Under the guide of Professor Stefano Profumo, graduate student Grant Roberts and undergraduates Lila Braff, Aarna Garg, and Jackson O’Donnell have published a new study titled “Early formation of supermassive black holes from the collapse of strongly self-interacting dark matter.” The study aims to explain the presence of high-redshift supermassive black holes in the early […]
SCIPP member Michael Riordan has been awarded the 2025 Abraham Pais Prize for History of Physics by the American Physical Society. Michael was cited “For important contributions to the history of post-World War II physics, including the discovery of quarks, the invention and development of the transistor, and the search for the Higgs boson; and for making […]
UC Santa Cruz has released an article honoring various postdoctoral scholars for their contributions in their respective fields and departments. Amon those honored is our own, Jennifer Ott, recognized for her significant role in Bruce Schumm’s Fast Sensors Group, as well as her participation in quality control of pixel-detector modules for the future upgrade of […]
SCIPP postdoctoral fellow, Sarah Geller, has co-authored a new study on primordial black holes. Theorists conceive that primordial black holes exert a gravitational force, which could account for at least some portion of dark matter in the universe. It is understood that primordial black holes do not “live” in our solar system, instead they travel […]
Christian Cagnino, a former Astrophysics student at UCSC is interning at Jefferson Lab through the DOE’s Science Undergraduate Laboratory Internship (SULI) program. Cagnino’s research, titled “Understanding the Characteristics of Magnetrons with Magnetic Field Trimming,” explores the potential of Magnetrons as alternative radio frequency sources for particle accelerators, but the implications are far-reaching overall. Mainly, Cagnino […]
Vera C. Rubin Observatory is a new astronomical facility under construction, funded by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) & the US Department of Energy (DOE). The facility has reached a new milestone recently, on April 27, 2024, when the 8.4-meter primary/tertiary mirror was successfully coated with protected silver. This paves the way for the […]
On January 9, 2024, the AESOP-Lite experiment launched on NASA’s largest balloon (60 million cubic feet) from the NASA Long Duration Balloon (LDB) site located on the Ross Ice Shelf close to McMurdo Station in Antarctica. AESOP-Lite is a collaboration between Robert Johnson of the UCSC Physics Department/SCIPP and the Bartol Research Institute at the […]
SCIPP researchers Amy Furniss and Tesla Jeltema have been elected to leadership positions in the VERITAS and DESC collaborations, respectively. Furniss, a new Associate Teaching Professor in the Physics Department, will serve as spokesperson for the Very Energetic Radiation Imaging Telescope Array System (VERITAS), a high-energy gamma-ray observatory with approximately 100 collaborators. VERITAS is made […]
The first Bay Area Strings, Information and Cosmology Symposium (BASICS) took place on October 13-14 in Santa Cruz. Over 70 theorists from the greater Bay Area and beyond were in attendance. The meeting featured talks by representatives from Berkeley, Davis, Stanford, Santa Barbara, and Santa Cruz. The topics covered a wide range in fundamental theory, […]
SCIPP researchers visited the Santa Cruz High School AP Physics classes on October 26, 2023 to introduce students to particle physics research. Students gained hands-on experience with the “Big Analysis of Muons in ATLAS,” and learned about potential careers in physics and astrophysics. The class began with an overview of the particle zoo and the […]
Earlier this year, SCIPP faculty member Shiva Abbaszadeh (Electrical and Computer Engineering) won a three-year $3.7M Department of Energy (DOE) Energy Earthshot award with a proposal to resolve the paradox of rhizosphere effect on soil carbon cycle. Abbaszadeh’s proposal “addresses the core mission of the Energy Earthshot by understanding how plant roots affect soil organic […]
The first computational HEP traineeship summer school took place July 24-28 at Princeton University. Student trainees completed various workshops and activities including hands-on demos, big picture talks, research papers, and more. Read more here.
Congratulations to SCIPP faculty member Howard Haber, whose book, From Spinors to Supersymmetry, has just been officially published by Cambridge University Press. Co-authored alongside Herbi Dreiner and Stephen Martin, the book gives an insight into supersymmetry and spinor techniques within quantum field theory. Containing numerous practical calculation examples and exercises, this book aims to provide […]
SCIPP celebrates 15 years of looking into the gamma-ray sky with the Fermi satellite. The Fermi mission was launched on the 11th of June, 2008 into low-earth orbit, and it has been scanning the gamma-ray sky since then. Its findings have been published in over 5000 publications, including over 30 in Science or Nature. The Santa […]
Congratulations to Samantha Contreras, a physics undergrad at UC Santa Cruz and a researcher for the ATLAS group at SCIPP, who was recently named a Goldwater Scholar by the Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Foundation. Read more about it here.
Congratulations to SCIPP faculty Wolfgang Altmannshofer and Howard Haber for being honored as Outstanding Referees by the Americal Physical Society. The Outstanding Referees Program recognizes scientists based on their manuscript review reports for the APS journals over the course of a career. Fewer than 0.2% of APS members are recognized each year. Michael Dine was named Outstanding […]
On March 4th, 2023, high school students from Santa Cruz county as well as the Bay Area traveled to UC Santa Cruz for the annual SCIPP/Quarknet Particle Physics Masterclass. Over 50 students were in attendance, working alongside SCIPP faculty to analyze data from the ATLAS experiment and experience what it is like to research Particle […]
SCIPP faculty discuss the importance of training in computational high-energy physics and introduce the new Western Advanced Training for Computational High-Energy Physics (WATCHEP) research program. Click here to read the full article.
UCSC Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow and SCIPP affiliate, Noémie Globus, alongside Roger Blandford, investigates how elementary particle interactions could lead to the handedness we see in biological molecules. Click here to read the full article.
James Bullock, current Dean at UC Irvine’s School of Physical Sciences and former SCIPP Ph.D. Student, answers questions about the James Webb Telescope as well as his experiences as an astrophysicist. Read the full article here.
The most powerful digital camera ever built, now being assembled at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory at Stanford University, will create a vast panorama of space by taking snapshots of 20 billion galaxies — more than twice as many as there are people on Earth. “The discovery potential is fantastic,” said Steve Ritz, project scientist for […]
Several articles, interviews, and a special feature on the occasion of this anniversary. In these articles renowned theorists and experimentalists remember crucial moments from the times leading to the discovery and also provide a look ahead. Includes the article, “Higgs Boson Physics – The View Ahead” written by SCIPP faculty member, Howard Haber. Click here […]
