Research, teaching and outreach in Physics at UW–Madison
Research
Welcome, Professor Ke Fang!
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By Madeleine O’Keefe, WIPAC
When you think of scientific meccas throughout the world, Madison, Wisconsin might not be the first place that comes to mind. But for astroparticle physicist Ke Fang, Madison is the place to be. That’s because it’s home to the Wisconsin IceCube Particle Astrophysics Center (WIPAC): the “leader of particle astrophysics in the world,” according to Fang. “Throughout the years, there have been all kinds of meetings and workshops that drive people in this field to Madison because it’s the center for particle astrophysics,” she says.
Ke Fang
Originally from Huangshan, China, Fang earned a B.S. in physics from the University of Science and Technology of China. Afterward, Fang moved to the United States for graduate school and earned her PhD in astrophysics from the University of Chicago in 2015. Following that, she went to the University of Maryland and the Goddard Space Flight Center for a Joint Space-Science Institute fellowship. Most recently, Fang was a NASA Einstein Fellow at Stanford University in California.
Now, Fang has joined WIPAC and the UW–Madison Physics Department as an assistant professor. To welcome Fang and learn more about her, we met up on—where else?—Zoom for an interview.
Can you summarize your research?
I use both experiments and theory to understand extreme activities of our universe. We receive multiple types of messengers from the universe—all the way from optical light to gamma rays, cosmic rays, neutrinos, and gravitational waves. These messengers can be emitted by a common source, such as a binary neutron star merger. Specifically, I use theoretical models to understand how these astrophysical events produce different messengers, whether theoretical models explain the data, and how the data compare with theoretical models. I also use the HAWC Observatory, the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, and the Fermi Large Area Telescope (Fermi-LAT) to observe or to find sources directly. For example, I jointly analyze the Fermi-LAT and HAWC data to observe gamma-ray sources from 0.1 GeV to 100 TeV—across six orders of magnitude. Studies using multiple messengers and wavelengths are rewarding because they help us get a full picture of what these astrophysical sources look like.
How did you get into your field of research?
When I started graduate school, high-energy astrophysics was rather new; it’s a field that has quickly grown in the past decade or so. High-energy astrophysics traditionally refers to astrophysics with X-ray observations, because X-rays are higher in energy compared to the optical band that astronomers traditionally use. But in the last few years, high-energy astrophysics has had another burst of delving into even higher energies. When we move up in energy, by millions or billions, we see many new sources that were previously not observable in the X-ray band, or different aspects of sources that were previously seen at lower energies. And there are so many unknowns in this field; we can see surprising things at the highest energies, and many of those observations are discoveries. I think that’s really intriguing.
What attracted you to UW–Madison and WIPAC?
I think it’s pretty fair to say that WIPAC—with IceCube, CTA, HAWC, Fermi-LAT, ARA, and IceCube-Gen2—is now the leader of particle astrophysics in the world. I think there’s a close match between my expertise and what is currently being done at WIPAC, and I’m excited about joining the department and joining these explorations of higher and higher energy neutrinos and gamma rays.
What’s one thing you hope students who take a class with you will come away with?
The content you learn from a class is limited, but the contexts where you could apply the knowledge are unlimited.
What is your favorite particle?
Neutrino. If I have to pick one, neutrino is the one that I have in my heart.
What hobbies/other interests do you have?
Cooking! I like to explore different things. I come from China, so Chinese cuisine is what I started from when I just moved to the United States. But after all these years, I’m getting more exposed to different types of cuisines and starting to explore more, like with Thai and Italian. When I go to nice restaurants, I try to remember the name of the dish and find the recipe online.
Welcome, Professor Lu Lu!
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Lu Lu
New UW–Madison assistant professor of physics Lu Lu’s research program combines the past with the future. Her research looks for sources of ultrahigh energy particles, which is done by analyzing data that has already been collected. As she says, “Maybe data is already talking to us, we just haven’t looked.” But she is also working toward improving future data collection, which will require more technologically-advanced detectors. “My teachers, my great masters, have taught me that the current young generation has the responsibility to look into new techniques to go to the future for younger generations to proceed forward,” she says about her work in sensor R&D.
On January 1, Professor Lu joined the Department of Physics and IceCube. Most recently, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the International Center for Hadron Astrophysics at Chiba University in Japan. To welcome her, we sat down for a (virtual) interview.
What are your research interests?
