Research, teaching and outreach in Physics at UW–Madison
News Archives
First field season for IceCube Upgrade ongoing at the South Pole
Posted on
Over the past two months, a team of IceCube drill engineers have completed an impressive amount of work during the first of three consecutive field seasons for the IceCube Upgrade. The project is funded by the National Science Foundation and international collaborators.
The goal of the project is to drill seven holes in 2025/2026 and deploy seven more closely spaced and more densely instrumented strings of sensors in the central part of the array, which will improve IceCube’s sensitivity to low energies. Having a productive first field season both sets the Upgrade project up for success and trains the new generation of drillers at the South Pole.
The majority of the team’s engineers come from the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Physical Sciences Laboratory (PSL), where equipment is fabricated and shipped to the South Pole. Additional drill engineers hail from Sweden, New Zealand, and for the first time, Thailand.
“This year’s drill team is a group of 17 talented professionals who have completed an enormous amount of work,” says Kurt Studt, drill engineer at PSL and the on-ice drill manager for the Upgrade. “We’ve overcome many difficult challenges while dealing with the extreme environment at the South Pole, including temperatures as low as -35 ⁰F and windchills below -60 ⁰F.”
The IFD “carrot” drill head (left) drills a 40-meter hole in the firn (right). Credit: Kurt Studt, IceCube/NSF
Earth-sized planet discovered in ‘our solar backyard’
Posted on
A team of astronomers have discovered a planet closer and younger than any other Earth-sized world yet identified. It’s a remarkably hot world whose proximity to our own planet and to a star like our sun mark it as a unique opportunity to study how planets evolve.
The new planet was described in a new study published this week by The Astronomical Journal. Melinda Soares-Furtado, a NASA Hubble Fellow at the University of Wisconsin–Madison who will begin work as an astronomy and physics professor at the university in the fall, and recent UW–Madison graduate Benjamin Capistrant, now a graduate student at the University of Florida, co-led the study with co-authors from around the world.
“It’s a useful planet because it may be like an early Earth,” says Soares-Furtado.
Young, hot, Earth-sized planet HD 63433d sits close to its star in the constellation Ursa Major, while two neighboring, mini-Neptune-sized planets — identified in 2020 — orbit farther out. Illustration: Alyssa Jankowski
UW physicists part of study offering unique insights into the expansion of the universe
In the culmination of a decade’s worth of effort, the Dark Energy Survey collaboration of scientists analyzed an unprecedented sample of nearly 1,500 supernovae classified using machine learning. They placed the strongest constraints on the expansion of the universe ever obtained with the DES supernova survey. While consistent with the current standard cosmological model, the results do not rule out a more complex theory that the density of dark energy in the universe could have varied over time.
An example of a supernova discovered by the Dark Energy Survey within the field covered by one of the individual detectors in the Dark Energy Camera. The supernova exploded in a spiral galaxy with redshift = 0.04528, which corresponds to a light-travel time of about 0.6 billion years. This is one of the nearest supernovae in the sample. In the inset, the supernova is a small dot at the upper-right of the bright galaxy center. Image: DES collaboration
DES scientists presented the results January 8 at the 243rd meeting of the American Astronomical Society and have submitted them for publication to the Astrophysical Journal.
Keith Bechtol
The work is the output of over 400 DES scientists, including UW–Madison physics professor Keith Bechtol and former graduate student Robert Morgan, PhD ’22.
In 1998, astrophysicists discovered that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate, attributed to a mysterious entity called dark energy that makes up about 70% of our universe. While foreshadowed by earlier measurements, the discovery was somewhat of a surprise; at the time, astrophysicists agreed that the universe’s expansion should be slowing down because of gravity.
This revolutionary discovery, which astrophysicists achieved with observations of specific kinds of exploding stars, called type Ia (read “type one-A”) supernovae, was recognized with the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2011.
In this new study, DES scientists performed analyses with four different techniques, including the supernova technique used in 1998, to understand the nature of dark energy and to measure the expansion rate of the universe.
As a graduate student in Bechtol’s group, Morgan was part of the DES supernova working group that worked to identify type Ia supernova. This group had to address two main concerns with the data to enhance detection fidelity.
