The 2020 SPD Summer Scholars were Ojo Akinwale, David Bour, Fred Angelo Garcia, Kevin Liang, Drew Melis, Norman Moon, Joao Pereira and Kate Sturge. While the primary focus of the summer program was assessing the performance of the High-Granularity Calorimeter as part of the CMS detector upgrades, the group also wanted to acknowledge the COVID-19 relief efforts made by CERN personnel and the wider high-energy community. Collaborating remotely, they produced a video describing such efforts.
If you’re a student hoping to one day make your mark in the world of scientific research, there are few scholarships more prestigious than the Barry Goldwater Scholarship, which encourages students to pursue advanced study and research careers in the sciences, engineering and mathematics.
Over the last decade, the University of Maryland’s nominations yielded 33 Goldwater Scholarships—the most in the nation—and 13 of those scholarships were awarded to physics majors.
“It is not surprising that physics has produced more of UMD’s Goldwater Scholars than any other department over the last 10 years,” said Robert Infantino, associate dean of undergraduate education in the College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences. Infantino has led UMD’s Goldwater Scholarship nominating process since 2001. “The deep commitment of our physics faculty members to mentor undergraduates on research projects has helped to transform outstanding students like Scott into researchers who significantly advance physics research even as undergraduates and who become nationally competitive scholars for competitions like the Goldwater Scholarship and NSF graduate fellowships.”<
The physics department’s latest Goldwater Scholar is Scott Moroch, who will use the scholarship to begin taking graduate-level courses at UMD, an opportunity he earned by completing all of his undergraduate requirements ahead of schedule. Moroch plans to graduate in December 2020, a full semester early.
“I was really excited when I learned that I got the scholarship because I feel like I've worked really hard and I’ve participated in a lot of research as an undergraduate,” Moroch said. “It felt very rewarding and it gave me the confidence I needed to feel like I can be a leader in the field of accelerator physics and do more research in the future.”
Moroch has been interested in math and science since he was 13 years old, but he became interested in physics in 7th grade after reading an article about a teenager who built his own nuclear fusion reactor.
“After reading that article, something clicked and I just had to build one of these machines,” he said.
Moroch and one of his friends spent the next three years doing research and working on creating their own reactor. Creating the type of reactor they were looking to build—a tabletop fusion device—would cost thousands of dollars, so they had to get creative. Moroch saved all of the money he received as gifts on his birthday and holidays, and he reached out to companies that donated scientific equipment or sold it to him at a discount.
“So many of these companies would normally build equipment used at universities or other research institutions, but they loved the idea that we were doing this project and getting involved at such a young age, so we managed to get a lot of equipment donated to the project,” Moroch said. “It was a huge help.”
By the time Moroch graduated high school, he had completed the nuclear fusion device. But he never entered it into a showcase or science fair. He simply did it for the love of physics.
“Physics started as a hobby for me,” Moroch explained. “Some people like fixing cars or collecting things, and I just like conducting different physics experiments for my own personal fulfillment.”
“Professor Koeth moved the cyclotron from Rutgers University in New Jersey to UMD, and that's actually one of the reasons why I chose to come to Maryland,” Moroch said. “I wanted to work on this machine.”
The beams that cyclotrons produce, while potentially dangerous, accomplish wondrous things—killing cancer cells with extreme precision, for instance, or changing atoms into a different element altogether.
“Research accelerators at universities are pushing the boundaries of physics,” Moroch said. “They get bigger and bigger with higher and higher energies.”
Now, Moroch is working with Koeth to develop a novel cyclotron storage ring for Lockheed Martin. The company is interested in using the technology for a new class of power supplies for aerospace electric propulsion systems that can carry things into the solar system and beyond.
With initial funding from Lockheed, Moroch showed that a cyclotron design could be effective, but it was unstable. So, the company decided to fund a more ambitious project at UMD—where the instabilities could be factored out. Moroch now leads a significant portion of the research team.
“In the past 20 years, I have mentored several dozen undergraduate researchers, and Scott Moroch is the first that has demonstrated the entire cycle of research and brought in substantial research funds,” Koeth said.
Last summer and fall, Moroch led a team of three undergraduates in assembling and upgrading a low-energy storage ring as part of the project, an accomplishment he is most proud of.
