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News: Research
January 13, 2020
Associate professor of physics, Gray Rybka, discusses how new technology that creates "atom waves" could impact the field of physics.Featured on Scientific American
January 1, 2020
Gerald Miller, physics professor, discusses the history of how what we know about the atom was discovered.Featured on Live Science
December 5, 2019
Read more of an article from the American Physical Society that overviews the neutrino mass programs. It references work in which the UW was/is a major player; SNO Project (Nobel prize 2015), the KATRIN project (current mass limits - see PRL) and Project 8 (the next generation neutrino mass experiment, currently residing in Physics-Astronomy Building basement).
November 8, 2019
Electrons in atoms are pretty talented. They can form chemical bonds, get kicked out of the atom and even “jump” to different locations based on their energetic states.In 1961, atomic physicist Ugo Fano theorized that electrons harbor another and unexpected talent: They can interfere with themselves as they simultaneously take two different quantum-mechanical paths. On one path, they jump within the atom between discrete energy states. On the other path, they jump off the atom into the... Read more
October 31, 2019
A satellite smaller than a loaf of bread will, if all goes well, launch this weekend on its way to low-Earth orbit. It will be the first student-built satellite from Washington state to go into space.Featured on UW News
October 7, 2019
A team led by scientists at the University of Washington has designed and tested a 3D-printed metamaterial that can manipulate light with nanoscale precision. As they report in a paper published Oct. 4 in the journal Science Advances, their designed optical element focuses light to discrete points in a 3D helical pattern.
The team’s design principles and experimental findings... Read more
September 23, 2019
At the 2019 Topics in Astroparticle and Underground Physics conference in Toyama, Japan, leaders from the KATRIN experiment reported on Friday that the estimated range for the rest mass of the neutrino is no larger than 1 electron volt, or eV. These inaugural results obtained earlier this year by the Karlsruhe Tritium Neutrino experiment — or KATRIN — cut the mass range for the neutrino by more than half by lowering the upper limit of the neutrino’s mass from 2 eV to 1 eV.The University of... Read more
September 10, 2019
Lukasz Fidkowski, an assistant professor of physics at the University of Washington, is one of the winners of a 2020 New Horizons in Physics Prize from the Breakthrough Foundation. The prize to early-career scientists, announced Sept. 5, recognizes Fidkowski and his three co-recipients “for incisive contributions to the understanding of topological states of matter and the relationships between them,” according to the citation.Fidkowski’s area of research is in condensed matter physics. This... Read more
August 7, 2019
Christopher Phillips, a research specialist in the Department of Astronomy, explains why there will be ideal conditions for stargazing in August.Featured on Vashon-Maury Island Beachcomber
August 5, 2019
In a recent undergraduate physics lab, students donned immersive headsets and held controllers in both hands to conduct an experiment in virtual reality (VR). As they manipulated objects in the virtual world, physics doctoral student Jared Canright bounced around the room, answering questions and addressing glitches. For the undergraduates, the VR experience was a novel way to learn a challenging physics concept. For Canright, it was an important step in his graduate research.
Canright is... Read more