In this edition of the Friday Newsletter, we look at images from Dark Matter Day and note a recent talk by one of our undergraduates at the Texas Section of the APS meeting.
Contents
CHAIR’S WEEKLY MESSAGE
“Fifth Annual Dark Matter Day Celebration”
International Dark Matter Day was created in 2017 as a way to bring global attention to one of the great scientific mysteries of our age. At SMU, we have been celebrating this event (held on or around October 31) since its inception. We’ve had public talks, special seminars, and even had a local TV station to run a story on activities at SMU. The most lasting thing that we have done, however, one that sticks in the memory of all who partake, is the dark matter rock hunt.
This morning, three students (all leaders in the SMU Society of Physics Students) gathered with myself and Prof. Jodi Cooley at a restaurant near campus. We pored over a map of campus on a mobile phone, marking numbers on the map where we intended to hide dark matter rocks. These rocks, symbolic of the contribution of dark matter to the energy budget of the universe (26 rocks for the 26% of the universe composed of dark matter), were then hidden in accessible locations across the campus.
By the time we go to press today, the main event will have concluded. The rock hunt ran from 8am to 3pm. Anyone who stumbles on a rock will find along with it a laminated card with instructions. Those instructions tell the finder to bring it to the Physics Main Office to collect a prize. The dark matter rock hunt engages the campus, and even members of the community who come to the campus to do their part, in the global search for dark matter’s constituents.
Dark matter has been with us since almost the beginning of time. Quantum fluctuations in the early universe seeded over-densities and under-densities in the matter of the cosmos in those first moments. Dark matter, feeling only the weakest of interactions known to physics, collected in these regions of space. These over-densities were then stretched into a vast web of dark matter, knots. Normal matter (atoms and the things that comprise atoms), with all of its rich interactions, nonetheless settled into these dark matter pockets. It is from these clumps of dark matter that galaxies, and today the vast ocean of galaxies, formed and evolved.
But what is dark matter made from? We do not know. Efforts at SMU seek to spot actual particles of dark matter, and to better fingerprint the behavior of dark matter in the early cosmos. Despite global efforts, the nature of dark matter eludes us to this day. As educators, we seek to expand the frontier of human knowledge; however, we also recognize that difficult puzzles like this will take generations of scientists to unravel. We train the next generation to do what we could not … to stand on our shoulders, as we stood on the shoulders of the generations before us … in the hopes of seeing a little further than we could. This is the burden and the reward of the academy: the create knowledge and train those who would inherit the discoveries and mysteries of our age.
We hope you, too, mark this day with your own thoughts about this mystery. Pick up a good book on the subject (“The 4% Universe” is a good one, by Richard Panek). Watch a documentary on this mystery (“Dark Matter,” an episode of the series PBS Nova that aired in about 2008, is a good choice). Or, tonight, look out into the night sky. If it’s clear, marvel at the dark spaces between the stars. What fills these spaces seems to rule to the cosmos.
In this week’s edition of the Friday newsletter, we look at images from Dark Matter Day and note a recent talk by one of our undergraduates at the Texas Section of the APS meeting in Clear Lake, TX.
Sincerely,
Stephen Jacob Sekula Chair, Department of Physics |
DEPARTMENT VIEWS
No Department Speaker Series Event on Monday, Nov. 1
There is no Department Speaker Series event on November 1. Use this break as an opportunity to catch up on homework or grab an early dinner with some friends. The series resumes on Nov. 15.
Learn more: https://www.physics.smu.edu/web/seminars/
All past speaker series events since August 2020 are available in our YouTube playlist.
What’d I Miss?
We all get too many emails from the University and College. Here are a few things you might have missed this week.
- Faculty: The Provost will use this week’s “Weekly Update” to spotlight students, and next week’s to spotlight faculty. The Provost encouraged submissions about the faculty. The August 27th edition of the newsletter, which summarized recent faculty research activities, was used as the basis of submissions by the Department Chair (c.f. https://blog.smu.edu/smuphysics/2021/08/27/physics-department-friday-newsletter-for-august-27-2021/). This is a good reminder that if you have news, share it with us for this newsletter … this makes it easy to then bundle up and share with the wider community, including university leadership. If you’re doing interesting things, reporting them in the newsletter is the first step to wider knowledge about your work.
