All posts by John Donoghue

Many new faces

At the start of the semester, Michael Ramsey-Musolf has joined us, coming from the University of Wisconsin. Michael’s work spans nuclear physics, particle physics and cosmology, and he is very well connected to all the forefront experimental efforts in these fields.

Michael has also brought with him several postdocs and students. New postdocs joining the UMass theoretical effort are Satoru Inuoe, Grigory Ovanesyan, Peter Winslow, and eventually Wei Chao. Also coming are two graduate students from the University of Wisconsin, Chien Yeah Seng and Huaike Guo.

Welcome to all! The group is already visibly more lively.

Ufuk Aydemir disertation defense

In our continuing theme for this summer, we had another successful thesis defense today. Ufuk Aydemir defended his thesis, which contained three topics on physics beyond the standard model. His thesis advisor was John Donoghue. He wrote about the tests of general covariance that was done with Donoghue and Anber, on the work with Lorenzo Sorbo on dynamical four-form fields, and recent work on self-healing and new physics in effective field theories. His publications are here, and there are still more in the works. Congratulations Ufuk!

Jared Vanasse thesis defense

Jared Vanasse successfully defended his thesis “Parity-Violation in Neutron Deuteron Scattering in Pionless Effective Field Theory” on June 7. This work involved extended calculations combining the weak interaction and strong force to describe parity violating observables in low energy neutron reactions. Barry Holstein served as Jared’s thesis advisor. Congratulations, Jared.

Also lets include congratulations to Barry Holstein. Barry indicated that Jared (and TJ last month) will be his last Ph.D. students. Barry has long been a successful mentor and colleague and these two theses are a nice way to finish as a Ph.D advisor.

TJ Blackburn defends thesis

On May 5 TJ successfully had his thesis defense with a topic “Quantum Corrections to the Gravitational Scattering of Massless Particles”. This addressed the multiple interesting effects when one uses quantum general relativity as an effective field theory to describe the interaction between a massless particle and a heavy gravitational source. TJ’s thesis advisor was Barry Holstein. Congratulations, TJ