Uncategorized Archives - Physics & Astronomy

Christmas Candlelight Tour and Stargazing

November 27, 2024

The Department of Physics and Astronomy is partnering once again with the Marble Springs State Historic Site for a night under the stars!

The December 13 event begins with storytelling as historic reenactors share tales of 18^th-century holiday traditions. Next comes a tour through charming and festive candlelit cabins. Finally, our physics graduate students will share their knowledge of astronomy and guide visitors through the night sky with telescopes set up on the main lawn.

This event is perfect for families, history buffs, and anyone who loves a starry night under the open sky.

Admission is free and open to everyone! You can RSVP and learn more about the event in greater detail at: https://www.facebook.com/share/kB2uj3CGa8sNLk3y/

WHAT

Christmas Candlelight Tour and Stargazing

WHO

Everyone!

COST

Free

WHEN

Friday, December 13

Candlelight Tour | 5:30 PM – 7:00 PM

Stargazing with UT Physics & Astronomy | 7:00 PM – 11:00 PM

WHERE

Marble Springs State Historic Site

Need More Info? Call (865) 573-5508 or email the Marble Springs Program Coordinator at danielles@marblesprings.net.

Marble Springs State Historic Site is funded under an agreement with the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation Tennessee Historical Commission.

Stargazing at Marble Springs

September 18, 2024

Join us on October 12th from 7:00 PM to 11:00 PM for a magical evening under the stars, hosted by our friends at the Marble Springs State Historic Site.

Come and explore the night sky through high-powered telescopes guided by UT’s expert astronomers. Discover constellations, planets, and other celestial wonders, and if we’re lucky, we might even catch a glimpse of a meteor shower!

Bring a blanket or lawn chair, your sense of wonder, and get ready for an evening of fun and learning. Whether you’re an astronomy buff or just curious, this event is the perfect way to connect with the universe.

This event is FREE and open to all ages. Don’t miss out on another chance to enjoy the stars at Marble Springs—see you there!

Event info: https://www.facebook.com/share/q1qAs93p3gRaHUdY/

Four UT Physics Students Win DOE SCGSR Support

June 27, 2024

Collage of graduate students who won national and university awards in spring 2024 — James Christie, Love Christie, Andy Tanjaroon Ly, Jinu Thomas, Charles Bell, and Colter Richardson

UT’s campus may be a little quieter during summer, but that doesn’t mean science stops. With help from the US Department of Energy, our graduate students are exploring exotic behavior in materials, measuring why carbon doesn’t fly apart, and testing the limits of the Standard Model of Physics. James Christie, Love Christie, Andy Tanjaroon Ly, and Jinu Thomas are among 86 students who learned this spring their thesis research will be supported by the DOE Office of Science Graduate Student Research (SCGSR) program.

Teaming students with state-of-the-art facilities at national laboratories, the SCGSR effort develops a new generation of scientists to lead innovation and discovery critical to the agency’s mission. While the students’ research projects may differ, the overall goal is the same: to learn more about the how nature works at a fundamental level.

Tanjaroon Ly and Thomas are both working with Professor Steve Johnston to investigate the inner workings of materials.

Tanjaroon Ly will develop computational models to study exotic superconducting states, where electric current moves through a material without losing energy. Working at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), he’ll use Monte Carlo simulations to carry out his research. Named for the famed casino, these calculations are a powerful tool using random sampling and probability to generate possible mathematical simulations for new states.

Thomas is working with quantum materials—those whose properties can’t be described by the classical laws of physics. He’s focusing on out-of-equilibrium systems that can drive novel phenomena, using time-resolved resonant inelastic X-ray scattering (tr-RIXS) to explore that behavior. Under Johnston’s supervision, Thomas will work with Dr. Mark Dean at Brookhaven National Laboratory.

While Tanjaroon Ly and Thomas deepen our understanding of materials, James and Love Christie are studying the carbon present in our cells and the model describing the building blocks of the universe.

Working with Assistant Professor Miguel Madurga at ORNL, James Christie is taking a closer look at the Hoyle state, the source of most of the carbon on Earth (including in humans). In this state, excited carbon can de-excite and turn into ground state carbon-12, which makes up nearly 99 percent of the carbon on our planet. His research focusses on measuring how often that transition happens instead of the excited carbon simply flying apart.

Love Christie will also be at ORNL, working with Professor Nadia Fomin on uncertainty studies for the Nab experiment. Using the Spallation Neutron Source’s powerful neutron beam, the experiment will provide precise testing of neutron decay parameters predicted by the Standard Model of Physics, the framework for the particles and forces foundational to our understanding of the universe.

The Road to Rocky Top

What brought these four students to Knoxville is in many ways a combination of UT’s strengths: the chance to be part of a strong research program at a large university that’s also close to home.

Tanjaroon Ly is from St. Petersburg, Florida, and earned his bachelor’s degree in physics and math at the University of Florida.

“I decided to attend UT based on the strength and diversity of the condensed matter research,” he said, noting the proximity of ORNL and the opportunity for collaborations there.

Thomas is originally from Kochi, Kerala, in southern India. He moved to the United States in 2009 and spent most of his time in Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin before moving to Knoxville for graduate school. After graduating from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with a degree in engineering physics, he said “visiting UT gave me the ‘big’ school feel I had as an undergrad. Having been away from physics for four years, the program here felt better suited to help me learn. Plus, it’s beautiful here in East Tennessee.”

For James Christie and Love Christie, who hail from Campbellsville and Richmond Kentucky, respectively, family made the difference. Both graduated from Eastern Kentucky University (James in physics with minors in chemistry and math; Love with a dual degree in physics and math).

Coming to UT meant “I stayed close to home, which is really nice,” James Christie said. “My family’s really important to me, so being close to home is good.”

Love Christie saw twin benefits in UT’s graduate physics program.

“It was the best option for following my passion and staying close to my family simultaneously,” she said.

Success Begets Success

Since 2016, 13 UT physics students have won SCGSR funding to help them untangle scientific questions as they work toward their graduate degrees. These latest awards are among multiple honors the department’s students won this spring, including a prestigious National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship for Charles Bell, who finished an undergraduate degree in May and will begin graduate studies at the University of Michigan this fall. A US Navy veteran, he worked with Assistant Professor Larry Lee in the Compact Muon Solenoid research group, where he helped create a visualization for a possible muon collider detector. The artwork made the cover of Science Magazine.

Graduate Student Colter Richardson also won support through the UT-Oak Ridge Innovation Institute Graduate Advancement, Training and Education (GATE) fellowship program. He’ll work with Professor Anthony Mezzacappa on Bridging Data Analysis and Physical Modeling of Core-Collapse Supernovae. He’s the eighth physics graduate student since 2020 to secure GATE funding.

Learn more about our graduate program in physics.

Honors Day Awards 2024

May 16, 2024

On May 6 the department hosted our annual Honors Day celebration to recognize outstanding students, faculty, and staff. Professor and Department Head Adrian Del Maestro welcomed guests and shared highlights from the department’s banner year: multiple distinguished awards and fellowships for our faculty and students, 33 graduates for 2023-2024, and milestones like passing the comprehensive exam (a feat 24 students have accomplished in the past year). Physics has a lot to celebrate! Many thanks to Assistant Professor Larry Lee for presenting the undergraduate awards and Professor Norman Mannella for presenting the graduate honors. Read more about our amazing awardees below, and see the photo album at the bottom of the page.

Extraordinary Departmental Service Awards

This award goes to staff members who’ve gone above and beyond their job descriptions to keep the department moving in the right direction. This year the department honored Josh Bell (Machine Shop Supervisor) and Debra Johnson (Business Manager). They were cited “for stepping up and taking over leadership of their respective areas (Machine Shop and Business Office), resulting in a seamless transition and continual excellent service in support of the department’s teaching, research, and service mission.”

Outstanding First Year Student Award

This award recognizes exceptional achievement by a student in the first year of physics study. The faculty considers traditional first-year students enrolled as physics majors as well as transfer students who are in their first year at UT.

This year we were fortunate to recognize three extraordinary students with this honor: Austin Miller, Amelia Sandoval, and Jordan Ashley.

While they have distinguished themselves academically, they also bring enthusiasm, discipline, and diligence to their coursework. They are off to a great start in physics.

Robert Talley Awards

The Talley Awards are made possible by the late Robert Talley, a UT Physics master’s and PhD graduate and a distinguished alumnus honoree.

