Almost one year has passed since the announcement of the first ever direct detection of gravitational waves, a historic “ripple in space-time” that proved Einstein right and opened a new field of astronomy.

To celebrate the first anniversary of LIGO’s detection, The Department of Physics and Astronomy invites the public the world premiere of the short film documentary “LIGO Detection” at Lewis Hall on February 6 at 6:00 PM.

In this, the third film about LIGO by filmmaker and visiting scientist Kai Staats, he investigates what unfolded between the incredible detection of merging black holes on September 14, and five months later, February 11, 2016 when LIGO announced the detection of merging black holes to the world.

LIGO Detection is the first documentary film released about the detection event of September 14, 2015. It features interviews with LIGO Scientific Collaboration members from Caltech and MIT, the voices of more than twenty LSC members who share their personal story of the day of detection, and the Media Event in D.C. as LIGO scientists explain the function of the detectors.

Doors open at 6:00. Light refreshments will be served. Show ends at 7:00 PM.
Free admission.

Two Brazilian researchers received prestigious awards to visit the Physics Department in the Spring and Fall of 2017.

Professor Maurício Richartz (Centro de Matemática, Computação e Cognição, Universidade Federal do ABC, São Paulo, Brazil) was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to visit our department. Professor Richartz will visit for about four months, two in the Spring 2017 (starting on January 24) and two in the Fall 2017. On February 7 he will give a Physics colloquium with title “Analogue Black Holes: Theory and Experiments”.

Caio Macedo, currently a postdoctoral researcher at Federal University of Pará (Belém, Brazil) in professor Luís Crispino’s Grav@Zon group, also received a grant from the APS International Research Travel Award Program to visit our department.

According to the U.S. News & World Report’s 2017 Best Global Universities List, the School of Pharmacy and the Department of Physics and Astronomy are the highest ranked units at the University of Mississippi. The best single-indicator rankings for our department are “Physics percentage of total publications that are among the 10 percent most cited”, “Physics international collaboration” and “Physics normalized citation impact”.

Ulrich Sperhake, Adjunct Professor at the University of Mississippi and long-term collaborator of the gravity group, was named a Fellow of the American Physical Society from the Division of Gravitational Physics. The list of new Fellows for 2016 is available at the APS website.