My prime interest is astroparticle physics, and my ultimate goal is to find the sources of the highest energy particles in the universe. These particles carry energy of about 1020 electronvolts. This is higher energy than what we have from the Large Hadron Collider and human technologies. The real attractiveness here is we don’t know how nature accelerates these particles. And once we identify the sources, we can test new theories beyond the Standard Model using sources crated by nature.
What are one or two main projects you focus your research on?
I’m involved in two experiments. One is IceCube, the other is Pierre Auger Observatory. I was doing cosmic ray analysis, but cosmic rays are usually charged particles and they are deflected in the magnetic field of the galaxy; they would not travel in a straight line. IceCube studies neutrinos which are neutral particles, they travel directly from the source. Pierre Auger detects ultrahigh energy photons, which are also neutral particles. One thing I want to do immediately after I join Madison is to combine these two experiments to do a joint analysis. We have photon candidates but we haven’t really tried to connect them in the multimessenger regime. By combining Pierre Auger photons with IceCube neutrinos, we could possibly find a transient source, a source that doesn’t constantly emit ultrahigh energy photons or neutrinos but all of a sudden there’s a flare. This type of analysis has never been done, but we have data on disks.
The second thing I’m interested in is using new sensor technologies. In IceCube, we have Gen2 being planned right now. Instead of using a single photon sensor, we’d use a more sensitive design and R&D. UW–Madison is taking the lead of designing this future detector. There’s also radio technology. So, to detect the highest energy neutrinos we need to build a large instrument volume. With optical array, it is really hard to scale up because one has to drill holes inside the South Pole, which is really expensive. But radio technology doesn’t have to go so deep, so they can bury their detectors on the surface areas, and the radiowaves can transmit further away than the optical photons in ice. For optical you have to make the detectors very dense, but for radio you can make the antennas further apart, so that means you can have a larger area and detect more events easily. I think radio is the way to go for the future.
You said you have a lot of data collected already and just need to analyze it. How do you analyze the data from these detectors?
We would have to search for photon candidates from the data from Auger, and identify where it comes from and what the time this event happened. Correspondingly, do we see neutrinos from IceCube coming from the same direction and at the same time? Because you can never be sure it’s a photon. It could be a proton. We then want to build a statistical framework to combine different multimessengers together in real time.
What does it mean if you find a photon in coincidence with a neutrino?
Cosmic rays were first detected more than 100 years ago, and there’s a rich history of studying where they come from. The mystery of origins still remains today because our poor knowledge on the galactic/extragalactic magnetic fields and mass composition of cosmic rays. In my opinion, the most probable way to solve this puzzle is to use neutral particles. If we can identify ultrahigh energy photons in coincidence with neutrinos, that is a smoking gun that we are actually looking at a source and we can finally pin down where in the universe is accelerating high energy particles. And therefore, we can study particle physics maybe beyond Standard Model. It’s just like a lab created by the universe to test particle physics.
What is your favorite element and/or elementary particle?
My favorite elementary particle is the electron anti-neutrino. I like muons, too. My favorite element is hydrogen.
What hobbies and interests do you have?
I’m afraid I’ll disappoint you because my hobby is related to my research: Augmented reality. When I heard about something called Microsoft Hololens, I thought, I could make IceCube a hologram. I bought these special glasses, and then made a program on it and used it for some outreach events. But the glasses are very expensive, so people said, “Okay we can’t buy hologram glasses.” So I moved it to mobile phones so that everyone could look at it for fun. It’s called IceCubeAR (note: download it for iPhones or Android phones). I made it with a group of friends in Tokyo.
Dark Energy Survey makes public catalog of nearly 700 million astronomical objects
The Dark Energy Survey, a global collaboration including researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, has released DR2, the second data release in the survey’s seven-year history. DR2 was the topic of sessions at the 237th Meeting of the American Astronomical Society, which was held virtually January 10-15.
The second data release from the Dark Energy Survey, or DES, is the culmination of over a half-decade of astronomical data collection and analysis with the ultimate goal of understanding the accelerating expansion of the universe and the phenomenon of dark energy, which is thought to be responsible for this accelerated expansion. It is one of the largest astronomical catalogs released to date. Keith Bechtol, assistant professor of physics at UW–Madison, has served as the DES Science Release co-coordinator since 2017, guiding the effort to assemble, scientifically validate, and document data releases for both cosmology analysis by the DES Collaboration and exploration by the broad astronomical community.
