News Archives - Physics & Astronomy

Reading and Learning the Meaning of the Sky

October 7, 2026

Astronomical seasons in the northern hemisphere, a color chart from NOAA tracking solstices and equinoxes

Join us Friday, October 9, when Teaching Professor Sean Lindsay shows the connection between the Sun, the sky, and the seasons. Watching the annual patterns in the sky gave rise to myths that connect humanity to the stars and gave us the power to construct calendars and predict seasonal events. Experience other cultures’ connection to the sky with full-dome short films from the One Sky Project. Stay until the end for a live sky demonstration and a question-and-answer session!

The event is free but due to limited seating reservations are required. Reserve your spot!

When: Friday, October 9, 2026
Where: UT Planetarium, Nielsen Physics Building, Room 108
Who: All ages
Cost: Free (Reservations required)
Time: Doors open at 7:45 p.m.; program starts at 8 p.m. and ends at 9 p.m.
Parking: Volunteer Hall Parking Garage on White Avenue.

Poster Prizes for Particle Physics Students

October 5, 2026

Congratulations to physics graduate students Caroline Riggall and Aidan Gardner-O’Kearny on their poster prizes at the 2026 Meeting of the American Physical Society Division of Particles and Fields. Held at Fermilab, the meeting brought together like-minded researchers to share their work, review the status of the field, and consider future directions.

Riggall and Gardner-O’Kearny are part of the department’s collider physics group and work with Associate Professors Larry Lee and Tova Holmes. They’re contributing to research for a possible muon collider, a next-generation tool for exploring energies beyond current capabilities in the search for new physics. Particle colliders typically rely on beams of protons and electrons. Muons are much heavier than electrons and, unlike protons, have no smaller components to siphon off energy in a collision. A muon collider would have greater energy yet come with a smaller footprint and offer more efficiency than existing facilities.

Riggall is stationed at Fermilab and won for her work titled “Solenoid-Based Lattices for Muon Ionization Cooling.” She addressed a principal challenge for a muon collider: cooling the beam so particles stay in a tight configuration and reach target luminosity. Current methods can’t keep up with how quickly muons decay (in about two microseconds). Riggall’s solution proposes ionization cooling by passing the beam through an absorbing channel—in this case solenoid-based focus-focus (FOFO) lattices with alternating polarity—that would cool both negative and positive charges in a single channel.

Gardner-O’Kearny worked at Fermilab over the summer and is back on campus this fall to pursue his doctoral work. His winning poster was “Electromagnetic Shower Reconstruction with the MAIA Detector.” Within the muon collider framework, the MAIA (Muon Accelerator Instrumented Apparatus) is a proposed detector with several layers, each designed to reconstruct different properties of particles.Muons from the incoming beam will decay into high-energy electrons and neutrinos, with the electrons generating electromagnetic showers as they interact with beamline components. Gardner-O’Kearny focuses on identifying the electrons resulting from collisions and differentiating them from beam-induced backgrounds.

A muon collider is a key aspect of the country’s particle physics roadmap and part of three central themes for the particle physics future: decipher the quantum realm, illuminate the invisible universe, and explore new paradigms in physics. UT’s high energy/particle physics group, including undergraduate and graduate students, is helping lead the way.

The Sun, the sky, the seasons: What’s it all about? Come find out!

September 21, 2026

This event has been canceled: Please check back for updates on planetarium shows!

Come celebrate and learn about the Autumnal Equinox at the UT planetarium!

On Friday, September 25, Teaching Professor Sean Lindsay will show the connection between the Sun, the sky, and the seasons. Watching the annual patterns in the sky gave rise to myths that connect humanity to the stars and gave us the power to construct calendars and predict seasonal events. Experience other cultures’ connection to the sky with full-dome short films from the One Sky Project. Stay until the end for a live sky demonstration and a question-and-answer session!

The event is free but due to limited seating reservations are required. Reserve your spot!

When: Friday, September 25, 2026
Where: UT Planetarium, Nielsen Physics Building, Room 108
Who: All ages
Cost: Free (Reservations required)
Time: Doors open at 7:45 p.m.; program starts at 8 p.m. and is 90 minutes long
Parking: Volunteer Hall Parking Garage on White Avenue. Temporary accessible parking be available on Circle Drive (near Dabney-Buehler Hall) and in the Perkins Hall lot (accessed from Middle Drive).

