Category: Research
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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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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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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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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 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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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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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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Celebrating the 15 Year Anniversary of the Fermi Mission (#Fermi15)
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…
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UC Santa Cruz leads DOE program to train computational high-energy physicists
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.
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James Webb Space Telescope Joins the League of Super-Telescopes
See below text or click here for article on webpage. — by Joel Primack | Jan 25, 2022 The following is a guest blog post from Joel R. Primack, Distinguished Professor of Physics Emeritus at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Dr. Primack served as Sigma Xi’s president in 2018–2019. The James Webb Space Telescope is now successfully assembled,…
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SCIPP postdoctoral researcher Giordon Stark is featured in Physics Today magazine, describing his work to improve the experiences of deaf/hard-of-hearing scientists and the interpreters who support them.
Deaf scientists thrive with interpreters and technology: Though still underrepresented in STEM, deaf and hard-of-hearing scientists are excelling in their fields and developing ways to more seamlessly communicate with their colleagues.
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Higgsinos under the microscope
Recent results from higgsino searches by the ATLAS collaboration have made their way into the CERN Courier. The existence of higgsino particles, predicted by theories of supersymmetry, could provide an explanation for the cosmological dark matter. SCIPPers Matthew Gignac, Bruce Schumm, and Giordon Stark contributed to the development of the disappearing track search and the…
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SCIPP Member Bruce Schumm was quoted in a Salon article about new results from a particle physics experiment called Muon g-2.
Why some physicists are skeptical about the muon experiment that hints at “new physics” The Muon g-2 experiment could upend the Standard Model of physics — but some think it may be a fluke. Here’s why
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New Higgs boson measurement from the ATLAS Collaboration at CERN.
https://atlas.cern/updates/briefing/studying-Higgs-decay-b-quarks
