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Project Descriptions
Fall 2026

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Showing 26 projects out of 26 found. On page 1 out of 1.
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Physics and Performance Studies for Present and Future Collider Experiments

Heather Gray - Professor, Physics

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     Location: Off Campus

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the most powerful particle accelerator ever built and researchers use its data to study what the universe was like shortly after the big bang. Researchers at Berkeley and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) play a key role in all aspects of the ATLAS...

 Mathematical and Physical Sciences

Measuring Distances to Supernovae to Constrain the Universe’s Present Day Expansion Rate

Taylor Hoyt - Staff Researcher, Physics

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: On Campus

Measurements of the speed at which the universe is expanding today, referred to as the Hubble constant, allow us to test the accuracy of contemporary cosmological models. Some recent measurements of the Hubble constant suggest a significant gap in the leading Lambda cold dark matter paradigm, coined the Hubble Tension...

Calibrating Spectroscopy of Type Ia supernovae to measure the Hubble constant.

Taylor Hoyt - Staff Researcher, Physics

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     

The Nearby Supernova Factory (SNfactory; Aldering+02,04) at Berkeley Lab has developed a model for inferring the distances between Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) that is about twice as accurate as previous ones. The model uses the spectral differences between different SNe to constrain variations in their intrinsic luminosities. The...

Calibration and Particle Reconstruction with the Mu2e Straw Tracker

Yury Kolomensky - Professor, Physics

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: Off Campus

Mu2e is a medium-scale particle physics experiment operating at Fermi National Lab, with UCB and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (LBNL) as collaborating institutions. Mu2e will search for the ultra-rare process whereby a muon particle converts directly into an electron, without the emission of any neutrinos. Though not forbidden...

 Mathematical and Physical Sciences

Charged Particle Tracking Design Optimization and Prototyping

Yury Kolomensky - Professor, Physics

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: Off Campus

Mu2e is a medium-scale particle physics experiment operating at Fermi National Lab, with UCB and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (LBNL) as collaborating institutions. Mu2e will search for the ultra-rare process whereby a muon particle converts directly into an electron, without the emission of any neutrinos. Though not forbidden...

 Mathematical and Physical Sciences

Improving Mu2e momentum resolution through Synchrotron Radiation Emission Spectroscopy

Yury Kolomensky - Professor, Physics

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs     Location: On Campus

Mu2e is a medium-scale Particle Physics experiment currently under construction at Fermi National Lab, with UCB and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab as collaborating institutions. Mu2e will search for the ultra-rare process whereby a muon particle converts directly into an electron, without the emission of any neutrinos. Though not...

 Mathematical and Physical Sciences

Analysis, simulations, and hardware developments for the studies of the weak interactions

Yury Kolomensky - Professor, Physics

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs     Location: On Campus

The Weak Interactions group at the Department of Physics is involved in several sensitive experiments, such as searches for neutrinoless double beta decay (NLDBD) with experiments CUORE and CUPID at Gran Sasso Underground Lab in Italy, and the measurement of electron's weak charge with MOLLER experiment at Jefferson Lab. We...

 Mathematical and Physical Sciences

Sensitivity study for a novel detection scheme for millicharged particles (LBNL)

Adrian Lee - Professor, Physics

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     Location: Off Campus

There has recently been a proposal for detecting millicharged dark matter (B. Gao et al. (2026), https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/r3rb-zhyl) using arrays of Josephson junction-based sensors. It is known that not all the dark matter can be comprised of fractionally charged particles, but such particles arise...

 Mathematical and Physical Sciences

Research in Cosmic Microwave Background (UC Berkeley Campus)

Adrian Lee - Professor, Physics

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     Location: On Campus

The cosmic microwave background (CMB) is a unique window to fundamental physics. It can be used to probe primordial gravitational waves, which are a distinct sign that the early universe has experienced an exponentially rapid expansion at its age of ~10^-32 seconds. The CMB photons also probe the properties...

 Mathematical and Physical Sciences

Instrumentation Development for Cosmic Microwave Background, Dark Matter, and Dark Ages experiments at LBNL

Adrian Lee - Professor, Physics

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: Off Campus

Our team specializes in the development, production, and evaluation of highly sensitive detectors, antennas, and readout electronics for a diverse range of cosmology experiments. These endeavors capitalize on the extraordinary properties of superconductivity and the principles of microwave engineering. Through the application of these cutting-edge techniques, we are interested...

 Mathematical and Physical Sciences

Research in Cosmic Microwave Background analysis and simulations

Adrian Lee - Professor, Physics

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     Location: Off Campus

The Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) is the oldest light in the Universe, and carries invaluable information about the Universe’s history and evolution. The detection of primordial gravitational waves in the CMB polarisation, a smoking gun for cosmic inflation, is one of the biggest challenges in observational cosmology. To achieve the...

 Mathematical and Physical Sciences

Neutrino Physics

Kam-Biu Luk - Professor, Physics

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: Off Campus

Neutrino is a sub-atomic particle that was thought to be massless. Recently, a new phenomenon called neutrino oscillation, a transformation of one type of neutrino to another kind, has been discovered in experiments. These important findings imply that neutrinos have mass and they can mix among themselves. Neutrino oscillations...

