physics-news

Hints that dark energy may evolve

March 24, 2025

DESI is an international galaxy survey experiment with more than 900 researchers from over 70 institutions around the world, including from the University of Utah, and is managed by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). The collaboration shared their findings today in multiple papers that will be posted on the online repository arXiv and in a presentation at the American Physical Society’s Global Physics Summit in Anaheim, California.

“What we are seeing is deeply intriguing,” said Alexie Leauthaud-Harnett, co-spokesperson for DESI and a professor at UC Santa Cruz. “It is exciting to think that we may be on the cusp of a major discovery about dark energy and the fundamental nature of our universe.”

The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) operating out of the Mayall 4-meter Telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory.

Taken alone, DESI’s data are consistent with our standard model of the universe: Lambda CDM (where CDM is cold dark matter and Lambda represents the simplest case of dark energy, where it acts as a cosmological constant with constant energy density). However, when paired with other measurements, there are mounting indications that the impact of dark energy may be weakening over time and that other models may be a better fit. Those other measurements include the light leftover from the dawn of the universe (the cosmic microwave background or CMB), exploding stars (supernovae), and how light from distant galaxies is warped by gravity (weak lensing).

“We’re guided by Occam’s razor, and the simplest explanation for what we see is shifting,” said Will Percival, co-spokesperson for DESI and a professor at the University of Waterloo. “It’s looking more and more like we may need to modify our standard model of cosmology to make these different datasets make sense together—and evolving dark energy seems promising.”

So far, the preference for an evolving dark energy has not risen to “5 sigma,” the gold standard in physics that represents the threshold for a discovery. However, different combinations of DESI data with the CMB, weak lensing, and supernovae sets range from 2.8 to 4.2 sigma. (A 3-sigma event has a 0.3% chance of being a statistical fluke, but many 3-sigma events in physics have faded away with more data.) The analysis used a technique to hide the results from the scientists until the end, mitigating any unconscious bias about the data.

“We now have a better understanding of where the preference for evolving dark energy arises in the data,” said University of Utah graduate student Qinxun Li. “By comparing the distance estimates from DESI to those from less distant supernovae and the predictions from the CMB, we can illustrate how a model with time-evolving dark energy describes the data better than does the standard model for the universe.”

DESI is one of the most extensive surveys of the cosmos ever conducted. The state-of-the-art instrument can capture light from 5,000 galaxies simultaneously, and was constructed and is operated with funding from the DOE Office of Science. DESI is mounted on the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Nicholas U. Mayall 4-meter Telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory (a program of NSF NOIRLab) in Arizona. The experiment is now in its fourth of five years surveying the sky, with plans to measure roughly 50 million galaxies and quasars (extremely distant yet bright objects with black holes at their cores) by the time the project ends.

Mechanical technician William DiVittorio performs a carbon dioxide cleaning on the mirror of the Mayall Telescope, where DESI operates.

The new analysis uses data from the first three years of observations and includes nearly 15 million of the best measured galaxies and quasars. It’s a major leap forward, improving the experiment’s precision with a dataset that is more than double what was used in DESI’s first analysis, which also hinted at an evolving dark energy.

“These new DESI measurements are not just more precise, but have also been shown to be extremely robust. We have compared these results to previous measurements and performed new tests of internal consistency and have detected no problems in the measurements” said Li, who developed several additional quality assessment tests on the DESI data that are new relative to the first-year results.

DESI tracks dark energy’s influence by studying how matter is spread across the universe. Events in the very early universe left subtle patterns in how matter is distributed, a feature called baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO). That BAO pattern acts as a standard ruler, with its size at different times directly affected by how the universe was expanding. Measuring the ruler at different distances shows researchers the strength of dark energy throughout history. DESI’s precision with this approach is the best in the world.

The collaboration will soon begin work on additional analyses to extract even more information from the current dataset, and DESI will continue collecting data. Other experiments coming online over the next several years will also provide complementary datasets for future analyses.