Keith Bechtol
Including a catalog of nearly 700 million astronomical objects, DR2 builds on the 400 million objects cataloged with the survey’s prior data release, or DR1, and also improves on it by refining calibration techniques, which, with the deeper combined images of DR2, lead to improved estimates of the amount and distribution of matter in the universe.
Astronomical researchers around the world can access these unprecedented data and mine them to make new discoveries about the universe, complementary to the studies being carried out by the Dark Energy Survey collaboration. The full data release is online and available to the public to explore and gain their own insights as well.
“Most of the nearly 700 million objects visible in DES DR2 images had never been seen by humans before the past few years,” Bechtol says. “If you take a moment to look at even a small patch of sky in the DES images, you can see asteroids of our Solar System, stars out to the edge of the Milky Way, and distant galaxies as they were billions of years ago. We look forward to see how our colleagues use this enormous new dataset for research and education.”
DES was designed to map hundreds of millions of galaxies and to discover thousands of supernovae in order to measure the history of cosmic expansion and the growth of large-scale structure in the universe, both of which reflect the nature and amount of dark energy in the universe. DES has produced the largest and most accurate dark matter map from galaxy weak lensing to date, as well as a new map, three times larger, that will be released in the near future.
One early result relates to the construction of a catalog of a type of pulsating star known as “RR Lyrae,” which tells scientists about the region of outer space beyond the edge of our Milky Way. In this area nearly devoid of stars, the motion of the RR Lyrae hints at the presence of an enormous “halo” of invisible dark matter, which may provide clues on how our galaxy was assembled over the last 12 billion years. In another result, DES scientists used the extensive DR2 galaxy catalog, along with data from the LIGO experiment, to estimate the location of a black hole merger and, independent of other techniques, infer the value of the Hubble constant, a key cosmological parameter. Combining their data with other surveys, DES scientists have also been able to generate a complete map of the Milky Way’s dwarf satellites, giving researchers insight into how our own galaxy was assembled and how it compares with cosmologists’ predictions.
Covering 5,000 square degrees of the southern sky (one-eighth of the entire sky) and spanning billions of light-years, the survey data enables many other investigations in addition to those targeting dark energy, covering a vast range of cosmic distances — from discovering new nearby solar system objects to investigating the nature of the first star-forming galaxies in the early universe.
This irregular dwarf galaxy, named IC 1613, contains some 100 million stars (bluish in this portrayal). It is a member of our Local Group of galaxy neighbors, a collection which also includes our Milky Way, the Andromeda spiral and the Magellanic clouds. 2.4 million light-years away, it contains several examples of Cepheid variable stars — key calibrators of the cosmic distance ladder. The bulk of its stars were formed about 7 billion years ago, and it does not appear to be undergoing star formation at the present day, unlike other very active dwarf irregulars such as the Large and Small Magellanic clouds. To the lower right of IC 1613 (oriented with North to the left and East down in this view), one may view a background galaxy cluster (several hundred times more distant than IC 1613) consisting of dozens of orange-yellow blobs, centered on a pair of giant cluster elliptical galaxies. To the left of the irregular galaxy is a bright, sixth magnitude, foreground Milky Way star in the constellation of Cetus the Whale, identified here as a star by its sharp diffraction spikes radiating at 45 degree angles. For coordinate information, visit the NOIRLab webpage for this photo | Photo: DES/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA. | Image processing: DES, Jen Miller (Gemini Observatory/NSF’s NOIRLab), Travis Rector (University of Alaska Anchorage), Mahdi Zamani & Davide de Martin
“This is a momentous milestone. For six years, the Dark Energy Survey collaboration took pictures of distant celestial objects in the night sky. Now, after carefully checking the quality and calibration of the images captured by the Dark Energy Camera, we are releasing this second batch of data to the public,” said DES Director Rich Kron of Fermilab and the University of Chicago. “We invite professional and amateur scientists alike to dig into what we consider a rich mine of gems waiting to be discovered.”
The primary tool in collecting these images, the DOE-built Dark Energy Camera, is mounted to the NSF-funded Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope, part of the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in the Chilean Andes, part of NSF’s NOIRLab. Each week, the survey collected thousands of pictures of the southern sky, unlocking a trove of potential cosmological insights.
Once captured, these images (and the large amount of data surrounding them) are transferred to the National Center for Supercomputing Applications for processing via the DES Data Management project. Using the Blue Waters supercomputer at NCSA, the Illinois Campus Cluster and computing systems at Fermilab, NCSA prepares calibrated data products for public and research consumption. It takes approximately four months to process one year’s worth of data into a searchable, usable catalog.
