September 2008

Dear Applicant:

We are delighted that you are interested in our graduate program, which is extraordinarily broad. The Department has added 41 new faculty members in the last 18 years, and we have plans for continued growth in the near future. The Department has Ph.D. programs in both physics and in astronomy, and students are separately admitted to each program. However, once admitted, a student can either easily transfer between the physics and astronomy Ph.D. programs or simply perform their dissertation research under the supervision of faculty in each program.

In astronomy, the faculty and graduate students have access to the twin Keck I and Keck II ten meter telescopes which are operated jointly by the University of California and Caltech, the University of California Lick Observatory, the solar observatory on Mt. Wilson, and soon the USRA-NASA SOFIA airborne observatory. Professor E. Wright is the Principal Investigator of the NASA Widefield Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission to be launched in November, 2009; WISE will map the large scale structure of the universe out to red shifts of order unity. In addition our faculty are frequent users of the Hubble Space Telescope, the Spitzer infrared space observatory, NASA's Microwave Anisotropy Probe, and the Very Large Array and other millimeter and radio telescopes. Several faculty are involved with the study of high energy gamma rays with the STACEE and VERITAS observatories, the measurement of ultra-high energy cosmic rays with the Pierre Auger project, and the search for dark matter with liquid xenon detectors ZEPLIN III and XENON 100. On Campus the Infrared Laboratory is world renowned for the design and construction of infrared instrumentation, particularly for the Keck Observatory. Several faculty are members of a consortium to develop adaptive optics. The research program includes astroparticle physics, astro-biology and extra-solar system planets, solar physics, Galactic astronomy with a special effort on the supermassive black hole in the Galactic Center headed by Professor Andrea Ghez, extragalactic astronomy and active galaxies, and cosmology. The Department is particularly pleased that this year, two young astronomers – Professor Alice Shapley and Professor Steven Furlanetto - have joined the faculty; their presence greatly strengthens the program in extragalactic astronomy in the study of galaxy formation and early evolution.

Our theoretical elementary particle physics group has programs in the study of quantum chromodynamics, supergravity and superstrings, and astroparticle physics. In QCD, we have a world-class effort in calculating the interaction cross-sections that are essential in searching for the Higgs boson and discovering supersymmetry and/or new physics beyond the Standard Model with the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The program in string theory involves the study of black holes, the investigation of interfaces between quantum field theory and string theory, and the exploration of time-dependent backgrounds. The string theorists benefit from close interactions with the Department of Mathematics and the Institute of Pure and Applied Mathematics (IPAM). In particle astrophysics, theorists and experimentalists conduct extensive programs on the origin of matter in the universe, in neutrino physics, on the nature and origin of dark matter, and properties of the ultrahigh-energy gamma and cosmic rays.

The experimental elementary particle physics group participates in experiments at Fermilab Tevatron that study the properties of top quarks, the search for the Higgs boson and supersymmetric particles, and the development of new beam diagnostics. At CERN in Geneva, UCLA is a founding member of the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) collaboration, one of the LHC's two large detectors that will search for the Higgs boson and supersymmetric particles. Our Professor Robert Cousins is currently serving as the Deputy Spokesperson of the 2000 scientist CMS collaboration, and has the responsibility to develop the software packages for the physics analysis. The intermediate energy/nuclear physics group has made major hardware and analysis contributions to the STAR detector collaboration at the Brookhaven Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC); in 2002 RHIC discovered the quark-gluon plasma, a state of matter that last existed when the universe was only one microsecond old. Currently, the nuclear physics group is participating in two neutrino experiments - the Daya Bay reactor experiment in China that will measure the neutrino mixing angle theta 13, and the CUORE experiment in Italy that will search for neutrinoless double beta decay.

