Upcoming Colloquia

Colloquia will resume Autumn Quarter, 2008

Recent Department News

Hank Simons wins 2008 Distinguished Staff Award

KATRIN Neutrino Mass Project Receives DOE Support

AIP Top 10 Physics Stories for 2007

Weekly Seminar Schedule

Available Positions in the Department

Archived News Articles

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The key role played by Hendrik "Hank" Simons, the CENPA shop administrator, in the success of many of CENPA's experiments was recognized with a 2008 UW Distinguished Staff Award. Hank is an extraordinary instrument maker, an efficient and realistic scheduler, and a helpful and patient design consultant for faculty, students and staff.
Distinguished Staff Awards provide the University an opportunity to honor the extraordinary accomplishments of staff.
Nominees must exemplify extraordinary service and demonstrate the University of Washington values of integrity, diversity, excellence, collaboration, innovation and respect. Nearly 100 staff members were nominated across the campus for 2008 Awards.  From this group, five individuals or teams were selected for a $5,000 award, and each awardee will be recognized at the annual University of Washington Recognition Ceremony.

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The KArlsruhe TRItium Neutrino mass project is a new, large-scale experiment on the beta decay of tritium with the goal of determining the mass of the neutrino with ten times the sensitivity of the best previous experiment (see http://www-ik.fzk.de/~katrin/index.html).  The ultimate sensitivity of the project is a mass of 0.2 eV, which will provide key information about the cosmological role of neutrinos in shaping the structure of the universe.  KATRIN is being constructed at the Forschungszentrum Karlruhe in Germany, and makes use of the tritium-handling facility built there for the ITER project.  Five nations including the US are collaborating.  The US Department of Energy Division of Nuclear Physics recently agreed to support the US role in KATRIN.  The UW and MIT are to receive a total of $2.6 M over 5 years to provide the focal-plane detector for the instrument, the data-acquisition system, and a number of special-purpose calibration systems.  The Project Manager for the US is Peter Doe, the US Spokesman is Hamish Robertson, and John Wilkerson leads the data-acquisition task.  All three are professors in the UW Physics Department and members of CENPA.

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The University of Washington has made two of the AIP top 10 physics stories for 2007. Single-top production seen first at D0 where the EPE group played a leading role; two of the three separate analyses were introduced and carried out by them. The other is the Gundlach et al. test of Newton’s second law.