Physics

Elliott Cheu is the interim Dean of the College of Science and a Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of Arizona. He started his academic career at Stanford University, where he majored in physics. While at Stanford, he participated in research at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), which piqued his interest in understanding the most fundamental elements of the Universe. This interest next led him to Cornell University where he obtained his Ph.D. in physics, with an emphasis on particle physics. After graduate school, Elliott obtained the Robert R. McCormick Fellowship at the University of Chicago, working on the KTeV experiment. This experiment was the first to discover a phenomenon called direct CP violation, which demonstrated the difference between matter and anti-matter. In 1996 Elliott moved to the University of Arizona, and has been here ever since. He currently performs research at the Large Hadron Collider, searching for new phenomena related to dark matter.

Koen Visscher is an Associate Professor in the Department of Physics with an interest in Biological Physics. He holds joint appointments in Molecular and Cellular Biology as well as in the College of Optical Sciences, and is a member of the Applied Mathematics Graduate Interdisciplinary Program. His research focuses on the role of mechanical force in Biology using single-molecule techniques such as optical tweezers. He pioneered the so called molecular force clamp, a feedback controlled optical tweezers that is able to maintain a constant force on a single individual moving motor protein. Recent interests are RNA structure, nucleic acid-protein interactions interactions, and translational recoding via -1 frameshifting.

Ultrafast Electron Microscopy is a pivotal tool for imaging the atomic motion in real time and space. The temporal resolution, limited to a few hundreds of femtoseconds (one quadrillionth of a second) permits recording movies of only the relatively massive atomic motion. Imaging of microscopic motions outside the atomic nucleus in the real-time requires a significant enhancement in the temporal resolution. My research program aims to obtain the attosecond (one quintillionth of a second) temporal resolution in electron microscopy and establish the “Attomicroscopy” —the fastest camera ever known—which takes the field of ultrafast imaging to the next level. Attomicroscopy provides a real-time access to all microscopic motions outside the atomic core and radically change our insight into the workings of the microcosm. We will use the Attomicroscopy to image the electron motion in biochemical molecules such as amino acids, DNA, protein…. etc. Attosecond imaging and controlling of the electron motion at the atomic scale will open exciting new ground and prospects in multiple fields of basic science, biological applications, and information technology.