Department of Physics

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Research Statement
  • - Polarbear: A CMB polarization telescope that will be located at the Atacama desert in Chile.

    - BICEP: A CMB polarization telescope that took data at the South Pole from 2006 to 2008.

    - CIBER: A rocket that will be used to measure the near-infrared background.
Awards & News
  • UCSD Physics Professor wins "Young Scholars Competition at the Amazing Light: Visions for Discovery" symposium
  • Brian Keating, assistant professor of physics at UCSD's Center for Astrophysics and Space Sciences, won first place and $20,000 in the Young Scholars Competition at the Amazing Light: Visions for Discovery symposium this month at the University of California, Berkeley. The competition at the conference honoring Nobel laureate Charles Townes' 90th birthday was intended to recognize young scientists from around the world with the potential to make such major breakthroughs as Townes' discovery of the laser. Keating was selected for his essay and talk on a telescope which he and his colleagues are constructing at the U.S. South Pole Station, Antarctica. Starting in December the telescope will search for primordial gravitational waves produced after the Big Bang and will test the theory of cosmological inflation. Judges for the competition included Townes, Nobel laureate Arno Penzias, planet-finder Geoff Marcy of UC Berkeley and Donald York of the University of Chicago. More information on the conference and competition can be found at: http://www.foundationalquestions.net/townes/ysc/young_finalists.asp
  • Professor Brian Keating receives an NSF Faculty Early Career Development Program Grant
  • UCSD physics Professor Brian Keating has received an NSF Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) Grant. Prof. Keating received the award for his proposal to measure the polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) from the U.S. Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station over the next five years. The polarization of the CMB has the potential to constrain models of the very early universe including the period of cosmological inflation which is hypothesized to have produced a relict background of gravitational waves. To study the imprint of these gravitational waves on the CMB, Prof. Keating and his Caltech, JPL, UC-Berkeley and European collaborators developed a novel astronomical observatory called the Robinson Gravitational Wave Background Telescope/BICEP. This telescope uses 98 polarization sensitive bolometers operating at 0.25 Kelvin to measure fluctuations in the CMB to a precision of 100 nanoKelvin. Prof. Keating and UCSD graduate student Evan Bierman deployed BICEP to the South Pole in December 2005 and plan to operate the observatory and analyze its data over the next five years. More information on Prof. Keating's research is available at: http://physics.ucsd.edu/~bkeating
  • 2006-2007 Hellman Faculty Fellows Award Winners
  • Professor Brian Keating and Professor Thomas Murphy, Jr. have been selected as recipients of the 2006-2007 Hellman Faculty Fellows Award. The Hellman Fellowship Program was established at UCSD in 1995 through the generosity of Chris and Warren Hellman. The program is designed to provide financial support and encouragement to young faculty in the core disciplines who show capacity for great distinction in their research and creative activities. Funds awarded are primarily intended to enhance the individual's progress toward tenure. Due to the outstanding caliber of the proposals submitted this year, the selection process was quite a challenge. Twenty-three proposals were submitted by Arts & Humanities and Social Sciences faculty, of which eight were selected to receive awards. Seven proposals were selected for funding out of the twenty-three submitted by the Physical Sciences, Life Sciences and Engineering Divisions.
  • UCSD Physics Professor Receives Presidential White House Science Award
  • Two faculty members at the University of California, San Diego were among 56 scientists and engineers who today received the nation's highest honor awarded by the White House to researchers at the outset of their professional scientific careers.
    Brian G. Keating, an assistant professor of physics, and Katerina Akassoglou, an assistant professor of pharmacology, were among this year's recipients of the Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers. They were given their awards, which consists of up to five years of research funding, at a White House ceremony today by John H. Marburger III, President Bush's science adviser and director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
    Established in 1996, the Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers recognizes outstanding scientists and engineers who, early in their careers, show exceptional potential for leadership at the frontiers of knowledge. The award is the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government on scientists and engineers beginning their independent careers. Nine federal departments and agencies annually nominate scientists and engineers who are at the start of their independent careers and whose work shows exceptional promise.
    "These scientists and engineers have not only brought transformational ideas to their fields of study, they have also enriched the educational environment, especially in their roles as mentors," said Kathie L. Olsen, deputy director of the National Science Foundation.
    Keating, who was nominated by the science foundation, is an astrophysicist at UCSD's Center for Astrophysics and Space Sciences who is one of the leaders of a collaboration building a telescope and observatory, called POLARBEAR, that will allow physicists for the first time to measure the "gravitational waves" that emanated from the universe during the first moments of its creation.
    Katerina Akassoglou Akassoglou, who was nominated by the National Institutes of Health, is a researcher whose work involves molecular and cellular mechanisms that regulate nervous tissue regeneration. In 2007, her lab identified a receptor that is critical in liver regeneration. Her team also discovered that fibrinogen, a protein found in circulating blood and important in blood clotting, can promote multiple sclerosis when it leaks from the blood into the brain, triggering inflammation that leads to MS-related nerve damage. Media Contacts: Kim McDonald, 858-534-7572
  • UCSD professor Brian Keating uses telescopes to study the precise moment the universe was created
  • Several crates containing what will be one of the most powerful radio telescopes in the world are now en route from Bergamo, Italy to the Port of Long Beach. Its ultimate destination is the Atacama Desert in Chile, one of the driest places on earth, and one of the best for astronomical observations.
    The telescope will be fully functional in about a year. And when that time comes University of California, San Diego cosmologist Brian Keating and his colleagues will have the inside track in the race to become the first to discover what happened in the first billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a second after the universe was formed.
    If Keating's group, which includes UCSD's Hans Paar, and researchers from UC Berkeley, as well as some from Canada, France and Japan, was to achieve this insight into what he calls the "embryonic universe," they would not only be able to more precisely explain the origin of the universe, but also its future. Their reputations would be cemented in annals of astrophysics, and they'd be in the running for a Nobel Prize.
    With the telescope, dubbed POLARBEAR (short for Polarization of Background Radiation), the scientists are trying to detect primordial gravitational waves. The existence of these waves would support the theory of inflation, which holds that right after the Big Bang, there was an incredibly rapid and violent expansion of the universe.
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  • UCSD's POLARBEAR experiment is moving to its permanent location in the Atacama Desert, Chile

  • Following a successful "first-light" four-month observing run, UCSD's POLARBEAR experiment on the Huan Tran Telescope at the James Ax Observatory located in the Inyo National Forest near Bishop, CA, is moving to its permanent location in the Atacama Desert, Chile.

    POLARBEAR is a collaboration between UC San Diego,
    UC Berkeley, University of Colorado, McGill University, Imperial College, the Japanese High Energy Research Organization, and the University of Paris.
    Polarbear's goal is to detect the gravitational waves produced during the era of inflation, shortly after the Big Bang by observing unique patterns of polarization of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation. These gravitational waves would be a telltale sign that inflation indeed took place. Additionally, measurement of the small angular scale polarization patterns have the capability to constrain the properties of Dark Matter and the mass of the neutrinos.

    POLARBEAR's receiver is able to detect the polarization of the CMB radiation through an array of over 1200 superconducting transition edge sensor bolometers cooled to 0.25 degrees Kelvin to reduce noise. Many months of observations must be combined to improve the signal to noise enough to observe the desired signals. Atmospheric water vapor is the enemy of ground-based
    microwave background measurements, hence the move to one of the driest sites on earth: the Atacama Desert, Chile where at an altitude of 16,500 feet, water vapor is greatly reduced.

    The POLARBEAR team has begun decommissioning the temporary observatory in the Inyo mountains which will be reassembled in Atacama for observations starting in early 2011.

    Polarbear team members from UC San Diego are David Boettger, George Fuller, Brian Keating, Nathan Miller, Hans Paar, and Ian Schanning.

  • UCSD Physicists To Assemble Microwave Telescope in Chile
  • The assembly of UCSD's telescope will commence shortly now that formal approval from the Chilean government for deployment in Chile's Atacama desert has been received. The telescope is part of the POLARBEAR project seeking to detect evidence for the inflationary epoch of the Big Bang.

    Please click on the following link for more information:
    http://sandiegouniontribune.ca.newsmemory.com/publink.php?shareid=1b98a071b

  • POLARBEAR experiment showing first microwave/radio "vision"
  • We are proud to announce that we got "first light/microwave" today with the POLARBEAR telescope in the Atacama Desert in Chile. We saw the planets Venus and Jupiter, not in the visible portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, but with microwave/radio "vision".

    Doesn't look too exciting at first glance but it's the start of big things for the project and team!

    It's an amazing place to be... very much like being an astronaut on Mars due to the high altitude (17,000') and the terrain. To complete the astronaut analogy most of us need to be on supplemental oxygen most of the time, which makes manual labor quite hard. But it sure beats the alternative!

    More pictures of POLARBEAR may be located on Flickr, and more detailed information about POLARBEAR may be found at the Huan Tran Telescope web page.

    Thanks to the whole collaboration and especially to the UCSD team (Darcy Barron, Dave Boettger, Frederick Matsuda, Nathan Miller, Stephanie Moyerman, Dr. Nathan Stebor, Praween Siritanasak) for all of their hard work and dedication!

  • New Telescopes to Give UC San Diego Researchers Glimpse of the Beginning of Time
  • Simons Foundation gives $4.3 million in funding for construction and installation of new telescopes to measure universe at its inception.

    Where do we come from? What is the universe made of? Will the universe exist only for a finite time or will it last forever? These are just some of the questions that University of California, San Diego physicists are working to answer in the high desert of northern Chile.

