| Department of Physics | April 20, 2026
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Happy Monday! 🎉 As always, The Compton Chronicle newsletter is where you'll find department updates, upcoming events, exciting opportunities, and ways to get involved in our growing community. Have a great week!Â
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This is our last week of seminars for this semester! Be sure to join us!
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A central feature of many van der Waals (vdW) materials is the ability to precisely control their charge doping, n, and electric displacement field, D, using top and bottom gates. For devices composed of only a few layers, it is commonly assumed that D causes the layer-by-layer potential to drop linearly across the structure. Here, we show that this assumption fails for a broad class of crystalline and moiré vdW structures based on Bernal- or rhombohedral-stacked multilayer graphene. We find that the electronic properties at the Fermi level are largely dictated by special layer—polarized states arising at Bernal-stacked crystal faces, which typically coexist in the same band with layer-delocalized states.  We uncover a novel mechanism by which the layer-delocalized states completely screen the layer--polarized states from the bias applied to the remote gate. This screening mechanism leads to an unusual scenario where voltages on either gate dope the band as expected, yet the band dispersion and associated electronic properties remain primarily (and sometimes exclusively) governed by the gate closer to the layer--polarized states. Our results reveal a novel electronic mechanism underlying the atypical single-gate–-controlled transport characteristics observed across many flat-band graphitic structures, and provide key theoretical insights essential or accurately modelling these systems.
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Quantum many-body systems remain among the most challenging frontiers of modern physics, where the complexity of microscopic interactions and the correlations they produce make predictive calculations notoriously difficult. Recent advances in machine learning are beginning to change how we represent and solve the Schrödinger equation from first principles.
In this talk, I will introduce neural quantum states: variational wave functions parameterized by artificial neural networks. I will show how these representations can capture correlations that are difficult for traditional methods, and discuss examples where they achieve competitive accuracy for strongly interacting fermionic systems, including nuclei and ultracold Fermi gases.
I will also give some intuition for what these networks are learning, and how this relates to familiar concepts in many-body theory. This perspective suggests a route to predicting properties of quantum matter directly from underlying interactions.
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The Tierras Observatory is a refurbished 1.3-m facility at Whipple Observatory designed for ultra-precise time-series photometry of M dwarfs. Its custom 40-nm filter centered at 864 nm, combined with a deep-depletion frame-transfer CCD, enables stable photometry at the few-hundred-ppm level over multi-month baselines. After demonstrating this stability on nearby low-mass stars, Tierras has transitioned into a productive science facility: constraining stellar rotation periods, measuring precise ephemerides of TESS planets, and enabling discoveries ranging from resonant sub-Neptunes around HD 110067 to a warm Jupiter around TOI-4641. Ongoing campaigns are targeting the lowest-mass M dwarfs to search for long-period terrestrial planets, leveraging Tierras’s stability to reveal small signals inaccessible to TESS alone.
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Physics Alumni Reunion last Friday! |
Physics alumni returned to campus for an opportunity to meet current faculty and students, and learn more about what's happening in the department today. They got to see just a glimpse of the incredible and exciting work happening across our community. We also got to hear from them about the exciting things that have happened in their lives since being a student! Thank you to all who came to show off our department and make connections with our alumni! Until next year ✌️
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Bhupal Dev offers new look at how the Universe evolved
A new study led by Bhupal Dev offers a new way to explain certain puzzling observations about how the Universe evolved. The research suggests that ghostly particles called neutrinos in the early Universe may have transformed into a previously unknown form of radiation.
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| Zifan Lin’s search for hidden worlds
MCSS Postdoctoral Fellow Zifan Lin is part of a broader effort to understand exoplanets in some of the most extreme environments in the universe. He works with Tansu Daylan to identify planets orbiting white dwarfs.Â
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