A research team led by physicists at the University of California, Riverside, reports tiny satellite galaxies of the Milky Way can be used to test fundamental properties of “dark matter” — nonluminous material thought to constitute 85% of matter in the universe. Using sophisticated simulations, the researchers show a theory called self-interacting dark matter, or...
A team of physicists at the University of California, Riverside; Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology has observed evidence of Majorana fermions — particles theorized to also be their own antiparticle — on the surface of a common metal: gold. This is the first sighting of Majorana fermions on...
Viruses — small disease-causing parasites that can infect all types of life forms — have been well studied, but many mysteries linger. One such mystery is how a spherical virus circumvents energy barriers to form symmetric shells. A research team led by physicist Roya Zandi at the University of California, Riverside, has made progress is...
Nanoscale technology has greatly improved our daily lives with products such as computers, phones, and solar cells. To develop the next-generation nanotechnology, new classes of materials need to be explored. Two-dimensional “valley semiconductors,” such as monolayer molybdenum disulfide (MoS 2) and tungsten diselenide (WSe 2), have remarkable properties and novel applications. When these materials absorb...
The University of California, Riverside, has won a University of California Multicampus-National Lab Collaborative Research and Training Award of $3.75 million that will allow the campus to focus on enabling scalable quantum computing. Quantum computers are expected to greatly outperform the most powerful conventional computers on certain tasks, such as modeling complex chemical processes, finding...
Yanou Cui, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy, is a coauthor on two important research papers on boosted dark matter, a novel type of dark matter model. A member of a flagship next-generation neutrino experiment named the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, or DUNE, Cui is an expert on the interface between particle physics and...
An international team of astronomers led by scientists at the University of California, Riverside, has found an unusual monster galaxy that existed about 12 billion years ago, when the universe was only 1.8 billion years old. Dubbed XMM-2599, the galaxy formed stars at a high rate and then died. Why it suddenly stopped forming stars...
Laura Sales first fell in love with astronomy when she was in middle school in Argentina, her country of birth. Today, she is an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at UC Riverside and the recipient of the National Science Foundation’s prestigious Faculty Early Career Development ( CAREER) Award, one of the most coveted recognitions...
A team of physicists has discovered an electrical detection method for terahertz electromagnetic waves, which are extremely difficult to detect. The discovery could help miniaturize the detection equipment on microchips and enhance sensitivity. Terahertz is a unit of electromagnetic wave frequency: One gigahertz equals 1 billion hertz; 1 terahertz equals 1,000 gigahertz. The higher the...
Earlier this month, the U.S. Department of Energy announced the selection of Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, NY, as the site for Electron Ion Collider, or EIC, a planned major new nuclear physics research facility. The EIC, which will be designed and constructed over ten years, will explore mysteries of the “strong force” that binds...
Bahram Mobasher, a professor of observational astronomy at UC Riverside, is a member of an international team of astronomers that found the farthest galaxy group identified to date. Called EGS77, the group of three galaxies dates to a time when the universe was only 680 million years old. While more distant galaxies have been observed...