The detailed precision cosmology constraints based on the full six-year DES data set will come out over the next two years.
The Dark Energy Survey uses a 570-megapixel camera mounted on the Blanco Telescope, at the CTI Observatory in Chile, to image 5,000 square degrees of southern sky | Photo: Fermilab
The DES DR2 is hosted at the Community Science and Data Center, a program of NOIRLab. CSDC provides software systems, user services and development initiatives to connect and support the scientific missions of NOIRLab’s telescopes, including the Blanco Telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory.
NCSA, NOIRLab and the LIneA Science Server collectively provide the tools and interfaces that enable access to DR2.
“Because astronomical data sets today are so vast, the cost to handle them is prohibitive for individual researchers or most organizations. CSDC provides open access to big astronomical data sets like DES DR2 and the necessary tools to explore and exploit them — then all it takes is someone from the community with a clever idea to discover new and exciting science,” said Robert Nikutta, project scientist for Astro Data Lab at CSDC.
“With information on the positions, shapes, sizes, colors and brightnesses of over 690 million stars, galaxies and quasars, the release promises to be a valuable source for astronomers and scientists worldwide to continue their explorations of the universe, including studies of matter (light and dark) surrounding our home Milky Way galaxy, as well as pushing further to examine groups and clusters of distant galaxies, which hold precise evidence about how the size of the expanding universe changes over time,” said Dark Energy Survey Data Management Project Scientist Brian Yanny of Fermilab.
This work is supported in part by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science.
About DES
The Dark Energy Survey is a collaboration of more than 400 scientists from 26 institutions in seven countries. Funding for the DES Projects has been provided by the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Ministry of Science and Education of Spain, the Science and Technology Facilities Council of the United Kingdom, the Higher Education Funding Council for England, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Kavli Institute of Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago, Funding Authority for Studies and Projects in Brazil, Carlos Chagas Filho Foundation for Research Support of the State of Rio de Janeiro, Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development and the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation, the German Research Foundation and the collaborating institutions in the Dark Energy Survey, the list of which can be found at www.darkenergysurvey.org/collaboration.
IceCube Collaboration awarded 2021 Rossi Prize
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The 2021 Bruno Rossi Prize was awarded to Francis Halzen and the IceCube Collaboration “for the discovery of a high-energy neutrino flux of astrophysical origin.”
The Bruno Rossi Prize is awarded annually by the High Energy Astrophysics Division of the American Astronomical Society. The 2021 HEAD awards were announced last night at the 237th AAS Meeting, which is being held virtually. Named after Italian experimental physicist Bruno Rossi—who made major contributions to particle physics and the study of cosmic rays, launched the field of X-ray astronomy, and discovered the first X-ray source, SCO X-1—the Rossi Prize is awarded “for a significant contribution to High Energy Astrophysics, with particular emphasis on recent, original work.”
The IceCube Collaboration is made up of over 300 researchers from 12 institutions in 53 countries. Halzen, the Hilldale and Gregory Breit Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, is the principal investigator of IceCube. The international group maintains and operates the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, a cubic kilometer of ice at the South Pole instrumented with optical sensors that can detect signals from high-energy neutrinos from outer space.
Shimon Kolkowitz awarded two grants to push optical atomic clocks past the standard quantum limit
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Optical atomic clocks are already the gold standard for precision timekeeping, keeping time so accurately that they would only lose one second every 14 billion years. Still, they could be made to be even more precise if they could be pushed past the current limits imposed on them by quantum mechanics.
With two new grants from the U.S. Army Research Office, an element of the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command’s Army Research Laboratory, UW–Madison physics professor Shimon Kolkowitz proposes to introduce quantum entanglement — where atoms interact with each other even when physically distant — to optical atomic clocks. The improved clocks would allow researchers to ask questions about fundamental physics, and they have applications in improving quantum computing and GPS.
Atomic clocks are so precise because they take advantage of the natural vibration frequencies of atoms, which are identical for all atoms of a particular element. These clocks operate at or near the standard quantum limit, a fundamental limit on performance imposed on clocks where the atoms are all independent of each other. The only way to push the clocks past that limit is to achieve entangled states, strange quantum states where the atoms are no longer independent and they become intertwined.
