For the first time, astronomers have mapped dark matter on the largest scale ever observed. Catherine Heymans and Ludovic Van Waerbeke of UBC presented their analysis of the gravitational lensing of about 10 million galaxies in four regions of the sky to the American Astronomical Society meeting in Austin, Texas on 2012-01-08.

The analysis reveal a Universe comprised of an intricate cosmic web of dark matter and galaxies that spans more than one billion light years. The dark matter is distributed as a network of gigantic dense areas, with less matter distributed in filament-like structures & large empty regions.

Catherine Heymans is a former postdoc in P&A, and is now a Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. Ludovic Van Waerbeke is an Associate Professor in the dept & has been with us since 2005. An international team of researchers also contributed to the project.

The project, known as the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope Lensing Survey (CFHTLenS), uses data from the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope Legacy Survey. It accumulated images over five years using the wide field imaging camera MegaCam, a 1 degree by 1 degree field-of-view 340 Megapixel camera on the CFHT in Hawaii. Galaxies included in the survey are typically six billion light years away. The light captured by the telescope images used in the study was emitted when the Universe was six billion years old - approximately half the age it is today.

See the following links for more details,

• CFHT Press Release
• BBC online story Dark matter's cosmic web revealed

Physics World annually lists the top ten breakthroughs in physics research. In their recently announced 2011 list, seventh place is awarded to the international team of physicists (including a number here at UBC & TRIUMF) working on the Tokai-to-Kamioka (T2K) experiment in Japan.

The researchers generate a beam of muon neutrinos at J-PARC (Japan Proton Accelerator Research Complex). The beam is fired 300 km underground to the Super-Kamiokande detector, where six electron neutrino-like events were observed. As the expected background of electron neutrinos was only 1.5, this may be evidence that muon neutrinos had changed, or "oscillated", into electron neutrinos. While the measurement is not good enough to claim the discovery of the muon-to-electron neutrino oscillation, it is the best evidence yet that one "flavour" of neutrino can oscillate into another.

The UBC researchers include Chris Hearty, Scott Oser, Hiro Tanaka, Thomas Lindner, Brian Kirby, Daniel Brook-Roberge, Christine Nielsen, Jiae Kim, Shimpei Tobayama and Sophie Berkman.

At TRIUMF are Akira Konaka, Rich Helmer, Kendall Mahn, Sujeewa Kumaratunga, Mike Wilking, Fabrice Retiere, Renee Poutissou, Jean-Michel Poutissou, Robert Henderson, Stan Yen, Andy Miller.

The 4.5-tonne SCUBA-2 (Submillimetre Common User Bolometer Array) camera, unveiled today as part of the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope at the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii, will survey wavelengths invisible to optical cameras and capture unprecedented information about the formation of stars.

SCUBA-2 was built in collaboration with Canadian, U.S. and Dutch scientists. The UBC team, which also includes P&A professors Mark Halpern and Douglas Scott postdoctoral research associate Ed Chapin, software engineer Andy Gibb, electronics engineer Mandana Amiri and graduate students Todd Mackenzie and Viktoria Asboth

See UBC Press Release for further details and the astro's group site for some pictures.

The Canadian SCUBA-2 Consorrtium page also has lost of background information.

Congratulations to Ian Affleck who has been chosen as the next recipient of the Lars Onsager Prize. This major prize of the American Physical Society is awarded for outstanding research in theoretical statistical physics including quantum fluids. This award recognizes Ian's pioneering role in developing and applying the ideas and methods of conformal field theory to important problems in statistical and condensed matter physics, including the quantum critical behaviour of spin chains and the universal behaviour of quantum impurity systems.

Lars Onsager was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1968 "for the discovery of the reciprocal relations bearing his name, which are fundamental for the thermodynamics of irreversible processes".

A major advance in predicting and quashing environmental decoherence, a phenomenon that has proven to be one of the most formidable obstacles standing in the way of quantum computing has been made at UBC & UC Santa Barbara.

UBC's Philip Stamp has been able to theoretically predict and hence control, all the environmental decoherence mechanisms in a very complex system, particularly the large magnetic molecule Iron-8. Stamp says “Our theory also predicted that we could suppress the decoherence, and push the decoherence rate in the experiment to levels far below the threshold necessary for quantum information processing, by applying high magnetic fields.”

In the experiment, California researchers prepared a crystalline array of Iron-8 molecules in a quantum superposition, where the net magnetization of each molecule was simultaneously oriented up and down. The decay of this superposition by decoherence was then observed in time – and the decay was spectacularly slow, behaving exactly as the UBC researchers predicted.

The results have been presented the July 20, 2011 issue of Nature

Stories about this research have also appeared in the following

• Vancouver Sun
• Vancouver Metro News
• Tech News World
• Santa Barbara Independent
• Scientific Computing
• Nanowerk news

The Tokai-to-Kamioka (T2K) neutrino experiment announced new results today which hint that muon neutrinos produced by a particle accelerator can transform into electron neutrinos as they travel across a long distance. The T2K experiment uses a beam of muon neutrinos produced at the J-PARC accelerator laboratory in eastern Japan. These neutrinos are beamed from J-PARC through the Honshu island of Japan to the Super-Kamiokande neutrino detector 295km away. Previous experiments have shown that muon neutrinos can transform into other kinds of neutrinos while in transit due to a phenomenon known as "neutrino oscillation". However, the very low rate at which they turn into electron neutrinos is an outstanding puzzle in particle physics that is the focus of a worldwide effort.

In data taken before the March 11 earthquake in Japan, T2K finds 6 candidate electron neutrino events. If muon neutrinos didn't change into electron neutrinos, then T2K should have only seen 1.5 events on average. The chance of seeing six or more events when only 1.5 are expected is less than one percent, suggesting that some of the muon neutrinos are indeed turning into electron neutrinos, although at a very low rate.

"This is the first time that an experiment looking for this effect has found a result not consistent with zero," said Prof. Scott Oser, spokesperson for the Canadian contingent of the T2K collaboration. "These results are very intriguing but not yet conclusive. Really we need more data to confirm that this effect is real and not just a statistical fluke. We're looking forward to the resumption of data-taking once the process of earthquake recovery is complete." T2K has submitted a publication describing the new results to the journal Physical Review Letters (see the draft).

UBC faculty members on the T2K experiment are Chris Hearty, Scott Oser, and Hirohisa Tanaka. UBC was instrumental in building two of T2K's near neutrino detectors and plays a key role in the data analysis.

