The American Physical Society (APS) has announced that Derek Teaney, Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at StonyBrook University, is among the organization’s 2023 Fellows. This distinction recognizes Professor Teaney as a leading physicist whose research and service as an educator have helped advance the frontiers of science and technology.
Professor Teaney’s research involves Quantum Chromodynamics, which describes the nearly massless particles called quarks and gluons that exist within the nucleus of every atom. When nuclei are crashed into each other at high speeds, these particles form an extremely hot and dense state of matter known as quark-gluon plasma, which existed a microsecond after the big bang. ProfessorTeaney’s work has helped elucidate these collisions, painting a more complete picture of the quark-gluon plasma in the very early universe.
“I am exceptionally delighted that Professor Teaney has been recognized with this distinct honor by the American Physical Society, which is made to no more than one-half of one percent of the Society’s membership each year,” said Chang Kee Jung, Distinguished Professor and Chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy. “Besides his outstanding contributions to nuclear physics, Professor Teaney is a dedicated and caring educator. He is also a reliable member of the department who is always willing to serve the university. We are fortunate to have him.”
With a BS from Yale University and a PhD from StonyBrook, Professor Teaney joined the Department of Physics and Astronomy in 2007 as a RIKEN Fellow. Since then, he has received multiple accolades including an Outstanding Junior Investigator award and a Sloan Fellowship.
The APS has named an annual cohort of fellows since 1921, and Professor Teaney joins a long list of StonyBrookprofessors who have earned the title. He also joins his father, Dale Teaney, who became an APS Fellow in 1964. To see the full list of past and present honorees, visit the APS Fellows archive page.
Stony Brook University Professor Harold Metcalf has been selected as the Optica (formerly OSA), Advancing Optics and Photonics Worldwide 2023 recipient of the Esther Hoffman Beller Medal. Metcalf, a distinguished teaching professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy in the College of Arts and Sciences, is being honored for outstanding mentorship of undergraduate students in hands-on optics research and for organizing an annual symposium for students to present their work during the Frontier in Optics/Laser Science (FiO/LS) conference.
The Beller Medal is presented for outstanding contributions to education in optical science and engineering. Consideration is given to the recipient’s outstanding teaching and/or original work in optics education that enhances the understanding of optics. The scope of the award is international, and candidates at every career stage are considered. It is endowed by a bequest from the estate of Esther Hoffman Beller.
“My sincere congratulations to Hal on this momentous achievement,” said Nicole S. Sampson, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and distinguished professor of chemistry. “His dedication to education – from mentorship of students from the high school to graduate level – in addition to his decades-long committment to advancements in optical science, are testament to the promience and recognition of our Physics and Astronomy program at Stony Brook. We are fortunate to have him among our faculty.”
Metcalf was recognized by Optica for being “a dedicated educator and mentor. He created the Laser Teaching Center (LTC) at Stony Brook University, which provides inquiry- and project-based active learning for students from high school to the graduate level. Another of his significant contributions to education is the annual Symposium on Undergraduate Research/LS [sponsored by the Division of Laser Science (DLS) of the American Physical Society] which takes place as part of Frontiers in Optics (FiO/LS). During the Symposium, undergraduate students present their research in oral and poster sessions and network with leading professionals in the field.
Metcalf’s research is focused on optical control of atomic motion, and he was one of the leaders in the earliest experiments of Laser Cooling and Trapping. He has published three textbooks, including “Laser Cooling and Trapping.” Metcalf has also held several visiting appointments, including Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); École normale supérieure (ENS) Paris, France; Utrecht University, Netherlands; University of Bonn, Germany and Beijing Institute for Modern Physics, China.
“This is a richly deserved award, as Hal is such a generous contributor to the Department and the Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics community, particularly to the younger generation,” said Chang Kee Jung, PhD, distinguished professor and chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy. “In addition, Hal made seminal contributions to the field of laser cooling and trapping of neutral atoms. The members of our Department appreciate him greatly, and I am very proud of his accomplishments.”
Metcalf earned his Bachelor’s degree in physics from MIT and his PhD in physics from Brown University. He was a postdoc at Stony Brook University before joining their faculty. Metcalf is a recipient of the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching, and is a Fellow of Optica and the American Physical Society.
James Lattimer, distinguished professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy in the College of Arts and Sciences at Stony Brook University, has been selected as a 2023 Fellow of the American Astronomical Society (AAS).
