Nobel laureate Adam Riess to give public lecture, The Surprising Expansion History of the Universe

On January 14, the White House announced that President Biden named Professor Andrew Wetzel as one of nearly 400 recipients of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE).

For several months earlier this year Physics and Astronomy PhD student Arsalan Adil traveled across northern Pakistan by motorcycle, sharing his love of science. In a recent Letters and Science Magazine article he is quoted as saying, “We often have discussions about diversity, equity and inclusion in physics, but often missing from these discussions are considerations about global inequities. There are so many people who are passionate about science, who want to study science, but they don’t have the resources for it.”

From the UC Davis Letters and Science Magazine: Behind the blackboards of Roessler Hall is a storage space filled with gadgets, tools and other physics demonstration materials. Matthew Smith stood among the rows of shelves in the room. In his hands, he held one end of a hand boiler flask; its opposite end, connected via a thin glass tube, was filled with an amber liquid. As Smith held the flask, his body heated the apparatus causing a shift in temperature and pressure. The amber liquid began bubbling. “I always equate physics demonstrations to visiting the Grand Canyon,” said Smith. “You can see a picture of the Grand Canyon but going there just cements the experience in way that a flat image can’t.” For close to 20 years, Smith has worked as the Department of Physics and Astronomy’s lecture demonstration support technician. Each quarter, he assists faculty and lecturers between 10 and 20 classes, helping with audio-visual equipment problems and solving information technology questions.

A recent paper led by first and second authors Fei Ge (UC Davis graduate student) and Marius Millea (UC Davis Project Scientist) presents results from two years of surveying the millimeter wavelength sky with the third generation camera on the South Pole Telescope.

Bob Svoboda has been selected to receive the 2024 APS DPF Instrumentation Award for his work on developing neutrons as a precision calibration source for Super-Kamiokande and for DUNE. He worked to develop a submersible neutron generator for Super-K that took the absolute energy calibration from 4% to 0.7%, allowing precision measurements of the solar neutrino spectrum. For DUNE, he also discovered that it was possible to shoot neutrons deep into liquid argon for calibrations due to a weird interference feature in the cross section at 57 keV. This feature was confirmed in an experiment done at LANL by Bob, Emilija, and Mike Mulhearn.

Strange particles that have mass when moving one direction but no mass when moving in another were first theorised more than a decade ago by a team including UCD Prof. Warren Pickett. These mass-shifting particles have now been glimpsed in a semimetal exposed to extreme conditions.

Congratulations to Jaroslav Trnka, 2024 recipient, Division of Particles and Fields Fellowship, "For deep contributions to exposing hidden mathematical structures in particle scattering amplitudes."