“One is that there is some leakage of other types of supernovae into the sample, so you have to calibrate the rate of misclassification,” Bechtol explains. “Also, the brightness of the supernova gives us a way of estimating its distance, but there is a distribution of how bright the Ia supernovae are. Because we are slightly less likely to detect the intrinsically fainter supernovae, there is a small bias that needs to be accounted for.”
Bechtol has been part of the DES collaboration since its formation in 2012, serving as a co-convener of the DES’s Science Release Working Group for four years and a co-convener of the Milky Way Working Group for two years. His role in this new study was in data processing and presentation.
“We collect all of the data, process it, and then release it as a coherent set of data products, both for use by the DES collaboration and as part of public releases to the community,” Bechtol says. “One of the aspects I worked on is the photometric calibration — our ability to measure the fluxes of objects accurately and precisely. It’s an important part of the supernova analysis and something that I’ve been working on continuously over the past ten years.”
Navigating new tech: Kael Hanson earns Draper Technology Innovation Fund award
Posted on
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).
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.”
Physics PhD student Stephen McKay named ALMA ambassador
Posted on
Stephen McKay
Congrats to physics graduate student Stephen McKay on being named an ALMA ambassador!
ALMA, or the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, is the largest radio telescope in the world. It can detect light radiated by clouds of dust grains in some of the earliest and most distant galaxies in the Universe. Researchers can submit proposals to ALMA that direct data collection to observe astronomical targets at a wide range of wavelengths, in order to accomplish many cutting-edge science goals. However, ALMA receives many more proposals than there is time to operate the telescope.
That’s where McKay’s ambassadorship comes in.
“Lots of groups at UW–Madison and other places will propose to get data from these telescope arrays,” McKay says. “In February, I’ll attend a training (through the ambassador program) where they will teach me tips and tricks for writing proposals. Then in early spring, I’ll run a proposal workshop here for anyone who wants to learn how to strengthen a proposal.”
In the Chajnantor Plateau, amazing picture of the antennas under the Milkyway. Credit: Sergio Otarola- ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)
McKay is no stranger to proposing and using ALMA data. A third-year graduate student in astronomy professor Amy Barger’s research group, he expects nearly all his publications will be based on ALMA data. His research focuses on old, distant galaxies and measuring and inferring physical properties about them: How massive are they? What is their rate of star formation? What processes trigger the rapid star-formation in these systems?
“The galaxies that I mainly study are faint or hard to detect in optical wavelengths or even near-infrared wavelengths. Until about maybe 25 years ago, we didn’t know a lot of these galaxies existed because they just weren’t visible in the typical telescope images we had,” McKay says. “The portion of the observed electromagnetic spectrum where these galaxies are brightest ranges from 500 microns to nearly one millimeter, which overlaps heavily with ALMA’s spectral coverage.”
Two years ago, McKay attended an ALMA workshop to learn more about how ALMA and similar radio arrays operate. With this ALMA ambassadorship, he will now help run the workshops and offer advice on crafting stronger proposals. The ALMA Ambassador Program is run through the National Radio Astronomy Observatory’s North American ALMA Science Center (NAASC). It provides training and an up to $10,000 research grant to early-career researchers interested in expanding their ALMA/interferometry expertise and sharing that knowledge with their home institutions.
“This program is helpful for me because I will learn more in terms of how to actually do my own research, but then I can also pass along what I learn with the rest of the astronomical community,” McKay says.
Jimena González joins Bouchet Graduate Honor Society
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.
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.
Welcome, Professor Vladimir Zhdankin!
Posted on
Vladimir Zhdankin (credit: Flatiron Institute)
Theoretical plasma astrophysicist Vladimir Zhdankin ‘11, PhD ’15, returns to UW–Madison as an assistant professor of physics on January 1, 2024. As a student, Zhdankin worked with Prof. Stas Boldyrev on solar wind turbulence and basic magnetohydrodynamic turbulence, which are relevant for near-Earth types of space plasmas. After graduating, Zhdankin began studying plasma astrophysics of more extreme environments. He first completed a postdoc at CU-Boulder, then a NASA Einstein Fellowship at Princeton University. He joins the department from the Flatiron Institute in New York, where he is currently a Flatiron Research Fellow.
