After 41 years tending to the people and places of the Department of Physics, Director of Administrative Services Lorraine DeSalvo retired in December. In tribute, colleagues established the Lorraine DeSalvo Chair's Endowed Award for Outstanding Service to provide annual recognition to physics employees who demonstrate exemplary commitment to their work. 

DeSalvo graduated from the University of Maryland in 1972 and immediately accepted a job in the Department of Chemistry. 

“I have had the pleasure of knowing so many truly wonderful staff members on this campus during my years here,” she said. “Having this fund to recognize physics department colleagues is the finest farewell I could have asked for.” 

DeSalvo’s duties covered both facilities and human relations, meaning that she knew every inch of space and every employee. Her vast institutional memory and cross-campus contacts allowed her to untangle innumerable bureaucratic knots.  As Department Chair Steve Rolston noted, the most commonly uttered phrase in the department in recent decades may well have been, “Just ask Lorraine.” 

Modern, energy-intensive physics experiments long strained the aging infrastructure of the John S. Toll Physics Building and required constant vigilance and frequent, extensive renovations. When funding was approved for the new Physical Sciences Complex, DeSalvo’s workload expanded considerably. She worked with architects, builders, and capital improvement staff to plan the move, order furniture, and ensure that labs were built to the exacting specifications of dozens of extremely particular scientists. 

She fostered camaraderie with vibrant holiday parties and memorable fiestas, extending invitations to helpful colleagues across a swath of campus sectors. To the department’s many international students, scholars and visitors, she extended her welcome, wisdom and warmth. She owned a variety of small stuffed flamingos, which she dispatched to travelers with a request for a scenic photo. A slideshow of UMD physics folks hoisting pink birds across the globe ran continually in her office. 

She also displayed a keen regard for the department’s achievements. 

After the death of physicist Joe Weber in 2000, his lab fell into disuse. DeSalvo kept protective watch over the “Weber bars,” colossal aluminum cylinders built to record gravitational waves. Years later, in 2015, the LIGO experiment detected gravitational waves, generating worldwide acclaim and renewing interest in Weber’s quest. Last March, the Weber Garden was dedicated outside of the Physical Sciences Complex.  

“Without Lorraine’s protective instincts and her foresight that the Weber bars would prove significant, these excellent monuments to UMD innovation would have been lost forever to campus and the world,” Rolston said.

As a retiree, DeSalvo says she looks forward to finding the best crab cake restaurants around—and to keeping in touch with the department. 

She was serenaded at her retirement party by the following: 

Her global flamingos and holiday parties
And summer fiestas gave Physics some verve
And year in and year out, there surely could be no doubt
How heartfelt is her motto of “I live to serve.”

Contributions to the Lorraine DeSalvo Chair's Endowed Award for Outstanding Service can be made here.

It is with much sadness that the Department of Physics announces the passing of several members of our community.

Janet Das Sarma (1971-2019) managed the Condensed Matter Theory Center for the last decade. She received the department’s Staff Excellence Award in October. More

Leona Dunklee (1926-2019) was an account clerk in the Department of Physics who supported the electronic development group and was active in planning departmental events.

Hans R. Griem (1928-2019), a noted expert in high-temperature plasmas and spectroscopy, served on the UMD faculty from 1957 to 1994. He was a consultant with Los Alamos National Laboratory. More

Udayaditya “Yudi” Konwar (1997-2019), an international student from Assam, India, would have been a junior physics major this year.

Don Langenberg (1932-2019) was a physicist, the Chancellor of the University System of Maryland from 1990 to 2002, and in recent years an active voice for education at the National Academies. More

Susanne Misner (1933-2019) is survived by her husband, Professor Emeritus Charles Misner. The couple donated proceeds from the sale of correspondence with Stephen Hawking to establish the department’s Weber Endowment for Gravitational Physics.

Lawrence A. Schmid (1928-2019) was a longtime NASA physicist who contributed to the Apollo Lunar Landing. He was a generous donor to undergraduate education in UMD’s Department of Physics.  

Joseph Sucher (1930-2019) was a Distinguished Scholar-Teacher and the poet laureate of the department. He established the Joseph and Dorothy Sucher Graduate Prize in Relativistic Theoretical Physics. More

Peter Hawley Walpole (1947-2019) was a physicist who worked on the Cosmic Ray Energetics and Mass (CREAM) and Boron And Carbon Cosmic rays in the Upper Stratosphere (BACCUS) experiments. 

Gaurang Yodh (1928-2019) was a UMD Physics Professor from 1961 to 1988 before moving to the University of California, Irvine. More

As a student, Zachary Eldredge (Ph.D. ’19, physics) examined the use of quantum mechanics to improve measurements.

“If you nZach Eldredge. Photo by Faye Levine.eed to know the difference in some quantity between two points, a common method is to measure the quantity at each point and then subtract,” Eldredge explained. “Instead, we developed methods to measure the difference directly. Our methods are more accurate because we only measure once, not twice.”

