Director's Letter - Fall 2019

Lars Bildsten.
Photo by Jakub Ostrowski.

Fall is the time of change. Six postdoctoral scholars have moved on to new positions as others arrive. Xiao Chen will be an Assistant Professor at Boston University, while Chao-Ming Jian is at Station Q for one year and then will move to an Assistant Professor position at Cornell University.  Adam Jermyn will be a postdoctoral scholar at the Flatiron Institute, where Yan-Fei Jiang has just started as an Associate Research Scientist. Le Yan has taken a Research Scholar position at the Chan-Zuckerberg Lab, and Shahriar Shadkhoo is pursuing a teaching career starting as a lecturer here at UCSB.

We have six new postdoctoral scholars who arrived this fall, with three in theoretical condensed matter physics: Anna Keselman from Station Q, Zhu-Xi Luo from University of Utah, and Meng-Xing Ye from University of Minnesota. Other arrivals are Sean Ressler, an astrophysicist from UC Berkeley, Ken Van Tilburg, a particle physicist from the Institute for Advanced Study and New York University, and Evan Bauer, an astrophysicist from UC Santa Barbara. They are settled into their offices and fully participating in KITP's activities! KITP staff member Megan Turley tells the story of former KITP postdoc Ben Brown's adventures here in the creation of an open-source software tool for fluid dynamics.

This Fall's newsletter has a nice mix of stories for you. Art has always had a strong presence in Kohn Hall. Gary Smaby tells his story of his strong involvement at KITP. I worked very closely with him on art production for the Munger Physics Residence, including stunning recent additions to the music room from his collection. Ulysses is back! That's the name of a remarkable active piece of sculpture designed by our Artist in Residence Jean-Pierre Hebért, described here. Eva Silverstein and Rob Leigh contributed a brief summary of our one-day celebration of Joe Polchinski's science in December 2018. Please enjoy!

We plan about 10 conferences per year, and now and again, we hit a resonance where new results stream in during the event and we make the news! That happened this July, during the "Tensions between the Early and the Late Universe" conference organized by Adam Riess, Tommaso Treu and Licia Verde. Adam (2011 Nobel Physics Prize) approached David Gross about this idea of a conference focused on the growing discrepancies between observations at early and late cosmological time. If confirmed at high significance, it would require an expansion of the standard model, and may perhaps lead to the discovery of new physics. Sounded perfect to me, so I agreed and set to working with Adam, Licia and Tommaso. They did a fantastic job recruiting all of the research groups that were making measurements with different techniques, and we started to see media interest as the conference approached. The conference was perfectly timed. Many new results were announced, and it was a roller-coaster ride to witness the real-time unveiling. The science writers in the room did a great job at summarizing the “Hubble Tension," resulting in articles in Science News, Science, Scientific American, and Quanta Magazine. I especially enjoyed the article in Quanta Magazine written by Natalie Wolchover as it highlighted KITP Program Manager David Kaczorowski's assist in the science nomenclature by introducing the word “surd". Look it up!  The coordinators have since authored an article for Nature Astronomy (Vol. 3, page 891) that summarizes the current state of the observations.

Of course, programs and conferences are the hallmark of what we do at KITP. KITP staff member Maggie Sherriffs summarizes the landmark 2001 program Statistical Physics of Biological Information which helped scores of physicists launch their quantitative biology careers. We host a special conference for US high school teachers once every year, read a touching testimonial from one of these teachers.

Spontaneous donations that enhance the experience of KITP's visitors continue to arrive. This spring I received a call from Chris Seaton, the longtime assistant to Walter Kohn. Walter’s spouse, Mara Kohn, had recently passed away and the family wished to donate an Astin-Weight upright piano. According to Mara’s daughter, Naomi Schiff, “At the time the piano was made, Mara was eager to give Walter a very special present and so she came up with the idea of a custom-built piano. Walter was a very musical person, who played flute and was dedicated to classical music as a listener." We were honored to receive this donation and placed the piano prominently in the family room of the Munger Physics Residence. In September, longtime Friends of KITP Michael and Nancy Gifford donated their custom pool table, which we immediately placed in the family room, adjacent to the Kohn Piano. This has already inspired a round-robin billiard tournament and we expect many new physics inspirations from the audio synergy of billiards and piano playing!

In closing, I note the passing of J. Robert Schrieffer on July 27, 2019. Schrieffer earned the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1972 with John Bardeen and Leon Cooper for the theory of superconductivity. He came to UC Santa Barbara in 1980 as one our first ITP Permanent Members. Schrieffer later served as ITP's second Director from 1984-1989 and played a major role in establishing ITP as a resource for the international physics community. In 1992, he moved to the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory at Florida State University and served as the Lab's Chief Scientist until his retirement. His impact across condensed matter physics was profound and will be missed.

~ Lars Bildsten, KITP Director
KITP Newsletter, Fall 2019