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New content and hot topics in the JRM Lab.

Hot Topics

We are sad to announce the death of Professor Emeritus and former department head, Chander Perkash Bhalla, 81 of Corinth, Texas, formerly of Manhattan, Kansas, who passed away peacefully on January 16, 2015 in Irving, Texas. Chander served as a professor of Physics at Kansas State University for 35 years, including serving at Department Head of Physics for 5 years. His research interests included theoretical physics, atomic collisions, and radioactive and non-radioactive transitions. He was named Professor Emeritus at Kansas State University. His complete obituary may be read via the Physics department.
Uwe Thumm, has received two major awards for his teaching and research. Uwe shared the Commerce Bank Distinguished Graduate Faculty Award with Kun Yan Zhu, professor of entomology. The award honors Thumm and Zhu for their outstanding scholarly achievements and contributions to graduate education at KSU. Each receives a $2,500 honorarium. The awards are supported by the William T. Kemper Foundation and the Commerce Bancshares Foundation. Uwe then received an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Research Award. The Senior Research Award honors the academic and research achievements of the award winner's lifetime.
JRM professor Brett DePaola appears in the new Science 2034 podcast. Brett discusses how incremental advances in the field of atomic, molecular and optical physics (AMOP) will give rise to technologies that enable breakthroughs in diverse areas. Listen to Building a Better Atomic Clock.
The August 2014 edition of the Division of Laser Science newsletter is available.
Congratulations to Vinod Kumarappan, who has earned tenure and the title of Associate Professor. See Kansas State's list of promotions for the Spring of 2014 for the complete story.

Local Research in the News

Proving the amazing usefulness of an X-ray laser, the LCLS collaboration continues to illuminate new and interesting things. The latest from the group that include Artem Rudenko and Daniel Rolles is the imaging of a virus. See the popular APS Viewpoint feature or the Nature News story. This follows on the heels of imaging a live bacteria.
Yujun Wang, a JRM research associate, and Paul Julienne at the University of Maryland, looked at theoretically predicting and understanding chemical reactions that involve three atoms at ultracold temperatures. Their findings help explain the likely outcome of a chemical reaction and shed new light on mysterious quantum states. The scientific journal Nature Physics recently published their findings. See also the K-State press release.
Assistant Professor Artem Rudenko and future faculty member Daniel Rolles are part of a collaboration at LCLS that has just published a paper in Science on Shapes and vorticities of superfluid helium nanodroplets.
Kansas State University physicists and computer scientists are involved in a collaborative project to understand how light interacts with matter. Our Itzik Ben-Itzhak is a co-principal investigator on the multimillion-dollar project, "Imaging and Controlling Ultrafast Dynamics of Atoms, Molecules, and Nanostructures". The project involves nine researchers at K-State as well as researchers at the University of Kansas and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. The National Science Foundation's Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research, or EPSCoR, recently supported the project with a three-year, $6 million award. The grant is developing a regional Nebraska-Kansas consortium to understand how ultrafast laser technologies influence photonics and electronics.
See older press releases concerning ultrafast physics at JRM.

Web Site Updates

Assistant Professor Artem Rudenko, soon-to-be JRM faculty member Daniel Rolles, and their collaborators have published in Science a paper on the imaging of charge transfer in molecules. This is the subject of our latest science feature story. See also the K-State press release, via K-State Today.
The Physics department newsletter for 2015 is now available, featuring, among other news, details of the JRM researchers' accomplishments. Read the newsletter here (pdf).
Download the Acrobat version of our latest visitor's guide.