physics
October 17, 2023
Closing in on the elusive neutrino
In a paper published Sept. 6 in Physical Review Letters, an international team of researchers in the United States, Germany and France reported that a distinctive strategy they have used shows real promise to be the first approach to measure the mass of the neutrino. Once fully scaled up, their collaboration — Project 8 — could also reveal how neutrinos influenced the early evolution of the universe as we know it.
March 24, 2023
Team detects first neutrinos made by particle collider
An international team of scientists has for the first time detected neutrinos created by a particle collider. The discovery — announced March 19 by the Forward Search Experiment, or FASER collaboration — promises to deepen scientists’ understanding of the nature of neutrinos, which are the most abundant particle in the cosmos. FASER’s detector picked up neutrinos generated by the Large Hadron Collider, which is based at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland.
October 26, 2022
UW is No. 6 in the world, according to US News Best Global Universities
The University of Washington rose from No. 7 to No. 6 on the U.S. News & World Report’s Best Global Universities rankings, released on Tuesday. The UW maintained its No. 2 ranking among U.S. public institutions.
May 5, 2021
FASER is born: new experiment will study particles that interact with dark matter
The newest experiment at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is now in place at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva. FASER, or Forward Search Experiment, was approved by CERN’s research board in March 2019. Now installed in the LHC tunnel, this experiment, which seeks to understand particles that scientists believe may interact with dark matter, is now undergoing tests before data collection commences next year.
September 16, 2019
KATRIN cuts the mass estimate for the elusive neutrino in half
An international team of scientists has announced a breakthrough in its quest to measure the mass of the neutrino, one of the most abundant, yet elusive, elementary particles in our universe. At the 2019 Topics in Astroparticle and Underground Physics conference in Toyama, Japan, leaders from the KATRIN experiment reported Sept. 13 that the estimated range for the rest mass of the neutrino is no larger than 1 electron volt, or eV.
March 5, 2019
FASER detector at the Large Hadron Collider to seek clues about hidden matter in the universe
On March 5, the CERN research board approved a new experiment at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva to search for evidence of fundamental dark matter particles. UW scientists are part of this endeavor, the Forward Search Experiment — or FASER — which seeks to answer one of the outstanding questions in particle physics: What is dark matter made of?
June 26, 2014
Nanopore technique rapidly decodes long DNA strands
A low-cost technique may make DNA sequencing more convenient and less cumbersome, perhaps eventually replacing large lab machines with hand held devices.
August 21, 2013
Physicists pinpoint key property of material that both conducts and insulates
UW scientists have made the first-ever accurate determination of a solid-state triple point, the temperature and pressure at which three different solid phases can coexist stably.
December 10, 2012
Do we live in a computer simulation? UW researchers say idea can be tested
A British philosopher once suggested the possibility that our universe might be a computer simulation run by our descendants. A team of physicists at UW has devised a potential test to see if the idea has merit.