See also the TRIUMF press release

Gordon Semenoff has been awarded an honorary degree from the University of Lethbridge at their Spring Convocation in June 2011. The Doctor of Science, honoris causa, recognises Gordon as an expert on quantum field theory.

Gordon has been a professor at UBC since 1990. He is noted for his co-invention of the parity anomaly in odd-dimensional gauge field theories and his pioneering work on graphene. Among his other awards and honours are the Canadian Association of Physicists Brockhouse Medal for Achievement and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

1000 seconds answers the alpha team ( including a number of Canadian researchers) in an article published in Nature Physics.

ALPHA is an international collaboration (including UBC's Walter Hardy and Andrea Gutierrez ) based at CERN, and whose aim is stable trapping of antihydrogen atoms, the antimatter counterpart of the simplest atom, hydrogen. Now that they can create & hold antihydrogen for appreciable durations, they now conduct basic experiments on these atoms.

Do matter and antimatter obey the same laws of physics? One intriguing way to test this would be to compare the spectra of hydrogen and its antimatter twin: antihydrogen. For example, the frequency of the 1s2s transition in hydrogen has been measured with some precision (about 2 parts in 10¹⁴). The CPT theorem requires that this frequency must be exactly the same in antihydrogen. A goal of the ALPHA experiment is to test this claim.

"I've always liked hydrogen atoms," said Walter Hardy, a leading expert in atomic hydrogen studies. "It's ironic that we are now trying to measure the same properties of antihydrogen that I measured many years ago on regular hydrogen. It is a crucial comparison, though, and will tell us if we truly understand the relationship between matter and antimatter.

Note that a photo of Andrea Gutierrez graces the front page of the CERN webpage.

The MOST satellite has detected transits by the inner most planet of orbiting the star 55 Cancer. Analysis of the data combined with previously published doppler measurements of the star, lead to a description of a "rocky planet that is as dense as lead and where a year lasts less than 18 hours".

Uncertainty as to the correct orbital period of the innermost planet (denoted by the letter "e'), led to the star being place on the space telescope MOST's, observing schedule. Ultraprecise optical photometry was obtained spanning a nearly continuous 14.5-day interval and transits of planet "e" were detected at the period of 0.736540 days as suggested by Dawson & Fabrycky 2010. "On this world, the densest solid planet found anywhere so far, in the solar system or beyond, you would weigh three times heavier than you do on Earth," said Jaymie Matthews in a statement.

The microsatellite, which orbits the Earth as part of a Canadian Space Agency mission, carries a 15 cm telescope and CCD photometer which measures visible light. Matthews is the mission scientist who leads the MOST team. Other UBC researchers contributing to this work are Thomas Kallinger, Diana Dragomir and former student Jason F. Rowe.

Read the paper A SUPER-EARTH TRANSITING A NAKED-EYE STAR on arxiv.org.

Also see the story Exotic planet is densest of its kind on CBCNews.

Congratulations to Jon Nakane who has been named to receive a 2011 Faculty of Science Achievement Award. Jon is a native of Vancouver and has earned 3 degrees from UBC, most recent being his PhD in Physics (2006). He has been with the Engineering Physics Project Lab since 2005 and Lab Director since 2007. He is heavily involved with the robotic course. (Phys 253).

These awards recognize staff, students and faculty whose contributions in areas such as service, administration, leadership and outreach have had a significant positive impact in achieving the goals of the Faculty of Science. See Faculty of Science Achievement Awards.

Muon geotomography, a new mineral exploration technology, built on the research of UBC physicist Douglas Bryman has received $1.8 million in proof of concept funding from Western Economic Diversification.

The technology is being developed by Advanced Applied Physics Solutions (AAPS) is a nationally designated Centre of Excellence for Commercialization and Research, established at TRIUMF - Canada's national laboratory for research into particle and nuclear physics.

The technique is similar in principle to CAT scans which use x-rays to make images of the body. High energy cosmic ray muons are attenuated in matter allowing images of structures within the earth such as dense ore bodies to be obtained using an array of underground sensors.

AAPS is completing first round proof-of-principle tests in collaboration with NVI-Breakwater at its Myra Falls mining operations on Vancouver Island, as well with TRIUMF, university partners, the Geological Survey of Canada and BC Ministry of Energy and Mines.

Douglas Bryman is the J. B. Warren Chair Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at UBC. His research has focused on particle physics through the study of rare decays of muons, pions, and kaons at TRIUMF and Brookhaven National Laboratory. He was recently awarded the 2011 W.K.H. Panofsky Prize in Experimental Particle Physics.

See also: Newswire.ca story.
UBC Science News release

Congratulations to first year student Gregory McMurtrie (PHYS 101/108/109) on placing 3rd in the "Best Student Oral Presentation" competition at at the "Undergraduate Pacific Physics and Astronomy Conference" (UPPAC) held at SFU March 4-6, 2011. Gregory's research presentation "Graphene: Background and CVD Growth" was conducted under the supervision of Prof. Josh Folk.

It's fantastic for a first year student to give a great research talk, let alone be selected as one of the very best talks of the conference!

Well done, Gregory!

Andrea Damascelli, an associate professor and CRC Tier II in Physics and Astronomy, is a recipient of the 2011 NSERC E.W.R. Steacie Memorial Fellowship. Damascelli studies quantum materials and is building a spectroscopy centre for the research and development of new electronic materials with never-before-seen properties. Andrea has previously been awarded a Sloan Fellowship.

The NSERC E. W. R. Steacie Memorial Fellowships honour the memory of Dr. Edgar William Richard Steacie, an outstanding chemist and research leader who made major contributions to the development of science in Canada during, and immediately following, World War II.

Every year, NSERC awards up to six Steacie Fellowships that are held for a two-year period. Successful fellows are relieved of teaching and administrative duties, so that they can devote all their time and energy to research. The Fellowships are held at a Canadian university or affiliated research institution.

See the UBC Press Release to see all UBC honourees and the story on Marketwire.

An international collaboration of scientists, including a research team here at UBC led by Douglas Scott presented the first results from the Planck satellite. Chief among the results is the Early Release Compact Source Catalogue, a windfall of data on thousands of very cold compact sources. Included in this, are data on "cocoon stars" -- dusty nebulae which enshroud newly formed stars, distant galaxy clusters & dusty star forming galaxies. This foreground radiation masks Planck's true objective &emdash; the study of the Cosmic Mircowave Background Radiation. The researchers believe that these foreground sources can be removed to provide an even clearer view of the CMB.

