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Faculty, Staff, Student and Alumni Awards & Notes

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Category: Department News
Published: Wednesday, January 29 2025 01:40

We proudly recognize members of our community who recently garnered major honors, began new positions and more.

Faculty and Staff 
Students
Alumni
  • Adam Ehrenberg (Ph.D, '24) joined the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA) as a Research Staff Member.
  • Chad Mitchell (Ph.D., '07) is a physicist at the Accelerator Technology & Applied Physics Division of Lawrence Berkeley National Lab.
  • Luke Sollitt (B.S., '97) is a planetary physicist for NASA.
  • C. V. Vishveshwara (Ph.D., '68) was recalled as Scientist of the Day on March 6, 2025.
Department News 

Maryland Gov. Wes Moore Announces $1B ‘Capital of Quantum’ Initiative Centered at UMD

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Category: Department News
Published: Wednesday, January 29 2025 01:40

aryland Gov. Wes Moore on January 14, 2025, joined University of Maryland President Darryll J. Pines and IonQ President and CEO Peter Chapman to announce a landmark public-private partnership to catalyze $1 billion in investments and position the state as a global leader in quantum information science and technology.

 Maryland Gov. Wes Moore speaks to the crowd at IonQ on January 14, 2025. Photo by Stephanie S. Cordle.

The “Capital of Quantum” initiative was introduced at an event highlighting Moore’s 2025 economic growth agenda held at IonQ, a leading quantum computing and networking firm founded on UMD research and headquartered in the university’s Discovery District.

“Quantum has the potential to transform every part of our economy and society, from national security to health care,” said Moore. “With extraordinary assets and partnerships, Maryland can—and should—lead in this new emerging sector, and we are moving forward with a clear strategy to make that vision a reality. Together, we will make Maryland the quantum capital of the world."

This strategic partnership aims to unlock more than $1 billion in investments—a combination of state funds, matching federal grants, private-sector investments and philanthropic contributions—over the next five years.

Moore last month signed an executive order that identified quantum computing as an industry that his and Lt. Gov. Aruna Miller’s administration will prioritize through state investment and support. His FY26 budget submission includes $27.5 million as the state’s initial investment toward the Capital of Quantum initiative, which is expected to spur more than $200 million in University of Maryland and partner investments to support academic, technical, workforce and ecosystem support.

The Moore-Miller administration has also committed continued funding for the construction of Zupnik Hall, a new $244 million state-of-the-art facility that includes more than $58 million in private investments and $185.4 million from the state, and which will add more quantum labs to the UMD campus.

“We are deeply grateful to Gov. Moore for his visionary investment in building a brighter future for Maryland’s economy,” said Pines. “He recognizes the immense potential of quantum technology and the possibilities we can explore if we work together to position our region as the global Capital of Quantum. We look forward to collaborating with the governor’s office and regional partners to ensure that this investment yields lasting benefits for all Marylanders.”

With the launch of the Capital of Quantum Initiative, the University of Maryland will move forward with plans to:

  • Recruit top quantum scientists and engineers from around the world to join the ranks of 200-plus UMD quantum faculty members—one of the largest concentrations in the world—to usher in a new wave of discovery and innovation.
  • Expand access to the National Quantum Laboratory (QLab), a unique UMD partnership with IonQ that provides students, researchers and entrepreneurs from around the world with hands-on access to quantum computers and scientists.
  • Hire test and evaluation experts to support quantum-focused projects and construct a new building for UMD’s Applied Research Laboratory for Intelligence and Security.
  • Create additional facilities to house an expanded Quantum Startup Foundry, a business accelerator based in UMD’s Discovery District that provides resources and support for entrepreneurs and startups bringing quantum technologies to market.
  • Launch education, outreach and training initiatives to include high school quantum curriculum, master’s and certificate programs, and workforce retraining opportunities.

Subject to the governor’s budget being approved, IonQ, an anchor partner in the initiative, will grow its corporate headquarters into a 100,000-square-foot facility with a data center, laboratories and office space within UMD’s Discovery District. IonQ also intends to double its corporate headquarters workforce to at least 250 people in the Maryland region over the next five years. Tuesday's announcement, once approved by the legislature, is expected to create high-paying and skilled jobs in diverse fields such as construction, software and hardware engineering, operations, applied physics, networking and more.

