & Tech

    Collider startup brings ATLAS to life

    Scientists at Harvard and around the world held their breath Wednesday (Sept. 10), as colleagues switched on the most powerful particle accelerator ever built, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the particle physics laboratory in Geneva.

  • Science & Tech

    ATLAS detector seeks to illuminate universe’s mysteries

    Scientists at Harvard and around the world held their breath earlier today, as colleagues switched on the most powerful particle accelerator ever built, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the…

  • Science & Tech

    DARPA awards interdisciplinary research team $1.2 million grant to study surface enhanced Raman scattering

    The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has awarded a $1.2 million grant to an interdisciplinary team of Harvard researchers to study surface enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) for the first…

  • Campus & Community

    GSAS Medal awarded to biologist, physicist, social scientist, art expert

    A biologist who has led groundbreaking research efforts on proteins, an art expert who leads one of the country’s foremost museums, an astrophysicist whose theories guide the study of galaxies and planets, and a social sciences professor who has shaped the course of East Asian studies received the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS)…

  • Arts & Culture

    ‘Instability and Decomposition’

    Instability is the reign of things erratic and unpredictable. Decomposition is the state of being as it unravels, nicely captured by a common sentiment: Things fall apart. The two words — and the frictive, unstable worlds they imply — were at the heart of a convocation of young scholars last week (April 25-26).

  • Campus & Community

    AAPT to honor mazur for contributions to teaching

    The American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT) has named Balkanski Professor of Physics and Applied Physics Eric Mazur its Robert A. Millikan Medal recipient.

  • Campus & Community

    Gabrielse to receive physics prize

    George Vasmer Leverett Professor of Physics Gerald Gabrielse has been named the winner of the 2008 Premio Caterina Tommassoni and Felice Pietro Chisesi Prize. The prize, which includes 13,000 euros, will be officially presented April 7 at the University of Rome.

  • Campus & Community

    Rambelje, Physics Department, 90

    Harry Rambelje, an assistant in the department of physics, died on March 1. He was 90.

  • Science & Tech

    Laser precision to help find new Earths

    Harvard scientists have unveiled a new laser-measuring device that they say will provide a critical advance in the resolution of current planet-finding techniques, making the discovery of Earth-sized planets possible.

  • Science & Tech

    Pioneer in spintronics celebrates birthday

    What might be Harvard’s oddest birthday party unfolded last week (Feb. 29-March 1). In a lecture hall at Maxwell Dworkin, 50 physicists gathered to share the latest research in spintronics, an emerging branch of their science concerned with the quantum spin states of electrons.

  • Campus & Community

    Newsmakers

    Three faculty elected to NAE, Linnean Society of London honors Wilson, Arthur Kleinman serves as Cleveringa Professor, Faculty earn Smith Breeden Prize, Pair wins prestigious NSF award, ‘Father of World Wide Web’ to receive Pathfinder Award

  • Campus & Community

    Scientist, educator Ehrenreich dies at 79

    A pioneer in semiconductor materials and a Harvard professor for more than four decades, Henry Ehrenreich, Clowes Professor of Science Emeritus, died on Jan. 20, a few months before his 80th birthday. Ehrenreich served as the University’s first ombudsman and extended his academic interests to government and public policy, spending a year working with the…

  • Campus & Community

    Sidney Coleman dies at 70

    Sidney Richard Coleman, a member of the Harvard faculty for 43 years and a giant of theoretical physics, died on Nov. 18 after a five-year struggle with Parkinson’s disease. He was 70.

  • Campus & Community

    Newsmakers

    It was announced Wednesday (Oct. 10) that the prestigious 2007 IZA Prize in Labor Economics goes to Harvard’s Richard B. Freeman. He was praised by the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Germany for “fundamental contributions that have monumentally shaped modern labor economics.”

  • Science & Tech

    ‘Hot’ ice could lead to medical device

    Harvard physicists have shown that specially treated diamond coatings can keep water frozen at body temperature, a finding that may have applications in future medical implants.

  • Science & Tech

    Prof. Lene Hau: Light matters

    In 2007, Professor Hau expanded upon her ’05 light-stopping breakthrough by transforming light into matter, and then back again.

  • Science & Tech

    Jackson raps abundance of ‘experts’

    In 1973, Shirley Ann Jackson became the first black woman to receive a Ph.D. in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Decades – and 38 honorary degrees – later, Jackson is the president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in upstate New York. Her resume includes time as a university researcher (in theoretical elementary particle physics);…

  • Science & Tech

    Light and matter united

    Lene Hau has already shaken scientists’ beliefs about the nature of things. Albert Einstein and just about every other physicist insisted that light travels 186,000 miles a second in free space, and that it can’t be speeded-up or slowed down. But in 1998, Hau, for the first time in history, slowed light to 38 miles…

  • Campus & Community

    Bloxham named FAS divisional dean

    Geophysicist Jeremy Bloxham has been named dean for the physical sciences in Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), Dean Jeremy R. Knowles announced Aug. 10.

  • Science & Tech

    Measuring one of the universe’s building blocks

    Only a few people think deeply about electrons. One is Gerald Gabrielse, Leverett Professor of Physics at Harvard University. In the past 20 years, he has discovered new things about them, things that even Albert Einstein never knew. And he’s trained a half-dozen young Ph.D.s in the business of how subatomic particles make the universe…

  • Campus & Community

    Using physics to understand biology

    Anita Goel is using the tools of physics to examine one of the most basic processes of biology, the way genetic information is extracted from DNA molecules and how this…

  • Campus & Community

    Drops in drops hold practical promise

    A team of Harvard researchers has developed a technique that allows the precise formation of double emulsions – droplets within droplets – that offers new ways to deliver drugs, nutrients,…

  • Science & Tech

    Prof. Lene Hau: Stopping light cold

    In 2005, Professor Lene Hau did something that Einstein theorized was impossible. Hau stopped light cold using atoms and lasers in her Harvard lab.

  • Campus & Community

    Lasers produce slow, cold antiatoms

    A new way to make colder atoms of antimatter has been found. It could help bring scientists closer to understanding why we, and everything else, are made out of matter instead of antimatter.

  • Science & Tech

    Light propagates via wires more slender than its own wavelength

    A research team led by Harvard’s Eric Mazur and Limin Tong, a visiting professor from Zhejiang University in China, reported on their work with nanowires in the Dec. 18, 2003…

  • Science & Tech

    First supernovae quickly seeded universe with stuff of life

    The early universe was a barren wasteland of hydrogen, helium, and a touch of lithium, containing none of the elements necessary for life as we know it. From those primordial…

  • Science & Tech

    Scientists look inside antimatter

    “We have obtained the first glimpse inside an antihydrogen atom, and this is a significant step on the way to precision measurements that will allow matter/antimatter comparisons to be made,”…

  • Science & Tech

    Harvard undergraduate discovers novel atomic cluster

    Eighteen-year-old Kevin Chan, a member of the Harvard College Class of 2004, used a supercomputer to discover a novel arrangement of atoms that had been missed by other scientists studying…

  • Science & Tech

    Young star may be belching spheres of gas, astronomers say

    Observations by astronomers of a young star in the constellation Cepheus, more than 2000 lights-years away, suggest that it is repeatedly belching spheres of gas. Current theories about how young…