After graduating last May, Eldredge took this expertise and his strong physics foundation to the Department of Energy’s Solar Technologies Office, which aims to make solar energy less expensive and more accessible and increase the amount of renewable energy in the United States. He spent seven months working in the office as an Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education (ORISE) Fellow and is now a technology manager.

“The process of how technologies progress from lab science to usable products is really interesting to me and was important to my quantum research, as quantum technology is trying to make that same leap at the moment,” he said. “In addition, physics has been a wonderful foundation. A good physics education prepares you to pick out the relevant patterns and generalize knowledge really quickly, and it's been a great help in giving me the background to get up to speed on all kinds of other technologies.”

Eldredge knew early on in his studies that he was interested in finding a science policy job to align with his interests in climate, renewable energy and technology development. 

“I really wanted to shift gears from my academic work into something more climate focused, and the ORISE fellowship provided a great opportunity.”

During his time at Maryland, Eldredge co-authored nine publications, including three first-author papers published in the journals Physical Review A and Physical Review Letters. 

“I’m proud to say that two of Zach’s papers are the highlights of my own research over the past few years,” said Alexey Gorshkov, Eldredge’s advisor who is an adjunct associate professor in the Department of Physics and a physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. “In fact, these two papers are so promising that we filed patents for the corresponding ideas, all having to do with the harnessing of the peculiarities of quantum mechanics for technologies such as powerful computing, secure communication and superior sensing.”

In addition to his work in the lab, Eldredge served as president of the social activism group Science for the People UMD and as a member of the Graduate Student Government. 

“Not only is Zach an excellent physicist, he was also an excellent citizen of the department,” said Steve Rolston, professor of physics and department chair. “He was one of the most active members of our self-organized graduate student committee, which strives to make graduate school as positive an experience as possible.” 

Eldredge also participated in public outreach activities, such as the American Physical Society’s Congressional Visits Day, the USA Science & Engineering Festival, and UMD’s Maryland Day. 

“I felt I had a duty as a publicly funded scientist at a major public university to reach out and talk to people, because the knowledge I gained there belongs to everyone,” Eldredge said. “When we discover amazing things, it is on us to communicate about them to the public.”

Written by Chelsea Torres

Charles Clark and Victor Galitski will launch the fifth edition of their Coursera class on quantum physics Jan. 20, 2020. Alireza Parhizkar, a UMD graduate student will serve as teaching assistant.

“The course begins by establishing the conceptual grounds of quantum mechanics and promises an exciting journey,” says Parhizkar, who joined Galitski’s research group in the summer of 2019. “It fulfills this promise by immersing the learner in advanced subjects of quantum physics, like superconductivity and path integrals, and illustrating them with colorful exercises.”   Two JQI Fellows will launch the fifth edition of "Exploring Quantum Physics" on Coursera Jan. 20. (Credit: Anna Bogatin)

The free course, titled “Exploring Quantum Physics,” explains topics in quantum physics at a level appropriate for an advanced undergraduate or beginning graduate student. The previous four editions had a total of about 100,000 enrollees, with roughly 2,000 people completing the course. “That’s a good number for a massive open online course, or MOOC,” says Clark, who is an Adjunct Professor of Physics, a Fellow of the Joint Quantum Institute (JQI), and a Fellow at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Maryland. Clark adds that the new edition of the course has a revised grading system as well as updated homework and exam questions.

“Exploring Quantum Physics” consists of eight weeks of video lectures, with a number of five- to fifteen-minute videos per week. The videos include voluntary ungraded quizzes, which automatically pause the presentation so that students have an opportunity to answer relevant questions. There are also weekly homework assignments—some will include reading historical papers by influential early quantum scientists such as Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr—as well as a final exam. “We tried to strike a balance between providing a historical perspective on the early development of quantum physics and modern concepts,” says Galitski, who holds the Chesapeake Chair of Theoretical Physics at the University of Maryland (UMD).

An advantage of MOOCs is that the course material is available to anyone, including some students who are younger than traditional undergraduates. Khadija Niazi and her twin brother Muhammad, who grew up in Pakistan, were 13 years old when they enrolled in an earlier edition of the course. Khadija, who once spoke about her experience with MOOCs at the World Economic Forum, says that she “thoroughly enjoyed that course [e]specially because of the peer's help and Charles Clark's constant help and encouragement in the forums.” Before beginning the quantum physics course, the twins had completed some introductory physics classes on the site and learned some calculus from videos on YouTube. Muhammad says that they wanted “to get a taste of what lies ahead.”

Both Niazi siblings stayed in contact with Clark after completing the class. Muhammad, who went on to publish his first experimental physics paper in the journal Royal Society Open Science when he was 16, says he will probably take the new edition of the course to solidify his understanding of the content.