“With only three years of data from DESI, we have far more precise measurements than were obtained in ten years using similar techniques in the previous galaxy survey, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey,” said Kyle Dawson, a professor in physics and astronomy at the University of Utah. Prof. Dawson was the co-spokesperson for DESI from Sept. 2020 to Aug. 2024 and was also the principal investigator for the last cosmology program within the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. “I anxiously await the results from the next few years of DESI and other cosmological programs to see if these 3-4 sigma results fade away or if indeed they stick and reveal new physics beyond what we had assumed in our standard model.”

Videos discussing the experiment’s new analysis are available on the DESI YouTube channel. Alongside unveiling its latest dark energy results at the APS meeting today, the DESI collaboration also announced that its Data Release 1 (DR1), which contains the first 13 months of main survey data, is now available for anyone to explore. With information on millions of celestial objects, the dataset will support a wide range of astrophysical research by others, in addition to DESI’s cosmology goals.

DESI is supported by the DOE Office of Science and by the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, a DOE Office of Science national user facility. Additional support for DESI is provided by the U.S. National Science Foundation; the Science and Technology Facilities Council of the United Kingdom; the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation; the Heising-Simons Foundation; the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA); the National Council of Humanities, Sciences, and Technologies of Mexico; the Ministry of Science and Innovation of Spain; and by the DESI member institutions.

Story above adapted from DESI.

Cool Science Radio: George Cassiday

March 14, 2025

George Cassiday

Not to be confused with the man who served as Congress's primary bootlegger during prohibition, George Cassiday is the recipient of the 2002 Distinguished Teaching award at the University of Utah and was professor of some of the most popular courses in the Physics and Astronomy Department at the U.

Known for teaching some of the more interesting, and arguably unconventional classes at the U, Cassiday taught a course titled "Does E.T. exist?" According to a 2015 article in The Chronicle, the good professor did not want students to simply dismiss his class as an easy way to get past a general education requirement.

“This course is not simply a ‘watered-down’ version of an introductory class in some single scientific discipline, such as basic physics or chemistry,” Cassiday said at the time. “Students learn a lot about different scientific disciplines by attempting to answer a question in which I have never found a single person who is not interested.”

The question students attempt to answer in Cassiday’s course was how life emerged in the Universe. Students also discussed the probability that life could evolve into an intelligent civilization capable of establishing contact with another intelligent civilization, such as ours.

Now professor emeritus, Cassiday talks with KPCW's Cool Science Radio about being part of the original team searching for illusive particles at the sub-atomic level as well as the history of them.

Gamma ray observatory gets green light

March 12, 2025

The creation of the CTAO-ERIC will enable the observatory’s construction to advance rapidly and provide a framework for distributing its data worldwide, significantly accelerating its progress toward scientific discovery. On Feb. 13, 2025, the ERIC Council approved to immediately negotiate the establishment of Japan as a strategic partner and the United States, Brazil and Australia as third-party members.

Animation of a blue light beam breaking up into multiple particles and hits Earth's atmosphere, scattering across the globe.

“This field did not exist before 1989 when the first the gamma ray source was detected. At that point, we knew of four sources in the world,” said Dave Kieda, professor in the Department of Physics & Astronomy at the University of Utah and the CTAO spokesperson for the U.S. “The past 35 years, we went from detecting the first to now seeing several hundred. With CTAO, we’re going to see thousands. And the University of Utah is part of that legacy.”

The CTAO-ERIC was established with the international support of 11 countries and one intergovernmental organization that contributed to the technological development, construction and operation of the observatory. For Kieda, the new array will give astronomers an unprecedented view of the mysterious radiation he’s spent his career studying.

“Over the last decade, people have discovered that these high energy gamma rays are present in many, many types of very energetic astronomical phenomenon, but we don’t know much about where they come from,” Kieda said.