“That turns out to be hard for a number of reasons. Entanglement requires these atoms to interact with each other, but a good clock requires them not to interact with each other or anything else,” Kolkowitz says. “So, you need to engineer a situation where you can make the atoms interact strongly, but you can also switch those interactions off. And those are some of the same requirements that are necessary for quantum computing.”
Kolkowitz is already building an optical atomic clock in his lab, albeit one that is not yet using entangled states. To make the clock, they first laser-cool strontium atoms to one millionth of one degree Celsius above absolute zero, then load the atoms into an optical lattice. In the lattice, the atoms are separated into what is effectively a tiny stack of pancakes — each atom can move around within their own flat disk, but they cannot jump into another pancake.
Though the atoms’ are stuck in their own pancake, they can interact with each other if their electrons are highly excited. This type of atom, known as Rydberg atoms, becomes close to one million times larger than an unexcited counterpart because the excited electron can be microns away from the nucleus.
“It’s kind of crazy that a single atom can be that big, and when you make them that much bigger, they interact much more strongly with each other than they do in their ground states,” Kolkowitz says. “Basically it means you can go from the atoms not interacting at all to interacting very strongly. That’s exactly what you want for quantum computing, and it’s what you want for this atomic clock.”
With the two ARO grants, Kolkowitz expects to generate Rydberg atoms in his lab’s atomic clock. One of the grants, a Defense University Research Instrumentation Program (DURIP), will fund the specialized UV laser that generates the high energy photons needed to excite the atoms into the highly excited Rydberg states. The second grant will fund personnel and other supplies. Kolkowitz will collaborate with UW–Madison physics professor Mark Saffman, who, along with physics professor Thad Walker, pioneered the use of Rydberg atoms for quantum computing.
In addition to being useful for developing new approaches to ask questions about fundamental physics in his research lab, these ultraprecise atomic clocks are of interest to the Department of Defense for atomic clock-based technologies such as GPS, and because they can be used to precisely map Earth’s gravity.
Scientists Say Farewell to Daya Bay Site
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The Daya Bay Reactor Neutrino Experiment collaboration – which made a precise measurement of an important neutrino property eight years ago, setting the stage for a new round of experiments and discoveries about these hard-to-study particles – has finished taking data. Though the experiment is formally shutting down, the collaboration will continue to analyze its complete dataset to improve upon the precision of findings based on earlier measurements.
The detectors for the Daya Bay experiment were built at UW–Madison by the Physical Sciences Laboratory, and detailed in a 2012 news release.
Says PSL’s Jeff Cherwinka, U.S. chief project engineer for Daya Bay:
The University of Wisconsin Physics Department and the Physical Sciences Lab were very involved in the design, fabrication and installation of the anti-neutrino detectors for the Daya Bay Experiment. It was a great opportunity for faculty, staff, and students to participate in an important scientific measurement, while learning about another country and culture. There were many trips and man years of effort in China by UW physicists, engineers and technicians to construct the experiment and many more for operations and data taking. This international collaboration took a lot of effort, and in the end produced great results.
The chief experimentalist at UW–Madison was Karsten Heeger who has since left for Yale. At present, Prof. Baha Balantekin is the only one remaining at UW–Madison in the Daya Bay Collaboration.
Researchers awarded Department of Energy Quantum Information Science Grant
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Three UW–Madison physics professors and their colleagues have been awarded a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) High Energy Physics Quantum Information Science award for an interdisciplinary collaboration between theoretical and experimental physicists and experts on quantum algorithms.
The grant, entitled “Detection of dark matter and neutrinos enhanced through quantum information,” will bring a total of $2.3 million directly to UW-Madison. Physics faculty include principal investigator Baha Balantekin as well as Mark Saffman, and Sue Coppersmith. Collaborators on the grant include Kim Palladino at the University of Oxford, Peter Love at Tufts University, and Calvin Johnson at San Diego State University.
With the funding, the researchers plan to use a quantum simulator to calculate the detector response to dark matter particles and neutrinos. The simulator to be used is an array of 121 neutral atom qubits currently being developed by Saffman’s group. Much of the research plan is to understand and mitigate the behavior of the neutral atom array so that high accuracy and precision calculations can be performed. The primary goal of this project is to apply lessons from the quantum information theory in high energy physics, while a secondary goal is to contribute to the development of quantum information theory itself.
