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.
Mark Saffman on the radio show “Perpetual Motion Machine”
Mark Saffman discusses quantum reality and its implications for quantum computing in a 30 minute radio show on WORT.
Justin Vandenbroucke turns smartphones into pocket cosmic ray detectors
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.
The Liberal Arts Advantage
The Liberal Arts Advantage is the annual report of the College of Letters & Science and is published each fall with the beginning of the new academic year.
CMS Upgrades approved
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.
Using the Higgs boson to search for clues
Wisconsin postdoc Maria Cepeda and graduate student Aaron Levine were instrumental in this CMS study of non-standard model Higgs couplings in search of clues regarding new physics.
The next generation dark matter experiment LZ which involves 7 tons of xenon has been approved.
CMS presents evidence for Higgs coupling to fermions
Wisconsin group played a leading role in presenting evidence for Higgs coupling to fermions. Graduate students Joshua Swanson and Isobel Ojalvo, undergraduate student Stephane Coopertein did crucial work on Higgs decays to tau-leptons. Prof. Sridhara Dasu co-led the CMS group that performed this analysis.
Hilldale Research Fellowships Awarded
Two students in the Department of Physics have received Hilldale Faculty/Undergraduate Research Fellowships for 2014-15 academic year: Aaron Stemo, working with Professor Cary Forest, and Nicholas Derr, working with Drs. Susan Nossal and Edwin Mierkiewicz.
CMS Trigger Upgrades
UW physicists are hard at work upgrading the trigger system for the CMS experiment at the LHC, which is in the middle of a maintenance period in preparation for higher energy collisions in 2016. Graduate student Tom Perry takes a break from this work to give the public an explanation of what the trigger system is, using a bowl of party mix.