Read the full story by Lisa Potter in @ The U. Video above: Animation of a gamma ray hitting Earth’s atmosphere, creating the blue Cherenkov light that flashes for a billionth of a second.

‘Vast discovery’ of black holes in dwarf galaxies

March 5, 2025

This dual achievement not only expands scientists’ understanding of the black hole population in the universe but also sets the stage for further explorations the formation of the first black holes to form in the universe and their role in galaxy evolution.

With DESI’s early data, the team was able to obtain an unprecedented dataset that includes the spectra of 410,000 galaxies, including roughly 115,000 dwarf galaxies—small, diffuse galaxies containing thousands to several billions of stars and very little gas. This extensive set would allow Pucha and her team to explore the complex interplay between black hole evolution and dwarf galaxy evolution.

While astrophysicists are fairly confident that all massive galaxies, like our Milky Way, host black holes at their centers, the picture becomes unclear as you move toward the low-mass end of the spectrum. Finding black holes is a challenge on its own but identifying them in dwarf galaxies is even more difficult due to their small sizes and the limited ability of our current instruments to resolve the regions close to these objects. An actively feeding black hole, however, is easier to spot.

“When a black hole at the center of a galaxy starts feeding, it unleashes a tremendous amount of energy into its surroundings, transforming into what we call an active galactic nucleus,” said Pucha. “This dramatic activity serves as a beacon, allowing us to identify hidden black holes in these small galaxies.”

The study is online as a pre-print ahead of publication in The Astrophysical Journal.

Read the full story by Lisa Potter in @ The U.

Future of Telescope Lenses

February 27, 2025

For centuries, lenses have worked the same way: curved glass or plastic bending light to bring images into focus. But traditional lenses have a major drawback—the more powerful they need to be, the bulkier and heavier they become. Scientists have long searched for a way to reduce the weight of lenses without sacrificing functionality.

And while some slimmer alternatives exist, they tend to be limited in their capacity and are generally challenging and expensive to make.

New research from University of Utah engineering professor Rajesh Menon and colleagues at the Price College of Engineering offers a promising solution applicable to telescopes and astrophotography: a large aperture flat lens that focuses light as effectively as traditional curved lenses while preserving accurate color. This technology could transform astrophotography imaging systems, especially in applications where space is at a premium, such as on aircraft, satellites and space-based telescopes.

Their latest study, featured on the cover of the journal Applied Physics Letters, was led by Menon Lab member Apratim Majumder, a research assistant professor in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering. Coauthors include fellow Menon Lab members Alexander Ingold and Monjurul Meem, Department of Physics & Astronomy’s Tanner Obray and Paul Ricketts, and Nicole Brimhall of Oblate Optics.

If you’ve ever used a magnifying glass, you know that lenses bend light to make objects appear larger. The thicker and heavier the lens, the more it bends the light, and the stronger the magnification. For everyday cameras and backyard telescopes, lens thickness isn’t a huge problem. But when telescopes must focus light from galaxies millions of light-years away, the bulk of their lenses become impractical. That’s why observatory and space-based telescopes rely on massive, curved mirrors instead to achieve the same light-bending effect since they can be made much thinner and lighter than lenses.

Read the full story by Lexi Hall — intern, College of Engineering

Steven Chu’s Random Walk in Science

February 25, 2025

Credit: Todd Anderson

It's also a resonant place for Frontiers of Science, the U’s longest running lecture series sponsored by the College of Science with, on February 18, Nobel laureate physicist Steven Chu at the podium.

Professor of physics, molecular and cellular physiology and energy science and engineering at Stanford University, Chu held the audience of nearly 500 captive with the central trope of his presentation that scientific trajectories — as with the course of one’s life — seldom follow a predictable path. The diminutive, bespectacled Chu with his self-deprecating, intrepid manner was there as exhibit A.