The first award (for Outstanding Undergraduate Research) goes to a student who has demonstrated a talent for solving problems through physics theory and/or experiment. Charles Bell has worked across theory, phenomenology, and experiment. One of his recent successes was helping visualize a particle detector in the game creation system Unreal Engine. He jumped into an incredibly daunting and unfamiliar framework and took the first steps into rendering these detectors in Unreal. The renderings that came out of this work have since been used in a recent issue of Science, including on the cover. This summer he’ll start graduate studies at the University of Michigan, working on the ATLAS Experiment at CERN to continue his particle physics research. He has earned a prestigious NSF graduate fellowship to support his work.

The second Talley Award recognizes Outstanding Undergraduate Leadership and goes to a student who has made significant contributions to the department outside the classroom, adding depth to our programs and encouraging interest in physics. Jordan Ashley spent time in the workforce before pursuing an undergraduate degree and joined the department as a transfer student. She’s been working in the particle physics group to perform a reinterpretation of an ATLAS search for displaced leptons in an R-parity violating supersymmetry context. She has written her own analysis code, helped merge everything into a GitHub project, and established a workflow for shared usage. She’s developed a fully working setup for event generation and compared results to those from the original paper. She’s working on scaling this up for large amounts of input data. Jordan also represented the department on a high energy physics lobbying trip to Washington, DC.

James W. McConnell Award for Academic Excellence

A bequest from UT graduate James W. McConnell established this Physics Excellence Endowment, resulting in $1 million in gifts to the physics department. The McConnell Award recognizes students who have senior standing and who have demonstrated outstanding performance in academic coursework.

Fredrick (John) Melhorn is a Chancellor’s Honors Scholar who has balanced rigorous coursework with research, including work for his honors thesis. His primary focus is on machine learning applications for direct photon classification in calorimeter clusters, which he tackled with enthusiasm and dedication. He exceeded expectations by delivering a fully functional Convolutional Neural Network model and a streamlined workflow for preprocessing physics data within a week. His proactive approach to learning and problem-solving has been evident throughout the research process, and he has consistently surpassed the goals set for him. He has also excelled in writing-intensive honors classes, building a strong academic record over his undergraduate career.

Douglas V. Roseberry Distinguished Upper Class Major Award

Douglas Roseberry loved physics and extracurricular activities inside and outside the department. He planned to attend graduate school at Princeton when he died unexpectedly in October 1959. In 1960, the department awarded the first Roseberry Award to honor a student with similar gifts and enthusiasm for research, academics, and leadership. The Roseberry Award is the department’s most distinguished undergraduate honor.

Taylor Sussmane has excelled in academics, research, and community service. She spearheaded the effort to revitalize our department’s Women in Physics group after a long hiatus. This group has sprung back to life with active meetings and membership, with support for women across the department. She worked in heavy ion physics before moving to the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment at CERN, studying possible new particles produced in the collisions of the Large Hadron Collider. With collaborators from UT and the University of Chicago, she led analysis that sets new unique constraints on such new particles, and remains one of the strongest limits to date in a particle region of model space. Next up, she’ll be a proud UT alumna when she continues her studies as a PhD student at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, working in experimental particle physics at the LHC.

Outstanding Graduate Teaching Assistant Awards

This year we recognized three outstanding Graduate Teaching Assistants for their fine work in the undergraduate physics labs.

Nico Braukman taught PHYS 221 and 222 this past year, inspiring student comments including: “Nico was one of the best TAs I have ever had. Very positive, helpful, and insightful. Made the material much more understandable.” And: “Nico was so helpful and kind throughout the semester! No matter how silly or ridiculous my questions were in lab, they were always kindly answered.”

Ryan Elder was a GTA for PHYS 231 this year, earning student evaluations such as: “Ryan was a great TA and his explanations were very helpful. He created a positive and unique lab environment that challenged me to critically think about how I gauge how well I understand the material.” And: “(Ryan) did a great job explaining concepts and clearly knew what was going on. He made a more fun learning environment by being friendly and approachable. Even when I’d be having a bad day, he always showed that he cared and was willing to offer help.”

Amber Stinson is an astronomy GTA whose student evaulations outlined how she is very good at running and teaching lab. One student wrote: “I was never confused during her explanations of labs, and she was always willing to help if I was stuck on any portions of the labs. She was very kind when helping other students.”

