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News: Research
May 31, 2024
It came as a shock last year when a new effect was seen in electrons. Researchers at the University of Washington, led by Professor Xiaodong Xu, reported in August 2023 that in a stack of two atomically thin crystalline sheets offset from each other at a slight angle, electrons behaved like quasiparticles with fractional amounts of charge, such as −⅔ and −⅗. A few months later, a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology reported the same effect in another material. It was the first... Read more
May 29, 2024
April 3, 2024
David Kaplan is on a quest to straighten out chirality, or “handedness,” in particle physics. A theorist at the University of Washington, Seattle, Kaplan has been wrestling with chirality conundrums for over 30 years. The main problem he has been working on is how to place chiral particles, such as left-handed electrons or right-handed antineutrinos, on a discrete space-time, or “lattice.” That may sound like a minor concern, but without a solution to this problem the weak interaction—and by... Read more
March 24, 2024
October 17, 2023
UW News has just posted a story about Project 8, an international endeavor to try to determine the mass of the neutrino. In a paper published last month, the Project 8 team reports that its distinctive strategy shows real promise to be the first approach to measure the neutrino’s mass. Once fully scaled up, Project 8 could also reveal how neutrinos influenced the early evolution of the universe as we know it.
Project 8’s first experiments took place on the UW campus, and many UW scientists are... Read more