Posts Tagged Department of Physics and Astronomy

Using the same mathematical framework as the Rochester Cloak, researchers have been able to use flat screen displays to extend the range of angles that can be hidden from view. Their method lays out how cloaks of arbitrary shapes, that work from multiple viewpoints, may be practically realized in the near future using commercially available digital devices.

A team led by Robert Boyd has demonstrated that the transparent, electrical conductor indium tin oxide can result in up to 100 times greater nonlinearity than other known materials, a potential ‘game changer’ for photonics applications.

Are humans unique and alone in the vast universe? This question– summed up in the famous Drake equation–has for a half-century been one of the most intractable and uncertain in science. But a new paper shows that the recent discoveries of exoplanets combined with a broader approach to the question makes it possible to assign a new empirically valid probability to whether any other advanced technological civilizations have ever existed.

The Kavli HUMAN Project holds great promise for putting big data to the test. But as astronomy professor Adam Frank argue, “with great promise comes great responsibility.” / NPR

Rochester researchers have developed a new conceptual framework for understanding how stars similar to our Sun evolve. Their framework helps explain how the rotation of stars, their emission of x-rays, and the intensity of their stellar winds vary with time. According to Eric Blackman, professor of physics and astronomy, the work could also “ultimately help to determine the age of stars more precisely than is currently possible.”

David Cameron, a visiting scientist in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, has discovered a new comet – the first to be discovered by an astronomer associated with the University or with the Rochester area in over a century, his colleagues believe.

A team led by professors Steven Manly and Kevin McFarland was honored “for the fundamental discovery of neutrino oscillations, revealing a new frontier beyond, and possibly far beyond, the standard model of particle physics.”

Combined with the current weakening of Earth’s magnetic field, the data suggest that the region of Earth’s core beneath southern Africa may play a special role in reversals of the planet’s magnetic poles.

Okubo, a Rochester alumnus and faculty member since 1964, was internationally known for his groundbreaking investigations into the patterns and decay rates of fundamental particles and symmetries of the universe.

The best guide to the boundary between our everyday world and the “spooky” features of the quantum world has been a theorem called Bell’s Inequality, but now a new paper shows that we understand the frontiers of that quantum world less well than scientists have thought.