Department of Physics and Astronomy

Faculty Spotlight

Peter Garnavich

Peter Garnavich, professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Notre Dame, has been elected as a Fellow of the American Astronomical Society (AAS).

He was elected for “innovative work on supernovae, gamma-ray bursts, and cataclysmic variables that has proven essential to furthering our understanding of various astrophysical phenomena,” the American Astronomical Society described in a press release.

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Faculty Spotlight

Edwin Huang

South Bend doesn’t have very much traffic, but in the San Francisco Bay Area, where Edwin Huang, assistant professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy hails from, traffic is a daily battle.

Traffic, he described, isn’t dissimilar to condensed matter physics. Huang joined the faculty at the University of Notre Dame this year. His research uses numerical and analytical techniques to study properties of quantum materials—and that’s where his correlation with traffic begins, with the “many-body phenomena.”

A single car or a few cars will go the speed limit, and operate independently, but when there are many cars on the road, the entire behavior of the traffic changes. They slow down and speed up for no reason.

“We try to study the same thing with electrons in materials, how behavior changes as a function of electron density strain on a system, or temperature change, for example,” Huang said. Changing these parameters can result in different phases of metals: superconductors, magnets, and materials with other properties.

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Faculty Spotlight

Xiaolong Liu

Superconducting materials are able to conduct electricity with zero electrical resistance, enabling technology like magnetic resonance imaging and the powerful electromagnets that support and propel magnetic levitation trains.

However, until recently, the ability to understand these extraordinary materials has been limited by a lack of experimental techniques for observing their properties at the atomic level.

In a recent study in the journal Nature, Xialong Liu, assistant professor in the University of Notre Dame Department of Physics and Astronomy, and collaborators from multiple institutions made the first ever observation of a pair density wave state—an ordered arrangement of electron pairs—in a an unexpected type of superconductor material called UTe2. The detection of such a state in this topological superconductor, discovered by using a type of microscopy called scanning tunneling microscopy, suggests that these states could differ from those in more common and conventional superconductors.

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Faculty Spotlight

Lauren Weiss

A team of astrophysicists led by Lauren Weiss, professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Notre Dame, created the first-ever catalog of small, earth-like planets with Jupiter-like siblings (planets that share the same star) — a critical component in the search for life elsewhere in our universe. 

“This catalog is the first of its kind and an unprecedented opportunity to explore the diversity of planetary systems that are out there with things that are like the solar system, but not exactly the solar system, and it gives us a chance to rewrite the story of how the planets form,” Weiss said. “The science question that I’ve been trying to answer over the past decade is: Of the other small planets like Earth that are out there, which of them have Jupiter siblings? Because this might be an important characteristic to look for, if we want to figure out where to find life.”

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