    Armed with a massive 3.5 meter (11.5 foot) diameter telescope designed to measure space-time fluctuations produced immediately after the Big Bang, the research team will soon be one step closer to understanding the origin of the universe. The Simons Foundation has recently awarded the team a $4.3 million grant to build and install two more telescopes. Together, the three telescopes will be known as the Simons Array.

    "The Simons Array will inform our knowledge of the universe in a completely new way," said Brian Keating, associate professor of Physics at UC San Diego's Center for Astrophysics and Space Sciences. Keating will lead the project with Professor Adrian Lee of UC Berkeley.

    Fluctuations in space-time, also known as "gravitational waves," are gravitational perturbations that propagate at the speed of light and can penetrate "through" matter, like an x-ray. The gravitational waves are thought to have imprinted the "primordial soup" of matter and photons that later coalesced to become gases, stars and galaxies-all the structures that we now see. The photons left over from the Big Bang will be captured by the telescopes to give scientists a unique view back to the universe's beginning.

    The telescopes of the Simons Array-named in recognition of the grant-will focus light onto more than 20,000 detectors, each of which must be cooled nearly to absolute zero. The result will provide an unmatched combination of sensitivity, frequency coverage and sky coverage.

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  • Scientists to explore from Arctic to jungles
  • Passports will take a beating this summer among the county's huge scientific research community.

    Scholars from San Diego State University to the University of California San Diego to California State University San Marcos are preparing to travel the globe. They will explore subjects as varied as water quality in Uganda to tuberculosis in Brazil to religious issues in Germany.

    We've pulled together a sample of the research, some of which will be explained in greater depth this summer in dispatches sent to U-T San Diego by the scientists.

    TOM ROCKWELL, seismologist, San Diego State University, will dig trenches on the Sudetic marginal fault in the Czech Republic in early July. He's examining whether the fault is active and could produce future earthquakes, which may have implications for nuclear power plants in Poland.

    BIANCA MOTHE, biologist, Cal State San Marcos, will spend much of the spring and summer in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, studying immune-system responses in patients who are infected with multi-drug and extreme-drug resistant tuberculosis.

    DAN CAYAN, research meteorologist, Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, will travel to the Sierra Nevada and the White Mountains in June to explore climate change and variability.

    BRIAN KEATING, astrophysicist, UC San Diego, will visit Chile's Atacama Desert in September to study the cosmos from the university's James Ax Observatory, home of the POLARBEAR telescope.

    DREW TALLEY, biological oceanographer, University of San Diego, will spend part of June in Bahia San Quintin, Baja California, comparing bivalve populations to historic records from the 1960s

    FOREST ROWHER, microbial ecologist, San Diego State, will be diving in the Galapagos, Franz Josef Land (Arctic) and Line Islands in the central Pacific throughout the summer. He will study how human activities increase microbes in the world's oceans.

    GENO PAWLAK, mechanical engineer, UC San Diego, will spend part of August and September on the leeward side of Oahu, Hawaii to help improve computerized models that simulate how currents and waves behave when they encounter coral reefs.

    MARC MEYERS, materials scientist, UC San Diego, will spend part of August on the Roosevelt River in Brazil trying to obtain the scales of armored catfish, as well as a different fish whose teeth look almost human-like. The goal is to find inspiration for the design of new, better, lighter, tougher and stronger manmade materials.

    GEORGE VOURLITIS, ecologist, Cal State San Marcos, will spend part of June and July in Cuiaba, Mato Grosso, Brazil, with undergraduates examining soil fertility and biodiversity in the Brazilian savannah, the country's second-largest and most vulnerable ecosystem.

    BETH O'SHEA, geochemist, University of San Diego, will spend part of June at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble, France, studying how arsenic is released from rocks into household well water.

    JOHN HAVILAND, linguistic anthropologist, UC San Diego, will spend part of June and July in northeastern Italy analyzing the Rhaeto-Romance language Friulian, and parts of July and August in Chiapas, Mexico, studying a previously unknown sign language in a Tzotzil (Mayan) speaking village.

    ANDRE KUNDGEN, mathematician, Cal State San Marcos, will spend June in Copenhagen, Denmark, exploring new directions in the study of graphs on surfaces. He'll work with renowned mathematician Carsten Thomassen.

    JULIE JAMESON, biologist, Cal State San Marcos, will visit Manila, Philippines in June to help educators learn better ways to teach science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

    ESRA OZYUREK, anthropologist, UC San Diego, will spend July, August and September in Berlin, doing research on Germans who convert to Islam.

    PAUL ETZEL, astronomer, San Diego State University, will spent part of the late summer installing the new 50-inch Phillips Claud Telescope on Mt. Laguna. The telescope will greatly improve the university's ability to study deep space.

    CAROLYN KURLE, biologist, UC San Diego, will spend the summer working in bays and estuaries in the San Diego area to study how certain pollution from runoff and stream outfalls is becoming incorporated into coastal food webs.

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