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News: Research
October 6, 2020
Physicists at the University of Washington have discovered that by layering 2D materials (like a stack of pancakes), rotating them in particular configurations and exposing them to extremely low temperatures, the layers exhibit "exotic and unexpected" properties.Featured on UW News
September 25, 2020
When a new and deadly coronavirus began to sweep across the world earlier this year, researchers from the UW’s Department of Physics, the University of Hong Kong and other institutions quickly assembled a team to learn how B cells — a central player in adaptive immunity — were engaging this enemy.
With about 10 billion B cells circulating in the human body at any given time constantly searching for invaders, that’s no easy task, said the UW’s Zach Montague, one of the team’s principal... Read more
Three UW Physics professors are the recipients of the 2021 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics
September 10, 2020
Three UW Physics professors are the recipients of the 2021 Breakthrough Prize in fundamental physics: Emeritus Professor Eric Adelberger, Professor Jens Gundlach, and Professor (and former Chair) Blayne Heckel. They are joined by UW Professor of Biochemistry, David Baker, who was awarded the Breakthrough Prize in life sciences. The Breakthrough Prizes, together with Nobels, are the most prestigious prizes in science. These $3 million prizes have been awarded annually since 2013 by the... Read more
September 1, 2020
UW News has posted a story about a $3 million grant to the UW to establish a NSF Research Traineeship at the University of Washington for graduate students in quantum information science and technology. The new traineeship — known as Accelerating Quantum-Enabled Technologies, or AQET — will make the UW one of just “a handful” of universities with a formal, interdisciplinary curriculum in this field. AQET students can come from doctoral programs in the Department of Chemistry, the Department of... Read more
July 1, 2020
John Cramer, professor of physics, is weighing in with a potential solution to one of the longest-running puzzles in quantum mechanics: a phenomenon known as wave function collapse.Featured on GeekWire
June 22, 2020
Katie McCormick, postdoctoral scholar in physics, explains how lasers can produce the slowest thing on earth.Featured on The Conversation
June 11, 2020
Today, stars fill the night sky. But when the universe was in its infancy, it contained no stars at all. And an international team of scientists is closer than ever to detecting, measuring and studying a signal from this era that has been traveling through the cosmos ever since that starless era ended some 13 billion years ago.
That team — led by researchers at the University of Washington, the University of Melbourne, Curtin University and Brown University —... Read more
April 28, 2020
Mengyu Yan, physics postdoctorate and Mitchell Kaiser, chemistry graduate student are developing a tool that uses electromagnetism to destroy viruses and bacteria.Featured on GeekWire
April 7, 2020
Gray Rybka, associate professor of physics, explains how scientists are detecting dark matter.Featured on Symmetry
April 6, 2020
The force due to gravity reduces with the square of the distance. If you double the distance, the force is not halved but reduced to a quarter of its original value. This law, called an inverse-square law, is based purely on geometry: we live in three spatial dimensions, and therefore the inverse-square law holds. However, if the universe has more than three spatial dimensions, the inverse-square law would break.
UW physicists J. G. Lee, E. G. Adelberger, T. S. Cook, S. M. Fleischer, and B. R.... Read more