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Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics
Condensed Matter Theory

Disorder induces topological Anderson insulator

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Condensed Matter Physics

Nadya Mason elected APS Fellow

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Biological Physics

Alumnus Ibrahim Cissé in Science News magazine

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Quantum Information Science

Two U of I representatives at White House quantum information and computing summit

Research
Condensed Matter Physics

University of Illinois team finds Wigner crystal—not Mott insulator—in 'magic-angle' graphene

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Brian DeMarco named University Scholar

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Research
High Energy Physics

University of Illinois part of $25 million software institute to enable discoveries in high-energy physics

Today, the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced its launch of the Institute for Research and Innovation in Software for High-Energy Physics (IRIS-HEP). The $25 million software-focused institute will tackle the unprecedented torrent of data that will come from the high-luminosity running of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s most powerful particle accelerator located at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland. The High-Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC) will provide scientists with a unique window into the subatomic world to search for new phenomena and to study the properties of the Higgs boson in great detail. The 2012 discovery at the LHC of the Higgs boson—a particle central to our fundamental theory of nature—led to the Nobel Prize in physics a year later and has provided scientists with a new tool for further discovery.

The HL-LHC will begin operations around 2026, continuing into the 2030s. It will produce more than 1 billion particle collisions every second, from which only a tiny fraction will reveal new science, because the phenomena that physicists want to study have a very low probability per collision of occurring. The HL-LHC’s tenfold increase in luminosity—a measure of the number of particle collisions occurring in a given amount of time—will enable physicists to study familiar processes at an unprecedented level of detail and observe rare new phenomena present in nature.

Research
Biological Physics

High precision microbial population dynamics under cycles of feast and famine

Scientists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have produced the most precise picture to date of population dynamics in fluctuating feast-or-famine conditions. Professor Seppe Kuehn, a biological physicist, and his graduate student Jason Merritt found that bacterial population density is a function of both the frequency and the amplitude of nutrient fluctuations. They found that the more frequent the feast cycles and the longer a feast cycle, the more rapid the population recovery from a famine state. This result has important implications for understanding how microbial populations cope with the constant nutrient fluctuations they experience in nature.

In the Media
High Energy Physics

Jessie Shelton interviewed for Space.com: 'Here's What Happens When a Higgs Boson Dies—and What It Means for Particle Physics'

Six years after discovering the Higgs boson, physicists have observed how the particle decays — a monumental contribution to scientists' understanding of the Standard Model of particle physics and the universe at large, study researchers said.

Excitement swirled in the physics community when, in 2012, physicists discovered the Higgs boson, an elementary particle predicted by the Standard Model that relates to how objects have mass. But this discovery didn't mark the end of Higgs boson exploration. In addition to predicting the existence of Higgs boson particles, the Standard Model posits that 60 percent of the time, a Higgs boson particle will decay into fundamental particles called bottom quarks (b quarks).

Research
Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics
Condensed Matter Experiment

Quantum simulation reveals mobility edge in a low-dimensional disordered landscape

Now scientists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign using an innovative quantum simulation technique have made one of the first observations of a mobility edge in a low-dimensional system. Physics professor Bryce Gadway and graduate student Fangzhao Alex An were able to combine a disordered virtual material—in this case a pair of coupled 1D chains—with artificial magnetic fields to explore this phenomenon.

Research
Biological Physics

New CRISPR technique skips over portions of genes that can cause disease

In a new study in cells, University of Illinois researchers have adapted CRISPR gene-editing technology to cause the cell’s internal machinery to skip over a small portion of a gene when transcribing it into a template for protein building. This gives researchers a way not only to eliminate a mutated gene sequence, but to influence how the gene is expressed and regulated.

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Saturday Physics for Everyone

Free Saturday-morning lectures on modern aspects of the physical sciences for high school students and the general public! Learn about recent advances in the physical sciences from world-class scientists and researchers and gain an understanding of how physics affects development in modern technology and influences your daily life. Select Saturdays in the fall, 10:15 a.m. to 11:30 a.m., at Loomis Laboratory of Physics in Urbana. Click for full schedule!

Dark Matter, a Physics Illinois video

Hear leading-edge scientists explain what we know about one of the greatest mysteries of our time. What could it be? How do we know it’s there? And what ingenious methods are scientists, working in different subdisciplines of physics and astronomy around the globe, using to detect dark matter? Astrophysicist Jeff Filippini, astronomer Felipe Menanteau, experimental nuclear physicist Liang Yang, theoretical particle physicist Jessie Shelton, and experimental particle physicist Ben Hooberman provide an accessible overview of some of the most exciting scientific research that is ongoing today.