Heard on campus: Celebrating Penn State’s milestones in physics

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — “Nature presents us with lots of facts. And in the beginning, they may all seem puzzling, mysterious and disconnected,” said Jainendra Jain, Evan Pugh University Professor and Erwin W. Müller Professor of Physics and holder of the Eberly Family Chair in the Penn State Eberly College of Science. “And the job of the theorist is to find the encryption key, the underlying principle that would impose coherence over all of those facts. So, one might ask, ‘What good is fundamental physics?’ Of course, we just want to understand why things work the way they do, or why nature works the way it does. Max Planck said that insight must precede application. So, if we want to use nature, we first have to understand it. And the history of physics is replete with examples where concepts and discoveries that were made just for the joy of understanding things later turned out to be extremely useful for the society.”

Jain, who received the prestigious Wolf Prize in Physics earlier this year, joined Mauricio Terrones, George A. and Margaret M. Downsbrough Head of the Department of Physics, Evan Pugh University Professor, and professor of chemistry and of materials science and engineering, and Tracy Langkilde, Verne M. Willaman Dean of the Eberly College of Science, on Sept. 5 to recognize several milestones in the Department of Physics at the college’s inaugural Science Matters: Spotlight Sessions event.

“Penn State’s leadership in the materials sciences is built on a fabulous legacy of bold ideas and groundbreaking research in physics and chemistry and other materials-related fields,” Langkilde said. “And that legacy truly lives on in the Eberly College of Science. This is a series that is designated to bring our community face-to-face with the brilliant minds behind our breakthroughs. These sessions are more than presentations — they’re about conversations. We want to explore the science that is happening, that is shaping lives, that is shaping our society, and that is shaping the future of science.”

This fall, the department is commemorating the 70th anniversary of Erwin Müller seeing the atom for the first time, the 10th anniversary of the Penn State LIGO team’s discovery of gravitational waves and Jain’s Wolf Prize recognition — the first at Penn State.

“My first modern physics experiment was the field emission microscope," Terrones said, referring to the microscope invented by Müller in 1937 and how it led to a "full-circle moment" for him. “I tell my students that you never know what you’re going to do five, 10 years from now, and sometimes you come back to an origin where you started, so you start connecting the dots, and that’s what I did.” 

Terrones explained that his office is in the historic Field Emission Laboratory space in Osmond Building, which was originally Müller’s lab.

In graduate school, Terrones said, he was the first person at his university to install a field emission microscope, which can be used to visualize electrons that come out of a metal. Terrones used the microscope for his work on carbon nanotubes — incredibly small structures of carbon atoms in a tube shape less than 100 nanometers wide, or less than a thousand times smaller than the width of a human hair.  His research has revealed that carbon nanotubes have implications for virus detection and other biomedical, industrial and electronic applications.

“All of our buildings have lots of history, and what we want to do with this series is make people aware of all the great things Penn State has done in the past and the things we can do in the future, as well,” he said.

A recording of the Spotlight Session “Celebrating Penn State’s Milestones in Physics” can be viewed on the Eberly College of Science’s YouTube channel, and additional community outreach events can be found on the college’s public events calendar.

Following the session, attendees were given the inaugural tour of an exhibition of Müller’s historic equipment. Earlier this year, Penn State alumnus John Andrew Panitz, who received his doctorate in physics in 1969 for his work with Müller on the atom probe microscope, donated several original pieces of equipment, including a collection of Müller’s research materials, to the Eberly College of Science.

Tour the historic equipment and today’s state-of-the-art facilities

This fall, the Eberly College of Science and the Penn State Materials Research Institute will host special tours for the public to see this very early, groundbreaking technology, as well as the modern version of the equipment: state-of-the-art atomic-resolution microscopes at the Materials Characterization Lab (MCL).

On home football game Fridays between 3 and 5 p.m., visitors can tour the original, historic Müller equipment in Osmond Lab and then walk over to the lobby of the MRI entrance of the Millenium Science Complex to tour imaging equipment in the MCL, one of three core facilities in the MRI that fuel the interdisciplinary, life-changing innovations of Penn State’s materials research.

Tour dates include the following:

• Sept. 12
• Sept. 26
• Oct. 10
• Nov. 7
• Nov. 21