http://scipp.ucsc.edu/news.html SCIPP News https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=3sESUT1UO6E&feature=youtu.be Video: My Life as a Particle Physicist, in American Sign Language, by SCIPPer Giordon Stark https://iris-hep.org/2020/02/17/analysis-preservation.html SCIPPer Giordon Stark was an Instructor at the recent IRIS-HEP analysis preservation boot camp https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/a-matter-of-interpretation-asl-physics Deaf scientist Giordon Stark works to ensure the field of physics research is accessible to all. https://inquiry.ucsc.edu/ Waiting with GODOT. Studying the physics of lightning requires fortitude and patience.By Anil Ananthaswamy https://www.aps.org/programs/honors/prizes APS announces 2020 recipients of Julius Edgar Lilienfeld Prize https://news.ucsc.edu/2019/07/breakthrough-listen.html Breakthrough Listen launches new optical search with VERITAS Telescope Array https://youtu.be/0WLk9ndcGEk Just released is a short movie of Roger the Koala making his stratospheric journey in hopes of finding the ubiquitous cosmic rays. Music by SCIPP graduate student Sarah Mechbal, and her band Salmon Hammock. http://scipp.ucsc.edu/news.html Physics Professor Michael Dine joins panel on string theory at World Science Festival https://www.uslua.org/ The diverse group included representatives from the USLUA, SLAC and Fermilab and was able to contact all 538 offices of Congress to deliver the funding ask of the Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel (P5). https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/desi-lenses-see-first-light DESI lenses see first light https://quarknet.org/content/friday-flyer-february-1-2019 Spotlight on the SCIPP University of California Santa Cruz QuarkNet Center SCIPP is the Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics (http://scipp.ucsc.edu/), the particle physics research institute at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Their main work in QuarkNet in the past few years has been to run great ATLAS masterclasses. The "SCIPP center" is headed up by mentor Jason Nielsen and administrator Vicki Johnson. Teachers in the group participate in many ways, including those masterclasses. Last November, SCIPP center teacher Jonathan Rockman lead his students in World Wide Data Day. https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/the-farmer-physicist SCIPP Member, Jacob Pasner, in Symmetry Magazine: The farmer physicist: A graduate student looks for belonging inside and outside academia, 01/22/19 By Sarah Charley. https://news.ucsc.edu/2019/01/telescope-inauguration.html SCIPP Member, David A. Williams, in the UCSC News: Scientists to inaugurate a new type of gamma ray telescope at Whipple Observatory The prototype Schwarzschild-Couder Telescope (pSCT) is designed as a pathfinder telescope for the Cherenkov Telescope Array. http://www.uslua.org/ A brief statement from Jacob: I'm very excited for the opportunity to represent SCIPP and ATLAS this coming March as a particle physics advocate to US congress representatives. I'd like to thank the USLUA for offering me this opportunity, my advisor Dr. Jason Nielsen for his continuing support and Dr. Giordon Stark for nominating me to give this Lightning Round Talk. https://about.gitlab.com/customers/cern/ Particle physics laboratory uses GitLab to connect researchers from across the globe. The European-based particle physics laboratory uses the application to manage hundreds of projects with more than 7,000 active contributors. https://physics.aps.org Two CERN experiments have observed the most probable decay channel of the Higgs boson—a milestone in the pursuit to confirm whether this remarkable particle behaves as physicists expect. https://news.ucsc.edu/2018/08/higgs-decay.html UC Santa Cruz physicists made important contributions to the discovery, which confirms the fate of the vast majority of all Higgs bosons produced in the LHC https://news.ucsc.edu/2018/07/veritas-blazar.html VERITAS supplies critical piece to neutrino discovery puzzle https://www6.slac.stanford.edu/news/2018-06-11-perspectives-10-years-discovery-fermi.aspx By capturing the most energetic light in the sky, the spacecraft continues to teach us about the mysteries of the universe. By William Atwood, Peter Michelson and Steven Ritz https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ Explanation: Rising through a billowing cloud of smoke, a long time ago from a planet very very close by, this Delta II rocket left Cape Canaveral Air Force Station's launch pad 17-B at 12:05 pm EDT on June 11, 2008. Snug in the payload section was GLAST, the Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope. GLAST's detector technology was developed for use in