Wayne Kincaid Award

Wayne Kincaid was a UT Physics alumnus who later worked as a research associate in the department. He devoted his energy to developing tools that would make learning engaging and accessible for students at all levels. The department established this award to honor his legacy by recognizing a student who shares his love for astronomy and astrophysics education.

Jordan Jubeck is one of two leads for the telescope labs we host for undergraduate students. In presenting the Kincaid Award, Sean Lindsay, senior lecturer and astronomy coordinator, described how she created an Astronomy Telescope Labs website that provides status updates on if the rooftop will be open, gives weather forecasts, and houses an archive of astrophotography taken from our rooftop observing platform. She has also been a tremendous and enthusiastic driver of astronomy education outreach, helping out with events at local schools, community groups, and our own solar (eclipse) and night sky observing events. She also runs much of our planetarium-based outreach programming.

Stelson Fellowships

Paul Stelson finished a PhD at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology when he was 23. He worked for MIT and then joined Oak Ridge National Laboratory as a nuclear physicist, eventually becoming Director of the Physics Division. Dr. Stelson especially enjoyed interacting with young physicists, serving as an adjunct professor in the physics department for nearly 30 years. His family established the Stelson honors in his memory to assist aspiring physicists in completing their education.

Each year we recognize two students at Honors Day with Stelson Fellowships. The first of these is for Professional Promise. Abhyuday Sharda began in our department as a teaching assistant, helping new graduate students adjust to the job by sharing all his notes and lab writeups from previous years. He then moved into research on XEM2 experiments at Jefferson Laboratory. He threw himself into data analysis, assembling needed resources, asking the right questions, and sharing everything he learns with his peers. He knows how to calibrate multiple spectrometer detectors, has done several efficiency studies, and recently obtained EMC results for several isoscalar nuclei. He has developed analysis code, collaborated with experts on detector calibrations and analysis techniques, and built life-long relationships with his peer cohort.

The Stelson Fellowship for Outstanding Beginning Research recognizes a student for outstanding progress early in their research. Johnny Lawless has been tackling problems, learning new skills, and producing results since he first joined the graduate program. He spent a summer at Fermilab working with a team doing test beam characterizations of a Compact Muon Solenoid tracker upgrade component. He quickly became a lead on that project, driving the result with his enthusiasm, curiosity, and hard work. He has since jumped into the world of Large Hadron Collider data analysis and Machine Learning for high dimensional input space problems. On top of his personal research contributions, he goes above and beyond to help train the large number of undergraduates to ensure success across the UT CMS group.

Fowler-Marion Outstanding Graduate Student Award

Joseph Fowler was part of Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Physics Division and also taught physics courses and conducted research at UT. With his colleague Jerry Marion he co-authored the textbook Fast Neutron Physics. They donated the royalties to the department, where the funds helped establish an award recognizing a graduate student who has excelled in scholarship, research, and departmental citizenship.

Harini Radhakrishnan has consistently excelled in all these areas. She has three published papers, (one as first author) with another important first author paper in the final manuscript preparation stage. She works to understand entanglement in condensed matter, including a paper that provides new insights into particle entanglement and will yield new tools able to diagnose the generation of exotic quasiparticles in and out of equilibrium. Her research contributes to a better understanding of how quantum statistical mechanics emerges from unitary time evolution in closed quantum systems, with implications for statistical, condensed matter, ultra-cold atom, and quantum information physics. Harini has contributed greatly to the department’s community, serving as president and vice president of the Graduate Physics Society. She also advised high school students as part of UT’s Upward Bound Program and served on the department’s Community Climate Committee, where she helped create the Individual Development Plan our students now use.

Faculty Honors

Honors Day offers the department an opportunity to recognize exceptional faculty contributions to teaching and research mentorship. The undergraduates select two awardees through the Society of Physics Students and the graduate students do the same through the Graduate Physics Society. This year’s honorees are:

Society of Physics Students Teacher of the Year Award: Assistant Professor Sherwood Richers

Society of Physics Students Research Advisor of the Year Award: Professor Michael Guidry

Graduate Physics Society Teacher of the Year Award: Professor Anthony Mezzacappa

Graduate Physics Society Research Advisor of the Year Award: Assistant Professor Larry Lee

Sigma Pi Sigma Inductees

Sigma Pi Sigma is the physics honor society. UT’s chapter began in 1954 with Alvin Nielsen among the inaugural members. The society’s four dimensions are service, encouragement, honor, and fellowship. This year we welcomed the following student’s into our chapter:

