Dear Physics Community,

A good Easter Sunday – warmish and quiet.

Physics Events

• Wednesday, April 15, 4-5 pm, Undergraduate Office Hour
• Thursday, April 16, 2020, 4-5:50 pm – Colloquium – Mina Arvanitaki
• Thursday, April 16, 2020, 12-1:30 pm – “Grading and Exam Guidelines for the Spring Term”, Nergis Mavalvala
• Thursday, April 23, 2020, 12-1:30 pm – Nikta Fakhri

Special Tuesday Lunch Talk Series

• Tuesday April 14, 12 pm noon, https://mit.zoom.us/j/632177654 BYOL
• Steven Silverberg – “Peter Pan” Disks: Long-lived Accretion Disks Around Young M Stars, and How Citizen Science Found Them
• Jinghui Liu “Vortices, space-time braids and loops in the membrane of a living cell”.

If you’d like to give one, contact Anna.

Physics Department

I made a mess – the last two days, I wrote about UROP direct funding – the proposals are of course written by the students and approved by their proposed supverisors, what I wrote was incorrect.   Current UROP students: please get with your supervisors and write a proposal.  Supervisors: pleas reach out to your UROP students and encourage them to write a proposal.

We have heard there will be direct funding available and the deadline will be April 21.  This has not been announced as it is still not clear to what extent there will be campus access over the summer.  However, it does pay to be ready.  IN any event, UROP proposals will be needed for funding through PIs or the Department.

Anyons – Frank Wilczek invented the term because a pair of anyons can have any phase when interchanged, so they are continuously variable between fermions and bosons.  This paper claims to have actually observed them.  Is this a big deal?  You tell me.

Academic Continuity Meeting – canceled for Sunday

Los Endos

New cell phone – I cannot resist ordering one of these.