Posts tagged cold
Professor grabs 8th MacArthur award for CU faculty
Sep 25th
Rey also is an assistant research professor in the CU-Boulder Department of Physics. She teaches undergraduate and graduate classes.
Rey is the eighth CU-Boulder faculty member to win the prestigious award from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation of Chicago as well as the fourth physics faculty member and third JILA fellow. Rey, 36, was one of 24 recipients of the 2013 “no-strings attached” funding. She will receive $625,000 paid out over five years.
“It is a great honor for me to be a MacArthur fellow and to receive such great recognition of my work,” Rey said. “I want to thank JILA, NIST, CU-Boulder and the outstanding group of colleagues, collaborators and students who have allowed and helped me to accomplish the research I have done.”
The MacArthur Foundation selection committee cited Rey as an “atomic physicist advancing our ability to simulate, manipulate, and control novel states of matter through fundamental conceptual research on ultra-cold atoms.”
“We congratulate Professor Rey on this exciting award, and, we also congratulate our faculty, whose ranks now include five Nobel laureates and eight MacArthur Fellowship winners,” said CU-Boulder Chancellor Philip P. DiStefano. “I believe Professor Rey’s work is emblematic of the research, innovation, and discovery at CU-Boulder, a body of work and a collection of great minds that is unmatched anywhere in the Rocky Mountain region and few places around the nation.”
Tom O’Brian, chief of the NIST Quantum Physics Division and Rey’s supervisor, said, “Ana Maria has rapidly established herself as one of the world’s top young theoretical physicists. She has a special ability to make very practical applications of theory to key experiments. Ana Maria has been crucial to the success of such world-leading NIST/JILA programs as ultracold molecules, dramatic improvements in optical lattice clocks, and use of cold atom systems and trapped ion systems for quantum simulations.”
At JILA, Rey works with ultracold atoms and molecules that are trapped in an “optical lattice,” a series of shallow wells constructed of laser light. Atoms that are loaded into an optical lattice behave similarly to electrons in a solid crystal structure. But while it’s difficult to change the properties of a solid crystal, the properties of an optical lattice—which essentially acts as a “light crystal”—are highly controllable, allowing Rey to explore a whole range of phenomena that would be nearly impossible to study in a solid crystal system.
Ultimately, Rey hopes her research will lead to the ability to engineer materials with unique characteristics such as superfluids—liquids that appear to move without regard for gravity or surface tension—and quantum magnets—individual atoms that act like tiny bar magnets.
Rey began studying physics at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogota, Colombia, where she received a Bachelor of Science degree in 1999. She came to the United States to continue her studies, earning a doctorate in physics from the University of Maryland, College Park in 2004.
Before coming to JILA in 2008, Rey was a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., and a postdoctoral researcher at NIST in Gaithersburg, Md.
Previous CU-Boulder faculty members who have won a MacArthur Fellowship include David Hawkins of philosophy in 1981, Charles Archambeau of physics in 1988, Patricia Limerick of history in 1995, Margaret Murnane of physics and JILA in 2000, Norman Pace of molecular, cellular and developmental biology in 2001, Daniel Jurafsky of linguistics and the Institute of Cognitive Science in 2002 and Deborah Jin of JILA, NIST and physics in 2003.
“Everyone at JILA is extremely proud of Ana Maria Rey’s accomplishments and wholeheartedly congratulate her for this prestigious MacArthur Fellowship,” said JILA Chair Murray Holland. “She has an incredibly quick mind for physics and is one of the truly creative and ingenious scientists of her time, while also being a wonderful teacher and mentor to both undergraduate and graduate students. This is a great honor for Ana Maria, and a tremendous recognition of the important research programs in JILA and NIST.”
Rey is a highly effective mentor for an unusually large group of graduate students and postdoctoral fellows given the early stage of her career, O’Brian said. One of her recent graduate students, Michael Foss-Feig, won the prestigious 2013 Best Thesis Award of the American Physical Society’s Division of Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics. Rey herself won the same award in 2005 as a graduate student at the University of Maryland.
On Sept. 24, in another honor, the American Physical Society named Rey the winner of the 2014 Maria Goeppert Mayer Award, which recognizes outstanding achievements by a woman physicist in her early career:
Additional information on Rey is available on the Web at http://www.macfound.org/fellows/901 and http://jila-amo.colorado.edu/science/profiles/ana-maria-rey.
-CU-
From our mountain neighbors: road damage and homes on the brink
Sep 15th
- Town of Nederland Road Conditions Update at 11:20am Please be advised — roads are softening across the town due to the ongoing rains. Some areas are inaccessible — including the Big Springs neighborhood at Peakview Road and at the intersection of Alpine and Big Springs Drive. All residents are urged to stay off all roads. Do not attempt to drive around any cones or barricades.
- Magnolia Road Update at 11:45am: #97 between Magnolia Rd and #72 is now impassable. Road is flooded and washed away in spots.
None of these images is of his area nor house, but it’ll give you the confirmation that one of the major problems is and will be the severely eroded and continuing to erode soil …. His short email says it all for them :
Here are a few photos taken on our walk through Blue Mt. yesterday. We are just one small community of hundreds affected by this epic storm. I’m sure the cost of it all will be into the billions. Coal Creek Canyon just to our west is washed out and will take months to repair, stranding the few thousand folks on the west side of the washouts. They will still be able to get out, but it will take an hour or two to get to work, normally a 30 or 40 minute drive. The only impact to us so far is the loss of natural gas so cold showers and no heat, not that we need heat right now. Unseen are the tens of thousands of flooded basements in neighborhoods that from the street look unaffected. Damage for each of those will be in the thousands to replace carpets and furniture. Few of us have flood insurance. Just last week we were worried about the threat of fire.
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As the planet warms faster, more species will be increasingly at risk
Apr 21st
The acceleration of change means that the species inhabiting each zone have less time to adapt to the climatic changes, said lead author Irina Mahlstein, a CIRES scientist who works at NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colo. “The warmer the climate gets, the faster the climate zones are shifting. This could make it harder for plants and animals to adjust.”
The study is the first to look at the accelerating pace of the shifting of climate zones, which are areas of the Earth defined by annual and seasonal cycles of temperature and precipitation, as well as temperature and precipitation thresholds of plant species. Over 30 different climate zones are found on Earth; examples include the equatorial monsoonal zone, the polar tundra zone and cold arid desert zone.
“A shift in the climate zone is probably a better measure of ‘reality’ for living systems, more so than changing temperature by a degree or precipitation by a centimeter,” said Mahlstein.
The scientists used climate model simulations and a well-known ecosystem classification scheme to look at the shifts between climate zones over a two-century period, 1900 to 2098. The team found that for an initial 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit of warming, about 5 percent of Earth’s land area shifts to a new climate zone.
The models show that the pace of change quickens for the next 3.6 F of warming as an additional 10 percent of the land area shifts to a new climate zone. The paper was published online in the journal Nature Climate Change on April 21.
Certain regions of the globe, such as northern middle and high latitudes, will undergo more changes than other regions, such as the tropics, the scientists found. In the tropics, mountainous regions will experience bigger changes than low-altitude areas.
In the coming century, the findings suggest that frost climates — the coldest climate zone of the planet — will largely decrease. In general, dry regions in different areas of the globe will increase, and a large fraction of land area will change from cool summers to hot summers, according to the study.
The scientists also investigated whether temperature or precipitation had a greater impact on how much of the land area changed zones. “We found that temperature is the main factor, at least through the end of this century,” said Mahlstein.
John Daniel at the NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory and Susan Solomon at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology co-authored the study.
-CU press release
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