A SULI Summer for Physics Undergraduates

September 9, 2026

Physics majors are back in class this fall, many of them returning with a summer’s worth of research experience. Six of our undergraduates spent their summer break working on physics projects at national laboratories through the Department of Energy (DOE) Science Undergraduate Laboratory Internship (SULI) program.

SULI places students at 17 participating DOE laboratories and facilities to work with mentors on initiatives supporting the agency’s mission. The program gives undergraduates an opportunity to try out different areas of science, see how research is done at state-of-the-art facilities, and earn a stipend while expanding their professional networks.

Meet our Summer 2026 SULI Alumni!

Allie Dabney

Senior from Murfreesboro, Tennessee

SULI Site: Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, New York

Project: Dark sector searches for the Future Circular Collider

Mentor: Elizabeth Brost

Internship Highlight(s): The best part of my SULI experience was connecting with my mentor, Liza Brost. She has taught me so much about physics research and possibilities in the career field. Liza is someone who I look up to as a role model for my future.

Langa Lunga

Sophomore from Knoxville, Tennessee

SULI Site: SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Menlo Park, CA

Project: Cryogenic Characterization of a 28nm Chip for Device Characterization

In general terms I focused on testing microchips in extreme temperatures for their applications in dark matter and quantum computing experiments. I assisted in the debugging of the ASIC chip board at room temperature first and with the creation of an automated test bench that will run experiments autonomously in the cold environments, which at SLAC get down to 77 K and at LBNL (our collaborating lab) gets down to 4K.

Note: Langa finished first at SLAC and second nationwide in the 2026 IGNITE off! Competition among more than 135 competitors.

Mentor: Aldo Pena Perez

Internship Highlight(s): “Curiosity and optimism are the keys to the doors of success.” I feel like this quote is very fitting for my time at SLAC as I tried to live by it as much as possible. In doing so, I’ve been able to meet incredible scientists working on groundbreaking research, entrepreneurs who’ve raised and invested millions of dollars into companies, and ambitious peers like me seeking to make their own mark in the world. By being curious about other people and optimistic (about) their willingness to speak with me, I’ve learned an incredible amount in such a short time.

Amelia Sandoval

Senior from Knoxville, Tennessee

SULI Site: Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, New Mexico

Project: My project was focused on analyzing simulated background particle hits on ePIC detectors for the development of an advanced silicon detector for the upcoming Electron-Ion Collider (EIC). My group is working on an advanced silicon detector called the Fast MAPS Tracker (FMT) which aims to improve the precision of the current simulated detectors that the ePIC collaboration has developed. The FMT specializes in separating background events from the individual bunch crossings due to its high timing resolution of 2 ns.

My part of this project involved plotting various distributions from the Geant4 ePIC simulated background hit files by using reference detectors located close to the proposed FMT locations due to the fact that the FMT is not a part of the ePIC simulation yet. These distributions yielded important information about the background, such as the expected hit rate per event over one FMT sensor, spatial distributions of the background, and the particle composition of the background. All of this information will be scaled to the FMT timing window and input into a detector performance study so that my group can do a standalone simulation. Over the course of this project, I greatly improved my understanding of coding, and I learned how to use ROOT, which will be invaluable in the future. I am so thankful that I got this opportunity and I am excited to see where this project goes!

Mentor: Xuan Li

Internship Highlight(s): The best part about my SULI experience was that I got to spend 10 weeks doing what I want my career to be in the future: doing research at a national lab.

Dylan Stewart

Post-Grad (Bachelor’s in Physics, Spring 2026) from Knoxville, Tennessee

SULI Site: Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Project: Minimizing Uncertainty on Particle Energy Measurements in the Nab Experiment

During my appointment at the Nab experiment, I contributed to the development of one of the world’s most precise neutron decay experiments. Precision measurements of neutron decay provide a stringent test of the best theory describing fundamental particles and forces. Discrepancies between experimental results and theoretical predictions could point to previously undiscovered physics, making it essential to reduce experimental uncertainties that could obscure evidence of new physics. My research focused on improving the reliability, precision, and efficiency of the Nab experiment by reducing systematic uncertainties that could affect its measurements. I implemented new control systems for the detector calibration hardware and the high-voltage power supply, replacing outdated and error-prone procedures while automating key aspects of the experiment. I also developed optimization algorithms for detector calibration to determine the optimal configuration for each detector channel, improving the accuracy of energy measurements while reducing unwanted electronic noise.