Please give an overview of your research.
These days, most of my interest is in the field of plasma astrophysics — the application of plasma physics to astrophysical problems. Much of the matter in the universe is in a plasma state, such as stars, the matter around black holes, and the interstellar medium in the galaxy. I’m interested in understanding the plasma processes in those types of systems. My focus is particularly on really high energy systems, like plasmas around black holes or neutron stars, which are dense objects where you could get extreme plasmas where relativistic effects are important. The particles are traveling at very close to the speed of light, and there’s natural particle acceleration occurring in these systems. They also radiate intensely, you could see them from halfway across the universe. There’s a need to know the basic plasma physics in these conditions if you want to interpret observations of those systems. A lot of my work involves doing plasma simulations of turbulence in these extreme parameter regimes.
What are one or two research projects you’ll focus on the most first?
One of them is on making reduced models of plasmas by using non-equilibrium statistical mechanical ideas. Statistical mechanics is one of the core subjects of physics, but it doesn’t really seem to apply to plasmas very often. This is because a lot of plasmas are in this regime that’s called collisionless plasma, where they are knocked out of thermal equilibrium, and then they always exist in a non-thermal state. That’s not what standard statistical mechanics is applicable to. This is one of the problems that I’m studying, whether there is some theoretical framework to study these non-equilibrium plasmas, to understand basic things like: what does it mean for entropy to be produced in these types of plasmas? The important application of this work is to explain how are particles accelerated to really high energies in plasmas. The particle acceleration process is important for explaining cosmic rays which are bombarding the Earth, and then also explaining the highest energy radiation which we see from those systems.
Another thing I’m thinking about these days is plasmas near black holes. In the center of the Milky Way, for example, there’s a supermassive black hole called Sagittarius A*, which was recently imaged a year or two ago by the Event Horizon Telescope. It’s a very famous picture. What you see is the shape of the black hole and then all the plasma in the vicinity, which is in the accretion disk. I’m trying to understand the properties of that turbulent plasma and how to model the type of radiation coming out of the system. And then also whether we should expect neutrinos to be coming out, because you would need to get very high energy protons in order to produce neutrinos. And it’s still an open question of whether or not that happens in these systems.
What attracted you to UW–Madison?
It’s just a perfect match in many ways. It really feels like a place where I’m confident that I could succeed and accomplish my goals, be an effective mentor, and build a successful group. It has all the resources I need, it has the community I need as a plasma physicist to interact with. I think it has a lot to offer to me and likewise, I have a lot to offer to the department there. I’m also really looking forward to the farmers’ market and cheese and things like that. You know, just the culture there.
What is your favorite element and/or elementary particle?
I like the muon. It is just a heavy version of the electron, I don’t remember, something like 100 times more massive or so. It’s funny that such particles exist and this is like the simplest example of one of those fundamental particles which we aren’t really familiar with, it’s just…out there. You could imagine situations where you just replace electron with a muon and then you get slightly different physics out of it.
What hobbies and interests do you have?
They change all the time. But some things I’ve always done: I like running, skiing, bouldering indoors, disk golf, racquet sports, and hiking. (Cross country or downhill skiing?) It’s honestly hard to choose which one I prefer more. In Wisconsin, definitely cross country. If I’m in real mountains, the Alps or the Rockies, then downhill is just an amazing experience.
Welcome, Professor Matthew Otten!
Posted on
Matthew Otten
Atomic, molecular and optical and quantum theorist Matthew Otten will join the UW–Madison physics department as an assistant professor on January 3, 2024. He joins us most recently from HRL Laboratories. Prior to HRL, Otten earned his PhD from Cornell University, and then was the Maria Goeppert Mayer fellow at Argonne National Laboratory.
Please give an overview of your research.
Very generally, my goal is to make utility scale quantum computing a reality, and to get there faster than we would otherwise without my help. We have a lot of theoretical reasons to believe that quantum algorithms will be faster in certain areas; in practice, we need to know how expensive it’s going to be. It could be that a back of the envelope calculation says a quantum computer might be better, but because quantum computers are very expensive to build and have a lot of overhead, you could find that once you crunch the numbers really carefully, it turns out to cost more money or more energy or more time than just doing it on a supercomputer. In that case, it’s not worth the investment to build it, or at least not at this point. Part of my research is to understand and develop quantum algorithms and count how expensive they are. Once you do that, you can figure out the reason it’s so expensive is A and B. Then we go and we try to fix A and B, and then whack-a-mole all these bottlenecks down and eventually you go from, “It’ll never work,” to “Okay, it’ll work in twenty years.”
Another part of my research is looking at the physical qubits. These devices all have a lot of deep physics inside of them. If you just look at it from the quantum algorithm level, you might get so far. But if you dig down and try to understand the underlying physics, I think you can get further. You might be able to make devices cheaper, faster, or more performant in general. I do a lot of simulations of the underlying physics of these various types of qubits to understand what their properties are, what causes the noise that ruins computation, and what we can do to fix that noise. Through simulations on classical computers, sometimes very large ones, we come up with ways to tweak the system so that you get better performance, by coming up with better quantum algorithms and better qubits. Put those together and hopefully you get to a better quantum computer.
Once you arrive in Madison, what are one or two research projects you think your group will focus on first?
I’ll be bringing a few projects with me. The first is part of a DARPA program called Quantum Benchmarking, which I was part of while at HRL. We found really high-value computational tasks, not specifically quantum, that Boeing, which owns HRL, would like calculated: for instance, reducing corrosion. Corrosion causes planes to be grounded for maintenance, which is costly. Reducing corrosion will reduce maintenance costs and increase uptime. We’ve been developing ways to ask and answer the question, how close are today’s quantum computers to solving that problem? How big do quantum computers need to be to solve that problem? The specific task is understanding what it takes to solve such a large-scale problem, counting the quantum resources that are necessary and coming up with tests so that you could go to a quantum computer, run the tests, and hopefully be able to predict how much bigger or how much faster they would need to be to solve the problem.
Another one comes from the Wellcome Leap Foundation. We are trying to do the largest, most accurate calculation of biological objects — a molecule, string of carbon, something like this — possible on a real-life quantum computer. We’re trying to take techniques that have already been developed or develop new techniques to make circuits smaller, which means a less expensive quantum computer, and faster. That one is a competition, they gave us funding to do it, but if we complete the task better than other competitors, we get more funding to do more.
What attracted you to UW–Madison?
The strength of the science that’s happening in the physics and broader Wisconsin community is very attractive. When I visited, everyone was very nice, it’s a very collegial department. And being from St. Louis, I like the Midwest. I’ve lived in Southern California for a couple of years now and I haven’t seen snow, and that’s sad. Madison is a lovely area. Great people.
What is your favorite element and/or elementary particle?
I think it has to be silicon. Silicon is used in classical computing and potentially has use in quantum computing. And you’re carrying around silicon right now, just like everyone else.
What hobbies and interests do you have?
I have a Siberian Husky puppy and we’ll be very happy to go to Madison and do a lot of skijoring, which is cross country skiing, but the dog pulls you. I started running recently and I was jazzed up for my first half marathon and then I got COVID and I didn’t do it, so I’m still jazzed up for my first half marathon. I play a lot of board games and have a very large board game collection. And my daughter just turned one. She’s become a new hobby.
Welcome, Professor Rogerio Jorge!
Posted on
Rogerio Jorge
Plasma theorist Rogerio Jorge will join the UW–Madison physics department as an assistant professor on January 1, 2024. He joins us from IST in Lisbon, Portugal, where he is a research professor. Jorge completed his first postdoc at the University of Maryland at College Park, then accepted a Humboldt Fellowship where he worked on the design of fusion energy devices in Greifswald, Germany.
Please give an overview of your research.
My work is twofold: I uncover basic plasma physics phenomena and apply my plasma physics knowledge to the realization of fusion energy. My most recent work is devoted to the design of Stellarators, a type of fusion machine that is free of major instabilities and disruptions. Here, we try to have this clean renewable energy available to the world as fast as possible. While I’ve been doing research on fusion since my PhD studies, where I focused on one type of device called the Tokamak, when I went to the U.S. for my postdoc, I started focusing on the Stellarator. The Stellarator has had a lot of research since the ’60s, but only recently it had a big resurgence.
