A Letter from the Chair

Dear Physics alumni and friends,

Incredible! For the third year in a row, the Stanford Physics community has been the recipient of the Nobel Prize. Steve Chu was awarded the 1997 Nobel Prize, together with Claude Cohen-Tannoudji from the College de France, and Bill Phillips from NIST in Gaithersburg, MD, "for development of methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light". These techniques have already led to a fundamental understanding of gases at low temperatures, more precise atomic clocks, more precise gyroscopes, and very precise measurements of the acceleration due to gravity. In addition, Steve has applied aspects of the laser trapping to branch out into biophysics using "optical tweezers" and laser fluorescence to study biological molecules such as DNA and to study polymer physics. In addition to his excellent research, Steve is also one of the Department's best teachers, both in the classroom (he is now teaching the first year graduate level quantum mechanics course), and with his graduate students. Steve is relentless in his enthusiasm for laboratory research. He has attracted many of the best graduate students into his group and has a remarkable record of placing them in tenured or tenure-track positions at major universities like UC Berkeley, Yale and Caltech. In addition, Steve has been and continues to be an excellent citizen within the Department. Steve served as Chair of Physics before Doug Osheroff, and within the University at large, he has participated vigorously on numerous committees, including the Presidential selection committee which resulted in the recruitment of Gerhard Casper to Stanford.

Continuing with the discussion about our faculty, we are very pleased with the addition of Scott Thomas to our faculty as Assistant Professor in theoretical particle physics. His presence, together with Savas Dimopoulos, makes Stanford a powerhouse in the area of phonomenological theoretical particle physics. Scott is also exploring the couplings between string theory and extensions of the Standard Model in particle physics. Perhaps some of the tools of string theory can be applied to existing problems at the energy scales of existing or future accelerators.

Lenny Susskind, the Director of our newly formed Institute for Theoretical Physics which is supported through the President's Fund for five years, has recently been awarded the American Physical Society's 1998 Sakurai Prize (see Faculty Awards article). The Institute has provided the funding for a visitors program that has made an enormous difference to the vitality of the theory group here in the Department. Over the past several years, string theory has been revitalized through an unexpected coupling to general relativity. We now have the first consistent theory of quantum gravity and it is being explored vigorously. The field is moving rapidly, and Stanford's Theoretical Institute and theory group are playing major roles in the exciting search for a unified theory of all of the known forces of nature.

The major renovations have continued around Varian Physics. This summer, the Bloch Lecture Hall (fondly known as the Tank) was demolished (see story and photographs). Unfortunately, the new Regional Teaching Facility was not completed on schedule, so that we are housing our physics introductory classes in nearby classrooms. Our staff has done a remarkable job of preparing a temporary demonstration staging area, so that as many of these important demonstrations as possible can be used in those classes. We expect the new state-of-the-art facility to be ready for use at the beginning of winter quarter. The McCullough renovation and McCullough Annex construction (advanced materials research building) have begun in earnest, so that we are now surrounded on three sides by active construction projects! However, when complete, these new facilities will improve both the classroom instruction and the research efforts within the Department.

On the subject of awards, we were also delighted that last year Rosenna Yau, our excellent Department Administrator, was awarded the Arnice Streit Award in recongition of her outstanding administrative contributions (see article). During these financially constrained times, Rosenna has managed to keep us afloat financially while at the same time maintaining the collegial atmosphere that is so important to the success of our Department at all levels.

We will all sorely miss Wolfgang Jung, who retired at the end of September after thirty-two years in the Physics Machine Shop (see article). During his twenty-eight years as Machine Shop Foreman, Wolfgang guided the Shop through a number of critical changes while other Machine Shops across campus closed their doors. Many of us in the Department feel that it is essential to maintain an excellent machine shop for the training of graduate students. The machine shop classes that train students and postdocs provide invaluable information not only about the use of shop equipment, but also how to design an apparatus so that it can be fabricated efficiently. The shop remains in capable hands under the leadership of Karlhienz Merkle, who has worked in the shop since 1989.

Research articles in this newsletter include an update on the CHEX experiment, the Gravity Probe B experiment, and the current research of Bob Wagoner, Aharon Kapitulnik and Savas Dimopoulos. In my own research, the CDMS (Cryogenic Dark Matter Search) experiment is now well underway in the underground facility on the Stanford campus. We are looking for dark matter in the form of weakly interacting massive particles or WIMPs using a new class of detectors operated below 1 K. We have now reached the levels of sensitivity of the best experimental results from other groups, and will soon explore regions of phase space predicted by supersymmetric theories (the favorite extension to the Standard Model of particle physics).

On behalf of everyone in Physics, I wish to thank those of you who have made donations to the Department. Your contributions continue to be an important source of funding toward our Department's efforts to improve both teaching and research. I invite everyone to come and visit the Department and see all of the changes going on around us and the renovations to Varian Physics.

Best Wishes,

Blas Cabrera
Chair of Department of Physics