The Planck satellite, launched in 2009 is a mission of the European Space Agency with help from the Canadian Space Agency. The UBC team, Douglas Scott, Adam Moss, James Zibin & Andy Walker help develop software to analyze and calibrate the data.

Visit the ESA Planck Page for more details on this mission.

Physics World has awarded the 2010 Breakthrough of the Year to two international teams of physicists at CERN, who have created new ways of controlling antiatoms of hydrogen.

The ALPHA collaboration (including a number of poeple associated with UBC) announced its findings in late November, which involved trapping 38 antihydrogen atoms (an antielectron orbiting an antiproton) for about 170 ms. This is long enough to measure their spectroscopic properties in detail, which the team hopes to do in 2011.

Just weeks later, the ASACUSA group at CERN announced that it had made a major breakthrough towards creating a beam of antihydrogen that is suitable for spectroscopic studies.

The people associated with UBC that are working with the ALPHA team include professor emeritus Walter Hardy, Phd student Andrea Gutierrez, and a former M.Sc. student, Sarah Self El Nasr. Also contributing are former students Michael Hayden, now a professor at SFU and Makoto C. Fujiwara, who is the ALPHA-Canada Spokeperson & a reseacher at TRIUMF.

See the complete story at PhysicsWorld.com

Kris Sigurdson and researchers at TRIUMF and Brookhaven National Laboratory have proposed an idea to explain the missing "Dark Matter" problem and the asymmetry between matter & antimatter.

Astronomers have known for years that there had to exist considerably more matter in the Universe that can be seen -- hence this "missing" matter was coined Dark Matter. Recents estimates of the amount of this Dark matter ( eg results of WMAP ) are about 23% of the Universe, about five times that of regular matter.

The visible Universe appears to be made of matter, which is fortunate as matter & antimatter annihilate each other on contact. Since the discovery of antimatter in 1932, researchers have wondered why this asymmetry of particles over antiparticles. Indeed the theoretical framework of particle physics, the Standard Model, does not explain this "baryon asymmetry".

In the Nov. 19 issue of Physical Review Letters, Hooman Davoudiasl, David E. Morrissey, Kris Sigurdson, and Sean Tulin proposed a new particle dubbed X that could solve both of these mysteries. The new theory would extend the Standard Model to include a weakly coupled particle X & its antiparticle, with masses of about 1000 GeV, that links normal matter and dark matter. In the early Universe an equal number of X and anti-X particles would have been produced. However, X particles decay more often into neutrons than the anti-X decays into antineutrons; and anti-X particles decay more often into dark-matter antiparticles than X particles decay into dark-matter particles -- creating equal numbers of of nucleons and dark matter antiparticles. The researchers also propose an entirely new way to search for dark matter. Extremely rarely, a dark matter antiparticle might bump into an ordinary proton or neutron and induce it to decay. Based on estimates of the local density of dark matter on Earth this could be occurring at rates relevant for experiments searching for nucleon decay like the Super-Kamiokande experiment in Japan, although a re-analysis of data by the experimenters may be needed.

See also the Physics Review Letters abstract and the Synopsis in the APS magazine Physics

Links to New Articles (added 2010-12-13 )

• PhysicsWorld
• Wired Science
• PhysOrg

Atoms of antimatter have been trapped and stored for the first time by the ALPHA collaboration, an international team of scientists working at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research near Geneva, Switzerland. An account of this research has been published in the Nov 17th issue of Nature.

A UBC team, led by Prof. Walter N. Hardy, and including Ph.D. student, Andrea Gutierrez, and a former M.Sc. student, Sarah Self El Nasr, has made very important contributions to this international project. Prof. Hardy has been invited to participate in this international project due to his world-leading expertise in low temperature physics and precision microwave spectroscopy. In particular, he is the then world record holder of stability of cryogenic atomic hydrogen maser, in research he conducted in 1980s at UBC, together with his then student Michael Hayden, who is now an SFU professor.

For details of UBC contributions see this Note by M. Fujiwara. For details on the science, please see this Berkeley Labs release

UBC researchers have teamed with others at the Advanced Light Source, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to publish a paper in Nature which helps describe the behaviour of electrons in high temperature superconducting cuprates.

The research indicates that high-temperature superconductivity in copper oxides is linked to what they term 'incoherent excitations'--a discovery that sheds light on the electronic response of these materials before they become superconducting.

The study marks the first time researchers have been able to directly measure when electrons in a super conductor behave as independent well-defined particles, and when they evolve into ill-defined many-body entities.

"We've never been able to directly quantify the nature of electron behaviour within these materials across the entire phase diagram--the transition from non-superconducting to superconducting behaviour," says Associate Professor Andrea Damascelli, Canada Research Chair in Electronic Structure of Solids with the Department of Physics and Astronomy.

"A combination of advanced spectroscopic techniques, and access to very pure cuprate crystals produced at UBC have allowed us to measure what's going on below the surface of a high-temperature superconducting material through the entire progression of different phases."

Cuprates normally act as insulators but become superconductors when electrons are removed--a process known as 'doping' holes into the material. Physicists consider a material optimally doped when it achieves superconductivity at the highest, most accessible temperature. A material is ‘underdoped’ when its level of doping is less than the level that maximizes the superconducting temperature.

A central debate in the field has focused on whether high-temperature superconductivity--the ability to conduct electricity without resistance at record high temperatures--emerges from a fluid of individual Fermi liquid quasiparticles (the electron-like entities ‘dressed’ by the interactions with their surrounding that give rise to conventional low-temperature superconductivity), or is instead a property connected to the physics of ‘strongly-correlated’ Mott insulators, in which many-body electron behavior wipes quasiparticles completely out of existence.

Damascelli's team was able to measure a rapid loss of quasiparticle integrity in the material's electron behavior upon entering the cuprates' underdoped phase. "This implies that some very important concepts of Fermi liquid models breakdown entering this phase, and that we'll have to look in other theoretical directions to explain superconductivity."

The Nobel Prize in Physics 2010 was awarded jointly to Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov "for groundbreaking experiments regarding the two-dimensional material graphene".

