Research, teaching and public engagement in Physics at UW–Madison
The latest results combined weak lensing and galaxy clustering and incorporated four dark energy probes from a single experiment for the first time. This story is amended from one published by Fermilab, which includes information about the full results published by the DES collaboration The Dark Energy Survey (DES) collaboration — including scientists at the …
This post is modified from one originally published by Fermilab In the culmination of a decade’s worth of effort, the Dark Energy Survey collaboration of scientists analyzed an unprecedented sample of nearly 1,500 supernovae classified using machine learning. They placed the strongest constraints on the expansion of the universe ever obtained with the DES supernova …
This story was originally posted by the Graduate School Five outstanding scholars, including Physics PhD student Jimena González, are joining the UW–Madison chapter of the national Edward Alexander Bouchet Graduate Honor Society this academic year. The Bouchet Society commemorates the first person of African heritage to earn a PhD in the United States. Edward A. …
The winners of the UW–Madison 13th annual Cool Science Image contest were announced, and Physics has three winners! Our winners include graduate student Jacob Scott, the graduate student-professor pairing of Jimena González and Keith Bechtol, and alum Aedan Gardill, PhD ’23. Their winning images are below. A panel of experienced artists, scientists and science communicators …
Early in her thesis research, Jimena González was waiting. A lot. To better understand the nature of dark energy, she uses machine learning to search Dark Energy Survey cosmology data for evidence of strong gravitational lensing — where a heavy foreground galaxy bends the light of another galaxy, producing multiple images of it that can …
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 …
This past winter, Katie Harrison, then a junior physics major at UW–Madison, started thinking about which areas of physics she was interested in studying more in-depth. “Physics is in general so broad, saying you want to research physics doesn’t really cut it,” Harrison says. She thought about which classes she enjoyed the most and talked …
Machine learning and artificial intelligence are certainly not new to physics research — physicists have been using and improving these techniques for several decades. In the last few years, though, machine learning has been having a bit of an explosion in physics, which makes it a perfect topic on which to collaborate within the department, …
This post has been modified from the original post, published by MIT News To catch sight of a fast radio burst is to be extremely lucky in where and when you point your radio dish. Fast radio bursts, or FRBs, are oddly bright flashes of light, registering in the radio band of the electromagnetic spectrum, …
For decades, researchers assumed the cosmic rays that regularly bombard Earth from the far reaches of the galaxy are born when stars go supernova — when they grow too massive to support the fusion occurring at their cores and explode. Those gigantic explosions do indeed propel atomic particles at the speed of light great distances. …