Research, teaching and public engagement in Physics at UW–Madison
Could there be more particles like the Higgs boson? For the first time, the CMS experiment has searched for the decay of the Higgs boson into two more Higgs-boson-like particles with unequal masses. Written by: Ashling Quinn ’23 and Anagha Aravind (physics PhD student), originally published by the CMS Collaboration Some theories suggest that the Higgs …
Congrats to UW–Madison physics Prof. Sau Lan Wu, who announced her retirement effective January 1, 2026. One of the first two women on the physics faculty when she joined as an assistant professor in 1977, her nearly 50-year career stands as one of the most consequential in modern experimental particle physics. “Sau Lan is truly …
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 …
To truly understand our physical world, scientists look to the very small, subatomic particles that make up everything. Particle physics generally falls under the discipline of high energy physics (HEP), where higher and higher energy collisions — tens of teraelectronvolts, or about ten trillion times the energy of visible light — lead to the detection …
Ten years ago, on July 4, 2012, the CMS and ATLAS collaborations at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN — including many current and former UW–Madison physicists — announced they had discovered a particle that was consistent with predictions of the Higgs boson. In the ten years since, scientists have confirmed the finding was …
This story, by Meghan Chua, was originally published by the Graduate School In 2012, scientists at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider announced they had observed the Higgs boson particle, verifying many of the theories of physics that rely on its existence. Since then, scientists have continued to search for the properties of the Higgs boson and …
Note: This story has been modified slightly from the original, which was published by the CMS Collaboration. Their version has some nice interactive graphics to check out, too! The standard model of particle physics is our current best theory to describe the most basic building blocks of the universe, the elementary particles, and the interactions …
Neutrinos mix and transform from one flavor to the other. So do quarks. However, electron and its heavier cousins, the muon and the tau, seem to conserve their flavor identity. This accidental conservation of charged lepton flavor must have a profound reason, or low-levels of violation of that conservation principle should occur at high energy …