Awards and Honors

Tiancheng Song awarded Lee Osheroff Richardson Science Prize

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This post is slightly adapted from one originally published by Oxford Instruments

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Tiancheng Song

Oxford Instruments announced Feb 15 that Tiancheng Song, who will join the UW–Madison physics department as an assistant professor in May, has been awarded the 2024 Lee Osheroff Richardson Science Prize. He is currently an experimental physicist and Dicke Fellow at Princeton University.

Dr. Song is recognized for his efforts in developing and employing various measurement techniques at low temperatures and in magnetic fields to study 2D superconductivity and magnetism in van der Waals heterostructures. His works have uncovered a series of emergent quantum phenomena in 2D superconducting and magnetic systems.

The Lee Osheroff Richardson Science Prize promotes and recognises the novel work of young scientists working in the fields of low temperatures and/or high magnetic fields or surface science in North and South America.

“I am thrilled to be the recipient of the prestigious Lee Osheroff Richardson Science Prize this year! I feel this is a special honour because I am joining the ranks of remarkable scientists who have been awarded this prize for their famous experiments and achievements,” commented Dr. Song.

Tiancheng Song is currently a Dicke Fellow in the Department of Physics at Princeton University. Working with Prof. Sanfeng Wu, Dr. Song recently developed a new technique to investigate 2D superconductivity, strongly correlated phases and the associated unconventional quantum phase transition.

In his work at Princeton, Dr. Song successfully measured superconducting quantum fluctuations of monolayer WTe2 based on the vortex Nernst effect. The result led to the discovery of a new type of quantum critical point beyond the conventional Ginzburg-Landau theory and demonstrated a new sensitive probe to 2D superconductivity and superconducting phase transitions.

Dr. Song’s results have been well recognized by the community with his work being cited over 4,000 times. Dr. Song’s original contributions are demonstrated by the faculty offers he has subsequently received; he will join the University of Wisconsin–Madison as an assistant professor in May 2024.

As part of the prize, Dr. Song will receive $8000 as well as support to attend the APS March Meeting in Minneapolis where he will be presented his award.

The 2024 LOR Science Prize selection committee is chaired by Professor Laura Greene, NHMFL and FSU and includes: Professor Hae-Young Kee, Toronto University; Professor Collin Broholm, Johns Hopkins University; Professor Paula Giraldo-Gallo, University of the Andes; and Dr Xiaomeng Liu, Princeton (2023 winner).

About the LOR Science Prize

Oxford Instruments is aware that there is a critical and often difficult stage for many scientists between completing a PhD and gaining a permanent research position. The company is pleased to help individuals producing innovative work by offering financial assistance and suitably promoting their research work, through sponsoring the LOR Science Prize for North and South America for the past 19 years. The Prize is named in honour of Professors David M. Lee, Douglas D. Osheroff and Robert C. Richardson, joint recipients of The Nobel Prize in Physics 1996 for their discovery of ‘superfluidity in helium-3’.

The previous winners of the LOR Science Prize are Dr Xiaomeng Liu, Dr James Nakamura, Dr Matthew Yankowitz, Dr Sheng Ran, Dr Paula Giraldo-Gallo, Dr Kate Ross, Dr Brad Ramshaw, Dr Mohamad Hamidian, Dr Cory Dean, Dr Chiara Tarantini, Dr Lu Li, Dr Kenneth Burch, Dr Jing Xia, Dr Vivien Zapf, Dr Eunseong Kim, Dr Suchitra Sebastian, Dr Jason Petta, and Dr Christian Lupien.

Ke Fang named Sloan Fellow

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This story is adapted from one published by University Communications

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Ke Fang

Ke Fang, assistant professor of Physics and WIPAC investigator, is among 126 scientists across the United States and Canada selected as Sloan Research Fellows.

The fellowships, awarded annually since 1955, honor exceptional scientists whose creativity, innovation and research accomplishments make them stand out as future leaders in their fields.

Using data from the Ice Cube Observatory and Fermi Large Area Telescope along with numerical simulations, Fang studies the origin of subatomic particles — like neutrinos — that reach Earth from across the universe.

“Sloan Research Fellowships are extraordinarily competitive awards involving the nominations of the most inventive and impactful early-career scientists across the U.S. and Canada,” says Adam F. Falk, president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. “We look forward to seeing how fellows take leading roles shaping the research agenda within their respective fields.”

Founded in 1934, the Sloan Foundation is a not-for-profit institution dedicated to improving the welfare of all through the advancement of scientific knowledge.

