PHAS research featured in UBC annual report 2013-2014

Two PHAS research stories are featured in the UBC Annual Report under Research Excellence.

Professor Andrea Damascelli's work on superconductivity: Tiny Wrinkles: Big News for Superconductivity

"In 2013, Dr. Damascelli and his team made a breakthrough discovery involving ‘charge density waves’ (CDWs), now recognized as a universal behaviour in copper-based (cuprate) superconducting materials, in what could be a whole new pathway to higher-temperature superconductivity.

Unsuspected until now to be ubiquitous in cuprates, CDWs are ‘spontaneous spatial modulations, or periodic distortions, in the electronic density’ of a metallic crystal, while in its normal (non-superconducting) state.

These tiny variations, and their universal role in the electronic response of cuprate superconductors, were unveiled after Dr. Damascelli, UBC PhD student Riccardo Comin (lead author of the article published in Science) and the UBC-led international team studied the target cuprate by using a trio of highly advanced spectroscopies."

The ALPHA team's work on anti-matter: Finally . . . Got’cha!!

"About 14.38 billion years after the first microseconds of the Big Bang where anti-particles and particles (almost) utterly annihilated each other (‘normal’ matter are the last mesons standing by a mere one in 10 billion), UBC researchers not only helped create a swarm of 1,000 anti-hydrogen atoms, they corralled them in a sophisticated magnetic cage for more than 1,000 seconds, allowing for proper study and characterization of the strange doppelgangers. The ALPHA-Canada Collaboration won the prestigious NSERC John C. Polanyi Award; the multi-disciplinary teams included UBC Drs. Walter Hardy and Takamasa Momose, along with Nathan Evetts, Andrea Gutierrez, Mario Michan and Sarah Seif El Nasr. Dr. Fujiwara of TRIUMF, UBC Green College and the University of Calgary (also the spokesperson for the ALPHA-Canada team) and Dr. Michael Hayden of Simon Fraser University are alumni of UBC Physics and Astronomy."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51zwdWWEOwQ

Congratulations to both research groups! Click below for the complete UBC Annual Report 2013-2014: