Research Some parts of the adjustment were straightforward. Research group meetings and individual meetings with students moved to Zoom. Computational work is done from off campus. The biggest difficulty is for experimental labs. After several weeks of near-complete shutdown of on-campus research, the campus began gradually reopening. For months research groups could do time-sensitive work, but with at most two people per research group in the lab at a time. Masks were required, along with distancing of at least six feet, a minimum space of about 200 square feet per person, and special care to clean shared equipment. From the end of October all research has been allowed, with lab occupancy restricted to 50% of the full level. Masks and social distancing are still needed, but the additional 200 square foot per person requirement is no longer in effect. This allows most groups to function at something approaching a normal level, although with more care than usual for scheduling considerations. Training, which for some tasks is impossible remotely or even at a 6-foot distance, is the biggest remaining issue. We hope to solve this soon through limited exceptions to the distancing rule.

programming tasks. Even if these hadn't risen to top priority in normal times, their completion will be appreciated going forward. The ease of attending seminars with scientists around the world, now that we are all far too familiar with Zoom, is another plus. Increased use of remote talks and workshops will probably outlive the pandemic, although not to the exclusion of in-person events.

Instruction Coursework in Physics and Astronomy has been entirely remote starting spring quarter. Spring instructors had two weeks' warning, which led to a flurry of experimentation with tablets, webcams, and all manner of software. We cancelled two one-unit courses, the lower-level astronomy lab and the upper-level optics lab. Neither is required for any degree, and the point of both is the hands-on experience. We kept other lab courses to avoid delaying any student's graduation. Advanced Lab instructors provided students with data and focused the course on analysis techniques. For some of the electronics labs, as well as one freshman seminar, students were sent kits with Arduinos, breadboards, and other small items. They could then carry out specially designed activities from home.

As we learn lessons about how to manage remote instruction, we've made corresponding schedule adjustments. As a general rule, large components like lectures can be scaled up without sacrificing quality, while more interactive activities like discussion sections need to have fewer students than with in-person instruction. We've all but eliminated late-night discussion and lab sections. Never popular, these are even less effective when students attend from home after dinner, and their surroundings tell them their work day is over. Fortunately a remote format removes all constraints from classroom availability.

REU The potential impact of COVID appeared as we were making offers to our annual NSF-sponsored Research Experiences for Undergraduates program, so we kept the size small. Six students participated, as opposed to about 15 in recent years. Three students had originally been offered hands-on projects in condensed matter labs. Those three were all switched to computational work that had some connection to experiment. PhD alum John Mahoney then ran a programming workshop several hours a day during the first four weeks. The workshop ensured that everyone knew the basics of Python, including some data visualization. It also introduced some open-ended physics questions to keep the strongest programmers interested and gave the students an opportunity to interact with each other. We took advantage of the remote structure by having joint final presentations with the UCSB REU, attending a talk by a KITP physicist, and hearing from former REU students in different parts of the country about their career paths.

Alumni Seminar Series We run a seminar series every spring in which our alumni (and others with degrees in physics) come back to campus to tell our current students about life after graduation. This past spring we missed the in-person contact, but at the same time our reliance on Zoom eliminated geographic constraints. We had speakers join us to dispense their wisdom from as far away as Washington (Roderic Vanderscoff), Texas (Rylan Conway), Alaska (Catherine Cahill), and Washington, D.C. (Frederica Darema).

Graduation For the first time that any of us can recall, we held a departmental graduation ceremony as a substitute for the spring picnic. We liked it! Although inspired by Covid, we now plan to keep a departmental ceremony during graduation week even once we’re back to in-person operations.

Creating a more welcoming environment The student group, Diversity and Inclusion in Physics (DIP), has been very active on this front with a number of initiatives to promote diversity and a sense of belonging. These include a workshop on imposter syndrome, an anti-racism reading group, the formation of an APS-IDEA team, fact sheets to faculty about avoiding bias in recommendation letter writing, and preliminary work on the creation of a summer school targeted toward underrepresented minorities (URMs). DIP is working with faculty on efforts to make the teaching assistant training syllabus more inclusive. A letter asking that we make URM faculty hires a priority, signed by half the department's graduate students, has led to serious discussion about the hiring process among faculty.

