We look at the newly unveiled speaker featured in our final colloquium of the spring 2021 semester, look ahead to the next event in our Department Speaker Series, and share the April Physics Challenge from The Physics Teacher!
Contents
CHAIR’S WEEKLY MESSAGE
“April Magic”
Happy Tuesday!
“He’s lost it,” you’re saying.
You’re probably right, but in this specific case it’s not the correct explanation. The correct explanation is that we lost a week of instruction in February due to the winter storm that devastated Texas and its residents. The fallout from that, educationally speaking, is that in order to make up enough missing instruction days the university chose to reclaim the Good Friday university holiday and use it to make up a Tuesday; and to reclaim one of the “reading days” just before final exams to make up a Wednesday. So Friday is Tuesday and Tuesday becomes Wednesday.
Welcome to 2021.
April might be starting off on a weird foot, but this is actually a very exciting month for us. We are entering the last month of our Department Speaker series, featuring a fascinating range of topics from neutrinos and axion particles, to the cosmic microwave background, to the latest results from the Muon g-2 Experiment at Fermilab.
This is the honors and awards season for our students. We will feature in the coming weeks a spotlight on students receiving departmental, university, and other awards and honors. This month, of course, also closes out the academic spring term and sets us up for final exams and then Commencement in May. We’ll be preparing for this year’s graduation ceremonies, details of which will emerge formally in the coming weeks. April holds a lot of exciting potential!
In this issue of the Friday newsletter, we unveil the final distinguished speaker of the semester, look ahead to our next Colloquium on Monday, remind the department of upcoming electrical work, and share the April Physics Challenge from The Physics Teacher (remember: current SMU students are prize-eligible on these challenges!).
Sincerely,
Stephen Jacob Sekula Chair, Department of Physics |
DEPARTMENT VIEWS
Announcement: The Spring Colloquium (May 3) will feature Prof. Pierre Ramond (UFL), Distinguished Professor and 2020 Dirac Medal and Prize Recipient
We are very excited to announce that the final event of the Spring 2021 Department Speaker Series will feature Distinguished Professor of Physics Pierre Ramond (University of Florida), who will present a Colloquium entitled “The Unfinished Standard Model.” Most recently, Prof. Ramond was a co-recipient of the 2020 Dirac Medal and Prize for his role in the initiation of Superstring Theory. We will announce more details in the coming weeks, but meanwhile please save the date!
The final event of each major term is intended to be an intellectually rich event for both the department and the SMU Physics Community. We welcome all members of our university and department communities to join us for these events.
Prof. Lindley Winslow (MIT) to speak on neutrinos and axions
Prof. Lindley Winslow (MIT) is the featured Colloquium speaker at our next Department Speaker Series event on Monday, April 5, at 4pm. She will present a talk entitled “Axion Dark Matter and Neutrinoless Double-Beta Decay: New Techniques for New Physics” in which she will look at two of the biggest open questions in the Standard Model of Particle Physics: is the neutrino its own antiparticle, and is the Pecci-Quinn Symmetry, with its resulting axion particle, the right solution to the “strong CP problem” of the strong nuclear interaction? Join us at 4pm on Monday for this event!
Miss a Colloquium or Seminar? Don’t Panic … They’re Recorded!
You can catch up on the Spring 2021 (and Fall 2020!) Physics Speaker Series by checking out your favorite subjects from archives! Explore supermassive black holes, the new Electron-Ion Collider planned for construction in the U.S., new ideas about dark matter or other novel particles or forces, or the basic research needs for future scientific instrumentation in HEP … all from your personal devices! Enjoy our archive of the Physics Speaker Series Talks below.
Reminder: Expect Some Planned Power-Outages to Fondren Science Building in April
Work is scheduled to address a long-standing and important electrical issue that needs to be resolved in the area around SMU. This is likely to result in, at minimum, “electrical service fluctuations” of a short but meaningful duration in April. The community is asked to prepare ahead of time for such events by verifying un-interruptable power supply (UPS) batteries are operating at nominal capacity on sensitive equipment, or shutting off equipment (computers, instrumentation, etc.) entirely in advance of the scheduled events.
The current schedule has this work aimed for the weekends of April 10-11 and April 17-18. We’ll repeat this announcement in subsequent newsletters to keep awareness high about the upcoming electrical service fluctuations.
FACULTY NEWS
If you have something to share please feel free to send it along. Stories of your activities in research, the classroom, and beyond are very welcome!
STAFF NEWS
Staff In-Office Schedule for Week of April 5
The in-office staff schedule for the week of April 5 is nominally as follows:
- Monday: Lacey
- Tuesday: Lacey
- Wednesday: Lacey
- Thursday: Lacey
- Friday: Lacey
Michele is on-leave during the week of April 5 and not available to help with research operations. Please hold your requests until she returns the following week (April 12).
Of course, both are always available on Microsoft Teams, by Email, or by phone.
Full staff in-office calendar for April:
STUDENT NEWS
If you have something to share please feel free to send it along. Stories of students in research, the classroom, internships or fellowships, awards, etc. are very welcome!
ALUMNI NEWS
If you are an alum of the doctoral, masters, majors or minor programs in Physics at SMU, or have worked in our program as a post-doctoral researcher, and wish to share news with the community, please send your story to the Physics Department and we’ll work with you to get it included in a future edition.
THE BACK PAGE
April Physics Challenge!
SPS Faculty Advisor and our department’s informal “Puzzle Master,” Prof. Randy Scalise, invites you to try to solve this month’s physics challenge from The Physics Teacher. The first correct solution he receives (scalise@physics.smu.edu) from a student member of our Society of Physics Students will be awarded a prize. The winner will get to select from the following four books,
- Gleick, J. “Chaos: Making a New Science“.
- Crease, R. P. and Mann, Charles C. “The Second Creation: Makers of the Revolution in Twentieth-Century Physics“.
- Thorne, K. “Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein’s Outrageous Legacy“.
- Greene, B. “The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality“.
Solutions must be complete enough to understand your strategy, reasoning, and methods; providing answers with no explanations are not acceptable. Dr. Scalise urges submitters who believe they have the correct answer to, of course, also submit their solution to The Physics Teacher using the email address challenges@aapt.org. Make sure to follow the journal’s guidelines for submissions (see below). The deadline is the last day of this month.