Sloan Fellows are chosen in seven fields — chemistry, computer science, Earth system science, economics, mathematics, neuroscience and physics — based on nomination and consideration by fellow scientists. The 2024 cohort comes from 53 institutions and a field that included more than 1,000 nominees. Winners receive a two-year, $75,000 fellowship that can be used flexibly to advance their research.

Among current and former Sloan Fellows, 57 have won a Nobel Prize, 71 have been awarded the National Medal of Science, 17 have won the Fields Medal in mathematics and 23 have won the John Bates Clark Medal in economics.

Xiangyao Yu, assistant professor of computer sciences at UW–Madison, was also named a Sloan Fellow.

 

Navigating new tech: Kael Hanson earns Draper Technology Innovation Fund award

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Kael Hanson

Celestial navigation — charting a course through a combination of identifying star positions in the sky and knowing the time  — has existed for centuries and is considerably low-res compared to modern GPS systems. So why did physics professor Kael Hanson recently receive a Draper Technology Innovation Fund (TIF) award for an invention that is based off of it?

“The pain that we’re trying to address with this technology is vulnerabilities in GPS,” Hanson says. “Everyone uses GPS, but if it drops out or gets jammed, that could be a problem, especially for the military or commercial industries like aviation or shipping that rely on it to be working and accurate 100% of the time.”

GPS is vulnerable because the satellites’ weak signals can be easily drowned out by stronger signals. Its function is susceptible to both natural (e.g. strong solar flares) and man-made (e.g. jamming or intentional signal spoofing) incidents.

Distant stars and galaxies, however, remain unaffected by whatever is happening on or near earth, so they are useful visual points of reference — unless the current conditions include daylight, clouds, or fog. Hanson’s invention, known as GRADIANT, reverts to the same concept as celestial navigation, but with a modern twist to avoid any visibility issues.

“Charged particles spinning around in the magnetic fields of our galaxy give off synchrotron radiation at radio frequencies. This technology images the sky in radio frequencies,” Hanson says. “And by doing that, basically you can see through clouds. Our technology is reliably good in all scenarios.”

Radio astronomers have been cataloging radio data for decades, and the signals remain mostly static throughout time. The invention would detect radio frequencies at the user’s location, be computationally compared to the wealth of catalogued data, and then tell the user where they are.

Hanson is not exactly sure where he came up with this idea, but he thinks it came to him when he was at the South Pole 10-15 years ago working on the Askaryan Radio Array (ARA), a radio detector installed below the ice (it is co-deployed with IceCube, which is operated by WIPAC, of which Hanson was director from 2014-2022).

two oval-shaped views of the sky are shown. The left shows stars and galaxies in visible light, the right shows cloudy wisps and fewer but no less bright dots that look like stars, only they are detected at radiowave energies.
These two images of the sky are looking at the same sky but at different wavelengths. The left is optical, what you would see if you looked up on a clear night. The right is at radio frequencies. There are still plenty of objects that can be used to determine position, but the right image would be seen under a thick, overcast sky. Credit: Navigationis

“One of the background signals was the sun, and I thought ‘Oh, we can actually image the sun a couple hundred meters under the ice. Boy, wouldn’t that be interesting if you could somehow use this technology to try to figure out where you are based on where the sun is?’” Hanson says. “But then I just stuffed it away in my brain and didn’t really think about it (until recently).”

In 2021, Hanson started a company, Navigationis, to pursue his modern celestial navigation idea. This past summer, he submitted a disclosure for GRADIANT to WARF, for which a patent has now been filed. Then, he applied for and was awarded the Draper TIF funding.

Draper TIF provides a mechanism to support additional research necessary to bring new concepts and inventions to the patent and licensing stage. A main goal of the program is the eventual introduction of new products and processes into the marketplace for the public good. It is open to UW–Madison faculty and academic staff. The program is administered in partnership between Discovery to Product and the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation.

Hanson’s award provides $50,000, which he will use to try to make the technology more licensable.

“In order to really get this thing to the commercial state, it will take millions of dollars, it will take some additional investment,” Hanson says. “With this Draper TIF, we’re going to put together a prototype that actually proves in real hardware the working concept that’s in the patent. My hope is that I’ll have something I can point to, and venture capitalists will be that much more interested in making an investment, or the Department of Defense would be interested in supporting this work.”

Jimena González joins Bouchet Graduate Honor Society

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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.

