Last October, following one of the brightest flashes of gamma rays ever observed in the sky, telescopes around the world captured a wealth of data from an event that is thought to herald the collapse of a massive star and the birth of a black hole.
But that fire hose of data demonstrated clearly that...
Chris McKee received his Ph.D. in Physics from UC Berkeley in 1970. After a brief stay at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, he spent a year as a postdoc at Caltech. He then went to Harvard as an assistant professor of astronomy for three years, and in 1974 he joined the Physics and Astronomy Departments here at Berkeley. He served as the first Director of the Theoretical Astrophysics Center in 1985, and from 1985-1998 he directed the Space Sciences Laboratory. He was the Henry Norris Russell Lecturer of the American Astronomical Society in 2016 and appointed a Legacy...
Martin White received his B.S. in 1988 from the University of Adelaide and his Ph.D. in 1992 from Yale. After postdoctoral positions at the CfPA in Berkeley and an Enrico Fermi Fellowship in Chicago he became Assistant Professor of Physics and of Astronomy at UIUC. In 1998 he became an Assistant Professor of Astronomy at Harvard before moving to Berkeley as a Professor of Physics in 2001.
Research Interests
I am a theorist and phenomenologist. While I originally trained in Particle Physics, in the last few years my interest has centered around the question of the formation of...
Prof. Kasen received his B.S. from Stanford University and his M.S. and Ph.D. in physics from UC Berkeley. Prior to returning to Cal, he was the Alan C. Davis fellow at Johns Hopkins University and a Hubble fellow at UC Santa Cruz. He joined the Berkeley physics faculty in 2010, jointly appointed with the nuclear science division at LBNL.
Assistant Professor and The Michael M. Garland Chair in Physics
Prof. Dai received a B.S. in Physics from Peking University in 2011. Later on, he earned his Ph.D. in Physics from the Johns Hopkins University in 2015 working on theoretical cosmology. From 2015 to 2018, he was awarded an NASA Einstein fellowship and was appointed a postdoctoral Member at the Institute for Advanced Study in the School of Natural Sciences. From 2018 to 2020, he was a long-term John Bahcall postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, before he joined the faculty in the Department of Physics at the University of California, Berkeley.
Professor Emeritus and Professor of the Graduate School
Wick Haxton received his B.A. from UC Santa Cruz in 1971 and his Ph.D. from Stanford in 1976. He spent most of his early research career in the Los Alamos Theory Division, where he was a J. Robert Oppenheimer Fellow and later a staff member. He moved to the University of Washington in 1984 as Professor and, for 15 years, Director of the Department of Energy’s Institute for Nuclear Theory. In 2009 he joined UC Berkeley as Professor of Physics and Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory as Senior Faculty Scientist. His research interests include neutrino physics, nuclear astrophysics, tests of...
Studying the physics of atomic particles takes a lot of room. The Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the biggest particle accelerator, is in a ring tunnel 27km (17 miles) long buried about two football fields deep underground. It serves as the factory, or artisanal manufacturer, of bespoke subatomic particles like quarks. But where is the design studio for these rare...
Uros Seljak joined Berkeley as a faculty in 2008, jointly appointed with LBNL. He received his B.S. in 1989 and M.S. in 1991 from Ljubljana University, Slovenia and his PhD in 1995 from MIT. He was a Smithsonian Fellow at Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics from 1995 to 1998. Subsequently he served as a faculty at Princeton University, ICTP Trieste and Zurich University. He is the recipient of the David and Lucile Packard Fellowship in Science and Engineering (2000), the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship (2001), the Helen B. Warner award of American Astronomical Society (2001) and the NSF...
An artist's concept of a highly magnetized neutron star. According to current theory, axions would be created in the hot interior of the neutron star. UC Berkeley astrophysicists say that the strong magnetic field of the star will transform these axions into gamma rays that can be detected from Earth, pinpointing the mass of the axion. Image: Casey Reed, courtesy of Penn State;...
The purple and white emissions at the top are referred to as "Steve," while the green emissions are called "picket fence." The rare phenomena, which are distinct from the typical aurora, often occur together and may be caused by similar conditions at the edge of space. The photo was taken looking south over Berg Lake toward Mt. Robson in the Canadian...
