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

Manucharyan Cited by DARPA

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Published: Thursday, August 24 2017 12:54

Vladimir Manucharyan has received a 2017 Young Faculty Award from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Prof. Manucharyan's proposal, "Multi-terminal hybrid semiconductor/superconductor junctions", is aimed at developing devices to serve as robust building blocks of a topological quantum computer and act as test beds for topological effects predicted in exotic materials.

Dr. Manucharyan, the Alford Ward Assistant Professor of Physics, received his Ph.D. in 2010 from Yale Univerity and was a Junior Fellow at Harvard University before his 2014 arrival at UMD, where he is a Fellow of the Joint Quantum Institute and a member of the Center for Nanophysics and Advanced Materials. In 2015, he received a Sloan Research Fellowship and NSF CAREER Award. 

Moment of Reflection with Bowie State University: August 30

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Published: Wednesday, August 23 2017 11:35

Please join us as the University of Maryland and Bowie State University jointly observe a moment of reflection on August 30 at 12:05 pm. Together we will pause in silence for one minute to honor and remember the life of Second Lt. Richard Collins III.

Antonsen Named Distinguished University Professor

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Published: Thursday, July 27 2017 12:54

Professor Tom Antonsen has been named a University of Maryland Distinguished University Professor. This designation is the campus’ highest academic honor, reserved for those whose scholarly achievements “have brought distinction to the University of Maryland.”  He was cited for fundamental contributions to the related fields of plasma physics, charged particle beam research, and nonlinear dynamics.

Prof. Antonsen, who received his PhD at Cornell University, joined the University of Maryland in 1984 and currently holds appointments in the Department of Physics, the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Institute for Research in Electronics and Applied Physics (IREAP).  In 2016, he received the John R. Pierce Award for Excellence in Vacuum Electronics “for contributions to the theory of charged particle beam generation and the development of computational design tools for fast and slow wave devices.” He is a fellow of the American Physical Society. 

Distinguished University Professors in the Department of Physics

CMNS Article on Antonsen

Promotions and Appointments Effective July 1, 2017

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Published: Wednesday, July 26 2017 12:54

Kaustubh Agashe, who was promoted to the rank of Professor, is a particle theorist who was recently named a Fermilab Distinguished Scholar. Dr. Agashe researches mathematical extensions to the Standard Model, making theoretical predictions that can be tested experimentally in settings including the Large Hadron Collider and future accelerator facilities.

Carter Hall, who was promoted to the rank of Professor, researches neutrinos and dark matter. He has worked on the Enriched Xenon Observatory (EXO-200), and the Large Underground Xenon (LUX) detector, and is the new spokesperson for the LZ Dark Matter Experiment, based in the Sanford Underground Research Facility in the former Homestead gold mine in South Dakota.

Peter Shawhan, who was promoted to the rank of Professor, works on the LIGO experiment based in Louisiana and in Washington state. In recent years, LIGO made major news by confirming the existence of gravitational waves and thereby validating Einstein’s theory of relativity. Prof. Shawhan is also the Chair of the American Physical Society’s Division of Gravitational Physics.

Sylvester James “Jim” Gates Jr. has been appointed a College Park Professor. Gates joined the UMD faculty in 1984, and in the ensuing decades became an internationally-known advocate of science education. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a recipient of the National Medal of Science. He is now the Co-Director of the Presidential Scholars Program at Brown University.

David Clarke was promoted to the rank of Assistant Research Scientist. He received his Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins University, and his research focuses on the design, analysis, and manipulation of topological phases of matter for applications in quantum information processing.

Cornelius Griggs was promoted to the rank of Assistant Research Scientist. He received his Ph.D. at the University of Notre Dame, and works on advancing the techniques of superconducting gravity gradiometry and its applications, such as earlier detection of earthquakes.

Greg Jenkins was promoted to the rank of Associate Research Scientist. He received his Ph.D. at the University of Maryland, and studies the magneto-optical studies of Dirac and Weyl semimetals.

Hyunsoo Kim was promoted to the rank of Assistant Research Scientist. Kim received his Ph.D. at Iowa State University, and works in the development and application of very low-temperature instrumentation for the study of the electronic properties of novel materials.

Norbert Linke was promoted to the rank of Assistant Research Scientist. Dr. Linke received his Ph.D. at the University of Oxford, and at UMD was part of the team that realized the first programmable quantum computer based on five Ytterbium ions.