Chu's opening salvo was a retrospective of family photos of his unusually bright and accomplished family of birth, beginning with his father, mother and his father’s oldest sister who came to the U.S. from China, his father to attend MIT before graduate school during World War II. With two brothers, one Harvard-educated and another who, despite never earning a high school diploma, was accepted to UCLA and eventually snared five degrees, including a Ph.D at the age of 22, Chu describes himself as the “black sheep of the family.”

“How do you compete with that?” he quipped.

Following his bachelor’s at the University of Rochester, Chu found himself in graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley. After earning his Ph.D. he remained at Berkeley as a post-doctoral researcher for two years before joining Bell Labs. It was there that he and his co-workers developed a way to cool atoms by employing six laser beams opposed in pairs and arranged in three directions at right angles to each other. Trapping atoms with this method allows scientists to study individual atoms with great accuracy. Additionally, the technique can be used to construct an atomic clock with great precision. This work led to his 1997 Nobel Prize in physics.

While it may seem a straight line between his graduate work to stints at national laboratories, including as director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and professor of physics at Stanford, Chu’s tour through academic and high-level lab work was hit-and-miss, serendipitous and otherwise indirect. Even so, he managed to traverse multiple research interests, expanding into biological physics and polymer physics at the single-molecule level. He studied enzyme activity and protein and RNA folding using techniques like fluorescence resonance energy transfer, atomic force microscopy and optical tweezers. His polymer physics research used individual DNA molecules to study polymer dynamics and their phase transitions. He has continued researching atomic physics, as well, developing new methods of laser cooling and trapping.

Deepwater Horizon Explosion

But it is Chu’s work to help mitigate climate change and his advocacy for a greener economy that he is, perhaps, most celebrated for. During his four years as Secretary of Energy under Obama, the president praised Chu for moving the U.S. toward “real energy independence … doubling the use of renewable energy” and putting “our country on a path to win the global race for clean energy jobs.”

Ironically, the most dramatic moment of his tenure as secretary was not with renewables and the technologies for carbon sequestration but with oil. Three weeks after British Petroleum’s (BP’s) Horizon Deepwater offshore oil rig exploded in April, 2010, killing eleven and sending crude oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico, Chu was in a cabinet meeting. He recounts the story this way: “President Obama says, ‘Chu, go down there and help them clean it up.’ He didn’t say form a committee. He said, you go down there and help them because he knew I was a practicing scientist, or used to be, which is kind of amazing.”

Initially, Chu and his team were there only to assist BP as it struggled to regain control of its well on the seafloor. Getting accurate data from BP scientists and engineers proved to be a challenge. Chu’s own back-of-the-envelope math quickly determined that at least 40,000 barrels of oil per day were surging from the well head, and during his lecture at the museum, Chu admitted that he threw a “temper tantrum,” at one point to ensure that the scientific process he was accustomed to of “making a plan and following the plan” actually happened.

The government team found themselves intervening in various ways. They required BP to provide more accurate, even truthful measurements of the well’s pressure. In late May, they rejected BP's attempted “top kill” procedure. Once they secured the necessary data from BP, they approved the "top hat" approach to capping the well, a strategy of circulating methanol to prevent methane-filled ice from forming.

It was complicated, technical work that required many physicists who Chu helped assemble from his vast network, including important scientists from Los Alamos National Lab. What finally worked on July 12, according to a story in Scientific American, was the installation of a smaller blowout preventer installed atop the failed blowout preventer at the well's head on the seafloor, replacing the failed “top hat” approach.

Even so the risks to this “capping stack” were great, with concerns that the procedure might create a subsurface “blowout” that would end up draining all the estimated 110 million barrels of oil in the entire formation. Chu’s calculations, along with those of other government scientists, determined that the flow would have to be twice what it was for that to happen. Still, before deployment of the successful solution to the problem, they required BP to monitor the well's pressure continuously for 48 hours.