Investments in quantum computing are investments in Maryland's future, said Chapman.

“Through Gov. Moore’s strategic economic development initiative and proposed investment in quantum, he is not only supporting cutting-edge research and innovation but fostering economic growth and job creation in the state,” he said. “The governor's commitment is a testament to his vision for the pivotal role that quantum science will play in the state’s economic development and technological leadership. This investment will also enhance our collaboration with the University of Maryland to solidify the region as a global leader in quantum innovation.”

Original story: https://cmns.umd.edu/news-events/news/maryland-gov-wes-moore-announces-1-billion-capital-quantum

UMD Physicist Helps Sculpt Quantum Mechanics into Reality

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Category: Department News
Published: Wednesday, January 29 2025 01:40

In 2020, physicist Nicole Yunger Halpern received a rather unusual email out of the blue. Bruce Rosenbaum, a Massachusetts-based artist dubbed “the steampunk guru” by The Wall Street Journal, watched one of her lectures about quantum thermodynamics and was interested in collaborating with her. Rosenbaum saw something extraordinary in Yunger Halpern’s work—in terms of cutting-edge science and artistic possibility. 

For Yunger Halpern, who coined the term “quantum steampunk” while earning her Ph.D. in theoretical physics at the California Institute of Technology, it almost felt like scientific serendipity. 

“It’s been a privilege to interact with someone who is based in such a different world. I’m in physics, Bruce is in art. And yet, we both have a very strong shared interest in connecting the steam-powered world of the Industrial Revolution to today,” said Yunger Halpern, who is a theoretical physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, a fellow of the Joint Center for Quantum Information and Computer Science, and an adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Physics and the Institute for Physical Science and Technology at the University of Maryland.Quantum steampunk sketch by Jim SuQuantum steampunk sketch by Jim Su

The unusual partnership kicked off a multi-year quest to craft a piece of art that could represent two very different worlds. For weeks, Yunger Halpern and Rosenbaum worked over weekend Zooms and emails to brainstorm before enlisting others to help bring their ideas to life. 

In late 2024, they finally created their masterpiece: an eight-inch diameter sculpture that marries steampunk (a popular genre that combines Victorian-era aesthetics like brass, gears and steam with modern technology) with quantum physics (a rapidly evolving field that deals with how things work at the tiniest possible scales). At these tiny levels, objects don’t behave the same way as they do in our everyday world—for example, things can exist in multiple states at once, like a coin that, in some ways, behaves as though it were both heads-up and tails-up simultaneously.

Inspired by these strange behaviors present in quantum physics, Yunger Halpern and Rosenbaum focused their project on the concept of quantum engines, devices that convert energy from one form to another. According to Yunger Halpern, even a single atom can function as an engine, transforming random microscopic motion into useful energy. 

“Our sculpture depicts an engine that can operate at the atomic scale to convert heat energy— which is random, the energy of particles alwaysQuantum steampunkQuantum steampunk jiggling around—into useful work. Work is coordinated energy, the kind that charges our computers and powers our factories,” Yunger Halpern explained. “Like the steam-powered tech of the Victorian era, this engine relies on thermodynamic properties to make its conversion. We wanted to bring those two themes from very different periods of history together.”

Linking quantum and art for all

Creating this visual representation of the invisible quantum world required an unusual team with varied skills. Rosenbaum brought in illustrator Jim Su for the initial designs and design engineering company Empire Group fabricated the sculpture. Rosenbaum and Yunger Halpern coordinated a careful balance between artistic vision and scientific accuracy at every stage of the project. Gradually, the team grew to include other UMD faculty and staff members, including Distinguished University Professors Christopher Jarzynski and William Phillips, Senior Faculty Specialist Daniel Serrano and Scientific Development Officer Alfredo Nava-Tudela. The UMD Quantum Startup Foundry and Caltech’s Institute for Quantum Information and Matter also pitched in.

The result was a metallic, partially 3D-printed sculpture measuring eight inches in diameter, an eclectic mashup of both quantum science principles and artistic sensibilities. 

“Everyone shared their expertise to create our final product, whether they offered scientific or artistic contributions,” Yunger Halpern said. “It’s something we are all very proud of.”

