MUSTANG - a Penn Radio Telescope Array

Penn,the National Institute of Standards and Technology, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, and the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, have built a 3 millimeter array of 8x8 TES detectors for the Green Bank Telescope (GBT).

 

Topology and Liquid Crystals

Liquid crystal molecules can be molded into shapes which resemble a Hopf fibration, a complex shape from topology resembling a series of linked rings wrapped into a torus. This fascinating shape has applications in mathematics, quantum physics, and computer graphics.

From the lab of Bryan Gin-Ge Chen, former grad student of Prof. Randy Kamien.

Graphene

Penn physicists study graphenes, atomically thin sheets of carbon atoms in a honeycomb lattice. Graphene is the prototype Dirac material hosting a solid state realization of an ultra-relativistic electron gas and accessing new phenomena that are controlled by electric and magnetic fields and by the atomic registry when graphenes are stacked.

The SNO+ Experiment

SNO-plus is a multi-purpose neutrino experiment, located 2km underground in an active nickel mine in Sudbury, Ontario. It is a large liquid scintillator experiment, currently under construction, inheriting most of the detector hardware from the successful SNO experiment.  The Penn SNO-plus group is led by Professor Josh Klein.

 

Alternatives to Dark Energy

Perhaps the deepest mystery in physics today is the origin of the accelerating expansion of the universe.  Professors Khoury and Trodden work, among other things, on the possibility that it is due to a dark sector with new light degrees of freedom.  Screening mechanisms, such as chameleon and symmetron, may explain why such scalars, if light, have escaped detection.

 

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