In addition, I investigated how changes in the experiment’s magnetic field affect the angle at which protons strike the detector. By combining these measurements with detector simulations, I demonstrated that this technique provides a powerful new method for studying energy losses at the detector surface and used it to identify previously unrecognized damage in the experiment’s upper detector. These findings directly improved the collaboration’s understanding of an important source of systematic uncertainty. Together, these contributions improved the Nab experiment’s accuracy, automation, and reliability, strengthening its ability to collect the years of high-quality data needed to achieve its precision goals. Through this appointment, I gained experience in detector instrumentation, detector calibration, optimization algorithms, data analysis, simulation, and collaborative scientific research, strengthening the technical and professional skills needed for a career in experimental physics.

Mentor: Wolfgang Schreyer

Internship Highlight(s): Unlike other research experiences that I’ve gotten to do, SULI is unique in the amount of professional development, lectures, and workshops that were put together for us interns to attend outside of our own research projects. I had a lot of cool opportunities to learn not just about other areas of science but real technical skills that contributed to my ability to produce high-quality research.

Evan Toon

Senior from Knoxville, Tennessee

SULI Site: Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Project: At the High Flux Isotope Reactor (HFIR), future polarized Neutron Macromolecular Crystallography (NMC) studies are in need of a new Dynamic Nuclear Polarization (DNP) enhanced sample space to enable the accurate determination of hydrogen locations within protein structures of interest, as polarized NMC can greatly increase the signal to noise ratio and significantly shorten the data acquisition time for these neutron diffraction measurements. Mapping these hydrogen positions is essential for understanding biological function and molecular interactions and can drive advancements in structural biology and pharmaceutical research.

My work included the installation and commissioning of the major components required for this DNP enhanced sample space. Specifically, a new 1 K cryostat, 5 T superconducting magnet, microwave transmission, nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) electronics, and a new cryogenic sample space capable of positioning protein crystals in multiple orientations for thorough neutron diffraction measurements. Integrating this new DNP instrument along the IMAGINE-X beamline will enable upcoming and highly anticipated protein crystallography studies by providing various samples of interest the high degree of nuclear polarization required to accurately determine the hydrogen locations throughout the crystalline lattice.

Mentor: Josh Pierce

Internship Highlight(s): The best part of my SULI experience was seeing how the physics I learned in the classroom comes together in a real experiment while working alongside various other scientists, engineers, and technicians who make this cutting edge research possible. It showed me what large scale research at a national laboratory truly looks like and reinforced that this is absolutely the career I want to pursue.

Material Results for the Quantum Ecosystem

August 27, 2026

Public Lecture on Quantum Mechanics

August 12, 2026

Everyone is welcome to a public lecture presented by Professor Norman Mannella on Saturday, August 22, from 10:30 a.m. to 12 p.m.

What’s this talk about?

Quantum Mechanics: A Centennial Story (1925-2025)

The year 2025 marked 100 years since the birth of quantum mechanics, one of the most profound intellectual achievements in human history. This talk will retrace the extraordinary first 30 years of the quantum revolution, following the discoveries that revealed the strange and fascinating behavior of atoms, electrons, and light, and through the stories of scientists who challenged conventional wisdom and transformed our understanding of reality.

Where is it?

Institute of Advanced Materials and Manufacturing (IAMM)

Room 147

2641 Osprey Vista Way

Knoxville, TN 37920

When is it?

Saturday, August 22, 2026, from 10:30 a.m. to 12 p.m.

How do I sign up?

Space is limited, and registration is required. We strongly encourage you to register early to secure your spot.

For any questions, please contact Chodge8@utk.edu.

Brandi Skipworth Wins GATE Fellowship

July 16, 2026

Physics Graduate Student Brandi Skipworth is one of 10 graduate research assistants selected for a 2026-2027 Graduate Advancement Training and Education (GATE) fellowship. These UT Oak Ridge Innovation Institute (UTORII) awards support students involved in research affiliated with Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). Skipworth is working with the microelectronics lab in ORNL’s Physics Division to look for physics Beyond the Standard Model, the long-understood arrangement of particles and forces that describes how our universe works. She is part of Associate Professor Tova Holmes’s research group and is helping build tools to expand this framework. Her ORNL Advisor is Mathieu Benoit.

