Category: Research & Discovery
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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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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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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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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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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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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.
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Howard Haber’s New Book
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…
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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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The origin of life’s molecular asymmetry: An astrobiology perspective
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.
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Interview with a SCIPP Alumnus
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.
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SCIPP Scientists building world’s largest digital camera
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…
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Higgs Boson Anniversary
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…