AAS Fellows are recognized for their contributions to the Society and its overarching mission – advancing the science that informs humanity’s understanding of the universe. For his part, Professor Lattimer has made formative discoveries about the structure and evolution of neutron stars.
Professor Lattimer has collaborated with other scientists to develop pioneering simulations of proto-neutron stars and their neutrino emissions, and he also helped enable the use of high-performance numerical simulations by creating the first open-source equation-of-state code and tables suitable for their application.
Professor Lattimer is the first Stony Brook faculty member selected as an AAS fellow since the inaugural class of 2019. He is also a fellow of the J.S. Guggenheim Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the American Physical Society (APS).
“I am delighted that Jim has been recognized by the recently established AAS fellowship program,”said Chang Kee Jung, PhD, Distinguished Professor and Chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy.“Jim is an internationally renowned nuclear astrophysicist and has already received the prestigious Hans Bethe Prize given by the APS for truly outstanding work in the areas of astrophysics, nuclear physics, nuclear astrophysics, or closely related fields.”
From left, Chang Kee Jung, Barry Barish and Carl Lejuez. Photo by John Griffin/Stony Brook University
By Daniel Dunaief
Albert Einstein predicted gravitational waves existed, but figured interference on the Earth would make them impossible to observe. He was right on the first count. On the second, it took close to a century to create an instrument capable of detecting gravitational waves. The first confirmed detection, which was generated 1.3 billion light years away when two black holes collided, occurred in September of 2015.
For his pioneering work with gravitational waves, which now include numerous other such observations, Barry Barish shared the Nobel Prize in 2017 with physicists Rainer Weiss and Kip Thorne.
In the fall of 2023, Barish is bringing his physics background and knowledge to Stony Brook University, where he will be the inaugural President’s Distinguished Endowed Chair in Physics. Barish will teach graduate students and serve as an advisor to Chang Kee Jung, Chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy and Distinguished Professor.
From left, Barry Barish and Chang Kee Jung. Photo by John Griffin/Stony Brook University
“I’m really happy,” said Jung in an interview. “Nobel Prize winning work is not all the same. This work [Barish] has done with LIGO [the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory] is incredible.”
Jung suggested the discovery of these two merging black holes “opened up a completely new field of astronomy using gravitational waves.” The finding is a “once-in-a-generation discovery.”
Gravitational waves disrupt the fabric of spacetime, a four-dimensional concept Einstein envisioned that combines the three dimensions of space with time. These waves are created when a neutron star with an imperfect spherical shape spins, and during the merger of two black holes, the merger of two neutron stars, or the merger of a neutron star and a black hole.
Jung suggested a way to picture a gravitational wave. “Imagine you have a bathtub with a little rubber ducky,” he said. In the corner of the bathtub, “you slam your hand into the water” which will create a ripple that will move the duck. In the case of the gravitational wave Barish helped detect, two black holes slamming into each other over 1.2 billion light years ago, when life on Earth was transitioning from single celled to multi celled organisms, started that ripple.
While Barish, 86, retired after a lengthy and distinguished career at CalTech in 2005, Stony Brook has no plans to create a team of physicists who specialize in this area. “The most important thing is that people together exchange ideas and figure out what to do next that’s interesting,” Barish said in an interview. “I’ll keep doing gravitational waves.”
Instead of encouraging graduate students and even undergraduates to follow in his footsteps, Barish hopes to “help stimulate the future here and help educate students,” he said.
An important call
Jung, who became chair of the department in the fall of 2021, has known Barish for over three decades. On a periodic informal zoom call, Jung reached out to Barish to tell him Stony Brook had offered Jung the opportunity to become chair. Barish suggested he turn it down. As Jung recalled, Barish said, “Why do you want to do that?”
On another informal call later on, Jung told Barish he decided to become chair, explaining that he wanted to serve the university and the department. Barish asked him what he would do as chair. Jung replied, “‘I would like guys like you to come to Stony Brook. It took [Barish] about 10 seconds to think about it and then he said, ‘That’s possible.’”
That, Jung said, is how a Nobel Prize winning scientist took the first steps towards joining Stony Brook.
Last week, Barish came to Stony Brook to deliver an inaugural lecture as a part of the newly created C.N. Yang Colloquium series in the Department of Physics and Astronomy.
Stony Brook officials were thrilled with Barish’s appointment and the opportunity to learn from his well-attended on-site lecture.
In remarks before Barish’s packed talk at the Simons Center Della Pietra Family Auditorium, Carl Lejuez, Executive Vice President and Provost, said he hears the name C.N. Yang “all the time,” which reflects Yang’s foundational contribution to Stony Brook University. “It’s fitting that we honor his legacy with a speaker of Dr. Barish’s character who, like Yang, is also a Nobel Prize winner. It’s a really nice synergy.”
Indeed, Yang, who won his Nobel Prize in 1957, coming to Stony Brook “instantaneously raised the university profile,” said Jung, whose department is the largest on campus with 75 faculty.
Surrounded by a dedicated team of scientists, and with the addition of another Nobel Prize winner to the fold, Jung believes the team will continue to thrive.
“If you put together great minds, great things will happen,” he said.
Seeing the bigger picture
Barish is eager to encourage undergraduates and graduate students to consider the bigger picture in the realm of physics.
“[In general] we train graduate students to do something really important by making them narrower and narrower and narrower, so they can concentrate on doing something that’s worthy of getting a thesis and is as important as possible,” Barish said. “That works against creating a scientist who can look beyond something narrow. That’s bothered me for a long time.”
The problem, Barish continued, is that once researchers earn their degree, they continue on the same path. “Why should you happen to have had a supervisor in graduate school determine what you do for the rest of your life?” he asked.
Once students have the tools of physics, whether they are experimental or theoretical, they shouldn’t be so locked in, he urged. “It’s possible to use these same tools to do almost any problem in physics,” Barish added.
His goal in a course he plans to teach to advanced graduate students (that’s also open to undergraduates) is to provide exposure to the frontiers of science.
A few years ago, Barish recalled how the New York Times ran a picture of a black hole above the fold. He taught a class how scientists from around the world combined radio telescopes to make it act like one radio telescope the size of the Earth.
Helping students understand how that happened “pays off in the long run in making our physics students that we turn out be broader and more interesting and more interested in physics,” Barish said.
When Barish arrives next September, Jung said he plans to have some assignments for interactions with undergraduates. “Undergraduate research is critically important,” Jung said. Barish will also interact with various student groups, as well as the community outside the university.
Paul, second from right, in 2002 with colleagues David Fossan, Linwood Lee, Robert McGrath and Gene Sprouse; and Paul in a family photo. Photo from Gene Sprouse
For nearly 50 years, Setauket’s Peter Paul was a prominent member of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Stony Brook University. With his death March 11 at the age of 84, the physicist left behind a legacy that will be remembered for years to come, especially by his former colleagues.
A native of Dresden, Germany, Paul received a Ph.D. from the University of Freiburg, and immigrated to the United States when he accepted a postdoctoral position at Stanford University.
Linwood Lee, emeritus professor, recalled when he recruited Paul in the late 1960s. A former co-worker of Lee’s worked with Paul at Stanford University and told him how impressive the physicist was. Lee knew he had to hire him during a time when he called coming to Stony Brook University “an adventure” because the school was in its infancy.
Peter Paul. Photo from Stony Brook University
Lee said Paul was marvelous, and he’s grateful he recruited the professor.
“We established a laboratory here, and from the moment he got here, he was the driving force to make us all do better,” Lee said.
Paul was a professor at the university from 1967 to 2015 and later a distinguished service professor in the department and served as chairman twice during his tenure. One of Paul’s greatest achievements was building a first-class nuclear physics group along with his colleagues at Stony Brook.
In 1973, when the physicist spearheaded a small group to develop, design and construct Stony Brook’s superconducting linear for heavy ions, an improvement of the university’s existing Van de Graaff accelerator, it became the first such machine at a university lab.
Gene Sprouse, now a distinguished John S. Toll professor at SBU, was a graduate student at Stanford University when he met Paul. He later came to Stony Brook and worked on the accelerator project with him.
“That machine was really unique. It was a very powerful accelerator at a university,” Sprouse said.
Paul Grannis, another of Paul’s colleagues at SBU, said Paul was very proud of the accelerator project.
“It enabled research that had previously not been possible to be done, and it was quite a unique facility in the country,” Grannis said. “I know Peter was very proud of that and considered it one of his major achievements.”
