In our own galaxy and beyond, violent collisions fling a never-ending stream of stuff at the earth, and astrophysicists are eager to learn more about the processes that produce this cosmic barrage.

Researchers from around the world have teamed up to build the High-Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) gammy-ray observatory, an array of hundreds of huge water tanks on a mountain in Mexico. HAWC helps astrophysicists spot active cosmic neighborhoods by capturing the shower of particles created when high-energy packets of light smash into the earth's atmosphere.

Jordan Goodman, HAWC's lead investigator, and Dan Fiorino, a postdoctoral researcher at UMD, tell Chris Cesare about the details of the HAWC experiment and how it promises to fill some gaps in our understanding of the universe. To learn more about HAWC, please visit www.hawc-observatory.org. The collaboration is preparing to publish the first results of its search, and you can read about the details in an upcoming source catalog or a paper about high-energy gamma rays from the Crab Nebula.

This episode of Relatively Certain was produced by Chris Cesare, Sean Kelley and Emily Edwards and edited by Chris Cesare and Kate Delossantos, featuring music by Dave Depper, Podington Bear, Kevin MacLeod and Chris Zabriskie. Relatively Certain is a production of the Joint Quantum Institute and the University of Maryland, and you can find it on iTunes, Google Play or Soundcloud. 

To listen now, click here and a player will open.

JQI Fellow, Nobel laureate and Distinguished University Professor William Phillips has been inducted into the Mexican Academy of Sciences (la Academia Mexicana de Ciencias) as a corresponding member. The honor will be marked by an evening event held in Mexico City on March 23.

The event includes a talk by Phillips, titled "Time, Einstein and the coolest stuff in the universe," as well as a discussion between Phillips, Mexican Academy of Sciences president Jaime Urrutia Fucugauchi, and JQI Fellow and physics professor Luis Orozco, who nominated Phillips for membership. The entire program will be broadcast live beginning at 6 p.m. EDT.

The Department of Defense announced that Professor and CNAM Director Johnpierre Paglione (University of Maryland Department of Physics) and Assistant Professor and JQI Fellow Mohammad Hafezi (Electrical and Computer Engineering) are among those awarded the Defense University Research Instrumentation Program (DURIP) grants. The Department of Defense awarded 160 researchers from institutions all over the country with the DURIP award. DURIP supports the purchase of high tech equipment and innovative research enabling exciting advances in science and technology.

Paglione received an award for Materials Genome Approach to the Search for Superconductivity. Dr. Hafezi's award will support research for a Cryogenic System for Quantum Optical Measurement. Both grants are from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR).

DoD Press Release 

2017 DURIP winners

Physics professor and JQI Fellow Fred Wellstood has been appointed the newest UMD Co-Director of JQI. He assumed the role on March 1.

"Fred has played a major role in the JQI since its founding," says Gretchen Campbell, the current NIST Co-Director of JQI. "Most recently, his tireless efforts helped to design and ultimately build the new Physical Sciences Center at Maryland that many JQI labs now call home. I look forward to working with him to carefully steward JQI's future."