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...
The sketch of modern physics’ conundrum that we in the general public have a hazy picture of hasn’t changed for a hundred years. The cat is both kicking and has kicked, the electron is zipping around but we can’t know both where it is and how quick it is going, the particles are mysteriously linked in ways that appear faster than the speed of light, God...
Professor of Mathematics and Physics, Chern-Simons Distinguished Chair in Mathematical Physics
Mina Aganagic received her BS (1995) and PhD (1999) degrees from California Institute of Technology. From 1999-2003 she had a postdoctoral appointment at Harvard University. She was an Assistant Professor of Physics and an Adjunct Professor of Mathematics at the University of Washington, Seattle from 2003-4. In 2004 she was appointed Assistant Professor of Mathematics and Physics at the University of California Berkeley. She was promoted to an Associate Professor in 2008, and to Professor in 2012.
Hitoshi Murayama speaks at the Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel (P5) Town Hall Meeting at Berkeley Lab in February 2023. Paul Mueller, Berkeley Lab
Hitoshi Murayama has been elected to serve in the chair line of the Executive Committee of the American Physical Society’s Division of Particles & Fields.
Geoff Penington received his BA+MMath in Natural Sciences from Cambridge University in 2015, and his PhD in Physics, with Patrick Hayden, from Stanford University in 2020. He joined UC Berkeley in July 2020.
Research Interests
My research focuses on using ideas from the theory behind quantum computers (and, more generally, quantum information) in order to make progress in our understanding of the quantum mechanics of gravity. In particular, I have recently been working on understanding how the information that falls into a black hole ends up being encoded in the Hawking radiation...
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;...
Benjamin Safdi received his undergraduate degree from the University of Colorado at Boulder, a Master of Advanced Study from Cambridge University, as a Churchill Scholar, and his PhD from Princeton University in 2014. He was then a Pappalardo Fellow in physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology until 2017, when he started as an assistant professor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Dr. Safdi moved to LBNL in 2020 and then to UC Berkeley in 2021. He received the Department of Energy Early Career Award in 2018 and the IUPAP C11 Young Scientist Prize in Particles and Fields...
Raúl Briceño was born and raised in Caracas, Venezuela. In 2013, he received his PhD in Physics from the University of Washington. He then joined the Center for Theoretical and Computational Physics at Jefferson Lab as a postdoc. After three years as a postdoc, in 2016 he became the Nathan Isgur Research Fellow at Jefferson Lab. Shortly after, in 2017 he started an Assistant Professor position at Old Dominion University with a joint appointment at Jefferson Lab as a Staff Scientist. His research largely focuses on aspects of theoretical nuclear and particle physics. In 2023, he joined the...
