Department News
In Memoriam, Thomas Kuo
Thomas (Tom) Kuo, a long-time physicist and resident from East Setauket who has spent
decades as a faculty member at Stony Brook University, passed away on September 10th.
He was 91.
Kuo arrived at Stony Brook in 1968 and retired in 2013, but remained active in conducting research until last year. He will be missed by many of his colleagues and students here at Stony Brook, and in many parts of the world. Kuo's work was primarily in nuclear structure, the intricate aspects of nuclear matter, few nucleon systems, and lately on strongly coupled Fermi systems at the unitarity point. His work on the so-called Kuo-Brown interaction has impacted the work of a generation of nuclear physicists. His graduate students went on to leading positions, most notably director of Los Alamos National Laboratory and faculty positions around the world.
He was a beloved teacher, with a number of teaching awards from Stony Brook University and he was a co-editor for World Scientific. Originally from Taiwan, Kuo graduated from University of Pittsburgh in 1964, and carried his first postdoctoral fellowship at Princeton University, before joining Stony Brook. He is survived by his wife Anette, son Philip of Setauket and daughter Elaine of Ithaca.
A memorial is scheduled at 10AM on Saturday September 16, 2023 at the Moloney Funeral Home, 132 Ronkonkoma Ave., Lake Ronkonkoma, NY 11779.
In Memoriam, Amos Yahil
Emeritus Professor Amos Yahil, who retired in 2008, sadly passed away on August 25, 2023 after a short battle with AML. He was an early member of the Astronomy Group in the Earth and Space Sciences Department, joining the faculty in 1978 prior to becoming a professor in Physics & Astronomy.
He was born in Israel; his mother was an eminent Holocaust historian and his father was an Israeli diplomat who had many important assignments including the Israeli ambassador to Sweden. He received his doctorate in 1970 from Caltech in elementary particle physics and began studying cosmology as a postdoc at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. His 1974 report on the existence of an extensive quantity of intergalactic “dark matter” (published together with Ostriker and Peebles) is honored by the American Astronomical Society as one of the most important scientific publications of the 20th century.
At Stony Brook, he led efforts to enhance computational resources in the Department and developed important algorithms for reducing noise, enhancing images and detecting high-redshift galaxies, and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1984. In 1995, together with Stony Brook Prof. Kenneth Lanzetta and Alberto Fernández-Soto, Yahil discovered the two furthest galaxies known at the time.
In addition to over 100 publications with more than 10,000 citations in cosmology and nuclear astrophysics, Yahil has several patents in image processing that, as CEO of ImageRecon LLC and PIXON LLC, were used to develop medical imaging software that Siemens currently uses in the treatment of some 10 million patients worldwide.
Dr. Pérez Ríos Publishes First Book
Congratulations to Assistant Prof. Jesús Pérez Ríos for publishing his first book, An Introduction to Cold and Ultracold Chemistry!
This book introduces cold and ultracold chemistry: the study of scattering processes
and chemical reactions at temperatures below 1K, dedicated to master and graduate
students interested in atomic, molecular, and optical physics, and chemical physics.
The book covers all relevant systems: atoms, ions, molecules, and Rydbergs, presenting a comprehensive introduction to quantum scattering theory and quasi-classical trajectory calculations, including atoms, molecules, and ions.
Direct three-body recombination is introduced following a classical trajectory approach in hyperspherical coordinates with applications in cold chemistry scenarios. Finally, ultralong-range Rydberg molecules are presented alongside their decay mechanisms.
Congratulations to Dr. Pérez Ríos on this accomplishment! For more details about his research, please see his faculty profile here.