Mark Friesen promoted to Distinguished Scientist
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Mark Friesen
Congratulations to Mark Friesen on his promotion to Distinguished Scientist! The distinguished title is the highest title available to an academic staff member at UW–Madison.
Friesen joined the physics department in 2004 as an associate scientist, and has been with UW–Madison since 1998, when he began a postdoc in the Materials Sciences and Engineering department. His main research effort at UW–Madison has been related to silicon quantum dot quantum computing, in collaboration with physics professors Mark Eriksson, Sue Coppersmith, Bob Joynt, Maxim Vavilov, and others.
Friesen says his most important achievement in the department is serving as a research advisor: In 16 years with UW–Madison physics, he has advised or co-advised six postdocs, 11 Ph.D. theses, four current Ph.D. students, two M.S. theses, and several undergraduate research projects. He also has 123 peer-reviewed publications and five U.S. patents, and serves as a consultant for ColdQuanta, a quantum computing company.
“Mark is known around the world for his expertise in semiconductor-based quantum computing,” Mark Eriksson says. “He is especially well known for his calculations on how the band structure in silicon interacts with interfaces to determine the quantum states for electrons in silicon-based quantum devices.”
Congrats, Mark Friesen, on this well-deserved honor!
Welcome, Professor Uwe Bergmann!
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Uwe Bergmann
From bird feathers that allow for perfectly efficient flight to the bacterial enzyme that fixes nitrogen to help plants grow, nature has had a lot of time to figure things out. “There are so many things we need to be learning how to do from nature, because our methods are still much inferior to those!” says UW–Madison’s newest physics professor, Uwe Bergmann, the Martin L. Perl Professor in Ultrafast X-ray Science. “I think we are going in this direction of learning more and more from nature and using this knowledge to run our world sustainably, but still in a modern way. And that theme brings physicists and many other domains together.”
Bergmann is a physicist who develops and applies x-ray techniques to chemical, biological, engineering, and even archaeological research questions, trying to understand at the atomic level what nature has perfected over a few billion years. Prior to joining the Department on December 1, Bergmann was a Scientist at SLAC. Here, he will focus his research program on continuing to develop and apply novel x-ray techniques. To welcome Bergmann, we sat down for a (virtual) interview.
What is an overview of your research?
My research is developing and applying x-ray methods to solve problems. And these problems can be uncovering hidden writings in ancient books or the chemical elements buried in fossils to reveal the color in the original animal; studying photosynthetic water splitting to understanding the structure of liquid water; and making movies of a molecule carrying out specific work.
What techniques do you use in your research?
I use mainly x-ray techniques, and we do x-ray spectroscopy and sometimes also x-ray scattering and diffraction. The basic difference is that diffraction and scattering looks at the geometric structure — where are the atoms? — and spectroscopy looks at the chemical structure — where are the electrons? Recently we have been using powerful new x-ray lasers, where you can make ultrafast movies showing how chemical bonds are changing in real time. I also use x-ray fluorescence, which is a very powerful imaging technique for creating elemental maps showing the chemical composition of fossils for example.
Once your lab is up and running in Madison, what big projects will you focus on first?
I want to set up a new ultrafast x-UV laser system, able to making these molecular movies with femtosecond resolution. We want to make movies of fast chemical reactions and structural changes; when you expose a material to a light pulse and then watch how the atoms and electrons rearrange after the pulse. This is important for the next generation of advanced materials and a famous example is the water splitting reaction in plants to make O2. We still do not exactly know the mechanism of how these two water molecules are brought in, split up, and forced to make the bond to form O2.
In our latest project with x-ray fluorescence imaging we have scanned more than 50 pages of an ancient parchment book containing the work of the famous Greek physician, Galen of Pergamon. This so-called palimpsest contains a Syriac translation with his work including ‘On Simple Drugs’, which had been erased and overwritten with hymns in the Middle Ages, and catalogued as a new find at Saint Catherine’s Monastery in 1975. Scholars are interested in this translation as it gives information of how Galen’s work originally written in Greek spread east, were it became very popular in the Arab world. Using powerful synchrotron x-rays, we found that you can actually bring out this erased and overwritten text. And scholars can now read it! Key to this success was our new scanning system that records the whole x-ray fluorescence spectrum at each pixel of the image, and our collaborators’ ability to apply advanced machine learning algorithms to enhance the faint traces of overwritten text.
