Research, teaching and public engagement in Physics at UW–Madison
The combined results add to physicists’ understanding and validate the impressive collaborative effort between two competing — yet complementary — experiments. This story was published by Fermilab When the universe began, physicists expect there should have been equal amounts of matter and antimatter. But if that were so, the matter and antimatter should have perfectly …
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 …
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. …
The illustrious career of Baha Balantekin, the Eugene P. Wigner professor of physics at UW–Madison, was celebrated recently at the Neutrinos in Physics and Astrophysics Workshop through the Network for Neutrinos, Nuclear Astrophysics, and Symmetries (N3AS) Physics Frontier Center. Balantekin works at the intersection of nuclear physics, particle physics, and astrophysics. For much of his …
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 …
Elements are the building blocks of every chemical in the universe, but how and where the different elements formed is not entirely understood. A new paper in The Astrophysical Journal by University of Wisconsin–Madison physics professor Baha Balantekin and colleagues with the Network for Neutrinos, Nuclear Astrophysics, and Symmetries (N3AS) Physics Frontier Center, shows how …
By Daniel Heimsoth, Physics PhD student Simulating quantum systems on classical computers is currently a near-impossible task, as memory and computation time requirements scale exponentially with the size of the system. Quantum computers promise to solve this scalability issue, but there is just one problem: they can’t reliably do that right now because of exorbitant …
This story was originally posted by WIPAC IceCube collaborator and UW–Madison assistant professor of physics Lu Lu received a 2023 International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP) Early Career Scientist Prize “for her contributions to the development of high energy neutrino astronomy in the PeV energy region.” Lu accepted the award on July 27 during …
The Milky Way galaxy is an awe-inspiring feature of the night sky, dominating all wavelengths of light and viewable with the naked eye as a hazy band of stars stretching from horizon to horizon. Now, In a June 30 article in the journal Science, the IceCube Collaboration — an international group of more than 350 …
Congrats to Ke Fang, assistant professor of physics, WIPAC faculty member, and HAWC spokesperson, on earning an NSF CAREER award! CAREER awards are NSF’s most prestigious awards in support of early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their …