A Letter from the Chair

Dear Physics alumni and friends,

As the newly appointed Physics Chair, I am happy to report some of the recent exciting developments in our department. Major renovations have continued throughout the Varian building and surrounding areas over the past year. One of the most significant and dramatic changes has been the removal of the Varian parking lot facing Serra Street in preparation for construction of the new Regional Teaching Facility. This has been a huge undertaking, but the planned state-of-the-art teaching facility will greatly enhance our teaching efforts. The teaching labs are also being moved downstairs to the newly renovated sub-basement of Varian. There are also plans to replace the Bloch Lecture Hall next summer, so the construction projects will continue for some time. We look forward to a much improved and modernized facility when the work is completed.

Our faculty were the recipients of a wide range of impressive awards over the past year. Arthur Schawlow was inducted into the Inventors Hall of Fame. Steven Chu received a Guggenheim Fellowship award. Assistant Professors Mark Kasevich and Charlie Marcus received a Terman Fellowship and an ASSU Teaching Award, respectively. Seb Doniach was elected as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Patricia Burchat was selected as a University Fellow, and elected to the Executive Committee of the Division of Particles and Fields of the American Physical Society. Along with Stan Wojcicki and Giorgio Gratta, Burchat also received an NSF grant for Academic Research Infrastructure, to be used for computers and laboratory instrumentation for experimental particle physics research on campus.

The research programs in the Department remain vigorous and ambitious. In this issue we present articles about several of our research programs, including Stanford's role, led by Phil Scherrer, in the new SOHO satellite to measure the solar oscillation spectrum to unprecedented accuracy. These measurements will give us information about the internal structure of the sun. Peter Sturrock describes new theories about the Sun's corona which have been motivated by the wealth of new information from x-ray photographs of the solar corona. In addition, one of our new faculty, Giorgio Gratta, has undertaken a reactor neutrino experiment at the Palo Verde reactor to search for evidence of neutrino oscillations. These oscillations, from one form of neutrino to another, would indicate that there is a mass difference between the electron and muon neutrino families and thus a non-zero mass for at least one generation of neutrino. To test the possibility of tau to muon neutrino oscillations, Stan Wojcicki, spokesperson for the MINOS international collaboration, has undertaken the construction of a very large underground detector. A neutrino beam from Fermilab will be aimed at the detector in the Soudan mine in northern Minnesota. In my own research, we are now beginning to take data in our search for dark matter in the form of weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) in a shallow underground facility on the Stanford campus. We will present an update on this research in next year's newsletter. Other programs, such as Stanford's participation in the new Hobby-Eberly telescope, are being started in the next several months. Stanford's research on the HET during its check-out phase includes a spectral study of very distant galaxy clusters detected by the Hubble Space Telescope and a search for black holes in our Galaxy at the sites of nova explosions observed over the last century. Peter Michelson is leading a study of a next-generation gamma-ray telescope mission, which is under serious consideration by NASA for flight in the next decade.

This year brings a new class of promising students to our department. We are pleased to note that this year's class of twenty-three new Physics graduate students includes nine women. The Physics faculty have a strong commitment to excellence in teaching, and we look forward to a modernized facility to help serve those needs. We wish to thank those of you who have made donations to the Department, which have helped us to achieve some of our goals. Your continued support and interest is critical for us to create and maintain outstanding educational opportunities for our students.

News from former students and friends of the department is always welcome, and we hope you will visit the department whenever you are in the Bay Area.

Best regards,

Blas Cabrera
Chair, Department of Physics

Back to 1996 Newsletter Table of Contents