Physics & Astronomy
Jul 15, 2020
There’s a secret at the UC Irvine School of Physical Sciences. The secret is at the Infinity Fountain, which sits outside Rowland and Reines Halls and in front of Aldrich Park, and which is where…
Jul 1, 2020
The two W.M. Keck Observatory telescopes sit inside domes perched atop Hawaii’s dormant Mauna Kea volcano. Run by the University of California and Caltech, these telescopes help astronomers and other scientists discover things like planets orbiting other stars, or measure the acceleration of the expansion of the universe. Gary Chanan, Professor Emeritus in the UCI Department of Physics & Astronomy, has won the Yale 2020 Award for Advancement of Basic and Applied Science for the…
Jun 30, 2020
The survival of bacteria is constantly threatened by a multitude of viruses and antimicrobial mechanisms. Professor Albert Siryaporn's talk will explain recent discoveries by his lab about how…
Jun 30, 2020
The survival of bacteria is constantly threatened by a multitude of viruses and antimicrobial mechanisms. Professor Albert Siryaporn's talk will explain recent discoveries by his lab about how bacteria successfully defend against viral attacks and how these systems may be adapted to potentially combat SARS-CoV-2.
Jun 25, 2020
Using three observatories on Maunakea in Hawaiʻi, astronomers at the University of Arizona have discovered the second-most distant quasar ever found.
Jun 25, 2020
The U.S. Department of Energy has chosen Houlin Xin, UCI assistant professor of physics & astronomy, as an awardee in its DOE Office of Science Early Career Research Program.
Jun 23, 2020
Toshiki “Toshi” Tajima is a physicist in the Department of Physics & Astronomy, and he’s one of our faculty who, over the last few months, retooled his scientific skillset to help stem the still-encroaching tide of the coronavirus pandemic. Recently, Tajima, along with a team of researchers from across campus and around the world, formulated an idea that they call a “nanobroom” — a devise made of carbon nanotubes that surgeons might one day insert into the lungs of a COVID-19 patient and…
Jun 11, 2020
Anomalies in the radioactive decay of beryllium-8 and helium-4 point to the existence of a new force of nature. That is the conclusion of a group of theorists in the US, who have scrutinized data from experiments carried out by nuclear physicists in Hungary over the past five years. Results from the two different isotopes agree on both the mass and interaction strength of the hypothetical boson that would carry the long-sought fifth force, the team found.
May 26, 2020
Not only can Blu-ray lasers replay the “Harry Potter” series 50 times over, they may possibly help kill the coronavirus.
May 22, 2020
Ideas can come from everywhere. They can ignite when one imagines, for instance, that there could be a connection between the light that a firefly creates and the cells in our bodies, or that there might be a way to better manage fires in the Amazon rainforest by fingerprinting the different varieties of fire that blaze there. Such ideas led eight of our School’s graduate students this year to win the National Science Foundation’s Graduate Student Research Fellowship — a research fellowship…
May 22, 2020
Nobody in Katy Rodriguez Wimberly’s family does anything similar to what she does for a living, so when she heard that she won UCI’s Latino Excellence and Achievement Award, she knew that one of the reasons why was due to how out of the ordinary it was for her to come to UCI to get her PhD.
May 20, 2020
When particle physicist Mike Fenton moved to America last September, things didn’t go quite right for him. But Fenton will be the first to tell you that when the universe began some 13.7 billion years ago during the Big Bang, things started out just right.