1998-2002 News

  • Photos: Holiday Party (December 2002)

  • Photos: Professor Herbert Goldstein's 80th Birthday Party

  • Gerald Navratil, professor of applied physics, Dr. Andrea Garofalo (Ph.D '98), and Columbia researchers have discovered how to keep the pressure high in spinning plasma, thereby enhancing the national effort to create a practical fusion energy source for the future.
  • Horst Stormer, professor of physics and applied physics, is one of the scientific directors of the new Columbia Center for Electronic Transport in Molecular Nanostructures. He is working with Professor Ronald Breslow, Professor James T. Yardley, and a group of 16 Columbia researchers in the scientific quest toward a single molecule transistor.

  • Professor James Im was featured in Engineering News for his development of a laser-based process that will revolutionize semiconductor manufacture and flat panel displays. His new method is called SLS, sequential lateral solidification, and the fundamental breakthrough he discovered is that it is how a substance is melted and solidified that makes the difference. (Spring 2001)
  • Nicholas Fuller, a graduate student in Professor Irving Herman's group was awarded the John Coburn and the Harold Winters Student Award on November 1, 2001. This award is from the Plasma Sciences and Technology division of the American Vacuum Society (AVS), and is presented to the student whose paper is judged to be most outstanding based on technical content and quality of presentation. In May of 2001, Nicholas Fuller and M.S.E. graduate student, Steffen Kaldor, won AVS Graduate Student Awards. (November 2001)

  • W. M. Keck Foundation awards $1.5 million to the Columbia University effort to create a new laboratory to study electrons under extreme conditions. This effort is lead by Professors Aron Pinczuk and Horst Stormer.

  • Professor Adam Sobel has been chosen as one of the 2000 Packard Fellows for his proposal to understand tropical atmospheric dynamics and global warming through both numerical modeling and theoretical approaches. (2000)

  • Professor Mike Mauel was awarded the 2000 Excellence in Fusion Engineering prize awarded to individuals relatively early in their careers who have shown both outstanding technical accomplishment and potential to become exceptionally influential leaders in the fusion field. (2000)

  • Professor Horst Stormer shares 1998 Nobel Prize in Physics. Professor Horst Stormer, a joint member of the Department of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics and the Department of Physics, wins award for the discovery of bizarre motions of electrons in thin layers of semiconductors. (1998)

  • National Science Foundation Awards $10M for Research. NSF Funds Centers in Material Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC), headed by Professor Irving Herman of the Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics Department and Environmental Chemistry, headed by George Flynn, Higgins Professor of Chemistry.

  • Systems Designed to Hold a Homemade Sun, by Malcolm W. Browne of the New York Times, is about innovative experiments to produce fusion power in the laboratory. These include the advanced tokamak, the spherical torus, the stellarator, and the levitated dipole. Research activities in all four approaches are lead by Columbia University Professors Gerald Navratil, Allen Boozer, and Mike Mauel.

  • News story describing the recent joint appointments of Professors Aron Pinczuk and Horst Stormer in the Department of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics and Department of Physics