Stay informed about our group's research highlights, notable achievements, and key activities. Below, you'll find news from 2025.

← Back to News

2025

• 12/19/2025
  Dibyesh Ganguly has been awarded an Undergraduate Research Fellowship (URFP) by the UCLA Undergraduate Research Center. Learn more. Congratulations!

  
• 12/05/2025
  New group picture taken today — a wonderful moment capturing our team together.

  
• 12/05/2025
  Congratulations to Luke Sellers for receiving a Department Outstanding Teaching Award for the third year in a row.

  
• 11/21/2025
  Prof. Zhongbo Kang has received the prestigious Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. The award honors Kang’s contributions to high-energy nuclear and particle physics, particularly his work on quantum chromodynamics (QCD) and the strong interaction, which governs the structure and dynamics of visible matter in the universe. See the UCLA news announcement here.

  
• 11/12/2025
  Jani Penttala, a top nominee from the Department of Physics and Astronomy, attended the campus-wide 2025 UCLA Postdoctoral Scholars & Mentors Awards Ceremony. He joined fellow nominees from across UCLA in celebrating scholarly excellence and the achievements of the university’s postdoctoral community.

  
• 11/02/2025
  Just like in previous years, at UCLA's largest annual science fair — Exploring Your Universe 2025 — Zhongbo presented a science talk titled “Imaging the ‘Invisible’: From Black Hole to the Proton.” The talk filled the lecture room with an enthusiastic audience, and the first two rows were almost entirely occupied by young children. It was truly inspiring to see their excitement and curiosity for science.

  
• 10/22/2025
  Jani Penttala presented an invited talk on his recent research on energy–energy correlators at the 2025 Fall Meeting of the APS Division of Nuclear Physics, held in Chicago from October 17–20, 2025. During this trip, he was also invited to visit the Nuclear Theory Group at Argonne National Laboratory, where he delivered a seminar.

  
• 09/29/2025
  Zhongbo attended the annual National Advisory Committee (NAC) meeting of the Institute for Nuclear Theory (INT) at the University of Washington, Seattle, on September 25–26, 2025. The meeting provided a valuable opportunity to connect with colleagues and contribute to supporting the nuclear theory community.

  
• 09/16/2025
  Excited to welcome Carlos Lamas Rodríguez, a graduate student from the Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, where he works with Prof. Carlos A. Salgado. Carlos will be joining us for the Fall quarter, and we look forward to fruitful collaborations and new ideas ahead.

  
• 08/11/2025
  Zhongbo recently completed a six-week research visit to Germany, where he spent most of his time at Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY), Germany's premier national research center for particle physics, hosted by Dr. Markus Diehl of the DESY Theory Group. He also spent a week at the University of Tübingen visiting Prof. Werner Vogelsang. The visit was highly productive—fostering new collaborations, reconnecting with colleagues, and building new friendships.

  
• 07/17/2025
  Zhongbo Kang, Farid Salazar, and collaborators have published a new study in Physical Review Letters, presenting a unified framework that combines the Color Glass Condensate effective theory with high-twist collinear factorization. These two key approaches describe multiple scatterings in perturbative QCD across different regimes of nuclear density. The unified picture enables a consistent description of parton dynamics from the dilute to dense limit, paving the way toward mapping the phase diagram of parton densities in nuclei.

  
• 07/02/2025
  Our recent work on the energy–energy correlator has been published in Physical Review Letters. In this study, we examine the collinear limit of the energy–energy correlator in single-inclusive jet production in proton–proton and proton–nucleus collisions. Our formalism successfully describes the energy–energy correlator across the entire angular region measured in current experiments at the Large Hadron Collider.

  
• 06/26/2025
  We have successfully hosted the 2025 Saturated Glue (SURGE) Collaboration Meeting and Workshop at UCLA during June 23–25, 2025. Thanks a lot to all the participants for making the workshop productive. For details, please see the meeting page.

  
• 06/16/2025
  Zhongbo is visiting the Institute for Nuclear Theory at the University of Washington in Seattle this week, where he is co-organizing the CFNS–INT Joint Program: Precision QCD with the Electron Ion Collider. It is inspiring to see these foundational papers in our field.

  
• 06/02/2025
  Luke Sellers gave his first lecture on undergraduate quantum mechanics as a substitute for Prof. Chris Regan. The lecture was clearly and confidently delivered, and was very well received by the students. Congratulations to Luke on a successful debut in the classroom!

  
• 05/23/2025
  We had a busy and exciting week hosting Dr. Christian Bauer from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Prof. Felix Ringer from Stony Brook University. On Thursday, Christian delivered an outstanding department colloquium on quantum computing and its applications in particle physics. On Friday, Felix gave an engaging seminar titled “Toward simulations of QCD using qubits and qumodes”. Many thanks to both speakers for their insightful presentations!

  
• 05/16/2025
  Dr. Joao Barata, a CERN fellow, visited our group during the week of May 12–16. He delivered a seminar on his recent research on energy-energy correlators in heavy ion collisions. His visit sparked engaging discussions and helped identify several promising directions for future collaboration.

  
• 04/14/2025
  Many congratulations to Brian Chang and Curtis Zhou for receiving the Department of Physics & Astronomy REU Fellowship! This fellowship will support their summer research in our group. We are excited to have them on board and look forward to seeing the great results of their work this summer.

  
• 03/21/2025
  Prof. Gavin Salam from the University of Oxford visited our department and delivered a fantastic seminar titled "From Perturbative QFT to Physical Collider Predictions". The talk was insightful, deeply engaging, and sparked vibrant discussion. Many thanks to Prof. Salam for visiting and sharing his expertise with us!

  
• 03/21/2025
  Many thanks to Prof. Agnieszka Sorensen from Michigan State University—formerly a graduate student of Prof. Huan Huang—for a wonderful seminar today! It was great to have you back at UCLA—welcome home!

  
• 03/13/2025
  Many thanks to Ramona Vogt (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory / UC Davis) and Jørgen Randrup (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory) for a great visit and stimulating discussions!

  
• 03/03/2025
  Postdoc Jani Penttala and graduate student Diego Padilla participated in the Physics Opportunities at an Electron-Ion Collider XI conference, held from February 24–28 in Miami, Florida. They presented their latest research findings and engaged in discussions with the broader community. More details about the event can be found here.

  
• 02/25/2025
  It was a pleasure to have Arindam Bhattacharya from Harvard visit us and give a great talk! We enjoyed the discussions and look forward to more interactions in the future.

  
• 02/21/2025
  Many thanks to Kyle Lee from the MIT Center for Theoretical Physics for visiting us during the week of February 17–21. Kyle engaged in numerous stimulating discussions with our group and delivered an outstanding talk on Wednesday, February 19.

  
• 02/21/2025
  Our group had a pizza lunch together—always the best time! Great food, great company, and lots of laughs!

  
• 01/15/2025
  Prof. Zhongbo Kang has been invited to join the National Advisory Committee for the Institute for Nuclear Theory (INT) at the University of Washington, Seattle, for the term 2025 to 2027. As the Department of Energy’s national center for nuclear theory, INT provides a collaborative environment where scientists can advance the frontiers of subatomic physics through cutting-edge scientific programs.

  
• 01/10/2025
  We host the 2025 California EIC Consortium Collaboration Meeting from January 9 to 10, 2025. Even though the unexpected wildfire in Los Angeles has caused significant uncertainty and that made our meeting to be hybrid, we still have a productive meeting. You can find more details on the meeting website.