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Home Directory Undergraduate Program Graduate Program Research Outreach Information/ Help Calendar Guided Tour Search		Past Web Site Features 2008 Jerry Cowen Endowed Chair of Experimental Physics Full Story Halo 2: Opposite Spin Tim Beers and collaborators discover that the very outer part of our galaxy rotate in opposite direction from the rest of the Milky Way. Full Story 2007 MSU-PA Adjunct Professor Albert Fert wins Nobel Prize Oct. 7, 2007: Today the Nobel Foundation annoucned that the 2007 Physics Nobel Prize will be shared in equal parts between Albert Fert, Université Paris-Sud and also Adjunct Professor in our department, and Peter Grünberg, Forschungszentrum Jülich, "for the discovery of Giant Magnetoresistance". Full Story MSU-UM Tier 2 Computing Center Prof. Brock and collaborators use the Michigan Lambda Rail to establish a joint computing and analysis center to process data from the ATLAS detector at CERN-LHC. Full Story The Nanostructure Problem Prof. Simon Billinge's article in the journal Science draws attention to the nanostructure problem and proposes "complex modeling" as a way to remedy it. Full Story Single Top MSU's particle physicists are members of the DZero team at FermiLab, which has discovered the single top quark production, an event which was predicted 15 years ago by our own C.P. Yuan. Full Story $100 Million Grant for NSCL NSF Director Arden Bement, US Senator Carl Levin, Congressman Rogers, and Congressman Ehlers visit the NSCL to help celebrate the new $100 Million operating grant for the lab. Full Story 2006 21st Century Jobs Ruby Ghosh and collaborators at MSU were awarded a $914,000 grant from the Michigan 21st Century Jobs Fund to commercialize a real-time optical oxygen sensor for fisheries applications. Full Story Record Haul Professors Bass, Beers, Billinge, Donahue, and Voit win CNS faculty awards. Full Story MSU will go to the big DANSE $12M National Science Foundation grant is awarded for physics data analysis software development. Full Story 2005 Forschungspreis Prof. Davis Tomanek will receive the prestigious Alexander von Humboldt Foundation senior distinguished scientist award. Full Story Perfect Fluid Gary Westfall during his APS talk. Insert: Westfall and BNL's Roser and Kharzeev during the press conference April 18, APS Spring Meeting 2005, Tampa: Gary Westfall announces the discovery of a new state of matter created in ultra-relativistic heavy ion collisions. Full Story At the same meeting Hendrik Schatz and colleagues held a press conference to announce the measurement of the half-life of the doubly magic 78Ni. Full Story 2004 First Images From SOAR Dec.24: SOAR sends first World-class images CSCE July 30: Michigan State University announces funding for the Center for the Study of Cosmic Evolution. Full Story SOAR Apr.17: More than 300 guests attended the first light celebration for SOAR and the dedication of the SOAR remote observing room in the BPS building. Full Story 2003 JINA Nov.17: The National Science Foundation awards a $10 Million Physics Frontiers Center, the Joint Institute for Nuclear Astrophysics, to the University of Chicago, Notre Dame, and MSU. Full Story LON-CAPA June 2: MSU's LON-CAPA courseware system, initially developed by Physics/Astronomy faculty and students for delivery of physics homework and virtual university classes, received the 21st Century Achievement Award. Press Release / Case Study / Movie 2002 Oldest Star Tim Beers and his colleagues have discovered the oldest known star in the Universe, 36000 light years from Earth. [This discovery was featured in MSU TV commercials.] Full Story APS-DNP Meeting During October 8-12, approximately 600 physicists came to MSU to attend the 2002 Fall Meeting of the Division of Nuclear Physics of the American Physical Society. Shown here: Hendrik Schatz delivering his plenary lecture. Full Story BPS On April 12, we celebrated the opening of our new home, the $93 Million Biomedical and Physical Sciences Building. More than 600 guests witnessed the ribbon cutting ceremony. Full Story NSCL Director Gelbke NSCL scores twice The nuclear physics group at the NSCL had two reasons to celebrate this months. The National Science Board approved an almost 50% increase in the NSCL operating budget, netting MSU a $75 Million grant from the National Science Foundation for the next five years. And in his State of the State address, Governor Engler pledged the support of the State of Michigan for the RIA project. Full Story 2001 President McPherson Donates to SOAR MSU's President M. Peter McPherson and his wife Joanne are now also major donors to our SOAR telescope. They presented a check for $10,000 to Dean George Leroi during this year's homecoming celebration. Full Story Governor John Engler addresses the guests at the NSCL CCF inauguration celebration (Photo courtesy of Bruce Fox) On July 27, Michigan State University celebrated the inauguration of the newly upgraded state-of-the-art coupled cyclotron facility (CCF) at the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory (NSCL). Among the numerous dignitaries addressing the more than 400 guests at the inauguration was also Michigan Governor John Engler, who said that research done at the NSCL is critical to the state's economic growth. Full Story Gary Westfall in front of some of the tracks left in the detector by a violent collision of Gold nuclei. The little Big Bang A few microseconds after the big bang, the universe existed as a soup of quarks and gluons. These quarks and gluons were not confined in nucleons as we find them today, but instead formed a plasma of nearly massless quarks and gluons. Using the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, New York, nuclear physicists are attempting to recreate this state of matter (on a small scale, of course!) by colliding two beams of gold nuclei each with kinetic energies of 100 GeV/nucleon. This energy is thought to be high enough to create an extended system of deconfined quarks and gluons. MSU nuclear physicist Gary Westfall is working with the STAR (Solenoidal Tracker at RHIC) detector to seek out evidence of this new state of matter. Full story Modeling the Sun Robert Stein, a physics and astronomy professor at Michigan State University, and Aake Nordlund of Copenhagen University Observatory in Denmark are using NCSA's SGI Origin2000 supercomputer to simulate the processes behind the sun's smaller-scale features. Creating massive models of portions of the sun, their research team is focused on understanding convection and magnetic flux near the solar surface. Full story 2000 Lifelike Recorded Music At a recent meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, Dr. William Hartmann demonstrated a new technique for recording and reproducing sound leading to an unprecedented sense of realism. The recording process isolates each instrument of an ensemble on separate digital tracks. The reproducing process uses dedicated loudspeakers that simulate the radiation patterns of each instrument. Full story Window on the Universe MSU's Physics and Astronomy Department is one of four partners constructing the SOAR (SOuthern Astrophysical Research) 4m telescope in Chile. This instrument will provide an exciting opportunity to study the optical and near-infrared sources of the southern hemisphere, "home" of the center of the Milky Way galaxy. Observational facilities planned for the atrium of the new Biomedical and Physical Sciences Building [ View construction progress ] will allow campus astronomers to do experiments with the telescope locally and allow the public to watch it all happen. 1999 Legislature funds new building! The Michigan legislature has now approved $93M for the new Biomedical and Physical Sciences Center at MSU. The departments of Physics/Astronomy, Microbiology and Physiology will be housed in the new complex. Ground breaking will occur 10th Feb. 1999 with the scheduled completion date being late 2001. View construction progress of the building. 1998 Seventh and eighth grade students making infrared light sensors in a week-long summer science camp, Sensing our World '98. National Science Foundation Material Research, Science and Engineering Center at Michigan State University Center for Sensor Materials renewed for another five years

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