Neutrinos are very small particles which react weakly with mass.  Measuring their reactions involves an environment with incredibly low background radiation and interference.  The MAJORANA Demonstrator experiment is a collaboration of 129 researchers from 27 institutions and 6 countries which seeks to better understand these particles. UNC Physics and Astronomy faculty members John Wilkerson and Reyco Henning are both involved in this research, along with department Senior Research Scientist Mark Howe (as well as many graduate students and postdoctoral scholars). The experiment seeks to observe neutrinoless double-beta decay in atomic nuclei, which would demonstrate that neutrinos are their own antiparticles and offer greater insight into our understanding of the universe.

A study published in Physical Review Letters outlines how the MAJORANA collaboration has been able to successfully shield a germanium detector array from background radiation.  This is exciting news that opens the door to creating a larger-scale experiment to study the nature of neutrinos. For more information, see articles from the UNC College of Arts & Sciences and Oak Ridge National Laboratories. Further reading can also be found in a recent APS article written by UNC Physics and Astronomy Professor Jon Engel and Petr Vogel of California Institute of Technology.

UNC Physics and Astronomy Department Chair Dr. Christian Iliadis gave a presentation in Charleston, SC for the Patriots Point Eclipse on a Warship event. Visitors at the event were able to view the solar eclipse from the flight deck of the U.S.S. Yorktown, a warship decommissioned in 1970 which now serves as a naval museum. Around 3,000 people were in attendance.

The event was named in the New York Times as one of the six major eclipse viewing events in the United States, and it was promoted in several other eclipse viewing guides prior to August 21. Prof. Iliadis appeared on MSNBC to discuss the eclipse and demonstrate a pinhole viewer from the flight deck. Dr. Douglas Terrier, NASA Chief Technologist, and other NASA scientists were also in attendance.

Eclipse totality occurred in Charleston at 2:46 pm and lasted for approximately one minute and thirty-three seconds. It was the last large U.S. city to experience the eclipse and was a popular destination for many seeking a view of the event. Though the sky was overcast in Charleston on August 21, the cloud cover dispersed long enough for the totality to be viewed by the crowd.

More links:
MSNBC Transcript and Video Clip

UNC Physics and Astronomy Adjunct Professor Steven Christensen captured several amazing pictures of the 8/21 solar eclipse from Niota, Tennessee. The area experienced two minutes and thirty-nine seconds of totality. Niota and the surrounding communities in Eastern Tennessee were among the most ideal places to view the eclipse in its totality.

Several of Prof. Christensen’s images are below. To see all of the images that he captured during the eclipse, please see the full image gallery here.

Chelsea Bartram, a graduate student in the UNC Department of Physics and Astronomy, has received the Third Prize for her poster presented at TAUP 2017 — The XV International Conference on Topics in Astroparticle and Underground Physics. The conference was held in Sudbury, ON July 24-28 and the awards were handed out by Nobel laureates Takaaki Kajita and Art McDonald. Chelsea’s research involves searching for minuscule differences between the behavior of matter and anti-matter, specifically searching for CPT-violation in positronium decays. Her work is based at the Triangle Universities Nuclear Laboratory.

The American Astronomical Society recently featured UNC Physics and Astronomy postdoctoral associate and Hubble Fellow J.J. Hermes‘ research surrounding a newly discovered white dwarf.  Designated SDSSJ0837+1856, the white dwarf is “unusually massive,” and its uniqueness allows study of the rotation of intermediate-mass stars such as the progenitor star from which it originated In findings released by a team led by Hermes, Kepler K2 observations yielded measurements that indicate that this white dwarf is the “highest-mass and fastest-rotating isolated pulsating white dwarf known.”

The complete AAS article can be found here.

Gulden (Joule) Othman, a third-year graduate student in UNC Physics and Astronomy, was recently featured in Endeavors magazine’s ‘Women in Science Wednesdays’ for March 8, 2016. The full interview with the UNC research magazine can be found here. Congratulations, Joule!

The Department of Physics and Astronomy recently hosted the first Arts and Sciences ‘Meet the Scientists’ event with elementary school children from Carrboro Elementary.

The science component included a day long outreach program where 80 first graders, with their parents and teachers, participated in a variety of activities exposing them to the physics of the universe from the largest to the smallest scales. During their visit, they interacted with scientists and visited the telescope labs at Morehead. For many, this was the first of this type of experience.

Inspired by the hands-on science exposure and their first visit to UNC, these little ones set to work in their school, working to transfer their science images and imagination onto canvas, provided by the department. We will display their artwork in the halls of Phillips once it is complete.

Word has it that many of the students have already decided to study hard so that they can sign up for a science education at UNC when they grow up!

We are very grateful to the kids for the artwork, and to their teachers for their help and enthusiasm in making this event possible.

Over the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday (13-15 January), thirteen UNC physics majors attended the Conference for Undergraduate Women in Physics at Virginia Tech. This conference was one of ten sponsored by the American Physical Society, held simultaneously all over the United States and Canada. These conferences feature plenary talks, professional development workshops and panels, tours of physics laboratories, and opportunities for networking and social interaction. The photo below shows all the students who attended from UNC, as well as Prof. Laurie McNeil, who gave a plenary talk and participated in professional development panels during the conference. From left to right: (top row) Emilee Armstrong, Emily Michael, Delaney O’Connell, Margie Bruff, Samantha Pagan, Maggie Hildebran, Yi Hu, Helen Hansel, (bottom row) Carolyn Liu, Carlynn Ferguson, Callie Hood, Kristy Sakano, Prof. McNeil, and Bailey Canter.

Two of the UNC students presented posters about their research. The photo below shows Callie Hood and Kristy Sakano in front of their posters.

“Listening to speakers and meeting other women made me even more excited about studying physics, and I liked getting to know students from other schools. It was also great to learn about all of the different paths open to me as a physics student” said Maggie Hildebran, a sophomore physics major.

Bailey Canter, another UNC sophomore, added “The conference really helped me understand what to expect moving forward in the field of physics beyond my undergraduate career and what it takes to be successful.”

The Southeastern Section of the American Physical Society has presented the 2016 Pegram Award to Dr. Kent Price of Morehead State University (Tennessee). Kent received his PhD from UNC (working with Laurie McNeil) in 1998 and is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Physics at Morehead State. The citation for the award reads as follows:

The George B. Pegram Award recognizes physics educators who have demonstrated outstanding ability in undergraduate education. The George B. Pegram Award for 2016 is presented to Kent J. Price of Morehead State University for his extraordinary outreach and professional development activities in Eastern Kentucky, especially including mentoring high school physics teachers, for his development and teaching of a significant number of courses at Morehead State University, and for his motivating students to continue on to graduate work in physics.

Previous winners of this award who have UNC connections include former members of the UNC faculty Joe Straley (1972), Paul Shearin (1982), Wayne Bowers (1990), and Kian Dy (1999).

Dr. Price commented on this recognition, saying: “I am gratified that physics education efforts in rural Appalachia were considered important enough to recognize. Many school districts in the area do not have a single trained physics teacher. The few high school teachers who have more than nominal physics training are isolated professionally and have few opportunities for professional development in physics. I and the other university faculty who work with districts in the region are rarely noticed, so the fact that the award committee felt helping high schools in Eastern Kentucky with physics education worthy of recognition is a reward in and of itself.”

We are delighted that one of our graduates has received this significant recognition. Congratulations, Kent!

UNC partner Carestream Health unveiled a mobile medical imaging device at the 2016 meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) in Chicago, IL. The annual meeting is the largest radiology conference in the world. Carestream’s device features carbon nanotube technology developed by UNC Physics and Astronomy Professor Otto Zhou’s research group. For more information, see the Carestream news release.

An image of the Statue of Liberty Nebula (NGC 3576), taken at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile (CTIO), was featured on September 28, 2016 as NASA’s Astronomy Image of the Day. The featured photo was taken by PROMPT, a robotic telescope system developed by UNC astronomers and their collaborators and operated by UNC’s Skynet program. The image can be viewed in full here.

UNC Physics and Astronomy Professor Laura Mersini-Houghton sat down over the summer to meet with Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama. “It was a great honour and pleasure to meet Laura Mersini, Albanian star of astrophysics, living for years in the United States and today widely appreciated as one of the world’s leading scientists,” the Prime Minister wrote following the July meeting.

The original story appeared on the Albanian Ministry website.