Michael Winer, a physics graduate student at UMD, took an earlier edition of the course when he was a 10th grader at Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring, Maryland because he hoped to do physics research over the summer. “By far the greatest thing that came out of my taking the course was that I contacted professor Galitski and did research with him for two summers,” Winer says. “This was my first real research experience, and taught me a lot about the scientific process.” That work led Winer to win the Intel Science Talent Search competition in 2015, earning him a prize of $150,000 and a meeting with President Obama.

“Exploring Quantum Physics” is now open for enrollment. To learn more about the course and to see a detailed syllabus, please visit the landing page at Coursera.

Original story by by Jillian Kunze

• Charles Clark:
• Victor Galitski:
  
• Alirea Parhizkar:

Nine sources of extremely high-energy gamma rays have been identified in a new catalog compiled by researchers with the High-Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) Gamma-Ray Observatory, including nine University of Maryland physicists. All nine sources produce gamma rays with energies over 56 trillion electron volts (TeV)—more than eight times the energy of the most powerful proton beams produced at particle accelerators on Earth—and three emit gamma rays extending to 100 TeV and beyond, making these the highest-energy sources ever observed in our galaxy. The catalog helps to explain where the particles originate and how they are produced with such extreme energies.The High-Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) Gamma-Ray Observatory was used to create a map of the galactic plane indicating the highest energy gamma ray sources yet discovered. (Credit: Jordan Goodman/University of Maryland)

“The very high-energy gamma rays we detect are produced by interactions of even higher energy charged particles near their source,” said Jordan Goodman, a Distinguished University Professor of Physics at UMD and U.S. lead investigator and spokesperson for the HAWC collaboration.  “Charged particles are bent in the magnetic fields of our galaxy and don’t point back to their origin. Gamma rays, like light, travel in straight lines allowing us to use them to map the sources of the high-energy emission. HAWC, which is a wide field-of-view instrument, views the overhead sky 24/7 giving us a deep exposure to look for the rare high energy gamma ray events.”

The catalog of high-energy sources was published online in the journal Physical Review Letters on Jan. 15, 2020.  Higher-energy astrophysical particles have previously been detected, but this is the first time specific galactic sources have been pinpointed for such high-energy particles. All of the sources have extremely energetic pulsars nearby. The number of sources detected may indicate that ultra-high-energy emission is a generic feature of powerful particle winds coming from pulsars embedded in interstellar gas clouds known as nebulae, and that more detections will be forthcoming.

The HAWC Gamma-Ray Observatory consists of an array of water-filled tanks sitting high on the slopes of the Sierra Negra volcano in Puebla, Mexico, where the atmosphere is thin and offers better conditions for observing gamma rays. When gamma rays strike molecules in the atmosphere they produce showers of energetic particles. Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light in a vacuum, but in water light moves a little slower. As a result, some particles in cosmic ray showers travel faster than light in the water inside the HAWC detector tanks. The faster-than-light particles, in turn, produce characteristic flashes of light called Cherenkov radiation. Using recordings of the Cherenkov flashes in the HAWC water tanks, researchers reconstruct the sources of particle showers and learn about the particles that caused them.

The HAWC collaborators plan to continue searching for the sources of high-energy cosmic rays. By combining their data with measurements from other types of observatories, such as neutrino, X-ray, radio and optical telescopes, they hope to elucidate the astrophysical mechanisms that produce the cosmic rays that continuously rain down on our planet.

“There are still many unanswered questions about cosmic-ray origins and acceleration,” said Kelly Malone, an astrophysicist in the Neutron Science and Technology group at Los Alamos National Laboratory and a member of the HAWC scientific collaboration. “High energy gamma rays are produced near cosmic-ray sites and can be used to probe cosmic-ray acceleration. However, there is some ambiguity in using gamma rays to study this, as high-energy gamma rays can also be produced via other mechanisms, such as lower-energy photons scattering off of electrons, which commonly occurs near pulsars.”

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In addition to Goodman, other UMD co-authors from the Department of Physics included Visiting Professor Robert Ellsworth; Principal Engineer Michael Schneider; Research Scientist Andrew James Smith; Graduate Students Kristi Engel and Elijah Job Tabachnick; and Postdoctoral Associates Colas Rivière, Chad Brisbois and Israel Martinez-Castellanos.

Text for this news item was adapted with permission from a press release written by Los Alamos National Laboratory. 

The paper “Multiple Galactic Sources with Emission Above 56 TeV Detected by HAWC,” A.U. Abeysekara, et al. was published in Physical Review Letters on January 15, 2020.

The National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Energy and Los Alamos National Laboratory provided funding for the United States’ participation in the HAWC project. The Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (CONACyT) is the primary funder for Mexican participation. The content of this article does not necessarily reflect the views of these organizations.  

Media Relations Contact: Bailey Bedford, 301-405-9401,