Physics grad student and teaching assistant Alleta Maier has been honored with one of 15 campus-wide TA awards. Alleta earned an Early Excellence in Teaching Award. Congrats!
News Archives
Laser focused on Alpha Centauri
Shine a laser pointer at a cat, and the cat may see and try to catch the light, but it certainly won’t feel it.
What if that light were not a milliwatt laser, but one hundred trillion times stronger — and the cat were essentially weightless, floating in space?
“Normally, optical forces are zero — you don’t feel light pushing on you. But with a very strong laser on a very light object, the forces start to be measurable and significant, and we are interested in studying those forces,” says Victor Brar, assistant professor of physics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “A new idea called laser sailing is one area where these optical forces become relevant.”
Brar, with graduate student Joel Siegel and colleagues, conducted a set of simulations in which they show that a self-stabilizing laser sail is theoretically achievable, making it that much more feasible that a spacecraft will make it to neighboring star systems in our lifetime.
Physics Fair volunteer opportunities
Please consider presenting or volunteering at the Annual Physics Fair!
First cohort of students dives into new quantum computing master’s
The inaugural MS in Physics–Quantum Computing is the first program of its kind in the U.S. It addresses an emerging workforce need by preparing students to enter this rapidly growing and highly complex field. Most of the students will complete their degrees August, and we checked in with them one semester into their studies.
Physics Students Offered Phi Beta Kappa Membership
Ten physics students have been honored with an invitation to join Phi Beta Kappa:
Dongxia Wu
Mari McPheron
Runze Li
Vicky Wen
Max McLachlan
Adam Shandonay
Thomas Yan
Sean Huth
Christopher DuPre
Steven Kan
Congratulations!
Baha Balantekin elected APS Speaker of the Council
Baha Balantekin, the Eugene P. Wigner Professor of Physics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, has been elected Speaker of the Council for the American Physics Society (APS). He will serve as Speaker-elect in 2020, Speaker in 2021, and Speaker Emeritus in 2022.
The APS Speaker of the Council presides over the Council, a body of elected leadership within the professional society. The Speaker also serves on the APS Board of Directors as well as presiding over the Council’s Steering Committee.
“It is an honor to be elected, for me and for the UW,” Balantekin says. “Speaker of the Council is another public face of APS besides the Presidential line.”
APS is the professional society of not only physicists in the United States, but also has a worldwide membership. According to the mission statement, APS exists to advance and diffuse the knowledge of physics for the benefit of humanity, to promote physics, and to serve the broader physics community. APS relies on volunteers to serve in leadership positions, such as Speaker of the Council, to advance its mission.
“Having Prof. Balantekin in the leadership role in the American Physics Society is a matter of pride for our department, and we are happy to share his leadership skills with the wider physics community,” says Sridhara Dasu, chair of the UW–Madison department of physics.
Balantekin was elected to the role at the annual election meeting of the APS Board and Council, held in early November 2019. He has been a Fellow of APS since 1994. He is currently completing his second year on the Council of Representatives and his first year on the Board of Directors, to which he was elected last year.
Mark Saffman wins WARF Innovation Award
Two technical breakthroughs, from the realms of experimental physics and microscopic communities, have claimed top honors from WARF this year.
The 2019 WARF Innovation Award winners are: Mark Saffman (physics) and Ophelia Venturelli, Philip Romero and Ryan Hsu (biochemistry). Saffman has developed simplified optical hardware for quantum computing. His technology, recently licensed to ColdQuanta Inc., improves an apparatus for particle trapping, which will reduce the cost and complexity of next-generation quantum computing devices.
“We’re trying to push the envelope on how much computation we can do with a quantum computer,” said Saffman. “We currently have more than 100 quantum bits…that’s the largest number of quantum bits any lab in the world has been able to demonstrate to date.”
Ingersoll museum featured in L&S article
The Ingersoll Physics Museum and Steve Narf were featured in an article about museums and special collections within the College of Letters & Sciences.
Dark Matter Experiment’s Central Component Takes a Deep Dive – Nearly a Mile Underground
Last week, crews at the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF) in South Dakota strapped the central component of LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) – the largest direct-detection dark matter experiment in the U.S. – below an elevator and s-l-o-w-l-y lowered it 4,850 feet down a shaft formerly used in gold-mining operations. At UW-Madison, the experiment is led by Physics Prof. Kim Palladino.
Wesley Smith honored for achievements in particle physics
The American Physical Society (APS) announced today, Oct 22, that Wesley Smith, a University of Wisconsin–Madison Professor Emeritus of Physics and former Bjorn Wiik Professor of Physics, has earned the 2020 W.K.H. Panofsky Prize in Experimental Particle Physics.
The Panofsky Prize recognizes “outstanding achievements in experimental particle physics,” and is the top APS award in that field.
Smith developed systems that enabled the discovery of the Higgs boson, a previously elusive particle believed to give mass to all matter. Smith led a team of over 100 scientists on the CMS experiment trigger system that captured the data for the Higgs’ discovery at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva.
“In the experiment at the LHC, proton beams collide 40 million times per second, and each time the beams cross, detectors record a snapshot. That’s over a megabyte of data, 40 million times per second. You can’t store it all,” Smith explains. “The problem is, one in 10 trillion of those collisions actually has a Higgs in it, and you don’t want to lose any of them. So how do you do this?”
To sift through the enormous amount of data, Smith and his team developed a triggering system. The two-step mechanism quickly filters through the first set of data, using high speed electronics to take one billion collisions per second and identify interesting patterns in up to 100,000 of them. Then, the second step uses thousands of computing nodes to filter the data down to 1,000 collisions per second — a reasonable amount of data that can be stored.
“We designed a large amount of electronics that runs incredibly fast, and it had to be programmable and flexible because we didn’t know what we were going to find,” Smith says. “We’re basically throwing out 99.9999% of the data, and keeping a tiny fraction where all the physics has to come out.”
Smith, who had previously led a team charged with a similar task for the Zeus experiment in Hamburg, Germany, was asked to lead the CMS triggering team in 1993. The Higgs was discovered in June 2012.
Even though a major goal of the CMS experiment was realized, physicists have much left to learn about the Higgs, which means studying more Higgs events. Continuing plans for the experiment, set to go online in the mid-2020s, involve increasing the amount of proton collisions by a factor of 10, resulting in 10 times more data per second. As Smith was finishing his career, he worked on the initial prototyping for an even more advanced triggering system to filter through larger data sets.
“This award means a great deal to me because it’s the recognition of my colleagues, of the team of people who contributed, and because it recognizes this particularly challenging area of detector development and particle physics experimentation which had to be solved in order to do physics at the LHC,” Smith says.
UW–Madison physics department chairperson Sridhara Dasu, who trained with Smith before beginning his faculty position, nominated Smith for the award.
“Professor Smith is recognized as the world-leading expert in the design, construction and operations of the trigger electronics system for hadron colliders,” Dasu says. “The trigger system is at the very heart of particle physics experiments, requiring the very best talent. Professor Smith is the leader in training those best experimenters.”