Research, teaching and public engagement in Physics at UW–Madison
This story, featuring physics grad student Abhishikth Mallampalli, was originally published by the CMS collaboration The CMS experiment conducts the first search for dark matter particles produced in association with an energetic narrow jet—the pencil jet. Dark matter remains one of physics’ greatest mysteries. Despite making up about 27% of the universe’s energy content, its true …
A team of 13,508 scientists, including over 100 from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, won the 2025 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, the Breakthrough Prize Foundation announced April 5. The Prize recognized work conducted at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) between 2015 and 2024. The Breakthrough Prize was created to celebrate the wonders of our scientific …
Neutrinos have always been difficult to study because their small mass and neutral charge make them especially elusive. Scientists have made a lot of headway in the field and can now detect three flavors, or oscillation states, of neutrinos. Other flavors continue to be elusive — though that could be because they don’t even exist. …
String theorist Jakob Moritz joined the faculty as an assistant professor of physics on January 1, 2025. He joins us from CERN where he has been a postdoc for just over a year. Previously, he was a postdoc for four years at Cornell University, and before that, he earned his PhD from the University of …
The international NOvA collaboration presented new results at the Neutrino 2024 conference in Milan, Italy, on June 17. The collaboration doubled their neutrino data since their previous release four years ago, including adding a new low-energy sample of electron neutrinos. The new results are consistent with previous NOvA results, but with improved precision. The data favor the …
Elias Mettner and Nadia Talbi, both conducting research in high energy physics at UW–Madison, won undergraduate presenter awards at the American Physical Society’s April Meeting. The meeting, held in Sacramento April 3-6, included seven undergraduate oral presentation sessions with six to eight students in each session. The top two students from each session earned “Top …
Sixteen professors, including physics professor Tulika Bose, were named to Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professorships, an award recognizing distinguished scholarship as well as standout efforts in teaching and service. The professorship provides five years of flexible funding — two-thirds of which is provided by the Office of the Provost through the generosity of the Vilas trustees …
Wasikul Islam, a postdoc with Prof. Sau Lan Wu, is a winner of the 2024 Wisconsin Initiative for Science Literacy Award for Communicating Postdoctoral Research to the Public. For this award, postdocs write a short article that describes their research for the general public. Interested postdocs apply to submit an article, then receive guidelines and …
Earlier this year, physics professors Tulika Bose and Kyle Cranmer were selected to serve on the Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel, or P5, a group of High Energy Physics experts that advises the Department of Energy Office of Science and the National Science Foundation’s Division of Physics on high energy and particle physics matters. P5 …