Rick Greene Named Kamerlingh Onnes Prize Winner Distinguished University Professor Emeritus Rick Greene has been honored with the 2026 Heike Kamerlingh Onnes Prize for his outstanding achievements in the realm of superconductivity. In the early 20th century, when Dutch physicist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes cooled helium to nearly absolute zero and submerged a… Read More
Remembering and Giving Back It’s been more than 30 years, but Jeff Saul (M.S. ’91, Ph.D. ’98, physics) still remembers the week that changed his life. “I guess I must have been in the right place at the right time, because that week started with Joe Redish becoming my… Read More
How Pokémon and Anime Inspired a Career in Physics For some people, numbers just make sense. That’s always been the case for Samuel Márquez González (B.S. ’25, physics). Márquez remembers his quantitative curiosity first sparking while he was playing Pokémon video games in elementary school. Inspired by his favorite character, Pancham, a pubescent dark-… Read More
Conducting Quantum Experiments in the ‘Coolest’ Lab on Campus When University of Maryland physics Ph.D. candidate Yanda Geng tells people he works at the ‘coolest’ lab on campus, he’s not exaggerating. In his laboratory at the Joint Quantum Institute (JQI), atoms are cooled to 100 nanokelvin—about one billionth of a degree above absolute zero… Read More