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SCIPP scientists bring diamond sensor technology to fusion energy research
SCIPP researchers Simone Mazza and Bruce Schumm are partnering with the company Advent Diamond to develop diamond-based sensors designed to monitor the intense radiation inside future fusion-energy reactors. The sensors are being designed to detect high-energy “burn” products from fusion reactions, offering a key diagnostic tool for safe reactor operation. As part of the University…
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Earl Almazan Receives Graduate Instrumentation Research Award
SCIPP graduate student researcher Earl Almazan has been selected to receive a Graduate Instrumentation Research Award (GIRA) from the Coordinating Panel for Advanced Detectors (CPAD), part of the American Physical Society’s Division of Particles and Fields (DPF). The national award recognizes Almazan’s innovative work developing thin-film sensors for charged particle tracking—technology that could significantly enhance…
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Stefania Gori Awarded 2025 APS Fellow
Stefania Gori, a professor of physics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, has been named the 2025 recipient of the Division of Particles and Fields (DPF) Fellowship from the American Physical Society (APS). The fellowship honors Gori for her seminal contributions to particle physics phenomenology beyond the Standard Model, particularly in advancing the understanding…
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SUSY Conference comes to UC Santa Cruz for first time
Associate Professor Wolfgang Altmannshofer co-chairs the organizing committee for SUSY 2025. One of the most important annual gatherings in the field of theoretical and experimental particle physics will take place for the first time at the University of California, Santa Cruz from August 18th to 23rd. This year’s conference will be hosted by the Santa…
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Computational High-Energy Physics Traineeship Program Summer School 2025
A recent computational high-energy physics traineeship program summer school just took place at UC Berkeley. This year’s school was hosted by the WATCHEP program, with special help from UC Santa Cruz, UC Berkeley, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The program introduced hands-on development exercises, high-performance computing lectures, open-source software community introductions, and career panel discussions. …
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Revolutionary Rubin Observatory debuts with first images taken by world’s largest camera
SCIPP and UC Santa Cruz researchers played pivotal roles in the unveiling of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s first images, released June 23, 2025. Located atop Chile’s Cerro Pachón, this NSF–DOE facility includes the 8.4 m Simonyi Survey Telescope outfitted with a record-breaking 3.2‑gigapixel camera—the largest ever built. Steven Ritz led the Images Group that produced all the image products for First…
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Genome June First Friday at the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History
Physicists from the Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics participated in the First Friday community science event at the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History. The event on Friday, June 6 was sponsored as “Genome June.” The event was part of SCIPP’s ongoing commitment to community outreach, aiming to make complex physics accessible and engaging.…
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Micro May First Friday at the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History
On Friday, May 2, the Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics (SCIPP) brought the wonders of the subatomic world to the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History’s “Micro May” First Friday event. The evening, themed around the science of the small, featured SCIPP researchers engaging the public with insights into gravitational lensing and particle collisions.…
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SCIPP physicists among winners of prestigious 2025 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics
Scientists from the Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics at UC Santa Cruz are among the thousands of researchers honored with the 2025 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, awarded to the ATLAS Collaboration at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) alongside its sister experiments ALICE, CMS and LHCb. This is one of the major awards sponsored…
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SCIPP Particle Physics Masterclass 2025 was a great event!
Approximately 30 high school students joined scientists from the Santa Cruz Institute from Particle Physics for the annual Particle Physics Masterclass at UCSC on March 15. The educational event introduced students to special relativity concepts, data analysis techniques, and experimental detector technology. Jason Nielsen, SCIPP Director and Professor of Physics, highlighted the international nature of…
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New analysis from DESI announces a theory about the universe may need to be modified
Researchers at UC Santa Cruz, including SCIPP faculty affiliates Alexie Leauthaud, Constance Rockosi and postdoc Sven Heydenreich, are part of the team announcing a suprising new measurement of dark energy. The new results with the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) suggesting that dark energy, previously thought to be an elemental constant of nature, could be…
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SCIPP Scientist Simone Mazza Honored with International Physics Award
Simone Mazza, an assistant research scientist at the Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics (SCIPP), has won an international award that recognizes contributions in the fields of fundamental interactions of matter. Mazza received the 2024 INFN Bruno Toushek Award from the Italian Scientists and Scholars of North America Foundation. Read the entire article here.
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SCIPP Scientists Publish New Study Connecting Supermassive Black Hole Formation to Self-Interacting Dark Matter
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…
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Michael Riordan Awarded 2025 Abraham Pais Prize
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…
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SCIPP Postdoc Jennifer Ott Recognized for National Postdoc Appreciation Week
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…
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New Primordial Black Hole Study from SCIPP Postdoc, Sarah Geller
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…
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UCSC Student Story, “Magnetically Drawn to Science”
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…
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Rubin Observatory Achieves Major Milestone with Reflective Coating of the 8.4-Meter Primary/Tertiary Mirror
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…
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AESOP-Lite Experiment Launched in Collaboration with the University of Delaware
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…
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SCIPP Researchers Elected to Lead Large International Collaborations in Astrophysics
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…
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SCIPP Hosts Inaugural BASICS Meeting
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,…
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SCIPP Outreach Visit to Santa Cruz High School
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…
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Shiva Abbaszadeh receives $3.7M grant from DOE for Energy Earthshot Initiative
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…
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WATCHEP Participates in Computational HEP Training Program
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.