News from the Chair

Four Corners American Physical Society Meeting

The UNM attendees gather for a photo at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University

Five physics students took home awards for their research at the annual meeting of the Four Corners Section of the American Physical Society

Over fall break, 23 students and two faculty from the UNM Department of Physics and Astronomy travelled to Prescott, Arizona to attend the annual meeting of the Four Corners Section of the American Physical Society (APS).

The conference, held this year at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, featured talks and posters from all areas of physics, ranging from fundamental studies of exotic particles to the behavior of liquid crystal devices essential for communications and radar. Among these research presentations were ten students representing UNM and highlighting their own contributions to the state of the art. In total, five UNM graduate students and five undergraduates presented their work.

UNM also sent two invited faculty speakers to the conference to give longer talks about the research they lead. Darcy Barron presented on Cosmology from CMB Polarization with POLARBEAR and the Simons Array, while Tara Drake's talk was about Microresonator Optical Frequency Combs.

The meeting culminated with the award ceremony, where excellent posters and talks were recognized with a certificate and a cash prize. Extraordinarily, five students from UNM were chosen to receive these prestigious awards. The winners were:

• Paul Gieri, graduate student, for his talk, Plasmonic Color Printing in the Nineteenth-Century
• Lauren Zundel, graduate student, for her talk, Evolution of Radiative Heat Transfer Between Graphene Nanodisks Over Time
• Amy Soudachanh, undergraduate student, for her talk, Nonlinear Kinetic Inductance Devices for Future Millimeter Wave Detection
• Ryan Gibbons, undergraduate student, for his talk, Improving light yield in a LAr veto for neutrinoless double beta decay searches
• Ivey Davis, undergraduate student, for their poster, Radio Emission Due to a Possible Exoplanet Around WX UMa

Award winners from UNM: (from left to right) Paul Gieri, Ryan Gibbons, Ivey Davis, Amy Soudachanh, and Lauren Zundel

APS is a nonprofit membership organization working to advance the knowledge of physics, and the Four Corners Section of APS supports the work of physics students by giving them opportunities to present their research and meet physicists in the region. Travel to the conference for UNM students was made possible through funds from the Four Corners Section of the American Physical Society. In addition, the undergraduate students, who traveled as part of the UNM Society of Physics Students (SPS), received funding from ASUNM and the Rayburn Reaching Up Fund.

See this article on the UNM News site and the photo gallery.