Past Recipients of the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation Fundamental Physics Innovation Awards

Paul Hess
Paul Hess, Visiting Assistant Professor of Physics at Middlebury College, will visit the Jayich group at UC Santa Barbara to study molecular ions that are promising systems to discover new sources of symmetry violation responsible for the absence of anti-matter in the Universe. The collaboration will perform the spectroscopy necessary to plan precision measurements for controlling these molecules at the level of single quantum states.

Pavlos Protopapas
Dr. Protopapas’ visit will bring the power and flexibility of machine-learning approaches to bear on the next frontier of gravitational-wave searches; namely, using precise radio observations of pulsars to make a Galactic net of clocks that can catch gravitational-wave emission from supermassive binary black-hole systems. With the ever increasing volume of data being collected, and some noise processes challenging to filter, deep-learning is an exciting tool to deploy on this new portion of the gravitational-wave landscape.

Mariangela Settimo
For the analysis of the data collected by the DAMIC experiment at SNOLAB to search for dark matter, and to discuss future directions and technologies for dark matter direct detection at the Center for Experimental Nuclear Physics and Astrophysics (CENPA) at the University of Washington.

Fred Wietfeldt
We are planning an experiment at the University of Washington to limit or measure the Fierz interference effect in the beta energy spectrum of Helium-6, a heavy isotope of helium, to a precision of less than 0.1%. The presence of this effect, predicted to be zero in the Standard Model of particle physics, may provide hints of new physics.

Ira Rothstein
Our collaboration involves utilizing S matrix techniques for the purposes of making precision predictions for gravity waves produced in binary inspirals.