Congressional Hearing Highlights Need for Quantum Technology Initiative

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Published: Wednesday, November 08 2017 09:38

Credit: E. Edwards/JQI

On October 24, 2017, two Fellows of the Joint Quantum Institute and the Joint Center for Quantum Information and Computer Science were among those that testified during a joint congressional committee hearing on the topic of American Leadership in Quantum Technology.

Carl Williams and Christopher Monroe attended as expert panelists, reading prepared statements and answering questions from committee members. Williams, who is also the deputy director of the Physical Measurement Laboratory at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), provided testimony about quantum research at NIST. Monroe—a Distinguished University Professor of Physics at the University of Maryland (UMD) and a co-founder and chief scientist at UMD-based startup IonQ, Inc—advocated for a National Quantum Initiative in his testimony. Both shared their perspectives on the path toward industry’s adoption of this emerging new technology.

The hearing focused on the status of quantum research in the US. Two panels with a total of six experts from government, industry, academia, and national laboratories testified. The witnesses emphasized that quantum information science will play a critical role in future advanced computing and secure communications. They also noted potential applications related to chemistry, medicine, artificial intelligence, and even space exploration.

In answering questions about the maturity of quantum information research, participants cited both Monroe’s and IBM’s small-scale quantum devices. According to panelists, commercialization of quantum technology is an imminent reality, rather than a futuristic goal. Participants discussed the global impact that industrial quantum science will have, noting that governments worldwide are investing in large-scale quantum research. China, Australia and Europe, in particular, are beginning to pour massive resources into funding quantum research.

Quantum at Maryland

UMD’s flagship College Park campus is home to a thriving quantum enterprise that is actively producing a competitive workforce, delivering innovative research, and attracting a network of strategic partners. With more than 175 scientists on-site and countless collaborations within a vast global research network, quantum programs at Maryland are leading the charge toward a quantum future.

• The Joint Quantum Institute (JQI), founded in 2006, is a physics research partnership with NIST and the Laboratory for Physical Sciences dedicated to intensely studying quantum science.

• A quantum-focused NSF Physics Frontier Center was first awarded to UMD in 2008 and renewed in 2014. This is a prestigious designation that promotes collaborative exploration of challenging but highly promising research areas.

• The Joint Center for Quantum Information and Computer Science (QuICS), launched in 2014, is a UMD-NIST initiative that expands research at the interface of quantum computer science and quantum physics. This innovative center seeks to understand and enable the full promise of quantum computation.

• UMD enjoys vital relationships with industrial and government-laboratory efforts in quantum computing, such as Microsoft, Northrop-Grumman, Sandia National Laboratories, the Army Research Laboratory, Booz-Allen-Hamilton, and the startup IonQ, Inc. Many UMD graduates have taken positions at these places. 

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Ravi Kuchimanchi Awarded Sakharov Prize

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Published: Friday, October 27 2017 10:30

Alumnus Ravi Kuchimanchi (Ph.D., 1995) has been awarded the 2018 Andrei Sakharov Prize of the American Physical Society "for his continued research in physics while simultaneously advocating for global policies that reflect science; for leading sustainable development, human rights, and social justice efforts; and for creating a vibrant international volunteer movement that learns from, works with, and empowers communities in India."

The Sakharov Prize, established to recognize outstanding leadership and/or achievements of scientists in upholding human rights, is named for the Russian nuclear physicist-turned-activist who won the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize for his advocacy of freedom, disarmament and human rights.

Dr. Kuchimanchi founded Association for India’s Development (AID) while a UMD graduate student. In 2012, he was named the International Alumnus of the Year by the College of Computer, Mathmatical and Natural Sciences. His life was dramatized in the move Swades.

Five UMD Physicists Elected APS Fellows

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Published: Thursday, October 12 2017 06:30

Michelle Girvan, Wolfgang Losert, Johnpierre Paglione, Edo Waks and Jake Taylor have been elected Fellows of the American Physical Society.

Prof. Girvan was cited for seminal contributions to the nonlinear and statistical physics of complex networks, including characterization of network structures and dynamics, and interdisciplinary applications.

She received her Ph.D. in physics from Cornell University, and joined the Department of Physics in 2007, after a postdoctoral appointment at the Santa Fe Institute. Prof. Girvan was a visitor at the Institute for Advanced Study from 2008-09, and in 2017 received the Richard A. Ferrell Distinguished Faculty Fellowship in the Department of Physics. She is a member of the Institute for Physical Science and Technology, and the Director of the COMBINE (Computation and Mathematics for Biological Networks) program.

Prof. Losert was cited for his imaginative studies of complex living systems, and for numerous contributions to understanding dynamical properties of complex systems at the convergence of physics, materials science, and biology.