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Jimena González

The Bouchet Society commemorates the first person of African heritage to earn a PhD in the United States. Edward A. Bouchet earned a PhD in Physics from Yale University in 1876. Since then, the Bouchet Society has continued to uphold Dr. Bouchet’s legacy.

“The 2024 Bouchet inductees are making key contributions in their disciplines, as well as to the research, education, and outreach missions of our campus. They truly embody the Wisconsin Idea and are exemplary in every way,” said Abbey Thompson, assistant dean for diversity, inclusion, and funding in the Graduate School.

The Bouchet Society serves as a network for scholars that uphold the same personal and academic excellence that Dr. Bouchet demonstrated. Inductees to the UW–Madison Chapter of the Bouchet Society also join a national network with 20 chapters across the U.S. and are invited to present their work at the Bouchet Annual Conference at Yale University, where the scholars further create connections and community within the national Bouchet Society.

The UW–Madison Division of Diversity, Equity, and Educational Achievement supports each inductee with a professional development grant.

González is a physics PhD candidate specializing in observational cosmology. Her research centers on searching and characterizing strong gravitational lenses in the Dark Energy Survey. These rare astronomical systems can appear as long curved arcs of light surrounding a galaxy. Strong gravitational lenses offer a unique probe for studying dark energy, the driving force behind the universe’s accelerating expansion and, consequently, a pivotal factor in determining its ultimate fate.

During her graduate program, Jimena has received the Albert R. Erwin, Jr. & Casey Durandet Award and the Firminhac Fellowship from the Department of Physics. Additionally, she was honored with the 2023 Open Science Grid David Swanson Award for her outstanding implementation of High-Throughput Computing to advance her research. Jimena has contributed as a co-author to multiple publications within the field of strong gravitational lensing and has presented her work at various conferences. In addition to her academic achievements, Jimena has actively engaged in outreach programs. Notably, she was selected as a finalist at the 2021 UW–Madison Three Minute Thesis Competition and secured a winning entry in the 2023 Cool Science Image Contest. Her commitment to science communication extends to a contribution in a Cosmology chapter in the book AI for Physics. Jimena has also led a citizen science project that invites individuals from all around the world to inspect astronomical images to identify strong gravitational lenses. Jimena obtained her bachelor’s degree in physics at the Universidad de los Andes, where she was awarded the “Quiero Estudiar” scholarship.

Ben Woods and team named finalists in 2023 WARF Innovation Awards

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Each fall the WARF Innovation Awards recognize some of the best inventions at UW–Madison. WARF receives hundreds of new invention disclosures each year. Of these disclosures, the WARF Innovation Award finalists are considered exceptional in the following criteria:

  • Has potential for high long-term impact
  • Presents an exciting solution to a known important problem
  • Could produce broad benefits for humankind

One of the six finalists comes from Physics. Research Associate Benjamin Woods and a team including Distinguished Scientist Mark Friesen, John Bardeen Prof. of Physics Mark Eriksson, Honorary Associate Robert Joynt, and Graduate Student Emily Joseph developed a quantum device that shows a significant increase in valley splitting, a key property needed for error-free quantum computing. The device features a novel structural composition that turns conventional wisdom on its head.

Two winners, selected from the six finalists, will be announced in WARF’s annual holiday greeting; sign up to receive the greeting here. Each of the two Innovation Award winners receive $10,000, split among UW inventors.

Victor Brar earns NSF CAREER award

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Congrats to associate professor Victor Brar 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 department or organization.

Victor Brar

For this award, Brar will study the flow of electrons in 2D materials, or materials that are only around one atom thick. His group has already shown that when they applied a relatively old technique — scanning tunneling potentiometry, or STP — to 2D materials such as graphene, they could create unexpectedly high-contrast images, where they could track the movement of individual electrons when an electric current was applied. They found that electrons flow like a viscous fluid, a property that had been predicted but not observed directly.

“So now instead of applying electrical bias, we’ll apply a thermal bias, because we know things move from hot to cold, and then image how [electrons] move in that way,” Brar says. “Part of what’s driving this idea is that Professor Levchenko has predicted that if you image the way heat flows through a material, it should also behave hydrodynamically, like a liquid, rather than diffusive, which is how you might imagine it.”

One motivation for this research is to better understand the general flow of fluids, a problem that is often too complex for supercomputers to solve correctly. Because STP visualizes the fluid-like flow of electrons directly, Brar envisions this work as potentially providing a way of solving  fluid mechanics problems by directly imaging flow, without the need of simulations, similar to what is done in wind tunnels.

