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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 7.22.2008 |
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