On July 15 at 2:25 P.M. Houston time, the test began. An ROV arm turned the handle on the capping stack 10 times, cranking it closed. For the first time since April 20, no oil flowed into the Gulf of Mexico.

Titanic Oil Age

Credit: Todd Anderson

Before being faced with what seemed like an unstoppable crude oil gusher, Chu had established a group called ARPA-E and its energy innovations hubs. With funding from the American Recovery Act — the more than $800 billion economic stimulus legislation Obama signed in early 2009 — ARPA-E funded a number of cutting-edge technologies. Its competitive grants were meant to kick-start promising projects that would attract the interest of private investors like those working with microbes engineered to turn hydrogen and carbon dioxide into liquid fuel.

Chu’s tenure at DOE ended in 2013 and he returned to Stanford where he helped establish Bio-X which linked the physical and biological sciences with engineering and medicine. Now the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Physics and Professor of Molecular and Cellular Physiology, he is still known as an advocate for conservation and the development of new renewable energy to save the planet and sequestration of carbon dioxide.

First attributed to Ahmed Zaki Yamani, the former Saudi Arabian Oil Minister, is a quote that Chu is most famous for using: "The Stone Age did not end for lack of stones, and the Oil Age will end, but not for lack of oil." At the Natural History Museum of Utah, Chu echoed these words to an enraptured crowd overlooking the valley and its vaulted sky, arguing that the Oil Age will come to an end not because we will run out of oil, but because new, more efficient energy sources will replace it.

At the end of his lecture Steven Chu, a self-proclaimed optimist, ominously screened the moment-before-striking-the-iceberg scene from the James Cameron film “Titanic” as an analogue to where civilization is today vis-à-vis a warming globe.

“That doesn't mean you shouldn't <turn> harder, right?” Chu announced referring to the decision by the captain and crew to turn the giant ocean liner even if it would take too long to avoid impact. “Okay, but it's going to take a long time,” he continued, “and so with that, I'm hoping that a little support in science in science technology grows.”

Astronomy teams win Scialog funding

February 21, 2025

Tanmoy Laskar with his mentees at a radio astronomy workshop at the U in summer 2024.

The three-year initiative 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).

Funded by the Research Corporation for Science Advancement (RCSA), the 21 separate awards of $60,000 in direct costs each will support a total of 20 scientists from colleges, universities, and research institutions in the United States and Canada. Laskar's team includes Igor Andreoni, Physics and Astronomy, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Mathew Madhavacheril, Physics and Astronomy, University of Pennsylvania. Their research focus is titled Rubin LSST as a Multi-Wavelength Discovery Engine for Relativistic Transients.

Scialog is short for “science + dialog.” Created in 2010 by RCSA, the Scialog format aims to accelerate breakthroughs by building a creative network of scientists that crosses disciplinary silos and stimulating intensive conversation around a scientific theme of global importance. The initiative represents a fulfilling new chapter in the story of RCSA’s long-term support of the Rubin Observatory, located in north-central Chile.

exploiting a novel synergy

With his team, Laskar studies the most energetic explosions in the Universe that hurl matter in fast jets close to the speed of light. This includes gamma-ray bursts from the deaths of massive stars, merging stars that make gravitational waves and provide the Universe with its supply of heavy elements, and tidal disruption events from stars getting ripped apart by black holes. "The rarity of these extreme explosions has made them difficult to find and understand in detail," says Laskar who explains that LSST, which operates at visible wavelengths of light, will discover thousands of these every year. "Unfortunately," he continues, the rarest and most interesting events will be buried in the millions of new alerts the survey will generate every night!. Our Scialog LSST project aims to solve this problem by exploiting a novel synergy of LSST with telescope surveys built for an entirely different purpose: to study the relict microwave light from the Big Bang."

