News Archive
MicroBooNE likely has ruled out possibility of ‘sterile neutrinos’
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Professor Andrew Furmanski of the School of Physics and Astronomy is a member of an experimental collaboration which has eliminated the possibility of a theorized possible fourth neutrino flavor, the ‘sterile’ neutrino with 95% confidence.
Pribiag named Dean's Fellow
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Professor Vlad Pribiag of the School of Physics and Astronomy has been named a Dean’s Fellow for the 2026-2027 Academic Year.
Cushman and Liu groups help SuperCDMS to major milestone
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School of Physics and Astronomy faculty members Priscilla Cushman and Yan Liu are part of a collaboration that successfully cooled the Super Cryogenic Dark Matter Search (SuperCDMS) experiment to base temperature - the temperature required for the superconducting detectors to become operational. This temperature is hundreds of times colder than outer space.
Miller and Skinner receive prestigious NASA Future Investigator Fellowships
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School of Physics and Astronomy graduate students John Miller Jr and Evan Skinner received highly competitive NASA Future Investigators in NASA Earth and Space Science and Technology (FINESST) Fellowships. Their research proposals were selected from almost 1500 in the field of Space Science and Technology with a selection rate <10%. The funding amount is $150,000 each for three years.
Coughlin part of team that developed alert broker “Babamul” to help parse data from the LSST
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Coughlin is part of a collaboration with Caltech to build a broker called Babamul, which can receive alerts from telescope surveys like Rubin Observatory and the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) to zoom in on those phenomena while they are still happening.
Pribiag part of team tackling confirmation bias in condensed matter physics
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Professor Vlad Pribiag, of the School of Physics and Astronomy, was part of a group of condensed matter physicists who recently demonstrated—through four case studies—how over-reliance on single pieces of evidence (so-called “smoking-gun” studies) can lead to the misinterpretation of observed effects.
Coughlin part of team that wins Scialog Award in early LSST research
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This Scialog–short for science + dialog– is a “three-year initiative that aims to advance the foundational science needed to realize the full potential of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s upcoming Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST).”
School welcomes Professor Oskar Vafek
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Meet Oskar Vafek, a new Professor in the School of Physics and Astronomy's Fine Theoretical Physics Institute.
Janssen wins Abraham Pais Prize
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Professor Michel Janssen of the School of Physics and Astronomy and the Program in History of Science, Technology and Medicine has won the American Physical Society (APS) 2026 Abraham Pais Prize for History of Physics.
DOE's quantum center SQMS Renewal Fuels UMN's Hunt for Dark Photons
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The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has announced a $125 million, five-year renewal for the Superconducting Quantum Materials and Systems (SQMS) Center, a national research center led by DOE's Fermilab. As a partner of the SQMS center since 2021, the University of Minnesota will play a critical, ongoing role in leveraging the center's cutting-edge technology to search for new discoveries in fundamental physics.