This year's Laureates both studied and began their careers as physicists in Russia. Now they are both professors at the University of Manchester in Great Britain. See the Nobel Prize Press Release

Graphene is a form of carbon only one atom thick, and has has remarkable properties. Not only is it the thinnest material known, but also the strongest. As a conductor of electricity it performs as well as copper. As a conductor of heat it outperforms all other known materials. It is almost completely transparent.

An interesting sidelight is that UBC professor Gordon Semenoff published a theoretical paper in 1984 discussing the properties of graghene -- "Condensed-Matter Simulation of a Three-Dimensional Anomaly". Physical Review Letters 53: 5449.

UBC and the Max Plank Society have signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) that will establish the Max Planck-UBC Centre for Quantum Materials.

The agreement also commits both institutions to conducting joint research projects in Canada and Germany, and to increasing scholarly exchanges.

The Physics & Astronomy Dept & UBC are renowned for research excellence in quantums materials -- including superconductors.

Professor George Sawatzkyof Physics & Astronomy and Chemistry will lead an impression team of talented researchers here at UBC; included will be four Canadian Research Chairs (CRCs), Sawatsky, plus Sarah Burke, Andrea Damascelli and Josh Folk, and five Fellows of the Royal Society of Canada.

See UBC Press Release for further information.

Doug Bryman will be receiving the 2011 W. K. H. Panofsky Prize in Experimental Particle Physics. This prestigious award from the American Physical Society will be shared with Laurence Littenberg, Brookhaven National Laboratory and A.J. Stewart Smith, Princeton University.

The Prize was established to recognize and encourage outstanding achievements in Experimental Particle Physics and the award this year is in recognition of their "leadership in the measurement of kaon decay properties and in particular for the discovery and measurement of

Doug has been performing precision tests of the Standard Model of Particle Physics by studying extremely rare processes which provide tight constraints on the existence of new physics beyond the Standard Model. The prize recognized the work performed in measuring kaon decay properties, and in particular for the discovery and measurement of the rare kaon decay into a pion, a neutrino and an antineutrino at the Brookhaven National Laboratory.

WMAP was sent into independent solar orbit on Wednesday Sep. 8 2010 at 11:20 am EDT. Throughout its 9 year mission, the observatory orbited at the outer Lagrange point (L2) of the Sun-earth system. Because this point is unique & is used by other observatories, NASA wanted WMAP to vacate this orbit.

The re-orbiting maneuver required a 20 minute burn producing a delta-v of 6.69 m/s. If no further burns are done, WMAP will have entered a superior heliocentric orbit roughly 7 million km above the Earth's orbit (recall that L2 is 1.5 million km above). In this configuration, the Earth will lap WMAP roughly every 14 years.

DON'T BE FOOLED BY THE LATEST WEB HOAX

Quoting the version of this cosmic urban myth which started circulating yesterday: "University of British Columbia Professor published an on-line article that projected an 800m asteroid would hit Antarctica in the fall of 2012. His article was on the www.phas.ubc.ca website for 2 days before it abruptly disappeared. The initial data was gathered by The Balloon-borne Large-Aperture Sub millimeter Telescope (BLAST) at McMurdo Station, Antarctica. The theorized asteroid was then tracked by Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope on Mauna Kea, which (with the Adaptive Optics Bonnette) supplies probably the sharpest images currently obtainable from the ground."

The ONLY true parts of this statement are: (1) there is indeed a balloon-borne instrument called BLAST in which UBC is a key partner, and it does collect data over Antarctica; and (2) the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope and its adaptive optics system do obtain superbly sharp astronomical images.

The rest is ridiculous. BLAST cannot detect asteroids. And no one could extrapolate the orbital path of a newly discovered asteroid to predict two years in advance that it would strike Antarctica (vs. other spots on Earth). No such article ever appeared on the UBC Physics & Astronomy web site.

This is a story on a par with the annual "Mars as big as the Full Moon" hoax that makes the rounds on the web, except that in this case, it can cause people undue alarm. The only reaction to this story should be amusement, followed by anger that some people are willing to prey on public fears and their interest in astronomy.

Dr. Jaymie Matthews

Recently held at the UBC Vancouver campus the 2010 Rising Stars of Research (RSR) included Engineering Physics students who were selected to represent UBC Engineering

Rising Stars of Research is an exciting and unique event which brings top undergraduate researchers from across Canada together to showcase their research accomplishments and explore their passion for innovation.

The Engineering Physics students and the titles of their posters are :

In addition to the honour of being the only entrants selected to represent UBC Engineering, Laz Milovanovic took First Place in the Engineering competition, with Mo Chen and Charles Zhu received Honourable Mention.

Congratulations!!!

On 2010-08-20, the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) completed its scientific mission after nine nearly flawless years of operation at the second Earth-Sun lagrange point, L2. The ninth year of all sky surveys was completed last week and then 10 days were spend investigating various sources of systematic errors.

WMAP has been stunningly successful, producing what is now called the Standard Model of Cosmology. WMAP measured the age of the universe to 1%, measured that it is spatially flat, again to 1%. We detected the effects of the cosmic neutrino background, set a new upper limit on neutrino masses, and measured several key predictions of inflation theory. See WMAP's Top Ten for more.

UBC's Mark Halpern and his lab represent the only non-US participants in this project.

A new pulsar has been discovered with the help of a volunteer network of 250,000 home and office computers around the world in a project known as Einstein@Home. Einstein@Home is a program that uses a computer's idle time to seek out evidence of gravitional waves & to find radio pulsars in binary systems. Data collected from the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico is segmented into "work units" and transferred to volunteer computers for processing.

The 24-milli-second pulsar has been designated PSR J2007+2722 (basically its position in the sky). The computers of Chris and Helen Colvin (Ames, Iowa, USA) and Daniel Gebhardt (Universität Mainz, Musikinformatik,Germany) identified J2007+2722 with the highest significance. The data is then further proccessed and the object is re-observed to confirmthe discovery. UBC researchers Ingrid Stairs, Marjorie Gonzalez, and Laura Kasian helped in this confirmation and are co-authors on the Science Express article.

A team of international scientists including UBC's Walter Hardy have published research in 2 July Physical Review Letters detailing how they cooled a cloud of antiprotons to 9 kelvin, or an order of magnitude lower than previous work.

The ALPHA team started with about 40,000 electromagnetically trapped anti-protons at a temperature of 1000 kelvin. Then by manipulating the trap, they were able to induce evaporative cooling, where about 90% of the hottest antiprotons escape, leaving the remainder at 9 kelvin. This is analogous to a cup of coffee cooling by steam ( hot water molecules) escape off the top.