terrestrial particle accelerators. So from orbit, GLAST can detect gamma-rays from extreme environments above the Earth and across the distant Universe, including supermassive black holes at the centers of distant active galaxies, and the sources of powerful gamma-ray bursts. Those formidable cosmic accelerators achieve energies not attainable in earthbound laboratories. Now known as the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, on the 10 year anniversary of its launch, let the Fermi Science Playoffs begin. https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap180608.html Astronomy Picture of the Day is the Fermi Science Playoffs image, in honor of Fermi's upcoming 10-year launch Anniversary, next Monday, June 11, 2018 https://news.ucsc.edu/2018/05/hurricane-antimatter.html First detection of the downward positron beam from a terrestrial gamma-ray flash was captured by an instrument flown through the eyewall of Hurricane Patricia in 2015 https://aesoplite.com/ AESOP-Lite, the cosmic rays experiment SCIPP Members, Professor Robert Johnson, and Graduate Student Sarah Mechbal, have been working on, with a group at the University of Delaware, should** be launching from Esrange, Sweden at 0000 UTC (3.00pm PST) for a 5 days flight to Northern Canada. It is possible for everyone to watch the live stream (already going) provided by the Swedish Space Corporation, and to track the trajectory of our payload across the stratosphere. http://www.svcomiccon.com/index.php/guest/christian-johnson/ Christian Johnson is a PhD candidate at the University of California, Santa Cruz studying particle physics. His research focuses on using NASA's Fermi Large Area Telescope (Fermi-LAT), a gamma-ray telescope, to search for evidence of new physics. He recently led a team of Fermi-LAT scientists to set a new upper limit on the abundance of primordial black holes (PBHs) by combing the Fermi-LAT data to look for evidence of the Hawking radiation produced by low-mass PBHs. He is also interested in novel searches for dark matter usingFermi-LAT, and in particular is studying gamma-ray emission from near the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy. https://news.ucsc.edu/2018/04/deep-learning-galaxies.html A deep learning algorithm trained on images from cosmological simulations has been surprisingly successful at classifying real galaxies in Hubble images https://officeofresearch.ucsc.edu/iatc/commercialization-/services/launchpad-2017-awards.html Prof. Schumm, and fellow PI's Simone Mazza and Hartmut Sadrozinski, applied for funding for their project Radiation Hardened AC-Ultra-Fast Silicon Detector (UFSD) through "Launchpad" which is part of the UC Santa Cruz SPLICE program, funded by the State of California Assembly Bill (AB) 2664 innovation and entrepreneurship program. https://news.ucsc.edu/2018/02/leauthaud-sloan-fellowship.html SCIPPer and UCSC Astronomer, Alexie Leauthaud, wins Sloan Research Fellowship! https://news.ucsc.edu/2018/02/primordial-black-holes.html SCIPP/Physics Graduate Student, Christian Johnson, quoted in the UCSC News about the recent paper, Novel search strategy advances the hunt for primordial black holes. http://atlas.cern/updates/physics-briefing/searching-supersymmetric-higgs-bosons-compressed-frontier December 18, 2017: Two new ATLAS news releases that feature exciting results from our SCIPP ATLAS group including SCIPP Members Prof. Mike Hance, and Graduate Student Sheena Schier! https://news.ucsc.edu/2017/12/jeltema-dark-energy.html Jeltema has a leading role in the Dark Energy Survey, a major international collaboration that is gathering precise measurements of the evolution of cosmic structure https://news.ucsc.edu/2017/11/schalk-aaas-fellow.html Terry Schalk, adjunct professor emeritus of physics at UC Santa Cruz, has been awarded the distinction of AAAS Fellow by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Election as AAAS Fellow is an honor bestowed upon AAAS members by their peers. Excess antielectrons aren't from nearby dead stars, study says The finding keeps open the possibility that the particles come from dark matter http://scipp.ucsc.edu/news.html SCIPP members Nicolo Cartiglia, Hartmut Sadrozinski and Abraham Seiden were looking for an opportunity to market their recent invention "AC-coupled Ultra-fast Silicon Detectors (AC-UFSD)" which is along the lines of decade-old expertise of cutting-edge instrumentation pursued by SCIPP. https://officeofresearch.ucsc.edu/ipmgmt/irp/index.html Congratulations to SCIPP Member, Professor Michael Dine, who has been selected as a 2018 recipient, together with Ann Nelson, of the APS Sakurai Prize for groundbreaking explorations of physics beyond the standard model of particle physics, including their seminal