Dark Excitons

Excitons are electrically neutral excited states of a material consisting of a bound state of an electron and a hole.  Prof. Jay Kikkawa explores previously unseen "dark exciton" states in carbon nanotubes and shows their dependence on geometry of the nanotube.

 

Dipole magnets at the Large Hadron Collider

Protons at the LHC are accelerated to 7 TeV (the equivalent energy to an electron subjected to the potential of more than 4.5 trillion batteries laid end-to-end).  To circulate such powerful beams of particles, the LHC employs superconducting dipole magnets like those shown to provide a magnetic field almost 100,000 times stronger than the earth's magnetic field.

 

Dark Energy Studies

Professor Masao Sako uses Type Ia supernovae to study the expansion history of the universe.  The graphs show (left and middle) Hubble diagrams from a simulated 5-year Type Ia sample from the Dark Energy Survey.  The right graph shows the 95% confidence limits on dark energy parameters.

Atacama Cosmology Telescope - in the north of Chile

The Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) is a 6-meter telescope located in the Atacama Desert of Chile on Cerro Toco.  It's goals are to study how the universe began and evolved to its current state and to discover its major constituents.  By observing the cosmic microwave background with great precision, the ACT experiment should get unprecedented measurments of cosmological parameters.

Bio-optics and bio-optical materials

Prof. Alison Sweeney and her colleagues believe that the reflective structures in giant clams help them grow algae. The clams use sub-wavelength structures formed from a protein called reflectin to optimize the photosynthesis of the algae living in the clam tissues.

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