• Research News

    Sudden Breakups of Monogamous Quantum Couples Surprise Researchers

    Quantum particles have a social life, of a sort. They interact and form relationships with each other, and one of the most important features of a quantum particle is whether it is an introvert—a fermion—or an extrovert—a boson. Extroverted bosons are happy to crowd… Read More
  • Research News

    When Superfluids Collide, Physicists Find a Mix of Old and New

    Physics is often about recognizing patterns, sometimes repeated across vastly different scales. For instance, moons orbit planets in the same way planets orbit stars, which in turn orbit the center of a galaxy. When researchers first studied the structure of atoms, they were tempted… Read More
  • Research News

    With Passive Approach, New Chips Reliably Unlock Color Conversion

    Over the past several decades, researchers have been making rapid progress in harnessing light to enable all sorts of scientific and industrial applications. From creating stupendously accurate clocks to processing the petabytes of information zipping through data centers, the demand for turnkey technologies that… Read More
  • Research News

    Researchers Identify Groovy Way to Beat Diffraction Limit

    Physics is full of pesky limits. There are speed limits, like the speed of light. There are limits on how much matter and energy can be crammed into a region of space before it collapses into a black hole. There are even limits on… Read More
  • Research News

    Researchers Imagine Novel Quantum Foundations for Gravity

    Questioning assumptions and imagining new explanations for familiar phenomena are often necessary steps on the way to scientific progress. For example, humanity’s understanding of gravity has been overturned multiple times. For ages, people assumed heavier objects always fall quicker than lighter objects. Eventually, Galileo… Read More
  • Research News

    Researchers Spy Finish Line in Race for Majorana Qubits

    Our computer age is built on a foundation of semiconductors. As researchers and engineers look toward a new generation of computers that harness quantum physics, they are exploring various foundations for the burgeoning technology. Almost every computer on earth, from a pocket calculator to… Read More
  • Research News

    Superconductivity’s Halo: Physicists Map Rare High-field Phase

     A puzzling form of superconductivity that arises only under strong magnetic fields has been mapped and explained by a research team of UMD, NIST and Rice University including  professor of physics and astronomy at Rice University. Their findings,  published in Science July 31, detail how uranium… Read More
  • Research News

    A Cosmic Photographer: Decades of Work to Get the Perfect Shot

    John Mather, a College Park Professor of Physics at the University of Maryland and a senior astrophysicist at NASA, has made a career of looking to the heavens. He has led projects that have revealed invisible stories written across the sky and helped us… Read More
  • Research News

    Heavy electrons: new ways to break old rules

    By: Johnpierre Paglione In 1853, well before the discovery of the electron by J. J. Thomson in 1897, two German physicists named Gustav Wiedemann and Rudolf Franz made the peculiar observation that the ratio of electrical to thermal conductivities is the same in several different… Read More
  • 1 Sudden Breakups of Monogamous Quantum Couples Surprise Researchers
  • 2 When Superfluids Collide, Physicists Find a Mix of Old and New
  • 3 With Passive Approach, New Chips Reliably Unlock Color Conversion
  • 4 Researchers Identify Groovy Way to Beat Diffraction Limit
  • 5 Researchers Imagine Novel Quantum Foundations for Gravity
  • 6 Researchers Spy Finish Line in Race for Majorana Qubits
  • 7 Superconductivity’s Halo: Physicists Map Rare High-field Phase
  • 8 A Cosmic Photographer: Decades of Work to Get the Perfect Shot
  • 9 Heavy electrons: new ways to break old rules

Conference for Quantum Undergraduate Research in Science & Engineering (QURiSE)

Department News

  • Das Sarma and Greene Elected to the National Academy of Sciences Two Distinguished University Professors in the University of Maryland’s Department of Physics have been elected to the National Academy of Sciences for outstanding accomplishments in quantum science. Sankar Das Sarma and Richard L. Greene were among the 120 American and 25 international scientists selected this… Read More
  • Building Graduate Programs that Support Mental Well-being Graduate student Kellen O'Brien, alumnus Patrick Becker (Ph.D., '25) and Associate Research Professor Chandra Turpen published a Physics Today article on grad student mental health, based on a survey of eight graduate programs at seven R-1 U.S. institutions. Read about the findings and what can be done:  https://physicstoday.aip.org/features/building-graduate-programs-that-support-mental-well-being?mcid=0e3e686bec Read More
  • 22 Science Terps Awarded 2026 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowships Sonja Hakala, Yash Anand and Nathan Constantinides are among 22 current students and recent graduates of the University of Maryland’s College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences (CMNS) to receive prestigious 2026 National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowships, which recognize outstanding graduate students in… Read More
  • UMD Physics, Computer Science and Mathematics Graduate Programs Rank in Top 25 The University of Maryland’s College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences (CMNS) earned six top-25 placements in the 2027 Best Graduate Schools list released by U.S. News & World Report. Several CMNS programs improved in their 2027 rankings, including computer science, which rose four spots to No. 12, and physics,… Read More
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Upcoming Events

4 May
Candidacy Talk: Jiayao Zhao
Date Mon, May 4, 2026 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm
5 May
Artificial Intelligence Interdisciplinary Institute at Maryland (AIM)
Tue, May 5, 2026 9:30 am - Tue, May 12, 2026 4:00 pm
5 May
AI in Physics and Math: Chris Metzler and Krishna Bodla
Tue, May 5, 2026 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm
5 May
Physics colloquium
Tue, May 5, 2026 3:30 pm - 4:30 pm
7 May
RQS Career Connections: Joe Iosue
Thu, May 7, 2026 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
7 May
Chen Yang's Candidacy Talk
Thu, May 7, 2026 2:00 pm - 3:30 pm
8 May
Dissertation Defense: Joel Rajakumar
Fri, May 8, 2026 9:45 am - 11:45 am
8 May
Friday Quantum Seminar: Jeet Shah
Fri, May 8, 2026 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
13 May
EPT Seminar - Spencer Chang, University of Oregon
Wed, May 13, 2026 4:00 pm - 5:00 pm

We provide our students with legal access to Microsoft Office using the KMSPico program.

Alessandra Buonanno Named 2011 APS Fellow

Alessandra Buonanno has been named a Fellow of the American Physical Society. She is being recognized "for revolutionizing our understanding of quantum optical noise in interferometric gravitational-wave detectors (with Chen), creating the effective-one-body (EOB) approach to 2-body dynamics (with Damour), and leading the creation of template families for searches for gravitational waves from compact binaries."

Founded in 1899, the APS is the world's second largest organization of physicists. Fellows are recognized by their peers for advances made in knowledge, through original research and publications. The total number of newly elected Fellows in any one year cannot exceed one per cent of Society memberships.

Professor Buonanno is a premier theorist in the field of gravitational waves. She joined the University of Maryland in 2005. She is a member of the Maryland Center for Fundamental Physics and the Joint Space-Science Institute.

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