Ten University of Maryland faculty members earned Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) awards from the National Science Foundation in the past fiscal year.

The five-year awards are the NSF’s most prestigious in support of junior faculty members who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and lead advances in the mission of their department or organization.

Hailu B. Gebremariam has accepted an appointment as a full-time lecturer.  He holds a bachelor's and a master's degree in physics from Addis Ababa University, an ICTPHailu Gebremariam diploma in high energy physics from the Abdus Salam International Center for Theoretical Physics and a master's degree in physics from Syracuse University. He received his UMD doctorate in 2005 under Ted Einstein, with the thesis Terrace Width Distribution and First Passage Probabilities for Interacting Steps. Prior to accepting his new position, he was an assistant professor at Montgomery College and a part-time lecturer in the Department of Physics.

Matt SeversonMatt Severson has accepted an appointment as a full-time lecturer. He holds bachelor’s degrees in atmospheric sciences and meteorology and in physics and mathematics from the University of South Alabama, and received his UMD Ph.D. in 2015 under Rabi Mohapatra, with the thesis Neutrino Mass and Proton Lifetime in a Realistic SUSY SO(10) Model.  Prior to accepting his new position, he was a part-time lecturer in the Department of Physics.

Wes Fuhrman, who recently completed his Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins University, has joined the Center for Nanophysics and Advanced Materials (CNAM) to conduct a one-year research program funded by the Schmidt Science Fellowship program. Fuhrman was one of 14 fellows chosen from 220 applicants for the first round of Schmidt funding.

Fuhrman received his bachelor’s degree at the University of California, Irvine, focusing on magnon decay dynamics and quantum game theory. At Hopkins, his interests turned to strongly interacting topological materials. This is also a focus area for CNAM researchers, making UMD an ideal place for Fuhrman to carry out a highly collaborative, multi-disciplinary research program focused on exploring the prospects of new technologies based on topological and correlated electron materials.

About the fellowship:

Schmidt Science Fellows, in partnership with the Rhodes Trust, aims to develop the next generation of science leaders to transcend disciplines, advance discovery, and solve the world’s most pressing problems. Schmidt Science Fellows was launched in 2017 by Eric and Wendy Schmidt and is a program of Schmidt Futures, delivered in partnership with the Rhodes Trust. The program has an initial commitment of at least $25m for the first three years.

The fellowship includes a $100,000 stipend and participation in a global meeting series. According to the program, fellowship recipients choose “leading laboratories at elite institutions that conduct exciting new research."

Candidate event showing the associated production of a Higgs boson and a Z boson, with the subsequent decay of the Higgs boson to a bottom quark and its antiparticle.

Scientists now know the fate of the vast majority of all Higgs bosons produced in the LHC.

Today at CERN, the Large Hadron Collider experiments ATLAS and CMS jointly announced the discovery of the Higgs boson transforming into bottom quarks as it decays. This is predicted to be the most common way for Higgs bosons to decay, yet was a difficult signal to isolate because it closely mimics ordinary background processes. This new discovery is a big step forward in the quest to understand how the Higgs enables fundamental particles to acquire mass.

After several years of refining their techniques and gradually incorporating more data, both experiments finally saw evidence of the Higgs decaying to bottom quarks that exceeds the 5-sigma threshold of statistical significance typically required to claim a discovery. Both teams found their results were consistent with predictions based on the Standard Model. UMD professors Alberto Belloni, Drew Baden, Sarah Eno, Nick Hadley and Andris Skuja are members of the CMS collaboration.

Higgs bosons are only produced in roughly one out of a billion LHC collisions and live only one-septillionth of a second before their energy is converted into a cascade of other particles. Because it is impossible to see Higgs bosons directly, scientists use these secondary particles to study the Higgs’ properties. Since its discovery in 2012, scientists have been able to identify only about thirty percent of all the predicted Higgs boson decays, while its decays to bottom quarks, which should occur sixty percent of the time, had not yet been observed.

“The Higgs boson is an integral component of our universe and theorized to give all fundamental particles their mass,” said Alberto Belloni of the University of Maryland. “But previously we had only directly seen the Higgs couplings to the tau lepton, and the W and Z bosons. Now we have seen the decay of the Higgs to a quark-antiquark pair. This measurement shows for the first time that the Higgs gives mass to a quark.”

The Higgs field is theorized to interact with all massive particles in the Standard Model, the best theory scientists have to explain the behavior of subatomic particles. But many scientists suspect that the Higgs could also interact with massive particles outside the Standard Model, such as dark matter. By finding and mapping the Higgs bosons’ interactions with known particles, scientists can simultaneously probe for new phenomena.

The next step is to increase the precision of these measurements so that scientists can study this decay mode with a much greater resolution and explore what secrets the Higgs boson might be hiding.

Further information:

ATLAS: https://atlas.cern/updates/press-statement/observation-higgs-boson-decay-pair-bottom-quarks

CMS: http://cms.cern/higgs-observed-decaying-b-quarks-submitted

A fabricated trap that researchers use to capture and control atomic ion qubits (quantum bits). (Credit: K. Hudek/IonQ and E. Edwards/JQI)NSF has announced a $15 million award to a collaboration of seven institutions including the University of Maryland. The goal: Build the world’s first practical quantum computer.

"Quantum computers will change everything about the technology we use and how we use it, and we are still taking the initial steps toward realizing this goal," said NSF Director France Córdova. "Developing the first practical quantum computer would be a major milestone. By bringing together experts who have outlined a path to a practical quantum computer and supporting its development, NSF is working to take the quantum revolution from theory to reality."

Dubbed the Software-Tailored Architecture for Quantum co-design (STAQ) project, the new effort seeks to demonstrate a quantum advantage over traditional computers within five years using ion trap technology.

The project is the result of a National Science Foundation Ideas Lab—a week-long, free-form exchange among researchers from a wide range of fields that aims to spawn creative, collaborative proposals to address a given research challenge. The result of each Ideas Lab is interdisciplinary research that is high-risk, high-reward, cutting-edge and unlikely to be funded through traditional grant mechanisms.

JQI Fellow Christopher Monroe will lead the team developing the hardware. JQI Fellow Alexey Gorshkov will be involved in the theory side of the collaboration.

Text for this news item was adapted from the Duke University and NSF press releases on the award.