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The School of Physical Sciences now has two new Associate Deans. Franklin Dollar of the UCI Department of Physics & Astronomy is the new Associate Dean of Graduate Studies, and Mu-Chun Chen, also of Physics & Astronomy is the new Associate Dean of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI). Both appointees come from long histories of experience with both engaging with the graduate student community at Physical Sciences, as well as stimulating action in the DEI realm.

Very recently, Dollar was part of an effort in his department to secure funding for the mentors of a graduate student-led program called Physics & Astronomy Community Excellence (PACE), which aims to give graduate students the peer support they may need. “Our vision is to foster a student-focused, transdisciplinary graduate experience in which a diverse student body can both succeed and lead in their chosen path,” Dollar said. “We will develop new support mechanisms to promote broader collaboration across the school, while making sure that students have the support they need.”

A team of physicists at CU Boulder has solved the mystery behind a perplexing phenomenon in the nano realm: why some ultra-small heat sources cool down faster if you pack them closer together. The findings, which will publish this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), could one day help the tech industry design speedier electronic devices that overheat less.

“Often heat is a challenging consideration in designing electronics. You build a device then discover that it’s heating up faster than desired,” said study co-author Joshua Knobloch, postdoctoral research associate at JILA, a joint research institute between CU Boulder and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). “Our goal is to understand the fundamental physics involved so we can engineer future devices to efficiently manage the flow of heat.”

For laser science, one major goal is to achieve full control over the spatial, temporal and polarization properties of light, and to learn how to precisely manipulate these properties.  A  property of light is called the Orbital Angular Momentum (OAM), that depends on the spatial distribution of the phase (or crests) of a donut-shaped light beam. More recently, a new variant of OAM was discovered – called the spatial-temporal OAM (ST-OAM), with much more elusive properties, since the phase/crests of light evolve both temporally and spatially. In a collaboration led by senior scientist Dr. Chen-Ting Liao, working with graduate student Guan Gui and JILA Fellows Margaret Murnane and Henry Kapteyn, the team explored how such beams change after propagating through nonlinear crystals that can change their color…