Halzen is being honored for his decades-long effort to build a massive, cubic kilometer telescope under the Antarctic ice to detect cosmic neutrinos. Last year, the telescope yielded the first evidence of cosmic neutrinos, nearly massless high-energy particles thought to come from cosmic sources such as supernovae, black holes and the violent cores of galaxies. The work opened a new field of astronomy.
News Archives
Wisconsin Science Festival 2014 – Visit website for lots of activity options
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.