Energetic explosions produce a lot of microwaves, providing an excellent test that can distinguish them from other classes of transients. "Our team will develop tools to search for millimeter emission from candidates found by LSST in data taken by concurrently running CMB surveys in real time. Not only will this help us find the most exciting events, but knowing the millimeter brightness and polarization of these events will be essential in testing our theoretical models about how nature makes these explosions and how physics behaves under the associated extreme conditions of temperature, density, and magnetization."

The team includes members with access to precursor surveys, which will help them quickly develop and test the tools they will need on data already on hand. "

"My expertise," says Laskar, "is on modeling these explosions and extracting physics from the data."

'Taking great data'

In November, at the initiative's inaugural conference held in Tucson, Arizona, Bob Blum, Rubin Observatory’s Director of Operations, discussed the recent successful use of the commissioning camera, which came online in October 2024.

“There's lots of challenges,” he said. “The system isn't reliable yet, but when it works, we're taking great data.”

With technical first light on the Rubin Observatory LSST Camera (the world’s largest digital camera) expected by early June 2025, full operations could start in September or October 2025. He said the first data preview should be available to researchers in March 2025, and the second in March 2026.

In time, the observatory will be able to survey the entire sky in only three nights and is expected to generate more than 20 terabytes of data each night, amassing a set of data and images that could address some of the deepest questions about the universe, its evolution, and the objects within it.

The Laskar group not only promises to help develop tools to find the most exciting events from those data made available each night, they will lead the modeling and data interpretation efforts. "I am looking forward to discovering and studying new and unusual events that will further our understanding of how physics behaves in some of the most extreme environments in the universe," says Laskar.

The Heising-Simons Foundation, The Brinson Foundation, the Leinweber Foundation, and independent philanthropist Kevin Wells are providing support to RCSA to fund the work of the eight cross-disciplinary teams.

by David Pace

Widening Our Cosmic View

February 6, 2025

Gail Zasowski

Teams are valued within scientific communities, but when it comes to broader public recognition it’s rare for anything more than an organization or singular leader to step into the spotlight.

But times are changing at breakneck speeds, the value of these enablers of science becoming more and more apparent as the spotlight grows to encompass them. With the upcoming launch of the Roman Space Telescope we are seeing a shift towards broader perspectives, bringing more voices into decision-making processes to optimize the pursuit of scientific advancement.

Taking a novel approach for NASA’s missions, where observations with telescopes like Hubble and James Webb were largely proposal-based (scientists writing competing proposals to win time using the telescopes’ instruments), Roman will be predominantly driven by surveys designed by the astronomical community as a whole. That community is made up of an extensive structure of committees involving hundreds (if not thousands) of astronomers who have spent years analyzing which observational designs would be the most useful for their community at large. This will create an archive of data which anyone in the world can access to do science.

A wider range of expertise

An undertaking like this requires organizational expertise which is where Gail Zasowski, an associate professor in the Department of Physics & Astronomy, comes into play. Co-chairing the Roman Observations Time Allocation Committee (ROTAC) alongside Saurabh Jha (Rutgers University), she and the committee of 13 scientists are tasked with taking all of these proposed survey designs and constructing a plan that best balances the scientific goals of the astronomical community. For example, some time will be spent studying black holes and stellar explosions dating back to the early universe, while other observations will focus closer to home, on stars and planets in our own Milky Way and even asteroids in our Solar System. Thus the ROTAC is faced with the challenge (or opportunity) to plan a multi-year observing program that includes everything from solar system formation to dark matter and dark energy.

“Our committee was deliberately chosen to span a wide range of science expertise,” Zasowski explains. “It’s our job to evaluate from a scientific perspective how to maximize the observational output of the telescope. Is there somewhere everybody wants to look, where an observation could kill two birds with one stone? Given other telescope missions around the world, where can Roman have the largest unique impact?”

It’s an impressive task to keep all these plates spinning at once, but that’s the beauty of moving these decisions to a communal level. By enabling collaboration, the community can plan far more efficiently than any one individual team or project could do on its own.

A wider range of voices

Yerkes Observatory Roman Workshop. Zasowski is pictured center left. Credit: Yerkes Observatory. Inset: Nancy Roman.

Zasowski was chosen for her background in ground-based astronomy surveys, a priority shared by the U’s Department of Physics and Astronomy. She explains that “Where many larger institutions will devote their time and money buying into one large telescope, we have elected to spend our time and energy participating in surveys. We feel it gets more bang for your buck, more photons per dollar, as being in these surveys not only grants access to data, but also access to the scientific community who makes the survey happen.”

This pattern repeats across campus, investing in building core skills and wider networking to get a foot into every door, rather than definitively propping only one open. Everything from the Science Research Initiative which builds research connections for students far earlier than most; to the Early Exploration Scholars which broadens those connections for all campus students; and to the ACCESS Scholars program working to eliminate social barriers that have traditionally existed in STEM.

By investing in the community aspect of science so early, the U’s students and faculty are perfectly suited to fill these organizational roles, bring people together and lay the groundwork that enables future science to be conducted.

Zasowski describes an inspiring experience at Yerkes Observatory last year. “We were at the observatory where Nancy Grace Roman [the telescope’s namesake] did her Ph.D.” she describes. ”We were in the rooms where she worked, talking about designing a survey to study the science she was interested in while using a space telescope named after her.”

As a woman in astronomy starting in the 1940s, Roman had faced significant uphill battles in securing her place in the astronomical community. For the “Mother of Hubble” to be honored in such a way — for the first telescope named after a woman to be so organized around working together — it's a beautiful full-circle moment. It's a symbol of progress, of our expanding view of the night sky mirrored in a scientific field expanding to include and celebrate those who historically struggled to find their place within it.

The Roman Telescope is scheduled to be launched in October of next year, to journey around the Sun for at least five years and provide the astronomical community with data to study for many more years to follow.

by Michael Jacobsen

Tino Nyawelo, Presidential Societal Impact Scholar

February 3, 2025

Nyawelo is a professor (lecturer) in the Department of Physics & Astronomy. His main area of research is physics education with the focus on equity/access in education. He is the Director of Undergraduate Research and coordinates the NSF Summer Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) Program.

In 2012, he founded the REFUGES program, a robust STEM-focused refugee and minority student support program with two distinct components: 1) an after-school program for middle- and high-school students; and 2) a summer bridge program for students transitioning to the University of Utah. REFUGES addresses the academic and cultural challenges of refugee youth in fifteen hours of programming per week on the U of U campus. Participants receive individual tutoring and mentoring, science enrichment activities, college and career readiness interventions, and workshops promoting healthy lifestyles. The program has impacted the lives of over 1,000 refugee youth living in the Salt Lake Valley.

In 2020, he joined the High School Project on Astrophysics Research with Cosmics (HiSPARC), a project in which high schools and academic institutions join forces and form a network to observe and measure ultra-high-energy cosmic rays with a ground-based scintillation detector. HiSPARC project started in the Netherlands in 2003, and in 2024 HiSPARC moved to University of Utah under his leadership and provided the initial infrastructure to imagine new research opportunities in K-12 science education. There are currently two projects that deploy HiSPARC cosmic ray detectors with high school students and teachers in Utah: 1) The InSPIRE Program (Investigating the Development of STEM-Positive Identities of Refugee Teens in a Physics Out-of-School Time Experience); and 2) A Research Experiences for Teachers (RET).

He obtained his master’s degree in theoretical high energy physics at the Abdus Salam International Center for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste, Italy. He received his Ph.D. in theoretical physics from the Free University of Amsterdam.

Other awardees include David Wetter, professor, population health sciences and adjunct professor, psychology, and director of the Center for Health Outcomes and Population Equity (HOPE); Matthew Basso, associate professor, gender studies and history; Divya Chandrasekhar, associate professor, Department of City and Metropolitan Planning; and Sameer Rao, assistant professor, mechanical engineering.

