On Wednesday, January 21, 7pm, a special edition of Wednesday Nite @ the Lab will feature a screening of Particle Fever at the Marquee Theater in Union South, UW–Madison. The film follows six brilliant scientists during the launch of the Large Hadron Collider, marking the start-up of the biggest and most expensive experiment in the history of the planet. 10,000 scientists from over 100 countries join forces in pursuit of a single goal: to recreate conditions that existed just moments after the Big Bang and find the Higgs boson, potentially explaining the origin of all matter. Particle Fever is a celebration of discovery, revealing the very human stories behind the tale of this epic experiment.

UW physics professors that had key roles in the Higgs discovery will give an introduction to the film. The screening is presented by the Physics Department, Wednesday Nite @ the Lab, and WUD Film.

Halzen is being honored for his decades-long effort to build a massive, cubic kilometer telescope under the Antarctic ice to detect cosmic neutrinos. Last year, the telescope yielded the first evidence of cosmic neutrinos, nearly massless high-energy particles thought to come from cosmic sources such as supernovae, black holes and the violent cores of galaxies. The work opened a new field of astronomy.

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The Wisconsin Science Festival is the passion of a growing coalition of scientists, artists, citizens and organizations dedicated to engaging everyone in the wonder and power of science, technology, engineering, art and math.

WiSciFest website

With a simple app addition, Android phones, and likely other smartphone brands in the not-too-distant future, can be turned into detectors to capture the light particles created when cosmic rays crash into Earth’s atmosphere.

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Phase-1 upgrades for the CMS detector, including the work of the UW CMS Trigger Team, are approved for construction with the attainment of the DOE Critical Decision 2/3 for a $43M project. Profs. Wesley Smith and Sridhara Dasu are leading the calorimeter trigger upgrade efforts at UW. The success is in part due to excellent hardware and firmware designed by UW engineers. Featured here is this year’s UW academic staff award winner Mr. Tom Gorski’s CTP7 board, sporting the highest-end Field Programmable Gate Arrays, Virtex-7 and ZYNQ from Xilinx Inc.

Next generation dark matter search to proceed