Supported by UMD’s Arts for All program, the sculpture will make its debut at the American Physical Society’s Global Physics Summit in March 2025 in honor of the United Nations’ Year of Quantum Science and Technology. After its premiere, the sculpture will head to Caltech before finding a home at UMD. 

But Yunger Halpern and her partners have ambitions beyond this first tabletop creation. They hope to create a much larger and grander version of their steampunk sculpture in the near future—complete with antique brasses, lasers, touchscreens and other high-tech interactive and moving elements.

“We have plans for our sculpture’s next iteration, but it’s still early in the fund-gathering process,” Yunger Halpern said. “For now, we’re focusing on sharing our tabletop quantum engine with the world and creating a tangible connection to what’s usually an invisible world. We hope that it’ll capture that sense of adventure in quantum thermodynamics for scientists and art enthusiasts alike.”

 

Written by Georgia Jiang

Finding the Beauty in Physics

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Category: Department News
Published: Wednesday, January 29 2025 01:40

Phoebe Hamilton’s (M.S. ’11, Ph.D. ’13, physics) research career at the University of Maryland could have ended when she earned her Ph.D. Instead, it marked the start of an exciting challenge—for Hamilton and her fellow high-energy physics researchers in UMD’s Department of Physics.
Phoebe Hamilton, Elizabeth Kowalczyk and Othello Gomes check a photodetector.Phoebe Hamilton, Elizabeth Kowalczyk and Othello Gomes check a photodetector.In fall 2012, Distinguished University Professor and Gus T. Zorn Professor Hassan Jawahery eyed a new opportunity after his research group wrapped up with BaBar, a collider experiment in California.

“BaBar had finished collecting new data and we were looking for the next gig for the group,” Hamilton recalled. “Hassan was my Ph.D. advisor and we talked about how exciting it would be to move to the Large Hadron Collider beauty—LHCb—experiment.”

Just two months before Hamilton defended her dissertation, Jawahery’s group learned that they had been formally accepted into the LHCb experiment, which is named after its primary research subject: a particle called the beauty quark, also known as a bottom quark or b quark. By studying bottom quarks produced by proton-proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider located near Geneva, Switzerland, researchers hope to come closer to understanding why there is so much matter but so little antimatter in the universe.

Excited by the opportunity to discover new physics at the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, Hamilton stayed at UMD. As a postdoctoral researcher from 2012 to 2020 and a faculty specialist from 2020 to 2023, she developed tools that enabled the LHCb to take measurements previously thought “impossible” by some scientists.

Now, as an assistant professor of physics, her contributions continue to level up the LHCb’s abilities, improving its chances of making groundbreaking findings.

“Getting to stay a postdoc as long as I did at Maryland was a real blessing,” Hamilton said. “I wasn’t sure I’d actually have the chance to become an assistant professor, but I'm very happy to get to do it. Maryland is such a home and such a family to me.”

Raising the BaBar

Hamilton’s interest in physics began in high school and she nurtured it with books about string theory by physicist Brian Greene. After graduating, she enrolled at Youngstown State University to pursue computer science, another one of her interests, but switched to physics after realizing that it inspired and challenged her more than any other subject.

“I like knowing how things work,” said Hamilton, who also enjoys learning new musical instruments for similar reasons. “The fact that physics is orderly and follows these predictable rules has always been fascinating to me.”

Hamilton quickly took to particle physics, and after earning her bachelor’s degree in 2007, she decided to pursue particle theory research in UMD’s graduate program. She chose UMD because of its wide range of research possibilities, which allowed her to try out different specializations before committing.

“I thought I knew what I wanted to do, but there was doubt,” she said. “With UMD, I thought to myself, ‘This is where I’m going to be able to thrive no matter what I do.’”

Hamilton soon discovered she enjoyed the experimental side of particle physics much more than theory. So when Associate Professor Doug Roberts put up flyers seeking student researchers for the BaBar experiment, Hamilton jumped at the chance.

BaBar was Hamilton’s introduction to experimental studies of CP violation, which occurs when two conservation laws of particle physics—charge conjugation and parity—are broken. By measuring CP violation at experiments like BaBar, researchers can begin to understand the differences between matter and antimatter.