“Also, there are these predicted phases of electrons that no one has observed before,” Brar says. “We want to be the first to observe them.”

In addition to an innovative research component, NSF proposals require that the research has broader societal impacts, such as working toward greater inclusion in STEM or increasing public understanding of science. Brar’s group is using haptic pens, devices that are commonly used in remote trainings for surgeons and in the gaming community because they give a gentle push back that mimics a realistic touch. By attaching the haptic pen to a scanning tunneling microscope (STM), people holding the pen can “feel” the individual atoms and surfaces that the STM is touching.

“We think materials science is one of those areas where feeling the forces that hold matter together may provide more intuitive than looking at equations,” Brar says. “We’re making virtual crystal lattices that you can touch with the haptic pen and feel how the atoms fix together, but we’re also making it so you can feel the different forces of the different atoms used.”

Brar plans to introduce the haptic pen and atom models into Physics 407 and develop a materials science module for the UW Alumni Association’s Grandparents University. And because the haptic pen relies almost entirely on touch, Brar plans to work with the Wisconsin Council of the Blind and Visually Impaired to improve access to materials science instruction for people with vision impairments.

 

 

Physics has three winners in the Cool Science Image contest!

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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 chose 12 winning images based on the aesthetic, creative and scientific qualities that distinguished them from scores of entries. The winning entries showcase the research, innovation, scholarship and curiosity of the UW–Madison community through visual representations of socioeconomic strata, brain cells snuffed out in Parkinson’s disease, the tangle of technology required to equip a quantum computing lab and a bug-eyed frog that opened students’ eyes to the world.

The winning images go on display this week in an exhibit at the McPherson Eye Research Institute’s Mandelbaum and Albert Family Vision Gallery on the ninth floor of the Wisconsin Institutes for Medical Research, 111 Highland Ave. The exhibit, which runs through the end of 2023, opens with a public reception at the gallery Thursday, Sept. 28, from 4:30 to 6:30 p.m. The exhibit also includes historical images of UW science, in celebration of the 175th anniversary of the University of Wisconsin’s founding.

The Cool Science Image Contest recognizes the technical and creative skills required to capture and create images, videos and other media that reveal something about science or nature while also leaving an impression with their beauty or ability to induce wonder. The contest is sponsored by Madison’s Promega Corp., with additional support from UW–Madison’s Office of University Communications.

a photograph of a room with the lights off, but the bulk of the image is taken up by a large piece of complicated equipment with many different colored laser lights visible, illuminating the shape of the equipment
The glow of red and green lasers and an array of supporting electronics fill a UW–Madison lab where physicists study the behavior of cesium atoms cooled within a fraction of a degree of absolute zero. The atoms could be used to store information in quantum computing systems. | Jacob Scott
an oddly-shaded portrait of physicist Marie Curie, which can only be viewed when a light polarizer is held in front of the portrait
Like the radiation she studied, this portrait of physicist Marie Curie is invisible until revealed by the proper equipment — in this case, a polarizer, a filter that blocks all light waves except those oscillating in a certain direction. One polarizing filter on the back layer of the portrait organizes the light shining through to the viewer. That light passes through layers of colorless cellophane, which rotate the waves a little or a lot depending on the layer’s thickness. A second polarizing filter, held by the viewer, filters the light again, selecting light at the wavelengths that correspond to the intended colors of the portrait. The image above is as the portrait appears viewed through a polarizer. | Aedan Gardill PhD ’23
an array of red-glowing images on a dark black background
Each image in this collage is of an astronomical phenomenon known as a strong gravitational lens, in which the light from a galaxy or cluster of galaxies is curved by a massive object in the foreground. The light is distorted into bright arcs, exhibiting physics theorized by Albert Einstein. Strong gravitational lenses offer a way to study dark matter, difficult to detect but considered a crucial factor in the structure, evolution and fate of the cosmos. | Jimena González and Keith Bechtol

Jimena González wins 2023 OSG David Swanson Award

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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 get so distorted that they appear as long arcs of light around the large galaxy in telescope images. She also focuses on finding very rare cases of strong gravitational lensing in which two galaxies are lensed by the same foreground galaxy, systems known as double-source-plane lenses.

First, she had to create simulations of the galaxy systems. Next, she used those simulations to train the machine learning model to identify the systems in the heaps and heaps of DES data. Lastly, she would apply the trained model to the real DES data. All told, she expected to find hundreds of “simple” strong gravitational lenses and only a few double-source-plane lenses out of 230 million images.

