News: 2021

The Physical Sciences Division community and the Department of Physics mourn the loss Ilan Naibryf, a rising fourth-year physics major remembered as a compassionate, dedicated friend.

UChicago-led South Pole Telescope has helped pinpoint the location of a supermassive black hole in galaxy Centaurus A. Contributing to the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration, the new imagery reveals how a gigantic jet is being born. Most remarkably, only the outer edges of the jet seem to emit radiation, which challenges our theoretical models of jets.

We are in the arc of aerospace history where small spaceflight experiences are sold—and may realize long-term visions of off-world settlements. Read more from postdoctoral scholar Jordan Bimm, historian of astronauts and astrobiology at the UChicago Stevanovich Institute, who published a commentary on billionaire space flights for Barron’s economy & policy coverage.

The Physical Sciences Division community and the Department of Computer Science mourn the loss of Max Solomon Lewis, a rising third-year Computer Science major who is remembered as a campus leader and selfless friend.

With Amazon founder Jeff Bezos launching on his Blue Origin rocket this week, Professor Rocky Kolb, Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, comments on the "billionaire space race" and its significance for the general public. 

High on Greenland’s ice sheet, particle astrophysicists like Cosmin Deaconu are searching for the cosmic accelerators responsible for the universe’s most energetic particles. By placing hundreds of radio antennas on the ice surface and dozens of meters below it, they hope to trap elusive particles known as neutrinos at higher energies than ever before. Deaconu, a senior researcher with Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics, spoke to Science from Greenland’s Summit Station: “It’s a discovery machine, looking for the first neutrinos at these energies.”

Duality, a first-of-its-kind accelerator for quantum companies, has accepted into its inaugural cohort six startups from across the United States and abroad. The 12-month program will provide training from the University of Chicago, as well as opportunities from Duality’s other founding partners. Read more about the six startups who join with UChicago to unlock the potential of quantum technology.

Scientists at Argonne and UChicago used a new artificial intelligence framework that allows for accelerated, scalable and reproducible detection of gravitational waves. Ian Foster, the UChicago Arthur Holly Compton Distinguished Service Professor of Computer Science and director of Argonne’s Data Science and Learning division, comments on their creation of a method to dramatically reduce data processing time for LIGO detections.

Building the wide open future of data science requires bringing new students into the fold today. And at UChicago, for the third consecutive year, the Center for Data an Computing (CDAC) Summer Lab serves as one of those gateways. Welcoming 55 high school, undergraduate, and master’s students to serve as research assistants on projects with more than 39 mentors and adding a new “social impact” track, it’s the largest year yet for the program designed to train and inspire the next generation of interdisciplinary computational and data scientists.

Planets with seasons like ours could host complex alien life, suggests a NASA study co-authored by Megan Barnett, graduate student in the Department of the Geophysical Sciences.

Incoming President Paul Alivisatos has been named the John D. MacArthur Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Chemistry, the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering and the College, effective Sept. 1. President Robert J. Zimmer has been named the Edwin A. and Betty L. Bergman Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Mathematics and the College.

Kate Smith, a postdoctoral researcher in the research group of Professor Fred Chong and the Chicago Quantum Exchange’s IBM Postdoctoral Trainees Program, received the Kenneth C. Smith Early Career Award in Microelectronics from the IEEE Computer Society, Technical Committee on Multiple-Valued Logic (IEEE TC MVL).

In a recent paper, University of Chicago researchers demonstrate how increased network competition from cell phone data use negatively impacts internet service for everyday Wi-Fi users. 
 

KICP Fellow Yi-Ming Zhong and scientists at UC Riverside have put forward a surprising theory to explain mysterious, supermassive black holes that formed early in the universe; those black holes could have formed with the help of dark matter.

The Hubble constant is one of the most important numbers in cosmology because it tells us how fast the universe is expanding. Read about the debate surrounding it and meet Wendy Freedman and Daniel Holz, the UChicago astronomers leading the way.