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riley newman
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Title: Professor of Physics
Research Interests:
Experimental Particle Physics and Gravitation
e-mail: rdnewman@uci.edu
Office: 3131 Frederick Reines Hall
Phone: (949) 824-7209, 6911
Fax:
(949) 824-2174
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:: Honors and Awards
overview
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Professor Newman was an undergraduate at Reed College and received his
Ph.D. in experimental particle physics from UC Berkeley in 1966. He
continued research in this field as an Assistant Professor at Columbia
University and joined the UCI Physics faculty in 1973.
research summary
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Many total surprises -- notably the violation of the fundamental
symmetries of parity conservation and time reversal (or CPT) invariance
-- have greeted physicists in this century. Parity violation might have
been discovered much earlier than it was, had it occurred to physicists
to look for such an "unlikely" possibility. What profound surprises lie
in wait for us now? And how long might such surprises escape discovery
in the pursuit of mainstream physics research?
Motivated by these questions, and building on a background in
experimental elementary particle physics, my research focuses on
possible exotic phenomena. With a postdoctoral fellow and a few
students, I conduct "tabletop" experiments to test for physical
possibilities which could escape observation in mainstream physics
research. These experiments have included: a
test of the rotational invariance of the weak interaction (might it
recognize a preferred direction in space?); a search for advanced
electromagnetic waves (traveling backwards in time) from a pulsed
antenna; a precision test of the charge neutrality of helium atoms in
liquid helium; and tests of the inverse square distance dependence and
composition independence of the gravitational force at short range.
Current work in my lab
focuses on:
- Measurement of the gravitational constant G, (motivated by large
discrepancies between results of G measurements by other groups in recent
years),
- Searches for new extremely weak forces in nature with macroscopic range, and
- Tests of the equivalence of inertial and gravitational mass.
Ultrasensitive cryogenic torsion balances are being developed for these
applications, which will be operated in a former Nike missile bunker at a
remote desert site. (see
Gravity Lab.)
representative publications
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:: Experimental Tests of the Gravitational Inverse-Square Law for Mass
Separations from 2 to 105 cm,
(with J. K. Hoskins, R. Spero, and J.
Schultz), Phys. Rev. D32, 3084 (1985).
:: Search for an Intermediate-Range Composition-Dependent Force Coupling to
N-Z, (with P. G. Nelson
and D. M. Graham), Phys. Rev. D42, 963 (1990).
:: Future Torsion Balances for Gravitation Experiments: What Are Their Limits?
(with M. Bantel et al.),
Proceedings of the Seventh Marcel Grossmann
Meeteing on General Relativity, Stanford, California,
July 1994.
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For
updates/corrections, please contact Alison Lara |
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updated 5/23/2005 |
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