Illinois Physics | The Grainger College of Engineering | UIUC

“Now is an exciting time to connect heavy-ion data to astrophysical observations of neutron star mergers,” says Illinois Physics Professor Jaki Noronha-Hostler. “There is so much activity going on both in laboratories and through observations. We have new heavy-ion data coming in from Brookhaven National Laboratory, smaller error bars for the neutron star radii from NICER, and hopefully new gravitational wave measurements of binary neutron star mergers will be detected by LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA in the ongoing observational run 4.”

It was too good to be true. Two years ago, a measurement suggested a subatomic particle called the W boson was heavier than predicted by theory. The discrepancy raised hopes it was a sign of new particles and forces beyond those in physicists’ standard model, a 40-year-old theory that, with vexing reliability, has explained everything observed in particle accelerators—although it fails to include gravity. Now, a new measurement indicates the W is as massive as expected, spoiling the mystery.

As a “pen and paper” theorist, SMitha Vishveshwara enjoys thinking about the what ifs and letting her imagination flow.

“The language of math is a beautiful way of discovering new things, but the physicality of it also matters. I love proposing things that can be realized in experiments and also studying the mysteries that experiments bring. It’s been an amazing playground here at Illinois for that,” she says.   

Illinois Physics Professor Jacob Covey has been selected for an Early Career Research Program (ECRP) award by the U.S. Department of Energy. 

Covey’s winning ECRP research proposal titled “Simulating nuclear physics with nuclear spin qudits” will leverage techniques, recently analyzed and proposed by his group, to encode multiple quantum bits (“qubits”) within a single atom. These techniques offer a route to improve the hardware efficiency of certain quantum computing and networking applications.