High-flying Experiments Tackle the Mysteries of Cosmic Rays

Cosmic rays are not rays at all, but highly energetic particles that zoom through space at nearly the speed of light.  The particles range in size, from subatomic protons to the atomic nuclei of elements such as carbon and boron. Scientists suspect that the particles are bits of subatomic shrapnel produced by supernovae, but could also be signatures of other cataclysmic phenomena.

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JQI graduate student named ARCS Endowment Fellow

Zachary Eldredge, a physics graduate student at JQI and QuICS, has been awarded an Endowment Fellowship by the Achievement Awards for College Scientists (ARCS) Foundation. The fellowship comes with $15,000 of financial support and is renewable. "I'm very thankful to the Foundation, as well as to the university for nominating me and helping me put together my application," Eldredge says. He will be honored at an awards reception at the National Academy of Science in October.

The ARCS Foundation is a national organization dedicated to supporting STEM education in the United States. ARCS partners with more than 50 colleges and universities in 16 regional chapters across the country—including the Metropolitan Washington Chapter, through which Eldredge received his fellowship. Rather than soliciting applications, the ARCS Foundation allows its partner institutions to select some of their top students in science, engineering and medical research as candidates for the award. Since its inception in 1958, the Foundation has provided more than $100 million of financial support to thousands of scholars.

Eldredge is a third year graduate student at JQI, having earned an undergraduate degree in physics from the University of Oklahoma in 2014. He currently works with JQI and QuICS Fellow Alexey Gorshkov on finding new ways to generate entanglement and use it as a quantum resource.

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Destabilized solitons perform a disappearing act

When your heart beats, blood courses through your veins in waves of pressure. These pressure waves manifest as your pulse, a regular rhythm unperturbed by the complex internal structure of the body. Scientists call such robust waves solitons, and in many ways they behave more like discrete particles than waves. Soliton theory may aid in the understanding of tsunamis, which—unlike other water waves—can sustain themselves over vast oceanic distances.

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