joint work on dynamical super-symmetry breaking, and for their innovative contributions to a broad range of topics, including new models of electroweak symmetry breaking, baryogenesis, and solutions to the strong charge parity problem. Michael adds, I am very gratified at being included in this illustrious group, which includes, of course, our own Howard Haber. (SCIPP Member, Professor Howard Haber, was a 2017 recipient of the APS Sakurai Prize.) The prize will be presented at the APS April Meeting on Sunday April 15. https://www.aps.org/programs/honors/prizes/sakurai.cfm Article in CERN Courier includes work done at SCIPP by SCIPPers Natasha Woods, Hass AbouZeid, and Professor Mike Hance. http://cerncourier.com/cws/article/cern/69893 What a great conference we hosted at SCIPP/UC Santa Cruz this week. In collaboration with CERN, TWEPP-17 was a success. Thank you to all participants. http://scipp.ucsc.edu/TWEPP2017/ ATLAS celebrates its 25th anniversary. Discover the history of the Collaboration and join the celebration with SCIPP. https://atlas.cern/atlas25 On Saturday, 9/16, twenty-one SCIPPers, ex-SCIPPers and their families participated in two teams in the annual Aquathon to raise awareness and funds for Abilities United, the not-for-profit agency that provides services to children and adults with developmental and physical disabilities. Our A-team, the Physics Aqua-Slugs, swam 104 laps and placed second overall, leaving many professional teams in its wake. Our team Priya's Rhymers excelled in the following BBQ. https://www.abilitiesunitedevents.org Descsription and Impact of US patent No 9,613,993 B2 , granted Apr. 4, 2017 Segmented AC-coupled readout from continuous collection electrodes in semiconductor sensors Hartmut Sadrozinski, Abraham Seiden UC Santa Cruz Nicolo Cartiglia INFN Torino http://scipp.ucsc.edu/news.html Physicists Try to Revive a Super-Safe, Decades-Old Cancer Treatment https://www.wired.com/story/physicists-try-to-revive-a-super-safe-decades-old-cancer-treatment/ SCIPP Member, Professor and Physics Department Chair Robert Johnson, in the news with the pCT (Proton Computed Tomography/proton CT) Project! http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2017/jul/17/proton-tomography-offers-better-preparation-for-therapy The Large Hadron Collider at CERN has restarted after its Extended Year-End Shutdown.  The ATLAS experiment captured first collisions on May 23. http://scipp.ucsc.edu/ SCIPP Member and Physicist Anthony Aguirre to be honored for his appointment as endowed chair in physics of information! http://news.ucsc.edu/2016/09/aguirre-appointment.html December 2016: Just announced! SCIPP Member and Distinguished Professor, Joel Primack, has been elected as President-elect of Sigma Xi. Congratulations Joel! http://scipp.ucsc.edu/ November 2016: SCIPP Member, Alan Litke, part of a team of ATLAS collaborators who developed a system that can record the neural activity of retinal cells. Inspired by the silicon microstrip detector technology employed in ATLAS, the team created an advanced multi-electrode array system that can simultaneously record the neural activity of hundreds of the retinal output (ganglion) cells. Full story at ATLAS Outreach at CERN. http://atlas.cern/discover/technology-transfer November 2016: Article published this morning on the Symmetry Magazine website, entitled, "What more can we learn about the Higgs?", in which four physicists, one of which is SCIPP Member Howard Haber, discuss Higgs boson research since the discovery with Angela Anderson of Symmetry Magazine (a joint Fermilab/SLAC publication). http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/qa-what-more-can-we-learn-about-the-higgs October 2016: Alan Litke (SCIPP) and David Feldheim (MCD Biology) have been awarded an NIH grant for interdisciplinary neuroscience research using their novel, comprehensive measurements of visually-evoked brain activity. The bulk of the credit for the experimental work goes to SCIPP postdoc Shinya Ito, with important technical contributions from Forest Martinez-McKinney and Serguei Kachiguine. For instrumental contributions to the theory of the properties, reactions, and signatures of the Higgs boson. https://www.aps.org/units/dpf/awards/recipient.cfm?first_nm=Howard&last_nm=Haber&year=2017 September 2016: ATLAS observes the Higgs boson with Run 2 data http://atlas.cern/updates/physics-briefing/atlas-observes-higgs-boson-run-2-data September 2016 http://phys.org/news/2016-08-nasa-fermi-mission-dark August 2016 http://scipp.ucsc.edu/news.html June 2016 http://news.ucsc.edu/2016/06/goldwater-scholar.html June 2016 http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=134446&org=NSF&from=news May 2016 http://news.ucsc.edu/2015/03/lhc-restart.html