Paul became a member of the Nuclear Science Advisory Committee in 1980, and as chair, led the development of the 1998 Nuclear Science Long Range Plan, which in turn led to the construction of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory.
Paul was appointed deputy director for science and technology in 1998 at BNL, and when John Marburger was appointed as President George W. Bush’s scientific advisor in 2001, Paul stepped in as interim director at the laboratory until 2003. Under Paul’s direction, BNL made many advances, including starting the construction of Brookhaven’s Center for Functional Nanomaterials, and conceptualizing the electron-ion collider as a successor to RHIC.
Peter Paul with Stony Brook University President Samuel L. Stanley, M.D. Photo from Stony Brook University
Paul returned to SBU after serving as interim director at BNL, and his ongoing success was never a surprise to those who knew him.
“Peter was very energetic and driven,” Sprouse said. “He was always pushing for excellence.”
Sprouse described Paul as a visionary who helped to create the Stony Brook University people know today, especially the Department of Physics and Astronomy.
“Throughout his career he helped to build the nuclear physics groups at Stony Brook, he helped to build the department, and then he helped to build things at Brookhaven,” Sprouse said. “He always kept an eye out for putting in place instruments and institutes that could strengthen Stony Brook in particular and Brookhaven, too.”
Grannis echoed Sprouse’s praise of Paul.
“He was very motivated to do the best that he could in all of his scientific endeavors and to insist that all those who worked with him do so,” Grannis said.
Chang Kee Jung, a SUNY distinguished professor, said when Paul returned to Stony Brook after his time at BNL, he looked for a research program to be involved in. He said he was surprised when Paul knocked on his office door one day and told him he was interested in the projects he was working on at the time.
Jung said he was hesitant at first due to Paul’s extensive experience. However, Paul assured him he would never do anything to interfere. Jung said Paul was always curious to learn more in his field, and didn’t have an ego despite all of his successes. The professor said Paul was the perfect person to have on his team, and he became an advisor to Jung. The two worked together until Paul became the university’s associate vice president for Brookhaven affairs — a position he held until his retirement in 2015.
He also remembers Paul fondly on a personal level and said he was grateful for the opportunity to visit the professor at home a couple of weeks before his death.
“Among all the people I met at Stony Brook, he was the strongest supporter of me, personally,” Jung said. “For whatever reason he liked me and the projects I was doing.”
Lee added that like many professors, Paul was always proud of his students. Many left SBU for prestigious careers, including Michael Thoennessen, chair, APS division of nuclear physics at Michigan University. Thoennessen wrote in an email Paul was his Ph.D. adviser when he attended SBU in the late 1980s.
Peter Paul. Photo from Bryant Funeral Home
“In Germany the Ph.D. adviser is called the ‘Doktor Vater’ (Ph.D. Father) and that is exactly what Peter was to his students,” Thoennessen wrote. “In addition to being a brilliant scientist and a great administrator, Peter was an amazing mentor. I would not be where I am right now without Peter’s advice and guidance.”
Grannis added that despite a demanding career, Paul led a well-rounded life.
“He had a very broad range of interests not only in science but in music, in travel, in reading,” Grannis said. “He was very well-informed on many things.”
Paul was an ardent opera-goer and hiker, and Jung remembers the professor being in his 70s and still traveling upstate to go skiing. His career provided him the opportunity to travel extensively, too. Among his trips were vacations to his homeland of Germany.
In his lifetime, Paul received numerous awards including the American Physical Society Fellow, Institute of Physics Fellow, Sloane Research Fellow, Alexander von Humboldt Senior Scientist Award and the Order of Merit First Class from the German government. Paul is also an inductee in the Long Island Technology Hall of Fame. However, his greatest honor may be the legacy he leaves behind at Stony Brook University.
“Peter was one of the people that made us a better university,” Lee said. “He was active in associating us with Brookhaven, and he was always a booster of the university, and we always boosted Peter. It was hard to keep him because he was recognized as a top scientist. He turned down some very good offers to stay here.”
Sprouse said Paul inspired many to come to SBU and helped them, with his encouragement and leadership, to develop their careers.
“I just think that he was somebody that was really dedicated to the university and wanted to build it,” he said. “For those of us who were at Stony Brook, 40, 50 years ago, Stony Brook was kind of a dream, and Peter really made it a reality.”
