University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth Physics Department

A rainy day for a graduation. Congratulations Physics Grads!

Research at UMassD: Gravitational wave science Professors Scott Field and Vijay Varma, as well as their students, have emerged as leaders at the forefront of gravitational wave science. Merging UMass Dart...

Physics Major - Alexis Petty is one of this years commencement speakers.

Class of 2024 Student Commencement Speakers announced Alexis Petty, Zemen Berhe, Susie Furtado, and Natalia Vargas to deliver speeches that exemplify determination and success

Physics Day - Graduate & Undergraduate presentations.

We are pleased to announce that our Member Spotlight for May is Jay Wang, Professor of Physics at UMass Dartmouth! Read more about Jay here ➡ https://ow.ly/HuP150RtEgI University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth Physics Department

COE Award ceremony

Eclipse viewing today at the Hirshfeld-Dowd Observatory.

NASA, ESA move forward on science supported by UMass Dartmouth faculty UMassD faculty and students play prominent role in probing the history of the universe

SPS hosted "Friends'giving" today

Halloween fun in the Physics Department!

UMassD PhD students and faculty gain new insights on binary black holes

Physics Undergrads Daniel Pierce & Daniel Vazquez presented their research on Friday, October 20th at the Fall 2023 Regional Meeting APS New England Section hosted by URI. They were accompanied by their advisor Dr. Renuka Rajapakse.

UMass Dartmouth premieres renovations, reopens Hirshfeld-Dowd Observatory After over a decade of harsh New England winters, the observatory’s rotatable dome now sits atop a rebuilt, well-sealed foundation, ready to resume scholarly use.

Zach Pereira, Matt Stearns & Eamon Lyons representing SPS at the Corsairs Fair today.

SPS first meeting of the fall semester. They hosted a meet and greet with the incoming freshman and transfer students.

This weekend marked the premier of director Christopher Nolan’s new film, “Oppenheimer.” our Prof. Robert Fisher provides a short analysis of the science and politics of the film.

“The ‘Oppenheimer’ film is a truly magnificent experience, densely packed and finely woven together by Ludwig Göranson’s score and Richard King’s sound design. The film interweaves two timelines with two different scientific and political themes. The first 2 hours of the film are shot primarily in color and termed ‘fission’ by the filmmakers, in reference to the nuclear fission process powering the atomic bomb. To my mind, these scenes are near-perfect. Robert’s musings and visions of stellar interiors, quantum orbitals, and nuclear reactions — which are conventionally depicted cinematically by boffins scribbling lifeless, meaningless mathematics on black boards — here thrum, crackle, and vibrate with an intensity of visuals and sound. The script hurtles to the violent climax of the Trinity test, bringing together a who’s who of titanic minds and powerful politicians of the twentieth century — Blackett, Bohr, Einstein, Heisenberg, Born, Tolman, Lawrence, Alvarez, Serber, Rabi, Bethe, Teller, Feynman, Fermi, Christy — Strauss, Stimson, Truman and many others. Oscar nominations for the entire creative team — from Nolan, Göranson, King, and cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema for the full stack of best original screenplay, score, sound, cinematography, and director are all guaranteed, and I would be shocked if they didn’t bring home the lion’s share of the awards. And Cilian Murphy, Robert Downey Jr., Emily Blunt, and Florence Pugh will get nominated for best acting categories and be leading candidates for awards.

Yet there’s room to kibitz. In contrast to the creative intensity of the film’s first two hours, which primarily dwell on the ‘fission’ theme, the final ‘fusion’ hour of the film, which dwelled at length on Oppenheimer’s involvement in the hydrogen bomb and his ensuing 1954 security hearing was to my mind a major miss. This source material has been dealt with many times before — and better — most notably in Kipphardt’s 1964 play but also the BBC 1980 TV series. The attempt is made to (over)simplify the drama of the hearing into a personal conflict between Strauss and Oppenheimer. As always the true history is far more nuanced. Even though the film drags on for another hour at this point, the fundamental reasons for Oppenheimer’s objections to the initial designs for the hydrogen bomb (or Super as it was then called) were never made clear, and were instead enshrouded in the voluminous dialog of the film. The earliest hydrogen bomb designs prior to Ulam and Teller’s breakthrough were incredibly unrealistic. For example, the first hydrogen bomb test, Ivy Mike (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_Mike?wprov=sfti1) with a conservative technical implementation of the Ulam and Teller mechanism weighed in at 80 tons and had to be constructed like an enormous industrial factory on site with its own liquid deuterium cooling system. These seemingly insurmountable technical challenges were only briefly alluded to in the script, when Oppie quips that Teller’s first designs would have had to be delivered by ‘ox cart rather than airplane.’ Once the technical challenges were overcome, Oppenheimer supported the Super. His acidic personality nonetheless made him a target by Teller and others, and the changing times of the Cold War exposed him politically.

There were plenty of original directions the creative team could have taken here — for example emphasizing Oppenheimer’s ultimate failure to live up to his role as the moral voice of authority in banning nuclear weapons forever, something which his Soviet counterpart Sakharov devoted himself to later in his life. But instead they decided to turn their magnum opus into yet another theatrical trope of the courtroom drama, hewing far too close to a literal interpretation of the ‘American Promotheus’ of Kai Bird’s source material.”

The Physicists Coalition for Nuclear Threat Reduction, formed in 2020 with a grant through the American Physical Society Innovation Fund, advocates for government policies that reduce nuclear threats. Find out how you can become involved: https://physicistscoalition.org/.

University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth Physics Department UMassD is a Tier One University, now offering an astrophysics focus for our physics majors. Our depa

Congratulations Mckenzie!

Mckenzie Ferrari Named 2023 ITA Sally Ride STEM Award Winner - UMass Dartmouth The Intercollegiate Tennis Association (ITA) has announced that recent University of Massachusetts Dartmouth graduate and women's tennis captain Mckenzie Ferrari has been named the recipient of the 2023 ITA Sally Ride STEM Award as endowed by Tam O'Shaughnessy.

Asking for help! In an effort to increase the population of the page please invite any current or former UMASS Dartmouth Physics Department students to like this page. Thanks!

Commencement 2023 Congratulations to all the Graduates!

Is Time Travel Possible? The laws of physics allow time travel. So why haven’t people become chronological hoppers?

Congratulations! COE Award recipients!

The New Observatory Dome is complete! Students got to enjoy viewing the night sky on Friday Night.

Mckenzie Ferrari ‘23:  Reaching for the (exploding) stars Physics major Mckenzie Ferrari is poised to join the next generation of leaders in astrophysics research.

Viktoriya Balabanova presenting today at Sigma Xi. Her poster title is "Investigation of the Validity of the Geostrophic Balance in the North Atlantic Ocean"

Congratulations to our awesome grads! Best wishes from the entire Physics Department! 😃

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration has imaged the tangled magnetic fields at the edge of M87’s supermassive black hole. By comparing these new observational results with a catalog of three-dimensional magnetohydrodynamical simulations, EHT scientists infer that the supermassive black hole at the center of M87 is gobbling up about one-thousandth of the mass of the sun each year.

https://www.eso.org/public/news/eso2105/

Join us on the South Coast of Massachusetts at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Center for Scientific Computing and Visualization Research as a research computing facilitator: jobregister.aas.org/ad/3acabe4b. The posting is active until the end of March.

Professional Tech I or II Research Computing Facilitator | AAS Job Register The Center for Scientific Computing and Visualization Research (CSCVR) at UMass Dartmouth aims to promote and conduct high-level interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research in scientific computing, and to mentor students in a supportive, broad, and deep interdisciplinary research environment. O...