In condensed matter physics, we have strong theoretical and experimental programs in systems that raise fundamental questions involving competing, complex phases of matter, such as quantum phase transitions and quantum critical points. Recent years have seen an explosion of unconventional materials with unexpected properties. These developments have provided us with the unprecedented opportunity to study the conceptual basis of theories of strongly correlated electronic systems. Members of our faculty are at the cutting edge of studies of high temperature cuprate superconductors, organic conductors and superconductors, metal-insulator transitions, quantum Hall effect, spintronics, and quantum computation, including the recent development at UCLA of a technique for the detection of single spin states. A new faculty member, Professor C. Regan, will utilize Transmission Electron Microscopy to produce real-time images of processes at the nanoscale, and to investigate the thermal radiation properties of carbon nanotubes.

The Department has an excellent program in low temperature physics and acoustics, particularly in the field of sonoluminescence. A recent spectacular achievement by a group under Professor Seth Putterman is the generation of "crystal fusion," whereby temperature cycling of a ferroelectric leads to the triggering of a nuclear fusion reaction.

The Department has rapidly growing experimental and theoretical programs in soft condensed matter physics and biophysics. The biophysicists conduct experiments involving manipulation of single molecules, charge transport in DNA, molecular dynamics simulations of molecular machine aspects of proteins, and novel detection techniques for DNA hybridization with applications to gene chips. Yet another area of research is the statistical mechanics of DNA conformational changes and protein-DNA interactions. There is a growing effort focusing on the physics of viruses, carried out in active collaboration with members of the UCLA Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry. Professor John Miao leads a very active effort in the reconstruction of three-dimensional images at micro and nano scales from x-ray scattering data. A new biophysics program headed by Professor Dolores Bozovic is investigating the physics of sound detection in the inner ear using revolutionary optical imaging cameras invented by Professor K. Arisaka that can resolve nanometer length scale and kilohertz time scale vibrations.

In 2001, UCLA was selected by the state of California to establish a new interdisciplinary center for nanotechnology in which scientists from chemistry, biochemistry, molecular biology, and physics are working together to build a new frontier at the smallest physical scales. The new California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI) building has been completed. The Department has recruited three new faculty who have CNSI appointments, and five additional faculty have joined the CNSI. The Department has just recruited a young experimentalist to start a program in Atomic, Molecular, and Optical physics in association with the CSNI.

UCLA is one of the very few institutions in the country to offer a research program in accelerator physics and free-electron lasers. In collaboration with the Department of Electrical Engineering, we are investigating the interaction of intense lasers with plasmas to produce extremely large accelerating electric fields. In addition, UCLA is the only university collaborating with several national laboratories in a new project to construct an extremely powerful free electron X-ray laser - the SLAC Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS), whose conceptual design was invented by Professor Claudio Pellegrini. Some of the hardware for the LCLS was built at UCLA by Professor J. Rosenzweig. The LCLS will become operational next year, and its extremely intense beam of coherent x-rays will allow the structure and dynamics of matter to be investigated at unprecedented time and space scales.

Finally, the Department has a strong program in basic plasma physics. The Basic Plasma Science Facility has a 20 meter long, magnetized plasma device which uniquely allows the investigation of low frequency and long wavelength phenomenae that can occur in fusion toroidal machines and in space. In addition, a large, low magnetic field Tokamak has recently been converted into a basics plasma facility that will permit the investigation of high-beta hydromagnetic wave phenomena in curved magnetic geometry. The theoretical plasma program is equally diverse, with a long tradition of numerical plasma simulations and analytic theory. Professor W. Mori heads a group simulating the properties of the high energy density plasmas that occur in inertial fusion experiments and in high energy astrophysical systems. Space plasma phenomena, and even studies of the galactic MHD dynamo, are other areas in which simulations are used to model plasma systems. The Center for Multiscale Plasma Dynamics is jointly run by UCLA and the University of Maryland, and investigates the interaction between small scale turbulence and large scale plasma instabilities. Finally, with the addition of a new faculty member, Professor C. Niemann, UCLA is now firmly associated with National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Our graduate students love the exciting diverse environment of research activities, and we hope that you will seriously consider becoming a member of this community. For more detailed information, see our Web page at www.physics.ucla.edu.

Yours sincerely,

Ferdinand V. Coroniti
Professor and Chair