Message to the Physics Community, Wednesday, April 29, 2020

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Dear Physics Community,

Nature has a great graphic about the race for a SAR-Cov-2 vaccine here.

Academic Continuity Meeting

Advisories

  • No more cutting across the field
  • Fine for not wearing your mask, $300, includes inside public (including MIT) buildings. You can get a mask in Lobby 7.

Events

  • Second Town Hall 4 pm Tuesday – announcement here
  • Ragon Institute Webinar, on Anit-body testing and reopening. Friday, 10 am but will be recorded. The last one was excellent

Some glimmer of good news for international students: David Elwell reported that students had been given appointments for via interviews in mid-late June, including in China.  The earliest dates before were in November.

Physics Department

In planning for the Fall, the Vice Chancellor has asked the Department to write 1-2 paragraph plan here for each of the four or five scenarios spelled out in these slides.  On Thursday at lunch, I would like to collect your thoughts on how we should respond to each.  

 We will certainly like some of the scenarios more than others (and we should say so) but we must respond to all of them as we really do not know what will happen.  I invite all of your to respond from your own perspective as an instructor who will organize and give the course, a student who will learn the material, and a staff member who will administer all the logistics to get the courses going.

 No decisions have been made about the Fall and the work we do in this document may very well inform those decisions when they are made.

AMO dark matter searches – Vladan’s group used the isotope shift in Yb+ to look for new bosons in the 1-100 MeV mass range, same range as accelerator experiments.

Squeezing – a major effort in our LIGO group in the past couple of years is to use squeezed light to improve LIGO’s sensitivity and increase LIGO’s range.  New paper on their and Japanese here.

Los Endos

Openings? –  Harvard letter from the Provost, and NASCAR in Charlotte May 24, 27.

Peter

P.S. I am posting these messages in my blog roll here. Thanks to Physics Council, Cathy Modica, Vicky Metternich and Christina Andujar for input and comments on these messages.