Thanks to the enormous progress in computational power, I do a lot of simulations for my work. I have worked on several codes, each focusing on a particular physics or engineering problem such as electromagnetic coils, stability, turbulence, and energy retention, which are all used in combination to do designs for new machines. I also collaborate with startups seeking to rapidly develop fusion energy and supervise students and postdocs who are trying to get new designs for new machines. Most of our work is in the realm of classical physics, based on things that people learn while they’re majoring in physics such as electrodynamics and electromagnetism. But then, we couple it with new computational and mathematical techniques, such as machine learning, to streamline our workflow.
We have ideas for Stellarator design that could allow for much better performance than we had before so that the resulting devices achieve higher temperatures and higher densities. However, we should always take into account that theory and experiment may operate on different planes. We are in contact with experimentalists who sometimes tell us, “Your machine is too complicated to build!” And then we have to go back and incorporate their constraints into the design.
Once you arrive in Madison, what are one or two research projects you think your group will focus on first?
Stellarator design and optimization will be one of the main branches, and we have many projects that either could be started or have started in my research group now that we will be continuing in Madison. One of these topics is the confinement of fast particles resulting from fusion reactions, that is, alpha particle dynamics. These must stay confined long enough to continuously feed energy to the plasma, leading to what we call a burning plasma. Right now, the machines we have, they’re still prototypes, meaning that they haven’t made many studies on the physics of burning plasmas. We still need to do a lot of research on it. Once we turn on the machine and start getting a lot of energy, we must be able to predict what’s going on. Burning plasma physics or fast particle physics is one of the major issues. Besides burning plasma physics, I will also continue the work on stellarator optimization, with a particular focus on how machine learning can help us obtain increasingly better designs and how to incorporate experimental constraints into the optimization. Another branch will be the study of basic plasma physics with a particular focus on astrophysical plasmas. During my PhD, I developed a method to accurately incorporate collisions between charged particles in plasmas. I intend to further develop that technique, creating a numerical tool that is easy to use and can be used to predict extreme events in space, as well as predict the behavior of plasmas in the lab, such as the Wisconsin Plasma Physics Laboratory.
What attracted you to Madison?
Madison has one of the best physics departments in the world, particularly in my area of plasma physics. I believe it’s one of the top places that people think of when they do the sort of work that I do, stellarators and basic plasma physics. This is because there is here a prototype fusion device, a myriad of experimental plasma physics facilities, and people doing state-of-the-art theory and simulation. Furthermore, when I visited Madison, I loved the views, the lakes, and the overall quality of life.
What is your favorite element or elementary particle?
I think I like the neutrino. It was fun learning about neutrinos in particle physics. They were thought to have no mass, but their flavors can actually oscillate while they travel, and this yields a very tiny but finite amount of mass. Besides, they can go through essentially everything without getting detected, they’re basically invisible! It’s something that you think you know what it is, and you know all the calculations and you understand it, but at the end of the day experiments and the nature tells you that you don’t exactly know what you think you know. There’s more to the story there and they seem so simple, yet there is more to the story.
What hobbies and interests do you have?
Definitely music. I play the guitar and I like to learn how to play new instruments. I have a few instruments around the house but the one that I am learning how to play right now is the violin. Like the neutrino, even with only four strings, it’s a deceivingly complicated instrument.
Federal physics advisory panel — including Profs. Bose and Cranmer — announces particle physics recommendations
Posted on
Earlier this year, physics professors Tulika Bose and Kyle Cranmer were selected to serve on the Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel, or P5, a group of High Energy Physics experts that advises the Department of Energy Office of Science and the National Science Foundation’s Division of Physics on high energy and particle physics matters.
One recommendation is to move forward with a planned expansion of the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, an international scientific collaboration operated by the UW–Madison at the South Pole. Other recommendations include support for a separate neutrino experiment based in Illinois (the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, or DUNE); continuing investment in the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland and the Rubin Observatory in Chile; and expanding involvement in the Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA), a ground-based very-high-energy gamma ray observatory. UW–Madison physicists have leading roles in all of these research efforts.
Additional recommendations include the development of a next generation of ground-based telescopes to observe the cosmic microwave background and a direct dark matter detector experiment, among others.
