News

Mark Friesen and team named finalists in 2023 WARF Innovation Awards

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 …

Lots of physics fun was had at WiSciFest!

Victor Brar earns NSF CAREER award

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 …

“Sandwich” structure found to reduce errors caused by quasiparticles in superconducting qubits

Qubits are notoriously more prone to error than their classical counterparts. While superconducting quantum computers currently use on the order of 100 to 1000 qubits, an estimated one million qubits will be needed to track …

Physics has three winners in the Cool Science Image contest!

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, …

Jimena González wins 2023 OSG David Swanson Award

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 …

Stas Boldyrev earns DOE funding to investigate turbulence in relativistic plasmas

This post was adapted from a U.S. Department of Energy announcement  The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced August 23 that it is funding $9.96M to support research in basic plasma science and engineering as well as …

Through machine learning maps, cosmic history comes into focus

By Jason Daley, UW–Madison College of Engineering For millennia, humans have used optical telescopes, radio telescopes and space telescopes to get a better view of the heavens. Today, however, one of the most powerful tools …

Mark Saffman part of team awarded NSF Quantum Sensing Challenge grant

This post was originally published by the College of Engineering 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 …

Ke Fang, Ellen Zweibel earn Simons Foundation funding to study electrodynamics in extreme environments

Much of what we understand about fundamental physics is based on experiments done in the convenient “lab” of earth. But our planet is just one location, with its own relatively mild electromagnetic field. Do forces …

Zain Abhari selected for SACLA graduate internship

Congrats to Physics PhD student Zain Abhari for being selected to the SACLA Research Support Program for Graduate Students. The one-year internship run by SACLA (the SPring-8 Angstrom Compact free electron LAser) accepts graduate students …

Congrats to Prof. Joynt on his retirement!

37 years after joining the faculty of the department of physics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Prof. Bob Joynt has announced his retirement at the end of July. Joynt is a condensed matter theorist who …

Lu Lu receives 2023 IUPAP Early Career Scientist Prize

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 …

Physics researchers named part of $18M NSF materials research center

The Department of Physics is part of a six-year, $18 million grant awarded to the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC) by the National Science Foundation. The award creates a National User Facility …

Join us for Nite @ the Lab!

Professor Justin Vandenbroucke will present IceCube Detection of Neutrinos from a Galaxy Near, Nearby.

Keith Bechtol, Victor Brar promoted to Associate Professors

Congratulations to Keith Bechtol and Victor Brar, who were both promoted to associate professors of physics with tenure! Bechtol is an observational cosmologist with research interests in dark matter and dark energy, using the whole …

Longtime physics staff member Ed Slotten has passed away

Ed Slotten, a longtime physics department staff member who retired in 2005, passed away June 1. He was 75. Ed joined the department shortly after graduating from Madison Area Technical College and worked here for …

IceCube shows Milky Way galaxy is a neutrino desert

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, …

Undergraduates named 2023 Hilldale Fellows

Physics major Dhanvi Hiriyanna Bharadwaj has been named a 2023 Hilldale Fellow, working with Ramathasan Thevamaran in Mechanical Engineering. Astronomy-physics major Vicki Braianova, who is working with physics professor Peter Timbie, has also received the …

Partnerships bring together UW–Madison quantum computing research, industry leaders

Two leading companies in semiconductor quantum computing are partnering with researchers at the University of Wisconsin­–Madison, itself a long-time academic leader in quantum computing. UW–Madison’s separate partnerships with Intel and HRL Laboratories are part of …