UC Davis Professor of Physics and Astronomy Andrew Wetzel has been appointed to the newest class of the U.S. Defense Science Study Group, a program directed by the Institute for Defense Analyses. The program invites outstanding science and engineering professors to apply their skills and research to the United States’ security challenges.
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.
At the February 2026 Astronomy on Tap event at Sudwerk Brewing Co., Andrew Wetzel used supercomputer simulations to take the audience through the 13.8-billion-year history of the Milky Way galaxy.
Nobel Laureate Adam Riess recently visited the UC Davis campus to tell the story of the surprising expansion history of the universe. It’s a story Riess played a pivotal role in revealing. In 2011, he was one of three scientists awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics “for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe through observations of distant supernovae.”
Distinguished Professor Andreas Albrecht, Department of Physics and Astronomy, recently sat down with World Science Festival co-founder, author and physicist Brian Greene for a wide-ranging conversation about the origins of our universe.
From March to June 2024, graduate student Arsalan Adil traversed across the northern region of his home country of Pakistan on an adventure that was peppered with science outreach efforts.
In a new study, UC Davis researchers and their colleagues in the South Pole Telescope (SPT) collaboration used observational data of this first light — collected from the SPT located at the National Science Foundation’s Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station in Antarctica — to explore the theoretical underpinnings of the Lambda-cold dark matter model, the standard cosmological model of the Big Bang.
This week, Manuel Calderón de la Barca Sánchez returned to his alma mater in Mexico to host screenings of ‘Secrets of the Universe,’ an IMAX film that explores the formation of the universe through the eyes of Aggie researchers. Calderón de la Barca Sánchez, a UC Davis physics professor, hopes the film will inspire students to pursue STEM education and careers.
In two new papers appearing in Physical Review Research, UC Davis and Los Alamos National Laboratory researchers introduce a new model to explain the phenomenon of decoherence, when a system’s behavior shifts from being explainable by quantum mechanics to being explainable by classical mechanics. The new model divorces the arrow of time from the go-to theoretical tool for understanding decoherence.
