12/10/2021: Congratulations to Kevin Mack-Fisher for passing his General Exam

Kevin gave a very nice talk today and passed the written and oral parts of his General Exam. Congratulations, Kevin—great job! Many thanks go to the Committee: Profs. Eric Abraham, Grant Biedermann, Kieran Mullen, and Ying Wang for their time, questions, comments, and suggestions!

12/03/2021: Congratulations to Dave Hill for passing his General Exam

Dave gave a very nice talk today and passed the written and oral parts of his General Exam. Congratulations, Dave—great job! Many thanks go to the Committee: Profs. Howie Baer, Robert Lewis-Swan, Arne Schwettmann, and Binbin Weng for their time, questions, comments, and suggestions!

11/29/2021: Dave Hill Awarded Avenir Foundation Graduate Student Fellowship

Congratulations to graduate student Dave Hill for being awarded an Avenir Foundation Graduate Student Fellowship for Summer 2022! Keep up the great work—we are looking forward to seeing cool results on cavity-emitter systems.

Prospective Graduate Student Open House: Thursday, Dec. 9 (1-3pm Central)

If you are interested in pursuing a Ph.D. in Physics, we invite you to join the department’s “Prospective Graduate Student Open House”!!! Send an email to PA-Grad at ou.edu to obtain the Zoom link info — we are looking forward to welcoming you at the virtual open house!!!

11/15/2021: Aidan selected as a recipient of the Rita H. Lottinville Prize

Aidan has been chosen as a recipient of a Rita H. Lottinville Prize honoring the 2020-2021 freshman class! Congratulations, Aidan!!! Each year, five outstanding University of Oklahoma sophomores are selected for the prestigious Rita H. Lottinville Prize. The prize, which includes a $1,500 scholarship, is administered by the OU Foundation. The prize was established in 1952 and endowed in 1982 by the late Savoie Lottinville in honor of his wife. A 30-year trustee of the OU Foundation, Lottinville was director emeritus of the OU Press and Regents’ Professor Emeritus of History. 

10/5: Undergraduate Aidan Sudler presents poster at departmental picnic hosted by SPS

Aidan was one of the many undergraduate students presenting their research at the departmental picnic. Congratulations to all undergraduates who presented their work — truly impressive! And many thanks to the SPS for sponsoring this event!

October 4-8, 2021: Doerte is giving four lectures at virtual School

Doerte Blume, Alejandro Kievsky, and Pascal Naidon are lecturing at the School on Critical Stability of Few-Body Quantum Systems. Doerte’s lectures are entitled:

• Lecture 1: 1D fermions: statics and dynamics
• Lecture 2: Dynamics of the helium dimer dynamics: universal and non-universal features
• Lecture 3: Efimov scenario in the presence of spin-orbit coupling
• Lecture 4: Dynamics of two-level emitter(s) coupled to bath

Check out the program and lectures at this link.

Sept. 16, 2021: Thank you, thank you, and another thank you to the Dodge Family!!!

September 16, 2021 is a memorable day for the Homer L. Dodge Department of Physics and Astronomy — we are extremely grateful to the Dodge family for their generous gift. OU’s announcement states: “The Dodge family chose to reserve half of the historic gift for OU’s Homer L. Dodge Department of Physics and Astronomy, within the College of Arts and Sciences, of which Homer Dodge was a former professor and chair. The physics department was renamed the Homer L. Dodge Department of Physics and Astronomy in 2005. Of the funds earmarked for the Physics and Astronomy Department, the majority will benefit the Dodge Family Postdoctoral Research Fellows Fund, followed by the Research Faculty Fund, the Strategic Research Investment Fund, and the Dean’s Student Recruitment and Bridge Fund. The remainder of the Physics and Astronomy Department allocation will go to the Distinguished Visitor and Workshop Fund and the Dean’s Graduate and Postdoctoral Retention Fund.” What a monumental and transformational moment for the department!

September 2021: Bisons in the Wichita Mountains

Congratulations to Kevin Mack-Fisher

Kevin passed his last qualifier. Congratulations, Kevin! With class work and qualifiers out of the way, we are looking forward to many interesting research discussions.

08/16/2021: Undergraduate Aidan Sudler selected to receive fellowship for Fall 2021

Aidan Sudler, who joined the Blume group through the FYRE program in Spring 2021 and continued working on the classical and quantum dynamics of a damped-driven harmonic oscillator remotely during the summer 2021, has been awarded a $1,000 fellowship for Fall 2021 through the Honors Research Assistant Program (HRAP). Congratulations, Aidan—keep up the excellent work!

07/30/2021: Bittersweet farewell

Today was AJ and Claire’s last day. We are sad to see these two talented, creative, and kind students leave the group. Yet, we are immensely happy for AJ to take the next big step (graduate school) and for Claire to get ready for her fall semester in France! The chocolate cake on the terrace of Lin Hall was delicious, even in the Oklahoma summer heat…

Dr. Yangqian Yan to join Chinese University of Hong Kong as Assistant Professor

Former graduate student Yangqian Yan will be joining the Department of Physics at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in August 2021 as an Assistant Professor — congratulations, Yan! You can learn more about Yan’s most recent scientific accomplishments here. We are looking forward to continuing to interact with Yan and wish him well in establishing his own group.

