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 …
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 …
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 …
On Earth, billions of subatomic particles called neutrinos pass through us every second, but we never notice because they rarely interact with matter. Because of this, neutrinos can travel straight paths over vast distances unimpeded, carrying information about their cosmic origins. Although most of these aptly named “ghost” particles detected on Earth originate from the …
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 …
Astronomers have long sought the launch sites for some of the highest energy protons in our galaxy. Now, a study using 12 years of data from NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope (Fermi) confirms that a remnant of a supernova, or star explosion, is just such a place, solving a decade-long cosmic mystery. Previously, Fermi has shown that the …
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 …
The Department of Physics is pleased to announce that Prof. Yang Bai has been promoted to the rank of full professor. “It is my pleasure and honor as Dean to approve Prof. Yang Bai’s promotion to Full Professor. His creativity and impressive breadth in particle physics research make him a leader not only on dark …