Fresno State Physics Department

Dr. Yongsheng Gao and two Fresno State students, William Barden and Gabriel Soto, have been selected for the Visiting Faculty Program (VFP) at FermiLab near Batavia, Ill. (near Chicago). This is a DOE funded program which supports 10 week research visits (May through August) of faculty and students from institutions historically underrepresented in the research community in order to expand the workforce vital to the Department of Energy (DOE) mission areas. The aim is to increase the research competitiveness of faculty members and their students from institutions like Fresno State. The link to this program is https://science.osti.gov/wdts/vfp .

MS student Joey Contreras gave the talk "Modified Commutators vs Modified Operators in a Quantum Gravity minimal length scale" at 1st Electronic Conference on Universe, Feb. 22-28, 2021. Joey's talk was selected as one of the few to be given via a live Zoom rather than being pre-recorded. You can see Joey's talk by going to https://ecu2021.sciforum.net/#recordings Going to "Live Session 4" on February 26th. Joey's talk starts at about the 1:57:40 mark.

Fresno State physics alumna Bouakham Sriri-Perez will be one of the plenary speakers, along with Nobel Laureate, Steven Weinberg at the joint APS/SPS/AAPT Texas section meeting -- see the link https://sci.tamucc.edu/news-and-events/tsaapt-aps/index.html . This meeting will be virtual and will send out the Zoom link as soon as it is available.

Congratulations to Dr. Ettore Vitali Ettore who was awarded the Provost's "Extraordinary Teaching in Extraordinary Times" in the category of Innovative Teaching.

Dr. Ettore Vitali published the paper "Dynamical structure factor of a fermionic supersolid on an optical lattice" in Phys. Rev. A 102, 053324 (2020). The paper has two Fresno State students -- Patrick Kelly and Annette Lopez (currently at Brown U) -- as co-authors. The link to the paper is https://journals.aps.org//abst/10.1103/PhysRevA.102.053324

Exciting news! Fresno State MS student E'Lisa Lee was co-author on the recent study published in Nature Astronomy about potential life in the upper atmosphere of Venus. Congratulations to E'Lisa!

Join us on Saturday October 17th for our newest event with the Fresno State Physics Department, filmed in our very own Valley PBS studio. This event will bring fun and interactive science experiments right to you! So mark your calendars, because you won't want to miss this one!

########LETTER FROM PHYSTEC######## We are pleased to inform you that your physics teacher, Bouakham Sriri-Perez, has been selected as the National PhysTEC Teacher of the Year! This award recognizes Bouakham as an exemplary teacher. Please accept our congratulations for your alum. For being named the National PhysTEC teacher of the year, she will receive a $1,000 classroom materials grant and be recognized at an upcoming AAPT Meeting and next year’s APS PhysTEC Conference.... Bouakham’s contributions to physics education are significant and impactful on her students, colleagues, school district, and state at a time when the nation is in desperate need of qualified physics teachers. Of the approximately 1400 new teachers who are hired to teach physics each year, only 35% have a degree in physics or physics education and in 2018, the American Association of Employment in Education found high school physics teachers to be in considerable shortage. As such, Bouakham's contributions are highly valued and respected, and we wish her many years of continued success as an educator. Sincerely, Monica Plisch Beth A. Cunningham PhysTEC Project Director Executive Officer American Physical Society American Association of Physics Teachers

Prof. Douglas Singleton was interviewed in Scientific American about recent work by Raymond Sawyer of UCSB on gravitational waves generating photons (i.e. the conversion of gravitons into photons). The interview can be found at https://www.scientificamerican.com//simulation-shows-pote/.

Three of our students won awards for their presentations at the CSM Virtual Research Symposium. These include 1st Place Grad Poster: Blanca Nico (Advisor: Yongsheng Gao) 1st Place Grad Oral Presentation: Sarah Kroeker (Advisor: Mihai Gherase) 3rd Place Grad Oral Presentation: Patrick Kelly (Advisor: Ettore Vitali)... Congratulations to these three students as well as the other physics students who took part in this (Jaeyeong Lee, Matt Brown, Adriana Hernandez, Kurt Shults, Anand Saggu, Avery Sheldon, Sean Duncan, Yugjeet Grewal and Michael Walkup). The award winners are posted at https://csmfresno.com/awards-recipients-of-the-csm-virtual/ and you can see all the presentations by going to https://csmfresno.com/college-of-science-and-mathematics-v/

Congratulations to Physics student Andrea Capa Salinas, winner of the Distinguished Internatinonal Undergraduate Award!

The Central Valley Astronomers will be meeting 7-9 PM Saturday 2/8 in East Engineering room 191 on the Fresno State Campus. The Central Valley Astronomers are Fresno's large, friendly, and expert astronomy club.

SPS trip to JPL on January 10th. SPS students in the JPL black room.

Here's a shoutout to our Downing Planetarium for being first on the list of cool holiday events to attend! https://collegian.csufresno.edu//take-a-break-with-these-/

Congratulations to MS student Jaeyeong Lee for winning 2nd place in the Kennedy Reed Award for Best Theoretical Research by a Graduate Student at the American Physical Society Far West Section meeting Nov. 1-2, 2019 at Stanford. The title of Jaeyeong's talk was "Minimum Length in Quantum Gravity -Modified Commutator versus Modified Operator". The link to the award announcement is https://sites.google.com/lbl.gov/apsfarwestsection/home

Congratulations to our SPS chapter members for again being selected as an Outstanding Chapter. Look for upcoming SPS events like trips to CalTech and JPL in January during winter break and upcoming SPS Zone meeting.

Our SPS club recently took a trip to NASA Ames to see SOFIA (Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy).

You are invited! End your week with a BANG! (or, a GRB) by joining us this Friday at 3PM: