We have a new faculty member, Dr. Michael Dennin, who will join the faculty as an Assistant Professor in Winter quarter 1997. Dennin was an undergraduate at Princeton, and received his Ph.D. from UC Santa Barbara in 1995, studying spatio-temporal chaos in electro-convective systems. He is currently a post doctoral researcher at UCLA, studying the properties of liquid crystal films. Professor Dennin is an experimentalist with interests in pattern formation and turbulence in non-linear hydrodynamic systems, and in phase transitions and kinetics of two dimensional systems including lypid bilayers and 2D foams. As a graduate student, he already established a record of outstanding undergraduate teaching.
Prof. William Heidbrink has been elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 1996. His citation reads: For quantitative studies of the confinement and thermalization of fast ions in tokamak plasmas and for discovery of several fast-ion driven instabilities.
Prof. William Molzon was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society. His citation reads: For contributions to the study of K-meson interactions, including a leading role in initiating and executing the most sensitive search for muon and electron number violation in kaon decays.
Prof. Herbert Hamber received the School of Physical Sciences Award to Physics and Astronomy for Outstanding Contributions to Undergraduate Education. This was given to Prof. Hamber in recognition of his seminal role in the creation and development of the Instructional Computing Lab and the Computational Physics course.
Prof. Virginia Trimble was elected to the Board of Directors of Sigma Xi, the Scientific Research Society. She was also elected to the Board of Directors of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific.
Prof. Gaurang Yodh was appointed to the Advisory Panel for Cosmic Rays for the Journal of Physics G of the Institute of Physics in England.
Linda Halsey Arias has joined our staff as assistant manager, replacing Marth DeYoung. Linda was previously with the Humanities Institute.
Graduate student awards for 1995-96 were the following: Wagner Truppel received the Outstanding TA Award; Andrei Schegrov received the Marko Vekic Award for best performance on the 1995 Qualifying Exam; and Eric Schneider received the Nobel Spouse Award, given by the UCI Town and Gown Society in honor of Sylvia Reines, for Schneider's graduate work on the High Energy Antimatter Telescope.
Undergraduate awards for 1995-96 went to: Ali Mokhberi for Outstanding Senior (Summa Cum Laude); Cawley Vacarella for Undergraduate Research, (Cum Laude); Kent Wong (Magna Cum Laude); Elizabeth Tong (Cum Laude); and Steve Dawson received the Herbert Chen Award for outstanding junior.
Super-Kamiokande, the world's largest water Cherenkov detector, began operation on April 1, 1996. It was built to search for Nucleon Decay and to help solve the solar and atmospheric neutrino problems. In its first month of operation, it collected more solar neutrino events than was collected during the entire several year operation of its predecessor and about half of the entire worlds supply of atmospheric neutrino events. This large event rate and low operating threshold will allow us to study the solar and atmospheric signals in much more detail and hopefully reveal the origin of the observed discrepancy. If neutrino oscillations are responsible for the effect, we hope to observe the oscillations and pin down the values of the oscillation parameters and thereby the neutrino mass.
There is a new website for the department, which we call the "open" site. It is to allow all faculty and graduate students to post their own individual webpages. The site is at http://www.physics.uci.edu/. It also contains our new service of posting student scores in large courses so that students can check for any errors and assess how they are doing relative to the class. The site is administered by Steven White and Dennis Silverman.