“Making that storage ring operational again was my most rewarding work because it was a real team effort,” Moroch said. “Some of my research projects have been individual projects, so it was exciting to have everyone be involved and play a part.”
Moroch will continue his work with Koeth on the cyclotron after graduation before starting graduate school in fall 2021 to earn his Ph.D. in physics. Once he finishes his graduate studies, he hopes to pursue a career in academia.
“I love doing research and I have loved teaching during the semesters that I have been a teaching assistant,” he said. “It's really rewarding to teach students and see them understand the concepts of accelerators for the first time. Several of these students have gone on to work in our research group, so I've gotten to work alongside them and watch them continue to grow and learn. I definitely think becoming a university professor is my ultimate end goal.”
Scientists observed what appears to be a bulked-up black hole tangling with a more ordinary one. The research team, which includes physicists from the University of Maryland, detected two black holes merging, but one of the black holes was 1 1/2 times more massive than any ever observed in a black hole collision. The researchers believe the heavier black hole in the pair may be the result of a previous merger between two black holes.
This type of hierarchical combining of black holes has been hypothesized in the past but the observed event, labeled GW190521, would be the first evidence for such activity. The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) Scientific Collaboration (LSC) and Virgo Collaboration announced the discovery in two papers published September 2, 2020, in the journals Physical Review Letters and Astrophysical Journal Letters.
“The mass of the larger black hole in the pair puts it into the range where it’s unexpected from regular astrophysics processes,” said Peter Shawhan, an LSC principal investigator and the LSC observational science coordinator. “It seems too massive to have been formed from a collapsed star, which is where black holes generally come from.”
The larger black hole in the merging pair has a mass 85 times greater than the sun. One possible scenario suggested by the new papers is that the larger object may have been the result of a previous black hole merger rather than a single collapsing star. According to current understanding, stars that could give birth to black holes with masses between 65 and 135 times greater than the sun don’t collapse when they die. Therefore, we don’t expect them to form black holes.
“Right from the beginning, this signal, which is only a tenth of a second long, challenged us in identifying its origin,” said Alessandra Buonanno, a College Park professor at UMD and an LSC principal investigator who also has an appointment as Director at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Potsdam, Germany. “But, despite its short duration, we were able to match the signal to one expected of black-hole mergers, as predicted by Einstein’s theory of general relativity, and we realized we had witnessed, for the first time, the birth of an intermediate-mass black hole from a black-hole parent that most probably was born from an earlier binary merger.”
GW190521 is one of three recent gravitational wave discoveries that challenge current understanding of black holes and allow scientists to test Einstein’s theory of general relativity in new ways. The other two events included the first observed merger of two black holes with distinctly unequal masses and a merger between a black hole and a mystery object, which may be the smallest black hole or the largest neutron star ever observed. A research paper describing the latter was published in Astrophysical Journal Letters on June 23, 2000, while a paper about the former event will be published soon in Physical Review D.
“All three events are novel with masses or mass ratios that we’ve never seen before,” said Shawhan, who is also a fellow of the Joint Space-Science Institute, a partnership between UMD and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. “So not only are we learning more about black holes in general, but because of these new properties, we are able to see effects of gravity around these compact bodies that we haven't seen before. It gives us an opportunity to test the theory of general relativity in new ways.”
For example, the theory of general relativity predicts that binary systems with distinctly unequal masses will produce gravitational waves with higher harmonics, and that is exactly what the scientists were able to observe for the first time.
“What we mean when we say higher harmonics is like the difference in sound between a musical duet with musicians playing the same instrument versus different instruments,” said Buonanno, who developed the waveform models to observe the harmonics with her LSC group. “The more substructure and complexity the binary has — for example the masses or spins of the black holes are different—the richer is the spectrum of the radiation emitted”
In addition to these three black hole mergers and a previously reported binary neutron star merger, the observational run from April 2019 through March 2020 identified 52 other potential gravitational wave events. The events were posted to a public alert system developed by LIGO and Virgo collaboration members in a program originally spearheaded by Shawhan so that other scientists and interested members of the public can evaluate the gravity wave signals.
“Gravitational wave events are being detected regularly,” Shawhan said, “and some of them are turning out to have remarkable properties which are extending what we can learn about astrophysics.”
The research paper, “GW190521: A Binary Black Hole Coalescence with a Total Mass of 150 Solar Masses,” was published in Physical Review Letters on September 2, 2020.
