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Recent News
August 30, 2021
Assistant Professors Matthew Yankowitz and Armita Nourmohammad have both been selected as 2021 recipients of NSF Faculty Career Development (CAREER) Awards, which are given to outstanding early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education. The award to Prof. Yankowitz is for "Tunable topological states in twisted van der Waals heterostructures” while the award to Prof. Nourmohammad is for "Emergence of functional organization in the adaptive... Read more
August 17, 2021
UW physics professor Gerald Seidler received an $800,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to create concrete waste caskets to dispose of nuclear fuel byproducts in collaboration with Sarah Saslow from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratories (PNNL). The project, Seidler’s first study on nuclear waste byproducts, will focus on furnishing cement caskets that can store nuclear fuel waste byproducts, and would support the eventual use of these caskets in storage areas deep underground... Read more
August 13, 2021
Matthew Yankowitz, an assistant professor in the departments of Physics and MSE, has been honored with a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The CAREER award is the most prestigious award given by the NSF in support of junior faculty members who exemplify the role of teacher-scholar through outstanding research, excellent teaching and the integration of education and research.
Read more at... Read more
May 10, 2021
April 29, 2021
On May 18, 2021, 1997 Nobel Laureate in Physics, William D. Phillips, will be speaking at an upcoming Frontiers of Physics Lecture Series event. You can read more and register for the event at the event page.
April 8, 2021
The first results from the Muon g-2 experiment at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory have revealed that fundamental particles called muons behave in a way that is not predicted by scientists’ best theory to date, the... Read more
March 5, 2021
We are sad to announce the passing of Joseph Rothberg, Emeritus Professor of Physics. Joe received his Ph.D. (studying muon capture in hydrogen) at Columbia University as a student of Leon Lederman. He spent a few years at Yale before joining the University of Washington as a tenured Professor. Much of Joe’s experimental work was carried out at CERN where he was an active member of the ALEPH (LEP) collaboration for many years. Joe joined the ATLAS experiment in the mid 1990’s and made many... Read more
February 25, 2021
Assistant Professor Matthew Yankowitz has been awarded the 2021 Lee Osheroff Richardson Science Prize which promotes and recognizes the novel work of young scientists working in low temperatures and/or high magnetic fields in the Americas. Dr. Matthew Yankowitz is recognized for his formative contributions to the field of moiré van der Waals heterostructures, spanning the initial discovery of band reconstruction in aligned graphene/boron nitride to more recent investigations of strongly... Read more
February 17, 2021
Early in life, we start to learn the rules of this world. We memorize simple lessons — like “what goes up, must come down” — that help us begin to make sense of our world. In time, we’re no longer surprised that rain is wet, food can spoil or the sun rises in the east and sets in the west.
But more than a century ago, scientists started to learn that all of those rules, patterns and lessons lie on a foundation that, to us, might seem filled with contradictions, confusion and chance. That... Read more
January 25, 2021
Among the vast number of possible nuclear isotopes, very few are stable. Stray above a certain mass number—by adding neutrons to an element in the Periodic Table—and eventually the corresponding nucleus can’t exist because it leaks nucleons. The neutron “dripline” that defines this limit of existence has been discovered experimentally for elements up to neon (see Viewpoint: Reaching the... Read more