One of the goals of this research being conducted at CERN is to create cold anti-hydrogen in order to study its basic nature.

A non-technical overview of this research is available in Physics Review Focus

An international team of scientists including UBC astronomer Ingrid Stairs has discovered a promising way to fine-tune pulsars into the best precision time-pieces in the Universe.

The discovery could give astronomers a new tool to study the powerful gravitational forces that shaped the universe.

Pulsars--incredibly fast spinning collapsed stars--have been studied in great detail since their discovery in 1967. The extremely stable rotation of these 'cosmic clocks' has enabled astronomers to discover the first planets orbiting other stars and provided stringent tests for theories of the Universe.

However, until now, slight irregularities in their spin have significantly reduced their usefulness as precision tools.

Astronomers have observed that pulsar spin rates slow very gradually over time. The team, led by the University of Manchester's Professor Andrew Lyne, used decades-worth of observations to determine that pulsars actually exhibit two different rates of spin change, not one as previously thought, and switch between them abruptly. The team also discovered that these variations are associated with changes in the pulsar's appearance that can be used "correct" for the shifts.

The findings were reported in 2010-06-24 issue of Science Express.

The discovery makes pulsars better tools for detecting gravitational waves--mysterious, powerful ripples which have not yet been directly observed, although widely believed to exist. The direct discovery of gravitational waves, which cause the distortion of space, could allow scientists to study the Universe shortly after the Big Bang and other violent events such as the merging of super-massive black holes.

"Many observatories around the world are attempting to use pulsars in order to detect the gravitational waves that are expected to be created by super-massive binary black holes in the Universe," says Stairs. "With our new technique we may be able to reveal the gravitational wave signals that are currently hidden because of the irregularities in the pulsar rotation."

"These changes are associated with a change in the shape of the pulse emitted by the pulsar," says George Hobbs of the Australia Telescope National Facility. "Because of this, precision measurements of the pulse shape at any particular time indicate exactly what the slowdown rate is and allow the calculation of a "correction". This significantly improves their properties as clocks."

A $30.7-million provincial investment in TRIUMF, one of the world's top subatomic physics labs is expected to help lead the way in alleviating future medical isotope shortages, while keeping B.C. and Canada at the forefront of particle and nuclear physics, Premier Gordon Campbell announced today (2010-06-22).

This funding announcement supports ARIEL (Advanced Rare IsotopE Laboratory), a $62.9-million project to build an underground beam tunnel that will surround a ground-breaking linear accelerator. ARIEL will allow TRIUMF to broaden its research in producing and studying isotopes for medicine and physics, including materials science.

TRIUMF is located on the University of British Columbia's Vancouver South campus. A number of Physics & Astronomy researchers including, Rob Kiefl, Jens Dilling, Chris Hearty, Nigel Lockyer, Andrew MacFarlane, Tom Mattison, Janis McKenna, and Lia Merminga are expected to take part in the research.

See also

• TRIUMF Press Release
• an overview of the ARIEL project

Ian Affleck has been elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society in its 350th anniversary year. The

Fellowship of the Royal Society is composed of 1300 of the most distinguished scientists from the United Kingdom, other Commonwealth countries and the Republic of Ireland. Fellows of the Royal Society are elected for life.

The society's citation reads Ian Affleck has made numerous ground-breaking contributions across a wide range of theoretical physics. His early work on dynamical supersymmetry breaking and the Affleck-Dine mechanism for baryogenesis had strong impact on particle physics. In mathematical physics, he contributed to important rigorous results on valence-bond groundstates in antiferromagnets. He has authored many seminal works in condensed matter theory applying field theoretic methods to systems of experimental relevance, e.g. staggered flux phases and local SU(2) gauge invariance in the theory of strongly correlated fermions relevant to high temperature superconductors and non-abelian bosonization methods in one-dimensional quantum many body problems.

Ian received his advanced degrees from Havard and has been with the dept since 1987. His research interests include high-Tc superconductivity, low dimensional magnetism, quantum wires and quantum dots.

Ludovic Van Waerbeke has been named by the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies as a 2010 Early Career Scholar.

Ludo joined the department in 2004 and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2009. He also holds a Canadian Institute of Advanced Research Scholarship in the Cosmology and Gravity programme. Ludo's research interests include the study of Dark Matter and related topics in cosmology and fundamental physics. Recently his work helped confirm the accelerated expansion of the universe by using weak gravitational lenses (arXiv:0911.0053).

The Peter Wall Institute's Early Career Scholars Program is for full-time UBC faculty who are in the professorial ranks and at the early stage of their academic careers at UBC. The objective for this program is to bring outstanding UBC early-career researchers together to share ideas and research approaches. in the hope that this interaction will broaden the research perspective of participants and will enhance their future research contributions. The program seeks to facilitate the orientation process for new faculty with respect to the research environment at UBC, including learning about the diversity in research topics and approaches, as well as helping them to acquire knowledge about the infrastructure for research support.

Congratulations, Ludo !!

Mark van Raamsdonk has won the 2010 Gravity Research Foundation Essay Competition. The title of Mark's winning essay is Building Up Spacetime with Quantum Entanglement and will be published in the Journal of General Relativity and Gravitation (GRG). The top essay also earns Mark $4000.

The Gravity Research Foundation was established in 1949 to encourage the study of gravity.

Andrzej Kotlicki recently received the 2009/2010 Rethink Award, given by the student-led group Common Energy, whose mission is to "bring UBC beyond climate neutral." The purpose of the Rethink Award is to recognize faculty members who are sustainability leaders for their achievements and contributions.

Common Energy describes reasons for recognizing Andrzej as a sustainability leader: Physics lecturer, and the first recipient of the 2009/2010 Rethink Award. Andrzej believes that knowledge is the best way to combat environmental issues.

Andrzej feels that if students are not taught to recognize sustainability they will not be capable of making informed ecological decisions. By making sustainability relevant and interesting to engineering students, he prioritizes their learning in a way that helps the leaders of tomorrow create bold, plausible solutions. Andrzej not only incorporates sustainability into engineering but also makes an environmental difference on a daily basis by driving a Prius, recycling and owning an electric bike. In his research, Andrzej has investigated the effects of natural sunlight in buildings on electricity reduction using applied optics. He also feels that electric cars will be very important in the future. Finally, he reaches out to the next generation of innovators by engaging in workshops with high school teachers in order to help them build a curriculum which makes physics more interesting for students while incorporating sustainability principles.