The research paper, ”Properties and Astrophysical Implications of the 150 Solar Mass Binary Black Hole Merger GW190521,” was published in Astrophysical Journal Letters on September 2, 2020.
The research paper, “GW190814: Gravitational Waves from the Coalescence of a 23 Solar Mass Black Hole with a 2.6 Solar Mass Compact Object,” was published in Astrophysical Journal Letters on June 23, 2020.
The research paper, “GW190412: Observation of a Binary-Black-Hole Coalescence with Asymmetric Masses,” has been accepted for publication in Physical Review D, and was published on Arxiv on April 17, 2020.
About LIGO and Virgo
LIGO is funded by the NSF and operated by Caltech and MIT, which conceived of LIGO and lead the project. Financial support for the Advanced LIGO project was led by the NSF with Germany (Max Planck Society), the U.K. (Science and Technology Facilities Council) and Australia (Australian Research Council-OzGrav) making significant commitments and contributions to the project. Approximately 1,300 scientists from around the world participate in the effort through the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, which includes the GEO Collaboration. A list of additional partners is available at https://my.ligo.org/census.php.
The Virgo Collaboration is currently composed of approximately 550 members from 106 institutes in 12 different countries including Belgium, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, and Spain. The European Gravitational Observatory (EGO) hosts the Virgo detector near Pisa in Italy, and is funded by Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in France, the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN) in Italy, and Nikhef in the Netherlands. A list of the Virgo Collaboration groups can be found at http://public.virgo-gw.eu/the-virgo-collaboration/. More information is available on the Virgo website at http://www.virgo-gw.eu/.
The new partnership with NRL is specifically focused on advancing quantum technology for applications that are relevant to the warfighter, and will involve exchanges of expertise and samples; collaborations in experimental, theoretical, and educational work; mutual research proposals; and the exchange of researchers.
"The University of Maryland is excited to partner with the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory to explore the diverse applications of quantum technologies," said Dr. Laurie Locascio, vice president for research at UMD.
Launched in 2019, QTC capitalizes on the university’s strong research programs and partnerships in quantum science and systems engineering, and pursues collaborations with industry and government labs to help take promising quantum advances from the lab to the marketplace. QTC has a long rooted history of working with the Department of Defense Research Labs, as QTC’s founding partner is the Combat Capabilities Development Command (CCDC) Army Research Laboratory.
Quantum technology is making a huge impact in industry and government sectors, and the partnership between UMD and NRL will help move critical technologies forward.
“Research in quantum information science and technologies has the potential to bring new warfighting capabilities to the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps as well as to provide benefits to society at large,” said Gerald M. Borsuk, Ph.D., associate director of research for the systems directorate at NRL. “We are excited about working with the Quantum Technology Center at the University of Maryland to advance leading edge quantum technologies. We share a mutual commitment to providing students and faculty with high quality educational outreach, knowledge sharing, and research opportunities.”
Both the QTC and NRL aim to build and improve STEM educational and research capacities, and provide resources and equipment for research activities. There have been collaborations and joint proposals between these groups in recent years, particularly in work on solid state systems. Moving forward, future interactions are expected to involve work on quantum dots and defects, and on systems for quantum memory and networking, with a goal to advance the scaling and integration of quantum technologies.
“Quantum technology is developing rapidly, and many organizations are quickly getting involved. We are thrilled to collaborate with NRL to strengthen the current research and training activities within QTC, expand our research in areas such as machine learning and quantum networking, and notably, accelerate realization of the quantum internet,” said Ronald Walsworth, founding director of the QTC and UMD professor of electrical and computer engineering and physics. Mohammad Hafezi, Alicia Kollár, Norbert Linke, Chris Monroe and Steve Rolston are also QTC members.
The partners are also interested in collaborating on technologies associated with creating and implementing a quantum internet network. This research would involve quantum memory, quantum repeaters and routers, as well as associated classical network theory and associated implementations. Another area of interest to both QTC and NRL include defect states in semiconductors, such as diamond and silicon carbide, for opportunities in networking and in sensing, particularly magnetometry.
“QTC translates quantum science into new capabilities and technologies for real world applications. This partnership gives QTC, UMD and the Navy the opportunity for joint research to advance quantum technology for the Navy and will help prepare a workforce trained in this critical area,” said Walsworth.
