Preposterous Universe

 
Congratulations to Eugene!

Another young mind enters the community of scholars. Congratulations to Eugene Lim, who just finished successfully defending his Ph.D. thesis, and is now an official doctor. Preposterous readers may know Eugene from his occasional appearance in the Comments, under the nom de blog "Your Hardworking Student." Eugene is only the second Ph.D. student I've had, so I'm still fumbling around a bit, but hopefully my inexperience as an advisor didn't scar him too badly.

Eugene's thesis work was about the gravitational effects of vector fields that violate Lorentz invariance by picking out a preferred direction in spacetime. We have one joint paper coming out soon, and he has a longer single-author paper, so I'll give more details about the research when they are ready. The basic story is surprisingly short and sweet: the vector field acts to change the measured value of the gravitational constant, but in different ways in different circumstances, so you can actually place interesting limits on its magnitude by comparing different experiments.

In the fall Eugene will be heading to Yale to take up a postdoctoral research position. Good luck!

~ posted by Sean Carroll at 4:11 PM ~ link ~ ~ ~