News

Yerkes Observatory now owns 180,000 historic glass plates, century-old starlight records set for digitization, research, and public access.

Daniel Holz, professor in the Departments of Astronomy and Astrophysics and Physics, serves as a PI on a research project that explores the physics of strong gravity. 

Devices can levitate powered only by sunlight, could explore little-known areas.

Webb telescope helps scientists narrow down the search for “Earth twin” planets.

Fortune 500 companies and federal space agencies allow students in the Master's in Applied Data Science to use classroom knowledge to create real-world impact.

K1 Semiconductor, which recently took second place in the Polsky New Venture Challenge and Grainger Engineering Tech Startup Challenge, is developing a technique that could drastically improve chip manufacturing.

Ten of the 18 projects awarded grants involve faculty from the Physical Sciences Division. These projects are crucial in tackling climate change.

Ahmed Bou-Rabee's superdiffusion research, featured in Quanta Magazine, proves a 1980s prediction using new methods in stochastic homogenization, with co-authors Scott Armstrong and Tuomo Kuusi.

Congratulations to Robert Wald, Charles H. Swift Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Physics, the Enrico Fermi Institute, and the College, who has received a 2025 Dirac Medal from the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP).

This episode of the Big Brains podcast features Chemistry Professor Greg Engel, who helped launch the field of quantum biology. Engel explains how plants and bacteria evolved to exploit quantum effects for photosynthesis—and how understanding these systems could spark a revolution in quantum sensing, medicine, and neuroscience.

Congratulations to Abigail Vieregg, Professor of Physics, Enrico Fermi Institute, Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics, and the College, who has received a 2025 Cottrell SEED Award!

Congratulations to Prof. Talapin and Prof. Anderson, who have received prestigious ACS awards! The American Chemical Society has announced its 2026 national award winners, acknowledged for their outstanding achievements in chemistry across various fields in the discipline.

Near Modane, a laboratory buried beneath the Alps is attempting to capture elements of a world parallel to our own. Paolo Privitera uses this laboratory to study dark matter. 

[Article published in French. View in Chrome browser for translation option.]

Fred Ciesla reveals how observations of a young star offer a glimpse of the high-temperature conditions that shaped rock formation in the early Solar System.

PhD student Roy Zhao's research on a region called Sagittarius C discovers that magnetic field in the area wraps around an expanding bubble of hot, electrified gas blown outward by the winds from a cluster of massive young stars.