Joesph Beller
Raghav Chari
Hugh Jones
Amanda Nowicki
Nolan Robertson
James Rogers
Alexander Sizemore

YETI Awards

Assistant Professors Tova Holmes and Larry Lee created the Year End Tournament of Imagination (YETI) in 2022 as an engaging challenge where players analyze data to solve puzzles, unlocking more clues to reveal fun facts. This year the department recognized the tournament champions at Honors Day, where we acknowledged the four finishers: Jordan O’Kronley, Sanket Sharma, Micah Hillman, and Rebecca Godri. Claiming the year’s honors by category were:

Very Delightful: Rebecca Godri
Very Interactive: Jordan O’Kronley
Overall winner: Micah Hillman

Photo of Adrian Del Maestro and Josh Bell — Adrian Del Maestro and Josh Bell

Photo of Debra Johnson and Adrian Del Maestro — Adrian Del Maestro and Josh Bell

Women in Physics Lunch: Spring 2024

May 9, 2024

Photo of the Women in Physics Lunch, May 2024, at the University of Tennessee.

The Spring 2024 edition of the Women in Physics Lunch was held on May 8. A large group of 40 undergraduates, graduate students, post-docs, and faculty gathered despite the challenging weather that we had in the morning.

While enjoying excellent food, we had a chance to catch up with each other and celebrate the end of the academic year learning about the future endeavors of the various members of our group that are graduating. We thank the Department of Physics for the support provided, and we are looking forward to our next meeting, the Fall edition, on December 4, 2024. Save the date!

Courtesy of Professor Adriana Moreo

Honors Day 2024

April 29, 2024

Plan now to attend the department’s annual Honors Day festivities on May 6, 2024!

We will celebrate our staff for their extraordinary service and our students for their academic, leadership, and research achievements. The Society of Physics Students and Graduate Physics Society will also honor outstanding faculty members for exemplary teaching and advising.

The awards ceremony will begin at 3:30 p.m. in Ballroom C (Room 272C) of the Student Union on UT’s campus (please note the change in location from previous years).

You can also attend via Zoom: https://tennessee.zoom.us/j/89778052194?pwd=WjUvTzB4Y3ovUU1ZbUFhTmhCWjBNQT09.

Announcement image inspired by research in Wonhee Ko’s group.

Teaching Students to Teach Themselves

April 16, 2024

A photo of Daniel Willingham — Daniel T. Willingham

Special Lecture by Professor Daniel T. Willingham, University of Virginia

Abstract: When children start school, it is completely up to the teacher to see to it that students learn. But as they grow older, they become increasingly responsible for their own learning. They must learn how to read complicated texts independently, and not just for comprehension, but to remember the contents. They must learn to avoid distraction, commit content to memory, take notes, judge when they have studied enough, avoid procrastination, and more. Studies show that most college students use very inefficient strategies for most of these tasks. In this talk I will summarize research from the last twenty years on a subset of these tasks, focusing on practical applications that can be communicated to students so that they can regulate their learning more efficiently.

When: Friday, April 26, 2024
Where: 307 Science and Engineering Research Facility (SERF)
What Time: 3:30-5:00 pm

Dan Willingham earned a PhD from Harvard University in cognitive psychology and is now a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia. His research concerns the application of cognitive psychology to K-16 education. He is the author of several books, including Outsmart Your Brain and Raising Kids Who Read. He is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association and the Association for Psychological Science.

The Art of Muon Collisions

April 3, 2024

Image of Science Magazine Cover 29 March 2024, Used with Permission — *Credit: Reprinted with permission from AAAS; See Terms & Conditions below*

Tova Holmes, Larry Lee, and Charles Bell

Assistant Professors Tova Holmes and Larry Lee are particle physicists and in their line of work, to think big, you have to think small. That’s where muons come in, and it’s how they became part of a Science Magazine story—including creating the cover art.

In “The Dream Machine,” journalist Adrian Cho reviews the newly-drawn roadmap for particle physics research in the United States. For the past century, physicists have designed, built, and deployed powerful accelerators that rev up and collide particles, precisely measuring the fragments and tracking the escapees to learn more about the building blocks of matter that make up the universe. With current instruments here and abroad reaching their energy limits, American physicists are looking at three possible types of colliders to replace them. Among them is a muon collider.

