News

Pitt and Carnegie Mellon University announced Dec. 2 that the two institutions’ library systems would “conduct a thorough review of options for collaboration” and “seek input from faculty, staff, students and other stakeholders from our two universities, the city and the region.” During the review, which will result in a preliminary report in March and a final assessment in June, the search to replace University Library System head Rush Miller upon his Dec. 31 retirement will be suspended temporarily. CMU also has placed on hold its search for a director of collections and information access services for its libraries.

This Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) will cover the contemporary subject of topology in condensed matter systems. The course will provide "a simple and hands-on overview of topological insulators, Majoranas, and other topological phenomena focused on ongoing research."

This course is a joint effort of Delft University of Technology, QuTech, NanoFront, University of Maryland, and Joint Quantum Institute.

This 12 week course will start February 8, 2016. Find more information and enroll here.

Electricity and magnetism rule our digital world. Semiconductors process electrical information, while magnetic materials enable long-term data storage. A research team led by PQI faculty Jeremy Levy has discovered a way to fuse these two distinct properties in a single material, paving the way for new ultrahigh density storage and computing architectures.

Levy and colleagues published their work in Nature Communications, elucidating their discovery of a form of magnetism that can be stabilized with electric fields rather than magnetic fields.

Pitt’s new physics department helium recovery system will put the campus at the forefront of U.S. university efforts to conserve the finite supply of this increasingly expensive laboratory gas.

With U.S. helium reserves being sold off and prices rising, Pitt has used the National Institute of Standards and Technology-funded renovation of mid-campus physics buildings, undertaken over the past five years, as an opportunity to install a new helium recovery system. It should be able to reliquefy at least 90 percent of the gas currently used and allow for experiments that might not otherwise have been affordable, says Patrick Irvin, faculty member in the Department of Physics and Astronomy.

PQI faculty Ken Jordan was featured in the September 4th, 2014 issue of the Journal of Physical Chemistry A. 

This issue was dedicated to Ken Jordan on the occasion of his 66th birthday. The preface “From Quantum Mechanics to Molecular Mechanics: A Tribute to Kenneth D. Jordan” was written by his friend and fellow scientist Jack Simmons, former graduate student Feng Wang, and his longtime collaborator Mark Johnson. This special issue “The Kenneth D. Jordan Estschrift" includes his autobiography, a list of his colleagues and publications, and his Curriculum Vitae.

The UC Irvine Center for Chemistry at the Space-Time Limit has received a $20 million renewal award from the National Science Foundation to continue its groundbreaking work in pushing the limits of interrogating chemistry on ultrafast and ultrasmall scales. Ultimately, the goal is capture chemistry in the act on the single-molecule level.

Headed by V. Ara Apkarian of UCI’s Department of Chemistry, CaSTL is one of eight NSF-funded “Centers for Chemical Innovation” that are designed to tackle grand challenges in the field. A team of 12 faculty members from five different universities and nearly 60 researchers have joined CaSTL to build the “Chemiscope” – the chemist’s microscope – designed to visualize chemical transformations on atomic scales and in real time.