- Faculty: Volunteers are requested for serving in review of undergraduate applicants to SMU’s scholar programs. “As a reminder, the President’s Scholars Program attracts some of the most academically gifted students in the nation to SMU. The scholarship provides full-tuition and fees for eight consecutive semesters or graduation, whichever comes first, and the Campus Community Award, which covers housing and dining on campus. The Hunt Leadership Scholars Program allows students to combine learning and leadership while enabling outstanding student leaders from all walks of life to come to SMU.” This is a great way to provide important service to the university. (“Faculty Volunteer Request: President’s Scholars and Hunt Scholars Programs Application Readers/ Interviewers”, sent by the academicsuccess account on Oct. 26, 2021)
- Faculty: RSVPs for December Commencement are requested by the Provost. The deadline is December 3. Commencement ceremonies are a crucial moment in the life of every graduating student. Please offer your presence in support of the students whose lives you have changed over the past four years. (“Invitation to SMU’s December Commencement,” sent by Provost Loboa on October 26, 2021)
- All: The Dedman College Community Mixer is on November 5. “All Dedman College faculty, staff, and students are invited. For more information and to RSVP by October 29, please visit: smu.edu/CommunityMixer.” (“This Week at Dedman College: November 1 – 7,” sent by the DedmanCollegeDean account on Oct. 28, 2021)
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
The department staff continue to work on behalf of Academic Operations (Lacey Breaux) and Research Operations (Michele Hill). They can be contacted for assistance, or to make appointments for input and help, through the Department Main Office (FOSC 102).
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!
Hamilton Scholar Stephanie Gilchrist Presents Her Research at the TSAPS Meeting
On Saturday, Oct. 23, Hamilton Scholar and Biophysical Science Major Stephanie Gilchrist presented her research at the Fall 2021 Texas Section of the American Physical Society (TSAPS) meeting. The meeting was hybrid, with about 20-30 people spread out the room and a similar number connected online. She showed how early work on the experimental aspects of the planned Electron-Ion Collider (EIC) suggests that single, identified Kaons can be a powerful tool for identifying charm quark production at the EIC.
Kaons are subatomic particles discovered in the 1940s. They are the heavier cousin of a particle called the Pion, itself made from the same quarks that comprise the proton and the neutron. The Kaon lives long enough when produced from a particle collider that it can traverse the material of the particle detector surrounding the collision point. Kaons appear in such experiments as a “track” – a series of ionization deposits whose spatial locations are precisely determined – as a flash of light in a system called a “Cerenkov Detector,” and then as a large deposit of energy in the “Calorimeter” system. Taking these three things together, it is possible at a modern experiment to identify over 99% of all Kaons while having very low contamination from other kinds of particles.
Stephanie’s work showed that by employing even a single such particle in an EIC event it was possible to boost the identification of chark-quark-initiated particles jets by almost 30% over the current baseline approach. The current baseline efficiency for selecting charm quarks this way, including her work, is about 23%. Her work continues with development of machine learning applications to the Kaon information, with the goal of further boosting this performance. Her work is done in the context of a proto-experiment called ATHENA (A Totally Hermetic Electron-Nucleus Apparatus) which will be proposed as a possible EIC experiment to the U.S. Department of Energy. SMU is part of the proto-collaboration making this proposal.
REMINDER: Majors and Minors Have Physical Mailboxes in FOSC 102
As announced in a letter from the Department Chair last week and in this newsletter, all actively listed Physics Majors and Minors, as well as Biophysics Majors, have mailboxes in the Physics Department Main Office (FOSC 102). Please check those at least once per week for information, announcements, and other goodies!
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
Scenes from Dark Matter Day, 2021 at SMU
