American Physical Society announces awardees of the Fundamental Physics Innovation Awards

College Park, MD, June 14, 2019 — The American Physical Society has announced the newest awardees of the Fundamental Physics Innovation Awards. The awards, funded by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, hope to stimulate ideas on innovative ways in which emerging technologies can be used to address pressing problems in fundamental physics beyond the Standard Model by bringing people together to collaborate on ideas and explore new cost-effective approaches.

The awards, which are bestowed multiple times per year, provide funding at three levels: Lectureship Awards ($2,000) for seminar presentations, Visitor Awards ($5,000-10,000) for longer collaborative interactions, and Convening Awards ($25,000-75,000) to support small scientific meetings.

“These awards are about bringing people together to think creatively about how we can take the next steps in fundamental physics beyond the Standard Model,” says Theodore Hodapp, Director of Project Development at APS. “Large mega-projects offer one direction, but table-top physics may offer a window into underlying physics in completely unexpected ways.”

The Standard Model, describing nature’s matter and force particles, is known to be incomplete, and the conventional techniques for discovering new particles (colliders, large detectors, etc.) are becoming prohibitively expensive. Given the challenge posed by open questions such as the nature of dark matter and dark energy, it is important to find alternative ways to test well-motivated theories that aim to solve important problems of fundamental physics.

Philip Cole: Philip Cole (Lamar University), Elton Smith (Jefferson Lab), and Michael Wood (Canisius College) will receive a Convening Award to organize the Light Dark Matter @ Accelerators LDMA2019 workshop. Andrea Celentano and Marco Battaglieri, both from INFN-Genova, are the lead workshop organizers of LDMA2019, which will convene in Venice, Italy, November 20-22, 2019.

Timothy Chupp: Measurement of magnetic fields with absolute accuracy is being transformed with the development of optically pumped 3He magnetometers and self-calibrated measurement the magnetic moment of the helion – the 3He nucleus. This Visitor Award will enable my collaboration with the group of Professor Klaus Blaum of Max Planck Institute, Heidelberg, bringing these two developments together and connecting to measurement of the magnetic moment anomaly of the muon, which is currently underway at Fermilab.

Yamaç Deliduman: Prof. Yamaç (Pehlivan) Deliduman from Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University in Istanbul and Prof. A. Baha Balantekin from University of Wisconsin – Madison will collaborate on the neutrino emission from a core collapse supernova. In particular, they will analyze the emergent many-body phenomena associated with neutrino flavor oscillations at high densities, and illuminate the possible role of sterile neutrinos in the scheme.

Jayant Murthy: This proposal aims to invite Jayant Murthy, an expert in observational analyses of the ultraviolet background radiation, to Maryland to engage in intensive discussions with James Overduin (Towson University) and Richard Henry (Johns Hopkins University) on the possibility that recently detected anomalies in this radiation may be connected to the nature of dark matter. In particular, we aim to determine whether a conclusive answer to this question may be obtained using data from the ALICE spectrometer aboard the New Horizons spacecraft.

Qiaoli Yang: Qiaoli Yang, Associate Professor of Physics at Jinan University in Guangzhou, will visit Professor Pierre Sikivie at University of Florida to explore the quantum nature of axion dark matter. As axions are generally predicted by theories with extra dimensions such
as string theory, a deep understanding of their quantum properties and consequent cosmological, astrophysical and laboratory properties may serve as a new window on ultra-high energy scale physics.

Jon Urheim: Prof. Jon Urheim of IU Bloomington will be presenting a department-wide colloquium on the DUNE (Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment) and NOvA (NuMI Off-axis electron neutrino appearance) projects which he works on, as well as on neutrino physics in general. Fundamental physics will be advanced through an interdisciplinary discussion linking neutrino physics with dark matter (LZ, UAlbany Prof. Szydagis) and the LHC (ATLAS, UAlbany Prof. Jain).

For more information visit the Moore Foundation Physics Innovation Awards website (https://www.aps.org/programs/innovation/moore/).

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