Department of Physics | January 12, 2026

Happy New Year and welcome back! 🎉🎉🎉 I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday and made it back to campus safely. As always, The Compton Chronicle newsletter is where you'll find department updates, upcoming events, exciting opportunities, and ways to get involved in our growing community. Looking forward to this semester together. Have a great week! Let's jump in to everything going on and coming up, and some things you may have missed over the break!

Planets with Two Suns: What Eclipsing Binaries Can Tell Us About Their Hidden Worlds | The St. Louis Astronomical Society January Meeting with Ekrem Esmer

Friday, January 16 at 7:30pm | McDonnell 162

No classes on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day!

The Physics Department office will be closed on Monday, Jan 19th. We will reopen on Tuesday, Jan 20th. 

First Colloquium of the Year with Jenny Coulter!

Wednesday, January 21 | Location & Time TBD

First Seminar of the Year with Gilberto Fabbris!

Monday, January 26 at 3pm | Compton 241

Krawczynski wins prestigious award from the American Astronomical Society

Henric Krawczynski has won the 2026 Bruno Rossi Prize, the most prestigious prize from the High Energy Astrophysics division of the AAS. The prize was awarded for Krawczynski's “pioneering contributions to the theory, instrumentation, and scientific interpretation of X-ray polarimetry."

mosAIcs & brAIns: Reimagining Art, Aesthetics, and Intelligence—One Tessera at a Time

What happens when one of humanity’s oldest art forms meets some of its newest scientific ideas? At the recent symposium mosAIcs & brAIns, the answer was a vibrant, provocative, and deeply human conversation—one that bridged contemporary mosaic practice, computational aesthetics, and emerging forms of computational creativity.

A Neutrino Mystery with Dr. Bhupal Dev

Bhupal Dev was recently interviewed by John Michael Godier for the Event Horizon podcast. They explored the perplexing 200 PeV particle detection beneath the Mediterranean Sea, nicknamed the “impossible neutrino.” 

Putting the Moon under a quantum diamond microscope

In an exercise that shows the potential of quantum sensing, Chong Zu & Chuanwei Zhang used their quantum diamond microscope — a device that runs on a flawed diamond crystal — to measure the magnetic properties of a tiny piece of Moon rock.

WashU Physics Alum Cassidy Metzger Blazing Trails in Graduate Astrophysics Research

After graduating in '25, Cassidy headed to Dartmouth to pursue her PhD. During her first semester, her work, "New TeV-emitting BL Lac Candidates from the eROSITA X-Ray Survey", was published in The Astrophysical Journal in October! We're so proud of you, Cassidy!

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