Congratulations Andrzej!

Read more about the Rethink Award

US President Barack Obama has nominated UBC Prof. Carl Wieman for the position of Associate Director of Science in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

Wieman, a 2001 Nobel Laureate joined UBC's Faculty of Science in 2007 as professor of Physics and Director of the Carl Wieman Science Education Initiative (CWSEI) to transform the teaching of science at UBC and elsewhere. He will take an unpaid leave of absence from the university upon confirmation of his appointment by the US Senate.

See The White House Press Release

The mission of the Office of Science and Technology Policy is threefold; first, to provide the President and his senior staff with accurate, relevant, and timely scientific and technical advice on all matters of consequence; second, to ensure that the policies of the executive branch are informed by sound science; and third, to ensure that the scientific and technical work of the executive branch is properly coordinated so as to provide the greatest benefit to society.

Sarah Gilbert the Associate Director of CWSEI, will become Acting Director in Carl's absence.

We wish Carl well...

UBC grad David Cheriton, now a computer science professor at Stanford University, has given UBC and CWSEI (Carl Wieman Science Education Initiative)a $2 million gift to revolutionize the way the institute teaches science.

The University of British Columbia alumnus is widely credited for mentoring Google’s founders and helping establish the company & established a reputation of backing a winner!!

“Prof. Cheriton understands the need and impact of undergraduate science education both from a student and educator perspective,” said Wieman, founder & director of CWSEI.

CWSEI's stated goal is "... to achieve highly effective, evidence-based science education for all post-secondary students by applying the latest advances in pedagogical and organizational excellence."

See CTV's new story and UBC Press Release

UBC post-doctoral fellow Gaelen Marsden recently presented images revealing tens of thousands of newly-discovered galaxies at the early stages of formation - just one billion years after the Big Bang. The images were obtained from data from the infrared camera, SPIRE, aboard the Herschel Space Observatory. The telescope was launched last May, and is now orbiting the sun at the L2 point of the Earth's orbit.

The images were presented at the International Herschel Science Team meeting in Madrid, Spain.

Data collected by Herschel are being analysed by the programme's biggest research project, the Herschel Multi-tiered Extragalactic Survey (HerMES). The project consists of more than 100 astronomers from six countries, including UBC Astronomy Professors Mark Halpern and Douglas Scott and post-doctoral fellows Ed Chapin, Gaelen Marsden, Elisabetta Valiante and Don Wiebe. Canadians are involved through the support of the Canadian Space Agency.

See story at PHYSorg.com

Professor Emeritus Edward Auld passed away on Nov 22. Ed will be sorely missed in the Department of Physics and Astronomy.

He was always, up until the last few days of his life, an extremely positive force who identified important goals and devoted himself tirelessly to realizing his vision. The various speakers at the recent "Auld Fest" made plain the enormous impact he had on students and TRIUMF, and so also on the Department. His eighteen year service as Director of the Engineering Physics Programme was devoted entirely to maximizing all aspects of the students' experience at UBC. He is largely responsible for putting the Engineering Physics Project Laboratory on a rock solid foundation that has now served generations of FIZZ students. It was Ed who had the vision to integrate COOP seamlessly with the Engineering Physics curriculum, and later, Ed who gave the department Newsletter the momentum it maintains to this date. Ed played an equally important role in designing and comissioning the main magnet in the TRIUMF cyclotron (he apparently was TRIUMF's 2nd employee in 1965!), and was a key player in many of the first physics experiments done at TRIUMF.

Thank you Ed, the department is in your debt.

Bill Unruh, has joined Stephen Hawking and other eminent physicists as a Distinguished Research Chair at the Perimeter Institute". The citation points to Bill's "seminal contributions to our understanding of gravity, black holes, cosmology, quantum fields in curved spaces, and the foundations of quantum mechanics, including the discovery of the Unruh effect."

Canada's Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics is an independent, non-profit, scientific research and educational outreach organization where international scientists cluster to push the limits of our understanding of physical laws and develop new ideas about the very essence of space, time, matter and information. Located in Waterloo, Ontario, PI also provides a wide array of award-winning outreach resources and public lectures for students, teachers and the general public in order to share the joy of research, discovery and innovation. In partnership with the Governments of Ontario and Canada, Perimeter Institute continues to be a successful example of private and public collaboration in science research and education.

See also the Perimeter's Press Release.

Two of our undergraduate students did well at the Canadian Undergraduate Physics Conference 2009.

Ashley Cook was awarded 1st place for her talk titled "Modeling Semiconductors with Impurities". Ronald Gagne took 2nd place for his poster Looking for the "Kick": White Dwarf Off-Centring in Planetary Nebulae Systems.

Congratutions, Ashley & Ron !

see the CUPC 2009 page for more information.

Willard S. Boyle, who was born in Amherst, Nova Scotia, and George E. Smith were honoured for inventing an imaging semiconductor circuit known as the CCD sensor. Charles K. Kao was cited for his breakthrough involving the transmission of light in fibre optics.

CCD, charge-coupled devices are at heart of most astronomical digital detectors and many of the consumer digital camera. This invention certainly revolutionized astronomy data acquisition and the field of photography.

Ever wonder how that UTube video gets to your desktop so quickly? Thank Dr. Kao! Fibre-optics have completed transformed the field of communications allowing near instanteous transfers of data around the world.

see the Nobel Prize Announcement page for further information.

Amid speculation of a Nobel Prize being awarded for the discovery of exo-planets, (in this the Year of Astronomy) a Globe and Mail article outlines the Canadian contribution to this field. Indeed the article makes the case that 2 Canadians, UBC professor emeritus Gordon Walker and former collegue Bruce Campbell should be considered for the prize.

The first evidence of exo-solar planets were detected in a system with a pulsar, PSR B1257+12, and the results were published in Nature by Wolszczan & Frail in 1992. In 1995 when the Swiss team of Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz published results on 51 Peg from optical spectroscopy.

Starting back in the 1980's, Gordon and Bruce developed a a technique to drive down errors in radial velocity measurements. Starlight was directed through an absorption cell filled with hydrogen floride before going to a dispersion grating & a digital detector. The Hydrogen floride absorption lines provided a fidical from which the stellar lines were measured with previously unheard of accuracies. In 1992 Walker et al published results on gamma Cephei which showed a 2.5 year period, but they attributed the variation to effects in the stellar atmosphere.