Skipworth is looking for “partner particles” predicted by supersymmetry, which could help explain phenomena that don’t fit the traditional model. To find them requires sophisticated tracking technologies. Her GATE project is “AI-Assisted Machine Vision for Tracker Module Assembly” and will take advantage of artificial intelligence to assemble, test, and calibrate high-density silicon detector modules at ORNL.

“My goal is to set up a reliable, well-documented process at ORNL for building and testing these silicon detector components so the lab can produce them consistently for future experiments,” she explained. “On a personal level, this fellowship rounds out my training by adding hands-on hardware experience to my software and analysis background and prepares me to lead detector development for future colliders.”

Skipworth earned a bachelor’s degree from the department in 2021 and won the prestigious Douglas V. Roseberry Award, the department’s top undergraduate honor. She joined the physics graduate program and in 2025 the department recognized her with the Fowler-Marion Award for her outstanding scholarship, research, and citizenship contributions.

“Brandi has consistently thrown herself at every new opportunity presented in graduate school, and she’s developed skills across teaching, computing, and scientific reasoning,” Holmes said. “I’m thrilled for her to get this chance to expand her expertise even further with this exciting project developing new tools to make the hardware required for our experiments to run.”

The GATE fellowship supports a 12-month appointment, including a $37,000 stipend, tuition waiver, fees, and health insurance. Skipworth is the 10^th physics graduate student to win a GATE Fellowship in the past six years.

Research Rock Stars: Thomas Papenbrock Explores the Forces at the Core of Matter

June 23, 2026

Rules for Nuclear Couples

June 10, 2026

Atoms are governed by nuclei and nuclei have rules of their own. Physicists like Assistant Professor Dien Nguyen study those rules. In a just-published Nature paper, she and colleagues report on a new quantum selection process that could impact how scientists understand nuclear structure, which plays a major role in fields like medicine and energy.

How Particles Pick Partners

A nucleus is a quantum system made up of protons and neutrons (nucleons), held together by the strong nuclear force. At very short distances, those nucleons can double up momentarily into short-range correlated (SRC) pairs.

“SRC pairs play an important role in helping us understand how protons and neutrons interact at very short distances inside the nucleus,” Nguyen explained. “This nucleon-nucleon interaction is what binds protons and neutrons together and determines many properties of the nucleus.”

An image in blue, red, and purple of calcium and iron protons and neutrons, including a schematic of electron scattering. — Calcium-40, Calcium-48, and Iron-54 (protons in blue; neutrons in red). Lower right: a schematic of an electron (purple) scattering off a nucleus and emitting a virtual photon (purple), which knocks out a proton (blue) from a correlated neutron-proton pair in the nucleus.

To find out how these partnerships form, she and the research team scattered electrons from calcium (Ca-40 and Ca-48) and iron (Fe-54) targets at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility, detecting both scattered electrons and knocked-out protons. Nguyen said the three nuclei chosen were a special collection based on how their protons and neutrons are arranged in discrete energy levels, or “shells.”

“Calcium-40 and calcium-48 have the same number of protons, but calcium-48 has eight additional neutrons in an outer shell,” she said. “Calcium-48 and iron-54 have the same number of neutrons, but iron-54 has six additional protons in the same outer shell. This comparison allowed us to separate the effect of adding neutrons from the effect of adding protons in a specific shell.”

The six additional protons in iron translated into some surprising results.

Nguyen explained that adding eight neutrons (40 percent) in calcium-48 resulted in only about 10 percent more SRC proton pairs over calcium-40. Adding six protons (30 percent) in iron-54, however, led to about 50 percent more SRC proton pairing compared to calcium-48. She said the results show that pair formation isn’t controlled simply by the total number of protons or neutrons.

“Instead, it depends strongly on the quantum orbitals that the protons and neutrons occupy,” she said. “In other words, nucleons are much more likely to form SRC pairs when their quantum states are favorable.”

She added that the results point to a new kind of quantum selection rule governing how nucleons can pair at short distances.

“It was not known before and could have an important impact on how we understand nuclear structure, especially how protons and neutrons interact and organize themselves inside the nucleus,” Nguyen explained.

