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Department of Physics and Astronomy

The Department of Physics and Astronomy has a rich and long history dating back to the latter part of the 19th century. Our faculty and students are exploring nature at all length scales, from the subatomic (quarks and gluons) to the macroscopic (black holes and dark energy), and everything in between (atomic and biological systems).

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News

New Details Revealed in the “Green Monster”

AAS NOVA — JWST images of the supernova remnant Cassiopeia A (Cas A) revealed for the first time a perforated, filamentary structure named the “Green Monster” for its resemblance to the home-run-thwarting wall at Fenway Park. Recently, researchers reported on this feature and the cause of its curious spots. Image of Cas A used in this article was taken by the James Webb Space Telescope as part of Prof. Danny Milisavljevic's work with supernovae.

The BTST, a key piece of the Upgraded CMS Detector, arrives at CERN

In a massive step toward CMS’ High-Luminosity era detector, a key component of the build has arrived at the CERN laboratories. CMS has received a very big box! The BTL-Tracker Support Tube (BTST) is a carbon fiber cylindrical structure designed to sustain the future CMS silicon Tracker and the Barrel Timing Layer (BTL), key components of the future CMS detector. This specialized design was a joint project of the Tracker and BTL engineers and physicists, under the leadership of the Purdue CMS group and the Composites Manufacturing & Simulation Center (CMSC) at Purdue University. The tube itself was manufactured in industry by a specialized company in California, Rock West Composites Inc. in 2023.

The quantum chase

SYMMETRY — Andy Jung had a secret. And he wasn’t the only one. Jung and many of his colleagues on the CMS experiment were in Traverse City, Michigan, at the 2023 International Workshop on Top Quark Physics. Jung was listening attentively as physicists announced an exciting finding: The ATLAS experiment—the other general purpose discovery experiment at the Large Hadron Collider—had measured entanglement at the LHC.

Purdue honors researchers with Seed for Success Acorn Awards

At a ceremony on Nov. 13, Purdue honored 275 researchers with the university’s prestigious Seed for Success Acorn Awards. Congratulations Purdue Physics and Astronomy Professors Tongcang Li, Niranjan Shivaram and Chris Greene for being awarded.

Merel van ‘t Hoff joins the faculty of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Purdue University

The Department of Physics and Astronomy at Purdue University welcomes a new member to the faculty, Merel van ‘t Hoff, as Assistant Professor, starting fall semester 2024. She is an expert in astrophysics, astrochemistry, and astronomy. Her research aims to understand how planets form and how prevalent planets like Earth might be in the Milky Way and other galaxies.

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Department of Physics and Astronomy, 525 Northwestern Avenue, West Lafayette, IN 47907-2036 • Phone: (765) 494-3000 • Fax: (765) 494-0706

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