Giving in Action: Physics
55
Graduate Fellowships
53
Undergraduate Scholarships
Emerging Faculty Research
Thanks to generous donor support, faculty in the Department of Physics are able to conduct cutting-edge research like that highlighted below.
Alysia Marino
Professor Alysia Marino holds the inaugural Jesse L. Mitchell Endowed Chair in Physics. Marino’s research group studies long-baseline neutrino oscillations at the T2K experiment in Japan, and the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) between FermiLab in Illinois and the Sanford Deep Underground Research Facility (SURF) in the former Homestake gold mine in South Dakota. She was part of the team that won the 2016 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for the discovery and exploration of neutrino oscillations. Marino is also part of the NA61/SHINE experiment at CERN.
Sascha Kempf
Associate Professor Sascha Kempf is the principal investigator on the Europa Clipper’s SUrface Dust Analyzer (SUDA). Scientists have long had their eyes on Europa as an important target in the search for life beyond Earth. This ice-covered sphere is slightly smaller than Earth’s own moon, and only the fourth-largest of Jupiter’s moons. Underneath its miles-thick layer of ice, researchers suspect Europa could hold more than twice the saltwater of all of Earth’s oceans combined—an ocean that might also carry ingredients necessary to sustain living organisms, including organic molecules like amino acids. “There’s, essentially, a thin sphere of particles around the moon,” says Scott Tucker, the SUDA project manager at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP). “It’s like Pigpen in the Peanuts comics with his cloud of dust.”
SUDA will use its wide mouth to capture those particles. These tiny grains will be moving at relative speeds of more than 10,000 miles per hour—so fast that when they hit the target that sits at the back of the instrument, they will vaporize on impact. SUDA collects the ions that escape from those collisions and measures them to determine exactly what the particles were made of. In order to ensure the particles are free from earthbound contaminants, SUDA is constructed in a clean room at LASP. “We have to be able to demonstrate that the material we detect is from Europa and not from us,” Kempf says.