Meaning in Every Achievement

Nguyen is the first author on the Nature paper and worked with the CaFe team (as they call themselves) to lead the project. They took the first data in late August 2022, when she was a Nathan Isgur Fellow at Jefferson Lab and a week away from delivering her daughter. A good friend and fellow CaFe member had a two-month-old baby at the time, and Nguyen said the two young moms made a pact.

“We said to each other ‘Let’s get the first paper out before our kids turn four,’” she said. “And we did it: we kept our promise with our babies.”

(For Nguyen there was an additional bonus: her husband promised her an upscale “CaFe” machine for morning coffee if they published in Nature, which he’s made good on.)

She is quick to acknowledge the research success is shared among the entire CaFe team, Jefferson Lab’s Hall C collaboration, including physics graduate and paper co-author Casey Morean (PhD, ’23).

“I am truly grateful to everyone who helped bring the project to this point,” Nguyen said.

Publishing in Nature is the latest in a string of successes she’s earned since joining the physics faculty in 2024. In 2025 she won a U.S. Department of Energy Early Career Award to support her research on how spin shapes the fundamental structure of matter. In 2026 she was recognized with the UT College of Arts and Sciences Excellence in Research and Creative Achievement Award (Early Career). She’s also deeply invested in helping her students succeed and has been voted the department’s Research Advisor of the Year by both the graduate students (2025) and the undergraduate physics majors (2026).

“For me, professional life is my passion and it always goes along with my personal life and with my loved ones,” she said. “So (the) personal part is meaningful to me (in) every achievement.”

Reconciling Fundamental Physics

June 1, 2026

Assistant Professor Haocun Yu is something of a scientific diplomat. In a recent Physical Review Letters (PRL) publication, she and colleagues show how a tabletop experiment can bring together two bedrock physics theories that have never been fully reconciled.

Subatomic Gravity?

More than a century ago Albert Einstein gave us the theory of general relativity, describing gravity in relation to space and time on large scales. Within a decade, physicists were developing a deeper knowledge of quantum mechanics: the laws that govern the subatomic world, including atoms, photons, and other microscopic systems.

“Quantum mechanics and general relativity are two of the most successful theories in physics, but they describe nature in very different ways,” Yu explained. “To understand nature at its deepest level, we need experiments that probe where these two frameworks overlap. Studying gravitational effects in genuinely quantum systems can help reveal whether the two theories remain fully compatible in that regime, and it may point the way toward new physics.”

She said the challenge in those studies is that compared to other physical effects, gravity is “extraordinarily weak” at the scale of single quantum particles. This gives it an extremely small signature that’s difficult to gauge. To overcome that obstacle, she and colleagues built a highly-stable 50-kilometer optical interferometer using compact fiber coils and tested it with single photons. The entire apparatus can fit on a tabletop.

An optical interferometer splits a beam of light, then recombines the resulting beams to create an interference pattern that makes precision measurements. Most lab-based interferometers lack the sensitivity required to pick up the elusive signal of gravity in a quantum system. In this experiment, the team’s unique design successfully detected a gravitationally-induced phase signal small enough to reach the regime needed for laboratory-scale measurements of gravitational redshift (a prediction of general relativity) with quantum light.

“Experiments involving both general relativity and quantum mechanics are necessarily at the cutting edge of precision measurement,” Yu explained. “Experiments simply did not have the stability, size, and phase sensitivity needed to reach that regime. Our work helps bring these tests closer to experimental reach.”

Quantum Phenomena on a Human Scale

Yu is a PhD graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the PRL research comes from her work as a Marie-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Vienna. She joined the UT Physics faculty in January 2026 and is drawing on her experience to create new research opportunities.

“I am building a quantum optics and sensing research program with broad applications, where advancing and developing new quantum tools for fundamental science is a central part of that vision,” she said.

Her work complements the department’s strong quantum science program. Physics faculty played key roles in the university’s quantum cluster hiring initiative and in securing National Science Foundation funding for the Center for Advanced Materials and Manufacturing, where they’re taming the complexity of quantum materials with artificial intelligence.

Yu is actively looking for students and postdocs to join her research group and contribute to work she said has long fascinated her.

“What especially drew me in is that fragile quantum effects can be harnessed as practical tools for precision measurement,” she said. “In return, these enhanced experiments can reveal mesoscopic and macroscopic quantum behavior in measurement devices — bringing quantum phenomena closer to human scales and advancing quantum science itself.”

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