News: Research

This month, PSD community members have been featured for their work discovering new metamaterials to improve optics for telescopes, designing patterns in self-propelling liquid crystals, and meauring ceramic chips in meteorites to study the early solar system, and more. In case you missed it, review our news headlines from February 2021.

The University of Chicago Library continues to look to the sky in an ongoing collaboration with Professor Rich Kron, Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, exploring the use of data obtained from historical astronomical glass plates to drive new astronomical discovery.

Prof. Guilia Galli, a leader in solar fuels, released a new design to optimize photoelectrodes for producing solar fuels. The research could boost a solar-powered fuel made by splitting water.
 

New research shows that the movement in liquid crystals can be harnessed and directed, a step toward developing autonomous materials that can sense inputs, amplify signals, and even compute information.

Prof. Daniel Holz comments on new recalculation of Cygnus X-1’s mass in New York Times

Yuanyuan Zhang, an astrophysicist with the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics and Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, led a study with Dark Energy Survey data of how light from inside galaxy clusters may be linked with dark matter.

Experimental cosmologist and Assoc. Prof. McMahon and his students developed a new metamaterials-based antireflection coating for the silicon lenses used in cameras that capture the oldest light in the universe.

New Scientist filmed an interview with Dan Hooper: What happened at the big bang? The search for dark matter, cosmic inflation, and other mysteries from the beginning of time.

Random twists of place: How quiet is quantum space-time at the Planck scale? Prof. Craig Hogan shares an update on the reconfigured Fermilab Holometer.

Ceramic chips inside meteorites hint at wild days of the early solar system. Using complex equipment in Nicolas Dauphas' Origins Lab, including a one-of-a-kind patented purification system that the team developed, Justin Hu measured the isotopes for eight different elements inside the chips.

Prof. Richard Kron's legacy includes helping to conceive and lead one of the most influential projects to map the sky, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, as well as the creation of the astrophysics major at UChicago and the project to digitize and explore the scientific potential of 100-year-old photographic images of the sky from the Yerkes Observatory. 

Computer scientist Marshini Chetty works to bridge the gap between science and humanity

A Physics student in the McMahon lab, Grace Chesmore, led the optical measurements of new metamaterial tiles to improve the sensitivity of large telescopes at SimonsObservatory. This discovery may yield insights into how the universe began.

New self-assembly method creates bioelectronics out of microscopic structures. Scientists in Prof. Bozhi Tian’s lab use a “bottom-up” approach to yield highly customizable bioelectronics.

Cosmologist Brian Nord is interviewed by Gizmodo about building a coalition of physicists and computer scientists promoting algorithmic accountability. Nord is a machine learning expert at Fermi National Laboratory who studies strong gravitational lensing and deep learning.