 Mathematical and Physical Sciences

Machine learning applications to DUNE prototype data

Kam-Biu Luk - Professor, Physics

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: Off Campus

This project will focus on applying contrastive learning and anomaly detection techniques to various DUNE prototype simulated and real datasets in order to identify deficiencies in our understanding of how neutrinos interact. The work will involve: preparing inputs from the DUNE simulation and data suitable for ML-libraries; development of...

 Mathematical and Physical Sciences

Research & Writing Brief for Deliberative Polling Event

Saul Perlmutter - Professor, Physics

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     Location: On Campus

Developing a deep understanding of complex public policy issues often requires more time than most citizens can reasonably devote. Because of this, political polls tend to measure people’s first impressions rather than what their more informed opinions might be. Deliberative Polling is a process designed to address this limitation. Participants...

 Engineering, Design & Technologies   Mathematical and Physical Sciences

Constraining Cosmology with Agentic AI: Discovering and Modeling Strong Gravitational Lenses

Saul Perlmutter - Professor, Physics

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     Location: Off Campus

Strong gravitational lenses are very rare occurrences and are a powerful tool in studying dark energy and dark matter, two mysterious entities that together account for 95% of the energy in the universe. The strong lensing team works on a range of projects with cutting-edge AI/ML techniques. We...

 Engineering, Design & Technologies   Mathematical and Physical Sciences

Measuring the universe with nearby and distant supernovae

Saul Perlmutter - Professor, Physics

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     Location: On Campus

Type Ia supernovae are used to measure the rate at which our Universes is expanding, today and over the past 10 billion years. In the past we used Type Ia supernovae to discover that the expansion of the universe is speeding up. Now we have developed new techniques for making...

 Engineering, Design & Technologies   Mathematical and Physical Sciences

Measuring the Expansion of the Universe with Spectra of Type Ia Supernovae from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument

Saul Perlmutter - Professor, Physics

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: Off Campus

It has been thought that the accelerated expansion of our universe is caused by an unknown "dark energy" which has a constant energy density. However, there are currently hints that dark energy is actually evolving over time. If this were true, there would be profound implications on fundamental physics and...

 Engineering, Design & Technologies   Mathematical and Physical Sciences

Research on Precision Silicon Position Sensors for the LHC and Data Analysis and Simulation Studies for Present and Future Collider Experiments

Marjorie Shapiro - Professor, Physics

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     Location: Off Campus

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the most powerful particle accelerator ever built and researchers use its data to study what the universe was like shortly after the big bang. Researchers at Berkeley and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) play a key role in all aspects of the ATLAS...

 Mathematical and Physical Sciences   Arts & Humanities

Restoring the Earliest Sound Recordings

Marjorie Shapiro - Professor, Physics

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     Location: Off Campus

LBNL researchers developed a novel method to restore early sound recordings using methods from precision optical metrology and data analysis (see: irene.lbl.gov). These methods have been applied to a number of important historical collections of early recorded sound. Over the past two years a project at the Smithsonian Institution in...

 Mathematical and Physical Sciences   Arts & Humanities

Search for New Physics with the ATLAS Experiment at the LHC

Haichen Wang - Professor, Physics

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: On Campus

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the most powerful particle accelerator ever built and researchers use its data to study what the universe was like shortly after the big bang. Researchers at Berkeley and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) play a key role in all aspects of the ATLAS...

 Mathematical and Physical Sciences

Language Models for Particle Detectors

Haichen Wang - Professor, Physics

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     Location: On Campus

Particle detectors like the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider are complex apparatuses whose language is made of data recorded in sub-detectors and sophisticated readout modules. Inspired by large language model's revolutions in natural language processing, this project ultimately aims to develop one or more language models at...

 Mathematical and Physical Sciences

Machine Learning and Agentic Workflow for High Energy Physics

Haichen Wang - Professor, Physics

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: Off Campus

In addition to the description below, this Fall (2025) we are adding a new component to our MLforHEP program. We are developing Large Language Model powered agent to automate data analysis and other computational tasks in High Energy Physics. High-energy physics data analysis deals with a huge amount of...

 Mathematical and Physical Sciences

Creation of Cartoons and Animations for Particle Physics Outreach

Haichen Wang - Professor, Physics

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: On Campus

We are seeking enthusiastic students to help create engaging STEM education and outreach materials to communicate the exciting science of high-energy physics to the public. This project will involve a directed reading component, during which students will conduct a literature review and discuss the material with a mentor. Together...

 Mathematical and Physical Sciences

Data Access and Visualization for the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument

Martin White - Professor, Physics

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: Off Campus

The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI, https://desi.lbl.gov) is making the world's largest 3D map of the universe. In this project you will help us develop web-based data access, visualization, and analysis tools for use by thousands of scientists worldwide...

 Mathematical and Physical Sciences   Digital Humanities and Data Science

Cosmology Data Analysis for the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument

Martin White - Professor, Physics

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: Off Campus

The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) survey is measuring the expansion history of our universe with unprecedented precision. By measuring the light from tens of millions of extragalactic objects, the DESI team aims to understand the nature of dark energy and how it has shaped our universe. Critical to DESI’s...

 Mathematical and Physical Sciences   Digital Humanities and Data Science

Exploring Survey Operations and Machine Learning for the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument

Martin White - Professor, Physics

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     

The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) survey is currently mapping the positions of millions of galaxies, stars, and quasars across the night sky from the Mayall Telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory. DESI aims to make the world’s largest 3D map of the universe to understand the effects of dark...

 Mathematical and Physical Sciences   Digital Humanities and Data Science

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