Department News Archive


C.L. Chien’s Team Report New Superconducting Material

C.L. Chien’s Team Report New Superconducting Material
Prof. C.L. Chien’s team of researchers have found a superconducting material that could someday power quantum computers. The material naturally exists between two states, a finding that could pave the way for more complex computing in the future. “We’ve found that a certain superconducting material contains special properties that could be the building blocks for […]


Tarini Konchady Named Media Fellow of the American Astronomical Society

Tarini Konchady Named Media Fellow of the American Astronomical Society
Tarini Konchady (B.S. 2017) has been named the new Media Fellow of the American Astronomical Society. She is currently studying Mira variables to help calibrate the extragalactic distance scale. Tarini is an active member of the broader astronomy community: she’s an author and editor for the graduate-student-run astronomy blog Astrobites, she co-organizes a chapter of […]


APS Physics Elects Andrei Gritsan, Michael Falk & Oleg Tchernyshyov as Fellows

APS Physics Elects Andrei Gritsan, Michael Falk & Oleg Tchernyshyov as Fellows
Professors Andrei Gritsan, Michael Falk (joint with Materials Science And Engineering), and Oleg Tchernyshyov have been elected as Fellows of the American Physical Society. No more than ½% of APS members can be elected as Fellows in any year, so this is indeed a great honor. The citations are as follows: Andrei Gritsan: “For significant […]


Nhan Tran Receives Department of Energy Early Career Research Award

Nhan Tran Receives Department of Energy Early Career Research Award
Nhan Tran, who earned his Ph. D. in the department in 2011 (supervised by Prof. Andrei Gritsan), received the U.S. Department of Energy Early Career Research Award for deep-learning acceleration of the boosted Higgs program and HEP computing. The DOE Early Career Research Award is a prestigious award designed to bolster the nation’s scientific workforce by […]


Ulascan Sarica Receives Springer Award

Ulascan Sarica Receives Springer Award
Ulascan Sarica, who earned his Ph.D. in the department in October 2018, working on studies of the Higgs boson with Prof. Andrei Gritsan, has received the Springer Award for an outstanding Ph.D. thesis. The award is comprised of a monetary prize to the student, as well as publication of the work in the Springer collection of […]


Brice Ménard to give the Hans Jensen Lecture at University of Heidelberg

Brice Ménard to give the Hans Jensen Lecture at University of Heidelberg
Prof. Brice Ménard has been invited to give the Hans Jensen Lecture at the University of Heidelberg as part of the doctoral program’s biannual “Heidelberg Physics Graduate Days.”  The lecture is named for Hans Jensen, who shared the 1963 Nobel Prize for the nuclear shell model, and is intended to honor speakers who  have made fundamental contributions […]


Liang Wu Receives McMillan Prize for Research in Condensed Matter Physics

Liang Wu Receives McMillan Prize for Research in Condensed Matter Physics
Liang Wu, who earned his Ph. D. in the department in 2015 (supervised by Peter Armitage), received the McMillan Prize “for novel terahertz and optical spectroscopy experiments on topological insulators and semimetals.” The McMillan Prize is an annual award given by the Department of Physics at the University of Illinois to an outstanding young researcher […]


Tommi Tenkanen Publishes a New Explanation for Dark Matter

Tommi Tenkanen Publishes a New Explanation for Dark Matter
Postdoctoral Fellow Tommi Tenkanen recently had a paper published as editor’s suggestion in Physical Review Letters that provides a new explanation for dark matter and explains how it may have been produced already before the Big Bang. The paper also presents a way to test the hypothesis by observing the distribution of galaxies in the […]


CLASS Telescope Featured on NPR’s All Things Considered

CLASS Telescope Featured on NPR’s All Things Considered
In a segment titled “Telescope In Chile’s Mountains Looks For Signals To Explain How The Universe Began,” NPR Science Journalist Joe Palca interviews Associate Professor Toby Marriage and others to share the science behind the Cosmology Large Angular Scale Surveyor (CLASS) project. Listen to radio segment on NPR’s website.


Emanuele Berti Named Fellow and President Elect of ISGRG

Emanuele Berti Named Fellow and President Elect of ISGRG
At last week’s meeting of the International Society of General Relativity and Gravitation (ISGRG), Professor Emanuele Berti was named a Fellow, and was also voted as the new President Elect of the society.  He will rotate in as President in three years. Prof. Berti joins many prominent researchers who have been officers or committee members of the ISGRG in the past.