Another exciting project we are working on is an x-ray laser oscillator. There are currently five very big hard x-ray free electron lasers around the world, but they operate in a single pass, which means they are not very stable. Our idea is to use a train of pulses from one of these big x-ray lasers — those are the not-so-clean pulses — to pump our gain medium. After the first pulse creates amplified spontaneous emission, we guide the emitted beam through a cavity made of four mirrors back to the same gain medium to meet up with the next pump pulse from the train. Doing this again and again and again, lets us crank up the beam until we have a perfect, clean and stable x-ray laser pulse, and at the point we will send it out of the cavity. This is similar to how most optical lasers work. We described the idea in PNAS earlier this year, and now we have a lot of work ahead to turn it into reality.
What attracted you to UW–Madison?
For some time, I have been thinking whether it would be possible one day to combine my research activities with teaching at a university. The ultrafast x-ray science chair in the Physics Department was a perfect opportunity and an excellent fit to the research I have been pursuing my entire career. Still, it wasn’t until my visit to Madison, experiencing the wonderful interaction with the students, faculty and staff, and feeling the energy on this beautiful campus, that I fell in love with the idea of joining UW–Madison.
What is your favorite element and/or elementary particle?
Manganese is my favorite element, just because I have been spending so many years studying it and it has so many amazing properties. It’s chemically very important as it has all these different oxidation states, ranging from +2 to +7. And it’s at the heart of the tiny little machine driven by sun light that nature uses to split water into oxygen, which I think is the most important reaction on the planet. Without that reaction there would only be primitive bacterial life on earth. For the elementary particle, I feel almost ashamed but of course it has to be the electron, because it does all the work. Nuclei hardly notice any chemical change, but electrons do all the bonding, all the rearrangements that make the world run; they are the worker bees of nature.
What hobbies/other interests do you have?
I love nature, animals, music, and outdoor activities, especially in and around water.
High Energy Physics group awarded three grants totaling over $14 million
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HEP post-doc Dr. Camilla Galloni next to the CMS end cap supporting the GEM detectors that were installed this fall. The primary structure in this photo was engineered at the UW–Madison Physical Sciences Lab. The big CSC chambers were installed, upgraded and reinstalled and operated by UW physicists. The smaller GEM chambers, which are barely visible in the interstices, are being commissioned by UW–Madison physicists through the second grant mentioned in this post.
The High Energy Physics (HEP) group at UW–Madison, which broadly focuses on identifying and understanding the fundamental aspects of particles and forces in Nature, has been awarded three significant grants in 2020. The grants — two from the Department of Energy (DOE) and one from the National Science Foundation (NSF) — are awarded either directly to UW–Madison or indirectly through multi-institution international collaborations, bringing over $14 million to the department.
The first grant, $7.37 million from DOE, funds research that is expected to help physicists understand how our Universe works at its most fundamental level. At UW–Madison, this research includes experimental and theoretical studies into topics such as using the Higgs boson as a tool for new discoveries and identifying principles of dark matter.
The grant will fund five areas of research: 1) studies of high energy proton-proton collisions; 2) studies of neutrino interactions; 3) studies of super-weak signals from galactic dark matter particles; 4) wide-area imaging surveys using powerful new telescopes; and 5) computational and mathematical methods of quantum field theory and string theory.
The other two grants awarded will provide funding for upgrades to the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) project at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. The first is an NSF-funded grant for which Kevin Black is leading the UW–Madison effort to upgrade the CMS End Cap muon system upgrade. The $900,000 to the department is part of a larger multi-institutional grant through Cornell University and runs through 2025.
“The GEM detectors are novel micropattern gas detectors which can handle the high background rates expected in the end-cap muon detectors. They will enhance the triggering and reconstruction of forward muons which are expected to make significant improvements and increased acceptance to search for new particles and make precision measurements of known particles and interactions,” Black explains. “UW has a long history with CMS muon system with Prof Matt Herndon, Senior Emeritus Scientist Dick Loveless, and Senior Scientist Armando Lanaro leading to the design, construction, operation, and upgrade of the other end-cap subdetector system instrumented with Cathode Strip Chambers.”
The other CMS-specific grant is a four-year, $5.3 million DOE grant through Fermilab that will fund the CMS trigger upgrade. This funding will allow the UW–Madison CMS group to perform all aspects of the work involved in design, prototyping, qualification, production and validation of the calorimeter trigger system for the upgrade. When completed, the project is expected to result in the collection of 25 times more data than is currently possible. Sridhara Dasu is the principal investigator of this grant.
