News 2025
AAAS Conference
February 14th -- Third year SJSU undergraduate student and physics major Emily Foreman presented research she has been conducting with Professor Curtis Asplund at the annual conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Boston. The conference convened over 4,000 scientists, scholars, civil servants, policy analysts, journalists and others interested in the intersection of science and public policy. Emily presented research on analyzing the degree and impact of independent scientific review, particularly by physicists, of US nuclear weapons policies. [photo attached]
Lattice Physics Takes Center Stage
February 11th -- Professor Ehsan Khatami and his former student Robin Newby (MS in
Physics, 2024) have a paper out on an unusual ferromagnetic behavior in a system of
electrons in a two-dimensional atomic crystal. In their numerical study, they show
that in the limit of extreme Coulomb repulsion between electrons that are occupying
every vertex of a square lattice, a magnetic transition happens as soon as some of
them are kicked out of the system. Namely, their spins, which are usually anti-aligned
on neighboring sites (in the so-called anti-ferromagnetic state) tend to line up with
each other and form a ferromagnet (at least on small scales). Intuitively, this can
be understood from the fact that removing some of the electrons allows others to move
around and their motion, which lower the overall energy of the system in the model,
is facilitated by a ferromagnetic background. They find that this "kinetic ferromagnetism"
persists even at relatively high temperatures.
The group also boasts the publication of another paper in Physical Review Research on the use of a recurrent neural network to represent the quantum mechanical wavefunction of many electrons. The former postdoc in the group, Eduardo Ibarra Garcia Padilla, who has recently accepted an offer to be an Assistant Professor of physics at Harvey Mudd College, is the lead author on this work. Congratulations Eduardo!!
Cal-Bridge Mentor Spotlight
January 30th -- SJSU student Mariana Rojas-Montoya, who is in our MS in Physics program
and is a Cal-Bridge scholar, and her Cal-Bridge mentors, SJSU Professor Curtis Asplund
and UC Merced Professor Sarah Loebman, were featured by the Cal-Bridge program in
their January "Mentor Spotlight." Mariana shared the following about her Cal-Bridge
mentors (pictured center and right), "They are what every mentor should be: compassionate
and encouraging." The Cal-Bridge program is a statewide network of all three segments of the California higher education system—CSU,
UC, and community colleges—together forming a comprehensive, end-to-end pathway for
the diverse undergraduates of California to successfully matriculate to PhD programs,
achieve their PhD, and then join the STEM professoriate in California and nationally
or become leaders in the California science and technology workforce.
CU*iP 2025
January 27th -- SJSU students Mariana Rojas-Montoya and Emily Foreman attended a Conference
for Undergraduate Women and Gender Minorities in Physics (CU*iP) this past weekend
(January 24-26) at UC Berkeley. CU*iP events aim to give students often who do not
see themselves represented in physics the opportunity to network and explore both
career and educational pathways. Foreman spent the weekend networking with other conference
attendees, and got the opportunity to tour Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL).
Rojas-Montoya spent her time as a volunteer working alongside Berkeley students and
LBNL volunteers.
A Fond Farewell to Alejandro Garcia
January 24th -- Hundreds of students, faculty members, and friends met up at WSQ 109 to wish Professor Alejandro Garcia farewell as he transitions into retirement, and to watch him perform some of the greatest hits of the many demos he has worked with and helped to develop over the years. He will be sorely missed! The event was hosted by Professor David Chai of the Animation & Illustration Design Program, where Garcia has built up strong connections over the years. Carlos Morante helped assemble demos.
Cosmic Dust Shells in Action
January 23rd -- Associate Professor Thomas Madura and collaborators have a new paper out using the James Webb Space Telescope to identify two stars responsible for generating carbon-rich dust a mere 5,000 light-years away in our own Milky Way galaxy. As the massive stars in Wolf-Rayet 140 swing past one another on their elongated orbits, their winds collide and produce carbon-rich dust. For a few months every eight years, the stars form a new shell of dust that expands outward — and may eventually go on to become part of stars that form elsewhere in our galaxy. The findings have been published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, and the Space Telescope Science Institute has also written up a popular summary.
New Insights into the Benefits of Reformed Physics Courses
January 23rd -- Professor Cassandra Paul and her colleague David Webb at UC Davis
have a paper out uncovering new benefits of implementing "reformed" physics courses
(courses incorporating high levels of active learning strategies in their design structure)
at the introductory college level. The paper is entitled "Examining equity and graduation
rates at two institutions using a course deficit model and the collaborative learning
through active sense-making in physics curriculum," and it was published on January
23rd in the journal Physical Review Physics Education Research.
As universities are currently struggling with how to retain students, decrease equity gaps, and increase graduation rates in a post-pandemic world, Paul and Webb compare the original success of a radically reformed introductory physics course with an implementation at a second institution. They find that students who take this reformed course at both institutions are 1) less likely to drop, 2) less likely to fail, and 3) do as well in later coursework when compared to students who took the original courses. The above items are found to be independently true for historically marginalized students. Furthermore, they find that 4) marginalized students who take this course 6% are more likely to graduate from a STEM field, eliminating the graduation equity gap at one institution. Building from their prior work, they continue to claim that demographic group differences are, perhaps, better understood as a problem with the system (i.e., through the lens of a "course deficit model") rather than as a problem with the demographic groups. Using this approach can be useful when determining how to eliminate student achievement gaps. Paul and Webb argue that higher education has the tools needed to significantly increase equity, and improve student success and retention in STEM. This requires an investment in the reform of large introductory STEM courses.
Ehsan Khatami Wins $628k from the NSF for High-Performance Computing
January 22nd -- Professor Ehsan Khatami has been awarded a $628k research infrastructure
grant from the National Science Foundation to fund the installation of an updated
high-performance computing cluster here on campus. The grant, entitled "Research Infrastructure:
CC* Compute-Campus: A campus-wide computing resource for research and teaching at
San Jose State University," was written by Khatami in collaboration with Bob Lim (the
SJSU Vice President of Information Technology and Chief Information Officer) and Feruza
Amirkulova (an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering). Congratulations,
Ehsan!
