News Room

Professor Mikhail Shifman, a theoretical high energy physicist, began his career on the eve of a big developments in high energy physics, the discovery of the J/ψ particle (charmonium) in 1974. “It was such an exciting time, he recalls. People would not sleep. Every day, new papers were coming out, new advances being made.” Shifman said that it was a great time to be a young theorist. He is betting that he will be able to book-end his career with another great era in particle theory. More »

Vincent Noireaux is an assistant professor in the area of experimental Biological Physics. Professor Noireaux’s research is centered around genetic information, in vitro synthetic gene networks and artificial “proto cells” which are able to express DNA. More »

Shaul Hanany’s observational cosmology group is building a balloon-borne instrument that will search for signatures of the Big Bang. Cosmologists posit that shortly after the Big Bang, as short as 10-35 seconds after the Bang, the Universe underwent a period of immense inflation during which its size inflated trillions fold. More »

School of Physics and Astronomy Professor John Wygant has been made Principal Investigator of a large NASA investigation to measure intense electric fields in the Earth's radiation belts. This project is part of a two spacecraft mission called the Radiation Belt Storm Probes, which will study energetic charged particle acceleration in the Earth's magnetosphere during major geomagnetic storms. More »

School of Physics and Astronomy Professor Daniel Cronin-Hennessy is leading up machine development for the NOvA module factory. NOvA, or NuMI Off-axis electron-Neutrino Appearance experiment is a proposed 18 kiloton neutrino detector that will search for the yet unobserved oscillation of muon- neutrino to electron-neutrino. It will be located above ground near International Falls, Minnesota and will be made almost entirely of plastic. More »

School of Physics and Astronomy Professor James Kakalios has made a career out of finding order in messy systems. From work on amorphous silicon, to helping neuroscientists map the brain, if it's noisy, Kakalios is there. More »

Spintronics is the art of controlling the spin of an electron for use in semiconductors and other materials. The research group of School of Physics and Astronomy Professor Paul Crowell is part of a Minnesota-based collaborative effort that recently solved a long-standing problem in this field. More »