UMass Amherst Physics

The 18th UMass Summer School on Soft matter and Complex Fluids starts in a couple of hours! Here is a group photo of the 2025 cohort from the top of Mt Sugarloaf.

The Physics Department hosted our annual student awards luncheon today - congratulations to all our awardees! Thank you to our wonderful donors who made this possible, with particular thanks to those who were able to attend in person or online.

David Kawall, professor at UMass Amherst Physics (pictured at right), is among the researchers honored with this year’s Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for their work making measurements of the properties of the muon in a series of increasingly precise experiments, known as the Muon g-2 Collaborations, first conducted by a team at CERN, then the Brookhaven National Laboratory, and most recently at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. The prize comes with a $3 million award to be shared among all the winners.

Congratulations David and team! Learn more: https://bit.ly/3QxTjbu

Our own Physics Prof. Dave Kawall was part of the Muon g-2 collaboration that was awarded the 2026 Breakthrough Prize for Fundamental Physics. Congratulations to Dave and his group!

Featuring UMass Physics faculty Shubha Tewari and undergraduates Nick Mazzoni and Dinuka Herath!

“Hiding science in really fun things”: Kids gets hands-on with real research in Denver Squishy Science Sunday, part of APS’ Global Physics Summit, welcomed 1,500 visitors to a local museum.

Congratulations to new Sloan Fellow Andrea Thamm, Asst Prof. of Physics at UMass Amherst! This is an honour shared by only 19 other faculty at UMass.

We’re proud to celebrate our newest Research Fellow, Dr. Andrea Thamm! This honor is awarded this year to just 126 of the most innovative early-career scientists across the U.S. and Canada.

Among the most prestigious and competitive awards available to young scholars, the Sloan Research Fellowship recognizes exceptional creativity, achievement, and potential. It’s also widely regarded as a testament to the strength of an institution’s faculty and its ability to attract top emerging researchers.

https://www.umass.edu/news/article/physicist-andrea-thamm-wins-sloan-research-fellowship

Did we just see a black hole explode?

In 2023, a subatomic particle called a neutrino crashed into Earth with such a high amount of energy that it should have been impossible. In fact, there are no known sources anywhere in the universe capable of producing such energy—100,000 times more than the highest-energy particle ever produced by the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s most powerful particle accelerator.

However, a team of physicists at UMass Amherst Physics—including Andrea Thamm, Joaquim Iguaz Juan, and Michael Baker—recently hypothesized that something like this could happen when a special kind of black hole, called a “quasi-extremal primordial black hole,” explodes.

In new research published by “Physical Review Letters,” the team not only accounts for the otherwise impossible neutrino but shows that the elementary particle could reveal the fundamental nature of the universe.

Learn more: https://bit.ly/3NZSFCt

Note: this image is an artist’s rendering of a black hole, unrelated to the research findings mentioned above.

College of Natural Sciences at UMass Amherst

Attention Physics majors! Are you wondering about career options after you receive your degree in Physics? Curious about grad school? Interested in learning about the various fields of physics, and what people do in those fields?

Join UMass Amherst Physics for Future Physicists Five Colleges Women+ Career Day on Saturday, January 31 at Smith College’s McConnell Hall.

Secure your spot for a day of networking and learning: https://bit.ly/4k7E9UR

Image Credit: Smith College

Congratulations to Prof. (Emeritus) John Donoghue, whose citation reads "For original and lasting contributions to the development of effective field theories, including work on gravity as an effective quantum field theory, and important contributions to chiral perturbation theory." When John is not working on effective field theories, you can find him playing in the Machine Shop band.

John F. Donoghue, a pathbreaking College of Natural Sciences at UMass Amherst physicist, has just been awarded the American Physical Society’s 2026 J.J. Sakurai Prize for Theoretical Particle Physics, among the most prestigious awards in the field.

“I’ve been here almost forever,” says Donoghue, who points to his department’s consistent track record of excellence as the factor that encouraged him to spend his adult life at UMass Amherst after coming here to earn his PhD. “I began with quark physics, and I’m now working on quantum gravity, but the work I’m being recognized for [theoretical particle physics] is the work that I’m the most proud of.”

Learn more: https://bit.ly/3X1kVFY

UMass Amherst Physics