“I fell in love with it very quickly,” Hamilton said of BaBar. “It was a fantastic machine and a fantastic experiment.”

Hamilton’s research contributed to the first measurement of how Bs mesons, a family of subatomic particles called mesons that contain a bottom quark and a strange antiquark, are produced at different collision energies. Ultimately, the BaBar experiment shed light on how antimatter is produced and set the stage for Hamilton’s participation in an even bigger—but messier—collider.

“The beautiful thing at BaBar was that you would get two hadrons containing bottom quarks and nothing else, so it was very clean and very easy to measure what was going on,” Hamilton said. “Here [at the LHCb], colliding protons is like colliding handfuls of rock salt. You get 100 reconstructed particles in every event and you have to sort through it.”

Achieving the ‘impossible’

For the last 12 years, Hamilton has been working to make those messy collisions a little easier to interpret. UMD’s contribution to the LHCb experiment falls within the realm of lepton flavor universality: a physics principle stating that the only difference between different “flavors,” or types, of leptons—including electrons, muons and tau leptons—is their mass. 

The LHCb is a good fit for this type of research because it analyzes a large number of particles containing b quarks, which transform, or decay, into leptons. In the beginning, though, some scientists thought that lepton flavor universality couldn’t be done at the LHCb because either one or three neutrinos escape undetected during collisions, making it difficult to determine all of the energies and momenta needed to distinguish muons from tau leptons. 

“Because of the messy nature of these proton-proton collisions, the consensus was that this was too hard for LHCb to do,” Hamilton said. “But Jawahery and I worked together on a technique to make some wild approximations and figure out a way to do it anyway.”

And they did figure out a way. Developed from 2013 to 2015 in collaboration with LHCb researcher Greg Ciezarek, their method of analyzing decays led to measurements of lepton flavor universality between muons and tau leptons that were previously thought impossible. 

“It was interesting to go from ‘This is probably another dead-end’ to ‘Oh, this might actually be worth something’ to ‘This is actually the star of the experiment right now,’” Hamilton said. “This is still an active area of research for us. We extended and superseded the 2015 measurement in 2023 and are working on the next generation of this in the data from the second run of the LHC.”

Cracking the K-pi puzzle

Over the years, Hamilton has also played a key role in making the LHCb’s equipment more durable and better at discerning different particles. She helped develop electronics for the Upstream Tracker sub-detector for the experiment’s first upgrade from 2022 to 2023 and is now testing new photodetectors in her lab. These new detectors would measure the light produced in upgraded modules for the LHCb’s calorimeter, which stops particles as they pass through and enables researchers to measure the energy deposited. 

This planned upgrade to the calorimeter aims to make energy measurements more precise, which can ultimately help researchers determine which particles were produced in a collision event.

“One of the big motivations for upgrading the calorimeter is making some of the granularity smaller so that you can tell different particles apart,” Hamilton explained. “Along with the ability to precisely measure the time different particles arrive, it should in principle be able to cope with five times the collision rate.”

Whether Hamilton is toiling in the lab or analyzing data from the LHCb, she continues to find inspiration in physics’ most puzzling questions. She recently submitted a research proposal to dive deeper into matter-antimatter asymmetries and continues to work on developing new and improved techniques for her research. 

From 2014 to 2015, she and her colleagues at UMD developed a way to study b-hadron decays with only one reconstructed trajectory, meaning that certain key information is missing. She believes this technique can now be applied to a persistent challenge in physics called the K-pi puzzle.

“The K-pi puzzle is the possibility that the Standard Model fails to explain the pattern of matter-antimatter asymmetry in b-hadron decays to two pseudo-stable mesons, pions or kaons—or one of each. The Standard Model predicts specific patterns to their CP asymmetries, which we can use to check the Standard Model’s validity, but theorists need measurements of them all,” Hamilton explained. “Some of these involve two trajectories to reconstruct and identify the b-hadron but many do not, and these tend to be the less understood ones.”

Going forward, Hamilton hopes to make more “impossible measurements”—and perhaps challenge or reshape the Standard Model of physics in the process.

“We have an opportunity to contribute to understanding this puzzle in some of the areas that are fuzziest right now,” Hamilton said, “and I think there's exciting things to be tried there.”

 

Written by Emily Nunez

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