News & Events

01-04-18

Marco Bernardi, Assistant Professor of Applied Physics and Materials Science, has been awarded the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award for his 5-year project, “First-Principles Electron and Spin Dynamics in Materials with Spin-Orbit Coupling”. The CAREER program is NSF's most prestigious awards for junior faculty members. The level and 5-year duration of the awards are designed to enable awardees to develop careers as outstanding teacher-scholars. Awardees are chosen because they exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research within the context of the mission of their organizations. [Caltech story]

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12-23-17

Professors Harry A. Atwater, Jr., Babak Hassibi, Oskar J. Painter, John Seinfeld, Joel A. Tropp, Kerry J. Vahala, and Paul Wennberg have been named by Clarivate Analytics and Web of Science as 2017 Highly Cited Researchers. Their research ranks among the top 1% most cited works in their fields and they are being recognizes for their dedication and focus to expanding the sphere of human knowledge.  [List of recipients]

Tags: APhMS honors Harry Atwater Paul Wennberg Oskar Painter John Seinfeld Joel Tropp Kerry Vahala Babak Hassibi

11-20-17

Marco Bernardi, Assistant Professor of Applied Physics and Materials Science, and his colleagues’ semiconductor research has shown that the coupling between electrons and thermal vibrations may be sapping energy from Light-emitting diodes—or LEDs. "Our work shows for the first time that the ever-present interaction between electrons with lattice vibrations can, by itself, explain why excited electrons can leak out of the active layer and account for inefficiencies in GaN LEDs," Professor Bernardi says. [Caltech story]

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10-18-17

Amnon Yariv, Martin and Eileen Summerfield Professor of Applied Physics and Electrical Engineering, has been elected as a 2017 Honorary Member of The Optical Society. He was elected for pioneering scientific and engineering contributions to photonics and quantum electronics that have profoundly impacted lightwave communications and the field of optics as a whole. Professor Yariv joins a very select and highly distinguished group of Honorary Members which include George E. Hale in 1916 and R.A. Millikan in 1950 from Caltech. [List of Honorary Members]

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10-13-17

Brent Fultz, Barbara and Stanley R. Rawn, Jr., Professor of Materials Science and Applied Physics, has been elected as a 2017 Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) “For seminal experiments demonstrating the importance of vibrational entropy to the phase stability of materials and transformational leadership in the development of neutron scattering techniques.” [APS Fellow Archive]

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10-11-17

Marco Bernardi, Assistant Professor of Applied Physics and Materials Science, has won a 2017 Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) Young Investigator Award. The objectives of this program are: to foster creative basic research in science and engineering, enhance early career development of outstanding young investigators, and increase opportunities for the young investigators to recognize the Air Force mission and the related challenges in science and engineering. Professor Bernardi received the award for his proposal entitled, “Ab Initio Electron-Defect and Electron-Phonon Scattering for Understanding and Designing High-Mobility Semiconductors and Oxides.” [AFOSR Press Release]

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10-10-17

Brent Fultz, Barbara and Stanley R. Rawn, Jr., Professor of Materials Science and Applied Physics, and colleagues have pinpointed that arrangement of atoms is the main source of an increase in entropy during the glass transition. One persistent mystery about metallic glasses occurs at the so-called "glass transition." A cold metallic glass is hard and brittle, but when it is heated past a certain point—the glass transition—it becomes soft. [Caltech story]

Tags: APhMS research highlights Brent Fultz MatSci

09-18-17

Stevan Nadj-Perge, Assistant Professor of Applied Physics and Materials Science, has been named the 2017 KNI-Wheatley Scholar in Nanoscience for his proposal to develop a novel nanofabrication technique to integrate atomic size objects, such as atomic chains, into superconducting interferometer devices. [Nurturing Nanoscience]

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08-01-17

Austin Minnich, Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Physics, is a recipient of the Bergles-Rohsenow Young Investigator Award in Heat Transfer from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME). The award recognizes an engineer who is under 36 years of age and is committed to pursuing research in heat transfer, and has demonstrated the potential to make significant contributions to the field.

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07-22-17

Austin Minnich, Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Physics, is a recipient of the International Photothermal and Photoacoustics Association (IPPA) Junior Prize. He received the prize for outstanding contributions to the understanding of quasiballistic thermal transport, including the development of photothermal methods to directly probe heat conduction at length scales comparable to phonon mean free paths; for demonstrating how microscopic transport properties of thermal phonons in solids may be obtained using photothermal experimental methods along with ab-initio calculations; and for advances in the mathematical treatment of quasiballistic transport using the Boltzmann equation.

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