“But, for example, when I did the search the first time, I mostly only got spiral galaxies, so then I had to include spiral galaxies in my training,” says González, a physics graduate student in Keith Bechtol’s group.

The initial steps took around two weeks (hence the waiting) before she could even know what needed to be changed to better train the model. Once she had the model trained and would be ready to apply it to the entire dataset, she estimated it would take five to six years just to find the images of interest — and then she would finally be able to study the systems found.

a woman stands in front of a screen with a research slide on the screen, she faces the audience and is gesturing with her hands.
Jimena González presents an award lecture at the 2023 Throughput Computing Conference. (provided by Jimena González)

Then, the email from the Open Science Grid (OSG) Consortium came. The OSG Consortium operates a fabric of distributed High Throughput Computing (dHTC) services, allowing users to take advantage of massive amounts of computing power. Researchers can apply to the OSG User School, an annual workshop for scientists who want to learn and use dHTC methods.

“[dHTC] is parallelizing things. It’s like if you had 500 exams to grade, you can distribute them among different people and it would take less time,” González says. “It sounded perfect for me.”

González applied and was accepted into the 2021 program, which was run virtually that year. At the OSG User School, she learned methods that would allow her to take advantage of dHTC and apply them to her work. Her multi-year processing time was cut down to mere days.

“Because it was so fast, there were many new things that I could implement in my research,” González says. “A lot of the methodology I implemented would not have been possible without OSG.”

This summer, González was selected as one of two recipients of the OSG David Swanson Award.

David Swanson was a longtime champion of and contributor to OSG, who passed away in 2016. In his memory, the award is bestowed annually upon one or more former students of the OSG User School who have subsequently achieved significant dHTC-enabled research outcomes.

She accepted the award at the Throughput Computing 2023 conference, where she presented her research and discussed how she used her training from the OSG User School to successfully comb through the DES data and find the systems of interest.

“When I got the award, I didn’t know anything about [Swanson],” González says. “But once I attended this event, I heard so many people talking about him, and I understood why it was created. It is such an honor to receive this award in his name.”

Choy leads team awarded National Science Foundation Quantum Sensing Challenge Grant

The National Science Foundation has selected a proposal “Compact and robust quantum atomic sensors for timekeeping and inertial sensing” by an interdisciplinary team led by University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers for...

Read the full article at: https://engineering.wisc.edu/blog/choy-leads-team-awarded-national-science-foundation-quantum-sensing-challenge-grant/

Lu Lu receives 2023 IUPAP Early Career Scientist Prize

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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 opening ceremony at the 38th International Cosmic Ray Conference (ICRC) held in Nagoya, Japan.

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Lu Lu

Early Career Scientist Prizes are given to early career scientists within each IUPAP commission who have up to eight years of postdoctoral research experience and have made significant contributions to the cosmic ray field. Lu is a recipient of the Early Career Scientist Prize in the Commission on Astroparticle Physics (C4).

Her PhD work focused on developing a novel technique to search for ultra-high-energy photons using data from the Pierre Auger Observatory. She also played a leading role in the initial design of the “Dual optical sensors in an Ellipsoid Glass for Gen2” (D-Egg), a two-PMT optical module for the IceCube Upgrade.

More recently, she made key contributions to the multimessenger correlation studies of the neutrino source candidate TXS0506+056 and to the detection of a particle shower associated with the hadronic decay of a resonant W boson.

Lu is currently an assistant professor of physics at the Wisconsin IceCube Particle Astrophysics Center (WIPAC) at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her current research focuses on diffuse high-energy astrophysical/cosmogenic neutrinos from TeV to EeV, Galactic PeVatron detection in the context of multimessenger observations, and the exploration of potential transient ultra-high-energy sources.

She is actively involved in IceCube outreach initiatives and has pioneered the development of an app that provides IceCube real-time alerts via augmented reality on mobile devices. Currently, she serves as co-lead of the diffuse science working group in IceCube and is one of three representatives of the physical science group of US-SCAR (Scientific Committee of Antarctic Research).

“I would like to express my deep appreciation for my collaborators and for those who work on foundational tasks such as reconstructions and calibrations, as their efforts behind the scenes make groundbreaking discoveries possible,” said Lu. “As early career scientists, we bear the responsibility of continuing and expanding experiments in the particle astrophysics field. We must collaborate and work together to ensure that the next generation of young scientists will have exciting discoveries to make.”