Physics

A Vanderbilt engineering graduate student has created a small-scale, efficient way to produce high-energy density plasma--the state of matter found in the center of stars and gas giants like Jupiter--with a tabletop device. Read More

NASA has awarded $4.4 million to a collaboration of scientists at U.S. universities, including a Vanderbilt professor, and NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center to help build a 2.5-meter ultraviolet telescope called the Extreme Universe Space Observatory for deployment on the International Space Station in 2017. Read More

Two astronomers from Vanderbilt and Georgia Tech, sharing a car after a snowstorm canceled their flights home from a conference, put together everything they had learned at the conference during that snowy drive and worked out that a collision between two black holes could explain most of what is known of a violent episode in the Milky Way's past. Read More

Kelly Holley-Bockelmann, assistant professor of astronomy and physics, wraps up this three-part podcast series with an interview about her specialty, supermassive black holes. Read More

University of Maryland physics professor Sylvester "Jim" Gates will give a free public lecture that traces the important role that the concept of symmetry has played in physics from the time of the ancient Greeks through present-day efforts to create a physical “theory of everything.” Read More

Kelly Holley-Bockelmann, assistant professor of astronomy, continues her discussion of black holes in the second part of this interview for Red Orbit. Read More

Kelly Holley-Bockelmann, assistant professor of astronomy, talks about what sets black holes apart from other objects in the universe and explains how the laws of space, time and gravity bend and even break down to create the most destructive force in the cosmos. Read More

Not long after he arrived at Vanderbilt nine years ago, Keivan Stassun, professor of astronomy, began building on a newly forged alliance with Fisk University, a historically black college just two miles from the Vanderbilt campus, in an effort to increase the number of African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans and other minorities earning Ph.D. degrees in science. Read More

Caltech's John Johnson will discuss the success of NASA’s Kepler mission, which has identified hundreds of potentially habitable Earth-sized and smaller planets in the Milky Way, and Project Minerva, an innovative observation facility that uses an array of small telescopes rather than a single large telescope. Read More

As the College Halls at Kissam construction project continues to take shape on the northeast corner of Vanderbilt’s campus, the university has announced plans to name the finished structures and areas within them in honor of several figures significant to the history and culture of the university. Read More

Oliver Schmidt, director of the Institute for Integrative Nanosciences at the Leibniz Institute for Solid State and Materials Research in Dresden, Germany, is the keynote speaker at the 13th Annual Nanoscience and Nanotechnology Forum Oct. 24 at Vanderbilt University. The Forum and NanoDay! activities are sponsored by the Vanderbilt Institute of Nanoscale Science and Engineering (VINSE) and the Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Materials Science. Read More

Twelve Vanderbilt University faculty members were honored for extraordinary contributions to their respective fields during an Aug. 28 celebration of endowed chair holders at the Student Life Center. Read More

An electrical engineer who is attempting to make wireless communications more reliable, an astronomer who studies the evolution of the cosmos by creating large numbers of virtual universes and a geologist who is studying the origins of super-eruptions have received the National Science Foundation’s Faculty Early Career Development awards. Read More

Star gazers – both those who have a telescope and those who don’t – should be happy to learn that the largest-ever three-dimensional map of the universe has been released to the public. Read More

The amount of damage that radiation causes in electronic materials may be at least 10 times greater than previously thought, say Vanderbilt scientists using a combination of lasers and acoustic waves to pinpoint the size and location of defects buried deep inside. Read More

This year a record number of Vanderbilt Graduate School students have won prestigious National Science Foundation graduate research fellowships. Read More

A small telescope with a lens no more powerful than a high-end digital camera has discovered the existence of two very unusual exoplanets. Read More

Vanderbilt is on track this year to become the number one producer of minority Ph.D. recipients in physics, astronomy and materials science, an area where minorities are grossly underrepresented. Watch the emotional journey of the latest doctoral graduates from the Fisk-Vanderbilt-Master’s-to-Ph.D. Bridge Program. [vucastblurb]… Read More

Post-doctoral researcher Andrew Steigerwald has been selected by the Materials Research Society and the Minerals, Metals and Materials Society as their 2012-2013 Congressional Science and Engineering Fellow. Read More

Four Vanderbilt researchers collaborated with scientists from the University of Illinois-Chicago, University of Kansas and MIT to describe the consistency of an unusual fluid produced when atoms of lead are smashed in the Large Hadron Collider. Read More