Outreach to Prospective Graduate Students Led by Professor Shirley Chiang, we have applied for membership in the American Physical Society’s Bridge Program as a Partnership Institution. The APS Bridge Program is a one to two-year post-baccalaureate program that provides students with research experience, advanced coursework, and coaching to prepare them for a graduate school application. Nineteen of our faculty are already engaged with this program. If successful in our application we will gain access to the APS Under-represented Minority (URM) applicant database, enabling us to reach out to qualified URM students to encourage them to apply.

Our faculty have also been very active in Cal-Bridge, a program designed to help physics and astronomy students at CSU campuses---the largest and most diverse university system in the US---build their credentials and get into Ph.D. programs. Professor David Wittman helped expand the program from its roots in Southern California and has served on the Northern California steering committee since its expansion, as well as the statewide Graduate Committee which provides feedback to all students navigating the grad school application process. He and six other faculty have mentored Cal-Bridge students. Professor Richard Scalettar has also served on the NorCal steering committee, researcher Brian Lemaux is serving as a graduate student fellowship reviewer and peer mentor leader, and graduate students Patricia Bolan and Ariadna Venegas-Li have recently served as peer mentors.

Recruitment This Fall we are launching Phase I of a campaign to create the Department of Physics and Astronomy Extraordinary Graduate Student Award. This award is intended to support students in their first and second year who have taken a non-traditional path to graduate school. We envision students who show promise as physicists but who may not be fully prepared for the usual PhD program. This can happen for a variety of reasons. For example, students who have significant family responsibilities, or whose finances require them to work long hours during college, cannot spend as much time on coursework and research as their more well-off classmates.

Victoria Norman, physics graduate student and member of the winning quantum hackathon team

Beyond the faculty, postdoc Ryan Sanders won a Hubble Fellowship, among the most prestigious of postdoctoral fellowships in the field of astrophysics. Graduate students Ben Cohen-Stead and Luke McClintock both won research awards that will take them to Los Alamos National Laboratory to continue their PhD work. Ben won the UC Laboratory Fees Research Program Award and Luke a DOE Office of Science Graduate Student Research Award. A team of students from the laboratory of UC Davis Professor Marina Radulaski won the California division of the Qiskit Summer Jam Hackathon with their project “QUantum Information Demonstrations PROmoting QUantum Optics (Quid Pro Quo). Graduate student Azalee Bostroem won a UC President’s Pre-Professoriate Fellowship to support her in the final year of her dissertation work connecting supernovae to their progenitors. 

Please let us know of any awards our alumni have received by emailing lknox@ucdavis.edu with ‘Alum Award’ in the subject line.

 Artist's illustration of a galaxy in the early universe that is very dusty and shows the first signs of a rotationally supported disk. (B. Saxton NRAO/AUI/NSF, ESO, NASA/STScI; NAOJ/Subaru)

Galaxies grow up faster than expected Physics & Astronomy Professor Lori Lubin and researcher Brian Lemaux are part of an international team of astronomers (ALPINE) studying the maturity of galaxies in the distant universe using a large array of radio telescopes in the high Atacama desert in Chile. Recent results published from these observations revealed a surprising number of galaxies in the early universe that were much more mature than previously expected, primarily indicated by the amount of dust and heavy elements created by these galaxies in a relatively short time (artist’s rendition to the left). These mature galaxies also appeared to prefer overdense regions in the distant universe, and Lubin and Lemaux are currently harnessing the power of the twin Keck 10-m telescopes on Mauna Kea in Hawai’i as part of an astronomical survey named C3VO to more fully understand how a galaxy’s environment helps it grow up. For more, see press releases from UC Davis, Keck, and the National Radio Astronomy Observatory.

