 Good News
Reading recent newspaper reports about the University of Tennessee gives one the impression that the forecast is very gloomy. And it is of course correct that we desperately need more funds in order to be competitive with many other programs and to attract the best and brightest students from Tennessee. However, there are also a lot of positive signs, at least in the department of physics.
This academic year we have been able to carry out four searches for new faculty members. We still have to finish one search for a joint UT/ORNL associate professor in high energy physics. The other searches have resulted in us hiring three extremely good physicists, which seems to bode well for the future.
In this issue you will read about Geoff Greene, who has joined us as a joint faculty professor in fundamental physics with neutrons. Geoff will be responsible for building a program in this field at the Spallation Neutron Source and at UT. The SNS will have at least one beam line dedicated to this area of physics, which is using the decay properties of neutrons to study fundamental aspects of the weak interaction. The hiring of Geoff is also another great example of the close collaboration our department has with ORNL. Without this collaboration we would not have been able to attract, nor to afford, a senior and accomplished researcher like Geoff.
The search for a replacement for Geoff Canright in theoretical condensed matter physics was one of the most successful searches in many, many years. We had more than 60 applications and more than 20 of them were from candidates that we all would have loved to interview. In the end we interviewed six outstanding candidates, all of whom would have been great faculty members. The chosen candidate for the assistant professorship, Victor Barzykin, has an extremely impressive record. When he was only 16 he won first prize in the 1985 International Physics Olympiad in Yugoslavia. Later he received his master’s degree from the prestigious Landau Institute in Moscow (Yes, he has read and mastered all of the Landau and Lifshitz text books!) and his Ph.D. from Illinois under the supervision of David Pines. Currently he is at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory at Florida State University.
In high energy physics there is both good and bad news to report. The bad news is that Bill Bugg has decided to retire. Bill has been one of the most influential members of the department ever and he cannot be replaced. In the next issue we will have more on Bill’s retirement, so I will not dwell on this issue for now. The good news is that Bill’s retirement has allowed us to search for two new faculty members for the high energy physics group. One will be hired in the above mentioned joint faculty position and the other will be a new assistant professor. We have just finished the latter search, which also attracted several impressive candidates. The chosen candidate, Stefan Spanier, got his education in Mainz, Germany, after which he spent several years at CERN and SLAC. He has been offered two very prestigious fellowships, a CERN Fellowship and a SLAC Panofsky Fellowship, but in both cases he turned them down to pursue something even better. In the latter case, a faculty position in our department! He is currently working on the BaBar experiment and is expected to continue this work on understanding the nature of CP violation when he joins us.
Bringing in new, energetic faculty members is one of the physics department’s highest priorities, so getting four in one year is extremely encouraging. But we also want to bring in great students at all levels. In the last newsletter I described the changes to our graduate program, but our undergraduate program has also received a lot of attention. In particular, due to generous contributions from many of you, we now have three scholarships named for Bill Bugg, Sam Hurst, and Rufus Ritchie, which will provide Professor Jon Levin, who is responsible for our undergraduate recruiting efforts, a wonderful tool in trying to get the best high school students from Tennessee to come to our department. These scholarships are a great start, but I sincerely hope that through future increases in our endowment we will be able to add even more scholarships.
As I hope you can see from this short overview of recent good news in our department, there are a lot of things to be optimistic about. The future is not nearly as gloomy as many will lead you to believe. We just all need to keep working hard together in order to make the good things happen.
Cross Sections, Spring/Summer 2002 Issue, Contents Page UT Physics News & Notes Page UT Physics Home Page This page was last updated on June 6, 2002. Please send comments to cal@utk.edu. |