Research, teaching and public engagement in Physics at UW–Madison
Congratulations to Associate Professor Ke Fang on her promotion with tenure, to Professor Justin Vandenbroucke on his promotion to full professor, and to Profs. Dan Hooper and Britton Plourde who were both granted tenure! Prof. Fang is an experimental particle astrophysicist and WIPAC investigator who studies the origins of subatomic particles and their fundamental nature …
Summer at UW–Madison is filled with trips to the Terrace, amazing weather, and usually a break from classes. Physicists in Madison this summer can add one more thing to the list this summer: over a half dozen conferences, workshops, symposia and undergraduate research programs hosted on or near campus. UW physics summer conference season kicks …
The department of physics is pleased to announce that Prof. Kevin Black has been named new department chair. His three-year term began July 1, 2024, succeeding Prof. Mark Eriksson. Black says he is looking to continue the department’s excellence in its mission of research, teaching, and outreach, and to continue developing an intentional commitment to …
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 …
This story was originally published by WIPAC Back in 2013, the IceCube Neutrino Observatory—a cubic-kilometer neutrino detector embedded in Antarctic ice—announced the first observation of high-energy (above 100 TeV) neutrinos originating from outside our solar system, spawning a new age in astronomy. Four years later, on September 22, 2017, a high-energy neutrino event was detected coincident …
This post was originally published by the IceCube collaboration. Several UW–Madison physicists are part of the collaboration and are featured in this story A month ago, the Seattle Community Summer Study Workshop—July 17-26, 2022, at the University of Washington—brought together over a thousand scientists in one of the final steps of the Particle Physics Community Planning …
The Department of Physics is happy to announce that Professor Brian Rebel has been promoted to full professor. Rebel is a high energy experimentalist whose research focuses on accelerator-based neutrino physics. He joined the department as an associate professor with a joint appointment at Fermilab in 2018, where he is now a senior scientist. “Professor …
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 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 …