'Incredible impact'

"As Presidential Societal Impact Scholars, these exceptional faculty demonstrate how public engagement and scholarship can have a broad impact on the world around us,” said President Taylor Randall. “As one of the nation’s leading research universities, we aim to improve the communities we serve by sharing our research and expertise in meaningful ways. The recipients of this award embody this mission, translating their work into efforts that not only shape their fields but also positively transform society.”

Each scholar will receive a one-time cash award of $10,000 and support from University Marketing & Communications to promote their research, scholarship and initiatives.

To be considered, the faculty member’s area of focus must address a major societal issue, such as physical health and well-being, mental illness, poverty, the housing crisis, an environmental problem, etc. The nominee’s work should have the potential to inform public debate and positively impact individuals, institutions and communities.

“This year’s scholars represent the incredible impact that faculty can have beyond the classroom through service and public engagement,” said law professor Randy Dryer, who established the award in 2022 through a gift to the university. “Their work not only advances their respective fields but also demonstrates a deep commitment to improving the lives of individuals and communities. These scholars translate their research and expertise into real-world solutions, making a tangible difference in society, using their knowledge to create a more just and equitable world for all.”

The 2025-26 Presidential Societal Impact Scholars will serve through May 2026 and then continue as members of the permanent scholars’ network. All scholars are highlighted here.

‘Brand new physics’ for next gen spintronics

January 16, 2025

Eric Montoya

Traditional electronics use the charge of electrons to encode, store and transmit information. Spintronic devices utilize both the charge and spin-orientation of electrons. By assigning a value to electron spin (up=0 and down=1), spintronic devices offer ultra-fast, energy-efficient platforms.

To develop viable spintronics, physicists must understand the quantum properties within materials. One property, known as spin-torque, is crucial for the electrical manipulation of magnetization that’s required for the next generations of storage and processing technologies.

Researchers at the University of Utah and the University of California, Irvine (UCI), have discovered a newtype of spin–orbit torque. The study that published in Nature Nanotechnology on Jan. 15, 2025, demonstrates a new way to manipulate spin and magnetization through electrical currents, a phenomenon that they’ve dubbed the anomalous Hall torque.

“This is brand new physics, which on its own is interesting, but there’s also a lot of potential new applications that go along with it,” said Eric Montoya, assistant professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Utah and lead author of the study. “These self-generated spin-torques are uniquely qualified for new types of computing like neuromorphic computing, an emerging system that mimics human brain networks.”

Hall of torques

Electrons have miniscule magnetic fields that, like planet Earth, are dipolar—some spins are oriented north (“up”) or south (“down”) or somewhere in between. Like magnets, opposite poles attract while like poles repel. Spin-orientation torque refers to the speed at which the electron spins around a fixed point.

In some materials, electricity will sort electrons based on their spin orientation. The distribution of spin-orientation, known as symmetry, will influence the material’s properties, such as the directional flow of a ferromagnet’s magnetic field.

Anomalous Hall torque is related to the well-known anomalous Hall effect, discovered by Edwin Hall in 1881. The anomalous Hall effect describes how electrons are scattered asymmetrically when they pass through a magnetic material, leading to a charge current that flows 90 degrees to the flow of an external electric current. It turns out, an analogous process occurs for spin—when an external electrical current is applied to a material, a spin current flows 90 degrees to the flow of electrical current with the spin-orientation along the direction of the magnetization.

“It really comes down to the symmetry. The different Hall effects describe the symmetry of how efficiently we can control the spin-orientation in a material,” Montoya said. “You can have one effect, or all effects in the same material. As material scientists, we can really tune these properties to get devices to do different things.”

Read the full, original story by Lisa Potter in @ The U.
This story also appeared in Nanotechnology Now.

College of Science

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Widening Our Cosmic View

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Hall of torques