News
In the 2010 rankings of graduate programs across the United States, announced by U. S. News & World Reporton 15 April 2010, to appear in the 27 April 2010 issue, Michigan State University's Nuclear Physics program was ranked number one, after several years of placing second behind MIT.
In 2009, Timothy Beers received an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Senior Research Award and achieved ISI's "Highly Cited Researcher" rating
In April 2009, two Physics/Astronomy juniors, Nathan Sanders and Jessica Muir, were named Goldwater Scholars for 2009-10.
The long wait is over! Collisions were observed in the ATLAS detector at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) on Monday, November 23. A picture of the first collision is shown above. This event, along with almost all of the events taken by ATLAS so far, was triggered by the MBTS (Minimum Bias Trigger Scintillators), constructed at MSU and installed at CERN (the signals from the MBTS counters can be observed as the yellow quadrangles in the top left).
The MSU Foundation, through the Strategic Partnership Fund initiative, has funded a group of scientists based in Physics (Chong-Yu Ruan, Martin Berz, and Phil Duxbury), NSCL (Marc Doleans), Chemistry (Marcos Dantus), and Material Sciences (Martin Crimp) for a joint effort to push the current limit of material imaging capabilities to the most fundamental level.
MSU physicists and their colleagues from around the world have confirmed the existence of a fundamental building block of nature. The recent discovery of a single top quark at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (FNAL) near Chicago fills in another piece of the puzzle of how the most fundamental components of matter and energy relate to one another.
On 11 December 2008, the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science named Michigan State University as the site for the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB), a proposed new $550 million facility for conducting cutting-edge research in nuclear physics and astrophysics, with potential applications in medicine and materials science to go along with its contributions toward advancing pure scientific knowledge.
At SCAN in 2008, Kyoko Makino & Martin Berz receive the3rd R. E. Moore Prize for Applications of Interval Analysis.
IUPAP Commision awarded Georg Bollen the SUNAMCO Medal in 2008.
Carbon does not stop amazing the scientific community – again and again. Until the 1980s, elemental carbon was believed to crystallize either as diamond, an ultra-hard and transparent solid, or graphite, a grayish layered substance used in pencils and lubricants. This perception changed completely with the discovery of the C60“buckyball” and other fullerenes, deemed significant enough to warrant the 1996 Chemistry Nobel prize.
In 2008, MSU Physicist Named Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow.
In 2008, Martin Berz recieved an honorary doctorate from St. Petersburg University in Russia.
April 29, 2008: In a ceremony in the MSU Abrams Planetarium, Dr. Chih-Wei Lai was installed as the first “Jerry Cowen Chair of Experimental Physics”. The Chair’s donor and Jerry Cowen’s son, Randy Cowen, two daughters of Jerry’s, as well as his widow Elaine, were in attendance to help celebrate the occasion.
January 2008
A team of scientists, led by University Distinguished Professor Timothy C. Beers, have used data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey to demonstrate that the halo surrounding the Milky Way comprises two stellar components rotating in opposite directions about the center of the Galaxy.
Tim Beers and Wolfgang Bauer were among the ten MSU professors that have been named University Distinguished Professors in recognition of their achievements in the classroom, laboratory and community. The designations, recommended by Interim President Lou Anna K. Simon, were approved by the MSU Board of Trustees on June 15, 2007.
MSU’s Gates Scholar has high energy for high-energy particles.
In 2007 Jack Baldwin won the MSU Distinguished Faculty Award.
Feb. 1, 2007: We are pleased that one of our Adjunct Professors of Physics, Prof. Albert Fert of CNRS/Thales and the University of Paris Sud, in Orsay, France, was just awarded the 2007 Wolf Prize and the 2007 Japan Prize, both jointly with Peter Grünberg of the KFA Jülich, Germany.
Tuesday, October 9, 2007
Albert Fert, Professor at the Université Paris-Sud and also Adjunct Professor at the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Michigan State University (MSU), and Peter Grünberg, Scientist at the Forschungszentrum Jülich, are sharing the 2007 Nobel Prize in Physics “for the discovery of Giant Magnetoresistance”.
EAST LANSING, Mich. - That giant is 750 miles of fiber optic cable that lassoes its three biggest research universities and Van Andel Institute to the future. Its first mission: To uncover the nature of the Big Bang by connecting U.S. physicists to their huge experiment ATLAS in Geneva, Switzerland, at the European Centre for Nuclear Research, or "CERN." The University of Michigan and Michigan State University together are creating one of the portals to these secrets for hundreds of U.S. physicists.