Jugal takes home “Best Oral Presentation Award”

The certificate reads: “This certificate of best oral presentation award is awarded to Jugal Talukdar of Center for Quantum Research and Technology, The University of Oklahoma, Norman, USA for the oral paper entitled “Separation-dependent emission pathways of quantum emitters” and is presented in the National Conference on Emerging Trends in Physics (NCETP 2021) held on 16th of June 2021.” Congratulations, Jugal — well done!

Former grad student Dr. Debraj Rakshit joined HBU faculty

Debraj Rakshit, who earned his Ph.D. in 2012 for work on few-fermion systems, joined the faculty at the Institute of Science, HBU, Varanasi. Congratulations, Debraj! Debraj’s recent work covers topics ranging from quantum information science to quantum computing to many-body physics, including exciting new developments in the areas of Pauli crystals, quantum droplets, and twistronics.

Claire I. Kvande joins group for summer ’21

Welcome to Claire Kvande, who is working with the Blume group during the summer 2021 as part of the REU program of the Homer L. Dodge Department of Physics and Astronomy. Claire is visiting from Kalamazoo College, which is located in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and working on understanding the time dynamics of finite-sized cavity rings. Welcome, Claire—we are excited to have you in the group!

A.J. and Jugal presenting at virtual DAMOP 2021 Meeting

05/06/2021 (departmental awards announced): Congrats to A.J. and Kevin!

Congratulations, Kevin, for being awarded a Kenneth and Joyce Harwell Scholarship — this is fantastic! Congratulations, AJ, for being awarded the outstanding graduating senior Fowler prize — this is fantastic!

A.J. Yates will be attending graduate school at Rice University in fall

Congratulations to A.J. for accepting Rice University’s offer to join their physics graduate program. Great job, A.J.! We are looking forward to working together during the summer 2021.

February 2021: Doerte named Outstanding Referee

The highly selective Outstanding Referee program annually recognizes about 150 of the roughly 71,000 currently active referees. At the start of the program, in 2008 and 2009, larger groups were selected by our Editors for the Outstanding Referee designation, in order to “catch up” and recognize referees who had already served for many years. Like Fellowship in the APS, this is a lifetime award. In this year, 2021, 151 Outstanding Referees were selected — Doerte was among them. Check out the APS announcement. Thanks to Physical Review and their staff for their excellent work, ensuring and promoting quality peer-review.

Congratulations to graduate student Dave Hill

Dave passed his last two qualifiers. Congratulations, Dave! With class work almost done, we are looking forward to great research contributions.

January 2021: Wishing postdoc Jianwen Jie all the best for the future!

All the best to postdoctoral researcher Dr. Jianwen Jie and his family.

Jianwen is returning to China after three years at the University of Oklahoma.

Safe travels!

And all the best for your and your family’s future adventures!

Hiking the Ouachita National Recreation Trail: Oklahoma/Arkansas Border

January 2021: Welcome to undergraduate Aidan Sudler

Welcome to Aidan Sudler! Aidan, a Freshman at OU, has joined the group to get involved in research. Aidan is part of OU’s FYRE program and will be exploring the classical dynamics of non-trivial harmonic oscillators, such as the van der Pol oscillator. The goal will be, down the road, to explore connections to quantum statistical mechanics descriptions.

Some press on Nature Physics article

The article entitled “Ultrafast manipulation of the weakly bound helium dimer” by Kunitski, Guan, et al., which appeared in Nature Physics on December 21, 2020, and is accompanied by a “News & Views” highlight entitled “Gently stirred not shaken” by Daniel Rolles, received quite a bit of press. See, for example “Quantum wave in helium dimer filmed for the first time: Collaboration between Goethe University and the University of Oklahoma” for a nice highlight by nanotech-now. Nature Physics had listed 14 news stories from 11 outlets on January 8, 2021.

Call for Nominations for 2021 Faddeev Medal

We are pleased to announce the call for nominations for the 2021 “Faddeev Medal” 
Prize. We are seeking nominations of scientists who have advanced the field of 
few-body physics significantly, either through ground-breaking research or due to 
crucial progress achieved over the course of their career.

The Faddeev medal was inaugurated in 2016 by the Topical Group on Few-Body Systems & Multiparticle Dynamics (GFB) of the American Physical Society and the European Research Committee on Few-Body Problems in Physics (ERCFBP) to recognize distinguished achievements in few-body physics. It is named in honor of distinguished scientist Ludwig D. Faddeev (1934-2017). It was awarded for the first time in 2018 to Vitaly Efimov and Rudi Grimm for “the theoretical discovery of a series of weakly-bound three-body quantum states known as Efimov states” and “in recognition of his ground-breaking experiments confirming the Efimov effect”, respectively.

The nomination deadline for the 2021 “Faddeev Medal” is April 15, 2021. See this link for more details.

Applications/Registrations Accepted Now for KITP Program & Conference in May/June ’22

We are very happy to announce that applications are now accepted for the KITP program entitled “Living near Unitarity“. The organizers are Olivier Dulieu, Chris Greene, Alejandro Kievsky, and Daniel Phillips. The program will take place in Santa Barbara, May 9-June 17, 2022. The application deadline is February 1, 2021!!! The program will be accompanied by the conference “Opportunities and Challenges in Few-Body Physics: Unitarity and Beyond“, coordinated by Doerte Blume, Olivier Dulieu, Chris Greene, and Alejandro Kievsky. The dates are May 23 – May 26, 2022. Let’s hope that Covid-19 will be under control by then — we are looking forward to welcoming as many friends as possible from all over the world! Let’s keep our fingers crossed. And in the meantime, please be responsible and wear a mask!

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