Later, Marcy & Butler used a variation of the absorption cell technique to discover many exo-solar planets.

The Canadian team recieved a Silver and three Bronze Medals at the 40th International Physics Olympiad, IPhO 2009, held in Merida, Yucatan, Mexico, from July 12 to 19, 2009. The team leader was Andrzej Kotlicki. High school students from over 70 ocuntries from throughout the world competed in this year's Olympiad.

The Canadian results were

• Jixuan Wang Silver
• Remy Mock Bronze
• Shawn Xu Bronze
• Jonathan Zung Bronze
• Michael Zhang Honorary Mention

See the IPhO 2009 for details.

Added 2009-08-18:: Report on the Canadian Team Experience provided by Guillaume Chabot-Couture and Andrzej Kotlicki, Team leaders.

'May we please use your space telescope?'

That what Jaymie Matthews remembers thinking when NASA came calling with a collaboration proposal for time on MOST.

The MOST (Microvariability & Oscillations of STars) microsatellite recently finished observing a target proposed by astrophysicist Dr. John Monnier of the University of Michigan. Monnier, the first NASA "Guest Observer" to use MOST, is an expert in taking 'pictures' of stars through a technique known as interferometry. His earlier work with alpha Ophiuchi, combined with about a month of MOST data, should constrain many of physical parameters of this rapidly spinning and vibrating star.

NASA, the operator of a number of space telescopes, all of which are larger than MOST, recognised that MOST's unique abilities would be of benefit to Americam astronomers. Thus a collaboration between the MOST teams, the Canadian Space Agency, and NASA was established to allowed NASA guest observers use of the Telescope.

David R. Cooper, President & CEO, Microsat Systems Canada Inc. (MSCI), the prime contractor in the building of MOST, noted that MOST "...has been bringing home amazing astronomical data for more than six years. This collaboration is further recognition of the value and contribution that MOST is making to this body of knowledge and to the cost effectiveness of the microsatellite platform."

MOST, NASA and the CSA will soon announce the second opportunity for American scientists to apply for observing time on Canada's space telescope. This is another example of the spirit of cooperation which exists among astronomers and space scientists in Canada, the US, and other countries in the world.

See also this article.

The Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) has funded the new "Superconducting Electron Accelerator at TRIUMF" with an award of $17,761,281 (99.7% of requested funds!) to build the new $52M high intensity electron accelerator at TRIUMF. The development of this accelerator plays a central role TRIUMF's next five year plan released in July 2008.

The superconducting RF accelerator technology at the heart of this accelerator is key for many research programs, from the radioactive beam expansion program at ISAC, to the International Linear Collider, as well as to research in medical imaging, particle astrophysics and materials science. Many research programs will be centered upon this new accelerator technology being developed by a team of Canadian researchers, lead by Dean Karlen (UVictoria) and Shane Koscielniak (TRIUMF), to be carried out here at TRIUMF, on the UBC campus.

In the Physics and Astronomy Department, Rob Kiefl, Jens Dilling, Chris Hearty, Nigel Lockyer, Andrew MacFarlane, Tom Mattison, Janis McKenna, and Lia Merminga are among the 19 co-applicants on this new CFI project.

See the press release from TRIUMF.

In a May 21, 2008 ScienceExpress article, scientists including UBC's Ingrid Stairs describe a double star system in which there is one "normal" Sun-like star and one rapidly-spinning millisecond pulsar (a neutron star emiiting beams of radio waves). Accretion of material onto the neuton star may be origin of the rapid rate of spin.

The milli-second pulsar, called J1023, was discovered in a 2007 survey by the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT) in West Virginia. The astronomers retroactively found that the object had been detected NSF's Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescope during a large sky survey in 1998, and had been observed in visible light by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey in 1999, revealing a Sun-like star. However when observed again in 2000, the object had changed dramatically, showing evidence for a rotating disk of material, called an accretion disk, surrounding the neutron star. By May of 2002, the evidence for this disk had disappeared.

"This strange behavior puzzled astronomers, and there were several different theories for what the object could be," said Stairs. A similar type of binary system, with a normal star accreting matter onto a fast spinning neutron star, but not emitting radio waves, is known as Low-Mass X-Ray Binary (LMXB). J1023 appears to be the 'missing link' connecting the two types of systems: "... this thing has flipped from looking like an LMXB to looking like a pulsar, as it experienced an episode during which material pulled from the companion star formed an accretion disk around the neutron star. Later, that mass transfer stopped, the disk disappeared, and the pulsar emerged" explained Scott Ransom of the NRAO.

This collaborative research was accomplished by a large team which was led by Anne Archibald, of McGill University, and included Ingrid H. Stairs (UBC), Scott M. Ransom (NRAO), Victoria M. Kaspi (McGill), Duncan R. Lorimer (West Virginia/NRAO), Maura A. McLaughlin (West Virginia/NRAO), and others.

Ingrid leads a team at UBC dedicated to finding and understanding pulsars and their companions. Pulsar searches include the tremendously successful multibeam survey at the 64-m Parkes telescope in Australia (which doubled the number of pulsars known); a similar large-scale survey at the 300-m Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico; and a drift-scan survey at the 100-m Green Bank Telescope. Much of the followup work involves pulsars in binary systems. Besides the strange object discussed above, there is a double-neutron-star binary that allows very stringent tests of general relativity. (see news item Twin Pulsar again confirms General Relativity) Ingrid has been on sabbatical leave at the Australia Telescope National Facility and the Centre for Astrophysics & Supercomputing, Swinburne University of Technology.

See the NRAO Press Release.

Stephan Ettenauer, a P&A graduate student working with TRIUMF researcher and adjunct professor Jens Dilling, has been selected to receive the prestigious Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship, an award valued at $50,000 per year for up three years. Ettenauer hails from Vienna, Austria.

Ettenauer's research proposal is entitled, "High precision measurements of superallowed nuclear beta decays for tests of fundamental symmetries."

The Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship (CGS) program aims to attract and retain world-class doctoral students by supporting students who demonstrate a high standard of scholarly achievement in graduate studies in the social sciences and humanities, natural sciences and engineering, and health; as well as leadership skills. The program is administered by the country's three federal research granting agencies - the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

ESA's Herschel and Planck telescopes have blasted into space on an Ariane 5 rocket from Kourou in French Guiana to help unlock some of the secrets of the universe.

