Dr. Gene Amdahl died today at the age of 92. As a young computer scientist at IBM in the early 1960s, Amdahl played a crucial role in the development of the System/360 series, the most successful line of mainframe computers in IBM’s history. He received his doctorate in theoretical physics from the UW in 1952.
News Archives
Winners of 2016 W.K.H. Panofsky Prize in Experimental Particle Physics announced
Stephen Olson, Ph.D. (UW-Madison 1970, advisor Pondrom) along with Drs. Jonathan Dorfan, Davis Hitlin, and Fumikko Takasaki have been awarded the 2016 W.K.H. Panofsky Prize in Experimental Particle Physics.
Campus Dining Spots Going Receipt-free
Through the Office of Sustainability, Professor Carlsmith connected with undergraduate Rachel Feil, who developed a receipt reduction project through her sustainability internship and as a class project for an environmental studies capstone course before graduating in 2014. In addition to cutting down on litter and exposure to BPA, housing will cut receipt paper expenses by close to 90 percent, saving about $20,000 to $30,000 per year.
Students create inventions of the future in UW-Madison garage
Some of America’s greatest innovations have come from garages, or basements. The makerspace called Garage Physics at UW-Madison is both.
Garage Physics: a makerspace for undergraduate brainstorms
Duncan Carlsmith (left) discusses an advanced search engine with Josh Cherek, the student who developed it, at the Garage Physics makerspace. The twin copper pipes in the foreground replicate an 1851 experiment that Albert Einstein cited as one foundation for his special theory of relativity.
Photo: David Tenenbaum
Francis Halzen Awarded Balzan Prize
The Balzan Prizewinners 2015 were announced today in Milan by the Chairman of the Balzan General Prize Committee, Salvatore Veca, together with the President of the Balzan Prize Foundation, Enrico Decleva, at the Corriere della Sera Foundation. Francis Halzen was awarded the prestigious prize “for his unparalleled accomplishments which have led to the construction of the large IceCube Neutrino Observatory in the south polar ice, a facility that has opened up a new window into the Universe through the study of cosmological high-energy neutrinos.”
Antarctic Neutrino Detector Firms Up Cosmic Neutrino Sighting
Sorting through the billions of subatomic particles that zip through its frozen cubic-kilometer-sized detector each year, researchers using the IceCube Neutrino Observatory have gathered powerful new evidence in support of 2013 observations confirming the existence of cosmic neutrinos.
The new observations are important because they herald a new form of astronomy using neutrinos, nearly massless high energy particles generated in nature’s accelerators: black holes, massive exploding stars and the energetic cores of galaxies. In the new study, the detection of 21 ultra high-energy muons – secondary particles created on the very rare occasions when neutrinos interact with other particles – from the mass of particles coursing upward through the IceCube detector provides independent confirmation of astrophysical neutrinos from our galaxy as well as cosmic neutrinos from sources outside the Milky Way.
The results are published today in the journal Physical Review Letters.
Entrepreneurial student R&D support
Garage Physics and Venturewell offer a program of support for UW-Madison entrepreneurial teams to conduct R&D and to participate in local and national business plan competitions.
Garage Physics is a makerspace in Sterling Hall for innovative student-focused research, education, and entrepreneurship. Venturewell (formerly National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance, NCIIA) is a national organization supporting student entrepreneurship.
For additional information and to apply, visit the website.
The Department is saddened by the passing of Prof. Bob March.
Prof. March, 81 years old, died peacefully at Agrace HospiceCare on August 4, 2015. Prof. March came to Wisconsin in 1960 as a post doc with Profs. Walker and Erwin. In 1962 he joined the faculty as an Assistant Professor, working with Profs. Camerini, Fry, Cline and Reeder on bubble chambers. March pioneered measurements of muon polarization in bubble chambers, which permitted the first direct test of time reversal invariance in weak interactions. His interests later in his career were in particle astrophysics. Prof. March was author of Physics for Poets, which has been translated into 6 foreign languages. Of his more than 240 publications, more than 100 were written for general audiences. He received many distinguished teaching awards during his tenure at Wisconsin.
In 2003 Prof. March wrote a history of the early years of Physics at Wisconsin (1848-1960) which can be found here.
All are welcome to join in a memorial and celebration of Bob’s life in the Varsity Room of Union South (on the UW Campus) on Sunday, September 13, 2015 at 1:30 PM.
John Unguris, Ph.D. 1980, wins APS 2015 Joseph F. Keithley Award for Advances in Measurement Science
For the invention and development of electron spin sources and detectors, and their application to measurement science.
John Unguris received a B.S. in Physics from Carnegie Mellon University in 1973, and a Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Wisconsin in 1980. He initially joined the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) as a National Research Council Postdoctoral Research Associate investigating the application of electron spin measurements to various surface sensitive spectroscopies. This work lead to the development of an electron microscopy technique for directly imaging magnetic nanostructures, Scanning Electron Microscopy with Polarization Analysis (SEMPA). He has since used SEMPA to measure the magnetic properties of a wide variety of structures including ultrathin patterned magnetic films, oscillatory exchange coupled magnetic multilayers, and multiferroic heterostructures. He is currently a Project Leader in the Electron Physics Group in the Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology, where he is leading multiple projects investigating the fundamental physics of magnetic nanostructures. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, and has been awarded a Bronze Medal from the Department of Commerce, and is a member of AVS and APS.