Prof. Losert holds a Ph.D. in physics from the City College of the City University of New York, and joined UMD in 2000 after appointments at Haverford College. He has served as director of the UMD Biophysics graduate program and is currently the director of the UMD-NCI Partnership for Cancer Technology and the Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs, Graduate Education and Research in the College of Mathematical and Natural Sciences. In 2006, he received the Richard A. Ferrell Distinguished Faculty Fellowship.

Prof. Paglione was cited for experimental contributions to the understanding of strongly correlated and topological electronic materials through the synthesis and investigation of heavy fermion compounds, unconventional superconductors and topological materials.

Prof. Paglione, who received his Ph.D. in experimental condensed matter physics from the University of Toronto, joined UMD in 2008. He is the recipient of a National Postdoctoral Fellowship Award from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Council of Canada, a Materials Synthesis Investigator Award from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, a DOE Early Career Award, the 2012 Richard A. Ferrell Distinguished Faculty Fellowship, and an NSF Career Award. He is currently the director of the Center for Nanophysics and Advanced Materials and is an Associate Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) Quantum Materials program. 

Prof. Waks was cited for significantly advancing the field of quantum photonics and for developing new concepts to strongly interact solid-state quantum emitters with nanophotonic components.

He received his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford University, and after a postdoctoral appointment there, joined the UMD Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in 2008. He accepted a joint appointment with the Department of Physics in 2017. Prof. Waks researches nanoscale photonic and semiconductor devices for applications in quantum computation, communication, and sensing. He is a Fellow of the Joint Quantum Institute and of the Optical Society of America and is the recipient of a Presidential Early Career Award and an NSF Career Award.

Dr. Taylor was cited for wide ranging contributions in using quantum properties of light and matter towards developing applications ranging from extreme sensitivity sensors and transducers to quantum information processing. 

He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University and was a Pappalardo Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before joining the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the Joint Quantum Institute in 2009. He has received a Presidential Early Career Award, a Department of Commerce Silver Medal, a NIST Sigma Xi Young Scientist Award and a C15 Young Scientist Award from the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics. Dr. Taylor is the NIST Co-Director for the Joint Center for Quantum Information and Computer Science. 

In addition. Dr. Surjalal Sharma from the Department of Astronomy was cited for pioneering and sustained contributions to nonlinear dynamical modeling of non-equilibrium phenomena in space physics and to the development of data-enabled science and for his leadership in fostering international collaborations.

Nobel Prize in Physics Awarded to Gravitational Wave Pioneers

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Published: Tuesday, October 03 2017 06:30

On October 3, 2017, the Nobel Committee for Physics announced the 2017 laureates for the 2017 Nobel Prize in physics.  Rainer Weiss (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Kip Thorne (Caltech) and Barry Barish (Caltech) have been formally recognized “for decisive contributions to the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) detector and the observation of gravitational waves.” Weiss will receive one half of the award; Thorne and Barish will share the other half.

Read more.

Professor Charles Misner and Gravity

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Published: Tuesday, October 03 2017 06:00

Professor Emeritus Charles Misner, long an expert in the study of gravity, spent a week in 2017 at the University of Cambridge as an invited participant in the celebration of Stephen Hawking's 75th birthday.  Prof. Misner's daughter Benedicte, who has known Stephen and Jane Hawking since she was a school girl near their home 50 years ago, joined in the festivities.

At a conference called Gravity2017 at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Prof. Misner gave two short invited talks.  One was mostly on the early history as the black hole concept was beginning to gel, and one was on the question of what the Einstein equations might believably tell us about spacetime inside black holes.

The third project was writing (with Kip Thorne) an introduction to the forthcoming republication of their 1973 textbook, Gravitation.  After a long life, unrevised but always in print, this classic work was dropped by a publisher who had acquired it after many publishing mergers and acquisitions and mistakenly only advertised it in their Chemistry catalog.  Princeton University Press then obtained rights to the book (popularly called “MTW”, after its authors Misner, Thorne and John Archibald Wheeler) and will reprint it as a $60 cloth bound volume on October 24.

Prof. Misner was also quoted in Nature on the 2017 Nobel Prize announcement.  His student Richard Isaacson (Ph.D., 1967), was noted as an "unsung hero" of LIGO, along with Joe Weber and Alessandra Buonanno, in a separate article in Nature.

CMNS has posted video from the UMD Gravitational Waves event on November 1, 2016.

The American Institute of Physics has interviewed Misner for its oral history collection:

https://www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/oral-histories/33697

https://www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/oral-histories/46734

Misner and his wife Susanne donated correspondence from Stephen Hawking to endow the Weber Fund: https://umdphysics.umd.edu/about-us/news/department-news/1463-letters-from-a-science-giant.html