An expert in quantum precision measurements, Nancy Aggarwal creates technologies to detect the universe’s unseen phenomena. In her lab, she’s developing two major experimental platforms: a first-of-its-kind gravitational-wave observatory and precision measurement systems for next-generation dark matter searches.
Mathematicians are challenging the idea that dark energy is responsible for the accelerating expansion of the universe. In a new paper published in Proceedings of the Royal Society A, mathematicians from the University of California, Davis, provide mathematical proof that instabilities inherent in the Einstein-Euler equations imply that the current model of the expanding universe is not viable.
When Carson Jeffres looks at the Yolo Bypass, he sees much more than a heavily trafficked strip of I-80 cutting across land meant for water overflow and agriculture. He sees an ecosystem amidst transformation, one integral to making California, as Jeffres calls it, a “salmon society.” Jeffres shared this vision of California as a salmon society with a packed house at G Street WunderBar for the May edition of the Davis Science Café.
Chemistry graduate student Cocoro Nagasaka works at the interface of environmental and energy sciences. And now he’s continuing his research at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, or LLNL, through the prestigious U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science Graduate Student Research program.
When her ovarian tumor symptoms were misdiagnosed, UC Davis researcher Elizabeth Neumann trusted her instincts and it changed the course of her work. Now, she’s using advanced imaging and mass spectrometry to improve early detection of ovarian cancer, while also speaking out about the challenges women face in healthcare.
While almost the complete inverse of astronomy and cosmology, fields concerned with the largest objects in our universe, particle physics aims to answer similar questions but from a different vantage. Matthew Citron discusses how particle physicists like himself use particle accelerators to search for dark matter.
Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have made a surprising discovery about a galaxy long, long ago and far, far away: It isn’t rotating. That’s something only seen in the most massive, mature galaxies that are closer to us in space and time, said Ben Forrest, a research scientist in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of California, Davis, and first author on the paper published May 4 in Nature Astronomy.
At the April Davis Science Café, environmental toxicologist Andrew Whitehead explored not only how our actions as a species affect ourselves, but also how they impact the innumerable species we share the Earth with.
At the April Astronomy on Tap event, Professor Daniel Cebra, the chair of the UC Davis Department of Physics and Astronomy, discusses how space agencies such as NASA contend with cosmic radiation when it comes to space travel and how his work as a high-energy nuclear physicist can help address these hazards.