Cox and Collaborator Try to Catch Coronavirus No, they are not trying to get infected. Physics Professor Daniel Cox and Chemistry Professor Michael Toney are adapting technology to make self-assembling protein scaffolds to combat coronavirus. Read the full story at UC Davis News.

Nickel oxide superconductivity: experiment supports theory 15 years later Both old and new theoretical work at UC Davis may clarify decades-old questions about the origin of superconductivity, as described in a 2020 Nature Reviews Physics ‘Yearly Highlights’ commentary by Professor Warren Pickett. After the initial 1986 discovery of high-temperature superconductivity in copper oxides, attention soon turned to sister compounds that might behave similarly, with nickel oxides chief among them. In 2004, Pickett and then-student Kwan-woo Lee pointed out an important difference between the copper and nickel oxides: the compound NdNiO2 has an active additional ‘frontier atomic orbital.’ Fifteen years later superconductivity was finally observed in this compound, after careful preparation. The experimental results from last year are best understood in light of the 2004 theoretical discovery, and have provided more clues that Lee and Pickett pursue in three 2020 Physical Review papers. 

The Vera Rubin Observatory (VRO), a major new astronomical facility decades in the making, is scheduled to begin conducting its Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) in early 2023. UC Davis has been a leading institution in this project ever since our 2004 recruitment of Tony Tyson to our faculty. Professor Tyson is the Chief Scientist of the VRO, named in January of this year to honor pioneering American astronomer Vera Rubin.

Camera sensors for the LSSTCam take first pictures. The Tyson group at UC Davis has special responsibility for testing components of the 3.2 Gigapixel camera, the world’s largest digital camera. It just took its first pictures in September.

Graduate student Daniel Polin (face toward us) working on camera raft construction.

Dark skies and bright satellites Recently Professor Tyson has been confronting a threat to the LSST and observational astronomy more generally: the planned deployment of tens of thousands of communication satellites in low-earth orbit. He has been working with SpaceX, who have launched the most of these satellites so far, and the astronomical community, to find mitigation strategies such as adjusting satellite orientation, darkening the satellite surfaces, and shielding them from the Sun. He co-authored, with Joel Parriott of the American Astronomical Society, a brief description of the problem and the efforts to create environmental protections for a precious natural resource: the night sky.

The red-carpet premiere of “Secrets of the Universe”, the Giant Screen film about the Physics of the Large Hadron Collider starring Prof. Manuel Calderón de la Barca and his UC Davis graduate students, was postponed due to COVID-19. While we await safe conditions to reopen theaters, Prof. Calderón de la Barca and the film production team have been avidly promoting the film via online webinars hosted by museums of science and technology, planetariums, and aquariums. These institutions have been eager to engage their audiences online since they are also facing the challenges of closures due to the pandemic. They include institutes in California, such as the California Academy of Sciences, and the Tech Interactive (San José), out-of-state institutes like the Pacific Science Center (Seattle, WA), and the Emera Astronomy Center and Jordan Planetarium of the University of Maine, as well as international venues such as the Armagh Planetarium in Ireland.

As part of the Science, Humanities and Arts: Process and Engagement (SHAPE) program a new course will be offered this winter: Creative Visualizations of Science, co-taught by Art Professor Darrin Martin and Physics and Astronomy Professor John Terning.

This course explores scientific discovery in visual terms as well as how science can be creatively communicated to non-experts. In a rapidly changing world, citizens need to be adequately informed about science in order to make educated choices. However, few people have sufficient time to keep up with the wide variety of developments. A further problem is that when scientists try to communicate with the public they typically fail to make a human/emotional connection hoping that "the facts will speak for themselves."

Visual representation can convey a great deal of information, but without the emotional component that art has the potential to evoke, it will always fall short.

The students will produce their own imaginative videos expressing responses to a specific scientific topic as a final project while linking scientific ideas and data with innovative visual analogies and personal narratives.