Will the Muon Have Its Moment?

Muons are fundamental particles. They’re quite a bit like electrons, but roughly 200 times heavier. Until now protons and electrons have been the particles of choice for collider physics, but with their extra mass muons are good candidates for collisions at energy scales up to 10 times higher than that of the Large Hadron Collider, the current world leader. As an early-career scientist, Holmes explained to Cho that waiting something like another five decades for a next-generation collider means the particle physics research she’s so passionate about would pass her by.

“I will be definitely not still working, possibly not alive,” she said.

That’s why she and Lee have spent nearly four years creating designs for a possible muon collider. Holmes coordinates the US-based research and development program for tracking detectors. (Her work has won her a Department of Energy Early Career Research Award, as well as place among the 2024 Class of Cottrell Scholars.) In her conversation with Cho she referred him to Lee as a source for images that could further describe the muon collider vision and enhance the article. Like Holmes, Lee has a strong belief in the power of imagery to convey scientific concepts, so he gladly accepted the assignment.

Renaissance and Romance

Planning for a muon collider is one thing. Promoting the idea to stakeholders is another. Holmes and Lee saw right away that the imagery accompanying those pitches didn’t always match the excitement for the collider’s promise.

In particle physics, “we have a long history of making what are called event displays,” Lee explained, which are simply visualizations of individual collision events. He said scientists have field-specific tools to create those displays, but the results look technical and aren’t particularly engaging.

“One thing I’ve wanted to do for a long time was bring in modern 3D environment modeling to essentially do the same thing, but in a slicker way,” he said.

With UT’s particle physicists’ involvement in the muon collider—specifically a conceptual design for a detector—he saw a fantastic opportunity.

“Right now, if we’re talking about the detector, we’re just in the design phase,” Holmes explained. “We write down some parameters, we try and visualize it, we simulate it, we shoot fake particles into it in our simulation, (and) we see what we can do to reconstruct it.”;

Lee enlisted Undergraduate Physics Major Charles Bell to help create a visualization of the detector and what the particles inside it might look like. They started with proprietary formats familiar to particle physics and brought in industry standard tools, ultimately incorporating Unreal Engine, a creative suite used for an array of simulation purposes. The resulting images were stunning enough to land on the cover of Science and alongside Cho’s article.

While standard event displays are great for showing off technical details, the new artistic images add another layer of strategic communication.

“Larry was trying to make a version of them that took advantage of all the tools that are out there to make them both useful and beautiful,” Holmes said. “Improving this kind of visual translation is really important for the future of our field because we have to be able to explain the kind of exploration we’re doing through visual media.”

Holmes said the muon collider’s success is dependent on audiences both inside and outside physics. At present only a few hundred scientists the world over are involved in the project.

“There have been past versions of this muon collider effort where the technology was not really close enough to ready for people to take it seriously as the next thing,” she said. “It needs to grow to happen. That means getting more people interested. It also needs the engagement of the field to get support from funding agencies. Being able to communicate clearly the excitement, and make sure that communication gets in people’s laps, matters.”

She’s hopeful Lee’s images will inspire a “renaissance” where researchers look at the technological progress surrounding the muon collider and see its potential in a new light. They both also want the public to become more excited about the science behind, literally, everything.

“In astrophysics it’s very easy to visualize because we take literal photographs of the universe,” Holmes said. “For us (in particle physics), we can’t take literal photographs. We do something similar with our detector reconstruction, but it doesn’t look like a photo.”

Lee said he wants images like those he created for the muon collider project to tie in to the “romantic big picture” of fundamental science and capture human imagination.

“We both feel very strongly that it’s important to make things visually compelling, because once you do, people remember them,” he said, even if they don’t fully understand the science behind the pictures.

“This was something we’ve been talking about in the muon collider effort because you’re asking the public to embrace a big project and if you can’t explain what it’s for, you have a real problem,” Holmes said.

This isn’t her first foray into art where the collider’s concerned: she created a poster that’s hanging in a good many physics departments as well as swag to promote the project.

Holmes and Lee believe that prioritizing compelling science communication isn’t just a feel-good pursuit: it’s a key to helping serious science thrive.

“This work is important,” Lee said. “It’s not purely outreach; it’s not purely just for fun. It really pushes us to the literal front of the journal.”

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