UW–Madison sophomore Haley Stueber did not always know she wanted to study physics, but she had an inkling.

“I started taking astronomy and physics classes in high school, and what really got me into physics was the astronomy aspect,” Stueber says. “I was always of the mindset that I wanted to keep learning, and I felt like the realm where I could do that was space, because the universe is so big.”

Like most women interested in pursuing a physics major, Stueber noticed something when she started college.

“All of my physics courses are predominantly male,” she says. “It was intimidating at first. I’ve definitely gotten more used to it, but it still just kinda sucks looking around the room and being like, ‘Alright, there’s one woman over there, one in that corner, and me.’” She notes that the male majority in her classes has not been largely problematic, but it would be nice to have more of a female presence.

Stueber’s experiences are similar to those of many women physics and physical science majors. According to Joelle Corrigan, a physics graduate student and president of GMaWiP, a UW–Madison organization for Gender Minorities and Women in Physics, only around 20 percent of undergraduate physics majors are women.

In an effort to support and retain women in physics, the American Physical Society hosts the Conference for Undergraduate Women in Physics (CUWiP). This year, 10 UW–Madison undergraduates, along with Corrigan and physics grad student Abigail Shearrow, attended the Midwest regional CUWiP, held January 17-19 and hosted by the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities.

“It is a very rare, empowering experience to be in a packed auditorium filled with women and gender minorities all excited about physics,” Corrigan says of the annual conference, which she first attended as an undergraduate. “They have many talks from amazing female scientists, sharing their work and providing role models to many students who may not have seen successful females in that role previously.”

Stueber concurs with Corrigan that it was helpful to see and meet women in the research labs they toured or heard speak during the conference — every presenter was a women scientist. Katy Jurgella, a junior astrophysics and geology major who is only now taking her first physical science course with a female professor this spring, agrees.

“Every presenter who talked about their research also gave an overview of their life story. If you see just their research, you’re like, ‘Oh, wow, this woman has a PhD in astrophysics, I’ll never get there,’” Jurgella says. “But then they mention they were born on a farm and I was like, ‘I was born on a farm, too!’ It was inspiring to me.”

While one focus of the conference was on research, an equal emphasis was given to professional development, including topics that often strongly apply to women.

Junior AMEP major Gabby Every says, “I went to breakout sessions this year on imposter syndrome, negotiation techniques for women specifically, well-being, work-life balance, and one on grad school. It was a catch-all of issues faced by women specifically.”

Anna Gerosolina, a junior astrophysics and chemistry major who currently has no plans to attend graduate school, says the professional development sessions were very helpful because they did not solely focus on women in academia issues.

“There was one talk about being a woman in the workforce in general, and how you need to be a little more aggressive. But it’s a hard balance because a lot of times we come across as bossy even though it comes across as great when guys are aggressive,” Gerosolina says. “That really stuck with me. It was basically, just stop apologizing for existing. And I didn’t even realize how much I did that.”

The Midwest regional CUWiP was held January 17-19, just before the spring semester began. The students who attended have already noticed a difference in how they approach their courses, professors, and classmates.

“Even two weeks into the semester, I’ve noticed I’m better at asking questions in class because I’m less afraid,” says Jurgella. “At the conference, they stressed, ‘Don’t be embarrassed if you don’t know something, because no one knows anything!’ It’s helped me remain humble, but I’m also less embarrassed now to ask about something I don’t know.”

All the women spoke of the support they now have from their fellow attendees, such as studying together, working together on projects, and just sharing experiences as women in the physical sciences.

“The conference is a great environment because sometimes I forget how reserved I can be in a room full of dominant male voices,” says Every. “Once you’re surrounded by all these women who feel the same way and have gone through similar things, you come out of your shell and talk about things that really matter to you.”

Adds Gerosolina, “These are women I can study with and not be mansplained about how to do basic physics. We even have a Snapchat group chat now!”

The American Physical Society (APS) announced today, Oct 22, that Wesley Smith, a University of Wisconsin–Madison Professor Emeritus of Physics and former Bjorn Wiik Professor of Physics, has earned the 2020 W.K.H. Panofsky Prize in Experimental Particle Physics.

The Panofsky Prize recognizes “outstanding achievements in experimental particle physics,” and is the top APS award in that field.

Smith developed systems that enabled the discovery of the Higgs boson, a previously elusive particle believed to give mass to all matter. Smith led a team of over 100 scientists on the CMS experiment trigger system that captured the data for the Higgs’ discovery at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva.

“In the experiment at the LHC, proton beams collide 40 million times per second, and each time the beams cross, detectors record a snapshot. That’s over a megabyte of data, 40 million times per second. You can’t store it all,” Smith explains. “The problem is, one in 10 trillion of those collisions actually has a Higgs in it, and you don’t want to lose any of them. So how do you do this?”

To sift through the enormous amount of data, Smith and his team developed a triggering system. The two-step mechanism quickly filters through the first set of data, using high speed electronics to take one billion collisions per second and identify interesting patterns in up to 100,000 of them. Then, the second step uses thousands of computing nodes to filter the data down to 1,000 collisions per second — a reasonable amount of data that can be stored.

“We designed a large amount of electronics that runs incredibly fast, and it had to be programmable and flexible because we didn’t know what we were going to find,” Smith says. “We’re basically throwing out 99.9999% of the data, and keeping a tiny fraction where all the physics has to come out.”

Smith, who had previously led a team charged with a similar task for the Zeus experiment in Hamburg, Germany, was asked to lead the CMS triggering team in 1993. The Higgs was discovered in June 2012.

Even though a major goal of the CMS experiment was realized, physicists have much left to learn about the Higgs, which means studying more Higgs events. Continuing plans for the experiment, set to go online in the mid-2020s, involve increasing the amount of proton collisions by a factor of 10, resulting in 10 times more data per second. As Smith was finishing his career, he worked on the initial prototyping for an even more advanced triggering system to filter through larger data sets.

“This award means a great deal to me because it’s the recognition of my colleagues, of the team of people who contributed, and because it recognizes this particularly challenging area of detector development and particle physics experimentation which had to be solved in order to do physics at the LHC,” Smith says.

UW–Madison physics department chairperson Sridhara Dasu, who trained with Smith before beginning his faculty position, nominated Smith for the award.

“Professor Smith is recognized as the world-leading expert in the design, construction and operations of the trigger electronics system for hadron colliders,” Dasu says. “The trigger system is at the very heart of particle physics experiments, requiring the very best talent. Professor Smith is the leader in training those best experimenters.”