Two of the most ambitious missions ever attempted to unveil the secrets of the darkest, coldest and oldest parts of the Universe got off to a successful start this afternoon with the dual launch of ESAs far infrared space telescope Herschel and cosmic background mapper Planck. The European Space Agency's project had international support including that of the Canadian Space Agency.

With funding from the CSA four Canadian science teams made important contributions to both satellites, considered to be two of the most ambitious missions seeking to better understand the birth of stars and the dawn of the Universe.

On the Planck mission, Douglas Scott of the University of British Columbia is leading the Canadian (Low Frequency Instrument( LFI) team.

At this year's CAP University Prize Examination two Physics & Astronomy students fared exceedinly well. Placing first, nationwide was Cedric Lin a 3rd year Honours Computer Science and Physics Program student. Alan Robinson (BSC (Honours Physics), Year 4) placed 5th overall. ,

The University Prize Examination run by Canadian Association of Physicists (CAP), is a nation-wide competition among undergraduates studying physics. The 2009 Examination was run by representatives from the University of British Columbia and was held on February 3rd, 2009.

Results Page.

Mark Halpern, Douglas Scott, Ed Chapin, and Gaelen Marsden are among the authors of a Nature article which discuss the results from BLAST and shows that one half of the starlight of the Universe comes from young, star-forming galaxies several billion light years away. Because of dust absorption these galaxies remained hidden until observations at sub-millimetre and far infrared wavelengths became possible.

BLAST, Balloon-borne Large-Aperture Sub-millimeter Telescope, was flown at an altitude above 36,000 meters in Antarctica in 2006. This allowed observations at wavelenghts near 0.3 mm which are not observable from the ground. These observations combined with shorter wavelength data from the Spitzer Space Telescope show a population of dust-obsurced star-forming galaxies.

UBC Press Release
BLAST Press Release

Congratations to Cedric !!

Cedric Lin was the UBC high scorer on the 2008 Putnam exam for the third year in a row, this time placing in the top 15 in the entire competition (out of a total of 3,627 participants).

Cedric is in the 3rd year Honours Computer Science and Physics Program.

The Sixty-Eighth Annual William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition was held on Saturday, December 6, 2008 and is administered by the Mathematical Association of America. The examination is constructed to test originality as well as technical competence. Teams of 3 undergraduate students from colleges and universities from the United States and Canada compete on problems of sophisticated mathematical concepts.

Douglas Scott has been recognized by the APS has an Outstanding Referee.

The Outstanding Referee program expresses appreciation for the essential work that anonymous peer reviewers do for our journals. Each year a small percentage of our 42,000 referees are to be selected and honored with the Outstanding Referee designation. Selections are made based on the number, quality, and timeliness of referee reports as collected in a database over the last 20 years. A full listing and further details on the program are available at publish.aps.org/OutstandingReferees .

See also copy of the APS press release.

Graduate student Patrick Bruskiewich has been awarded a Certificate of Recognition from Federal Member of Parliament Marc Garneau. M. Garneau you may remember is a former astronaut and head of the Canadain Space Agency.

The award recognizes Patrick's many contributions to government debate and public issues, including the recent controversy surrounding our satellite program and Radarsat-2. Last year MacDonald Dettwiler & Associates (MDA) proposed to sell its space divsion including Radarsat-2 to a US-based firm. The Federal government eventually blocked the sale following strong negative public reaction.

Patrick is working on a PhD with Janis McKenna on the Lithium Anomaly in standard Big Bang Nucleosynthesis models.

Dorian Gangloff, 5th year Engineering Physics, has won two key co-op awards - the 2008 UBC Science Co-op Student of the Year award and the 2008 BC/Yukon Association of Co-operative Education Co-op Student of the Year award.

See the Science Coop Newsletter for further details.

A University of British Columbia invention that brings natural sunlight into multi-floor office buildings will receive up to $2.1 million in funding from Sustainable Development Technology Canada (SDTC).

Lorne Whitehead and collegues in the Structured Surface Physics Laboratory developed the patented Solar Canopy Illumination System. The system consists of exterior façades with specially designed arrays of mirrors to track and collect the sunlight; and customizable light guides to bring the light into the building replacing traditional light fixtures. Dimmable flourescent lights within these guides provide the illumination when there is no sun.

A UBC spin-off company, SunCentral Inc., has recently been established to carry out six demonstration projects in Canada, including a prototype system that has already been installed in a building on the British Columbia Institute of Technology campus.

See UBC Media Release for further details.

A documentary about BLAST, the balloon borne telescope that was flown in Antarctica two years ago, made by Emmy award winning documentary film maker Paul Devlin will be shown this Saturday on the Discovery Channel.

"The film is fun to watch." said one earlier reviewer. "It is not at all the film I might have made, which is to say that it is actually exciting and tells a compelling personal story." The film focuses on Mark Devlin, the filmaker's brother and a Prof. at U. Penn. UBC's role in building BLAST is seriously underplayed in this film, but you'll get a real sense of what it feels like to bring a telescope to Antarctica. Filmed on 5 continents, the film has suspense and a few touching moments.

Apparently the air time is 4:30 pm PST, not as incorrectly reported & listed at 10:30 pm PST; check with your local provider.

The UBC BLAST team are Gaelen Marsden, Ed Chapin, Mark Halpern, Douglas Scott, Henry Ngo, and Guillaume Patanchon.

A representation of a Feymann diagram carved into stone is featured on the cover of the latest issue of Electronic Journal of Theoretical Physics.

This stone is one of the specially carved pavers that grace the front entrance of the Hennings Building. Each of the 6 pavers depict some important aspect of Physics & Astronomy.

SPIRES publishes a list each year of the most highly cited articles in high energy physics and related fields. This year there are three papers by the WMAP team (which includes Mark Halpern, UBC) in the top ten and six WMAP papers in the top 50. This is the 5th year in a row with at least two WMAP papers in the top 10.

SPIRES is a searchable online database of particle physics literature run by the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center.

WMAP, the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, is a NASA Explorer mission. WMAP produced the first full-sky map of the microwave sky with a resolution of under a degree, about the angular size of the moon. The patterns in the map result from well-understood physical processes that happened when the universe was young. By matching the patterns in the map to the physics we know, WMAP has produced a convincing consensus on the contents of the universe, erasing lingering doubts about the existence of dark energy, and severely limiting the density of hot dark matter.