Phillips named member of Mexican Academy

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Category: Department News

Published: Thursday, March 23 2017 16:17

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.

DURIP Grants Awarded to Johnpierre Paglione and Mohammad Hafezi

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Category: Department News

Published: Friday, March 17 2017 11:47

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

Wellstood named new UMD Co-Director of JQI

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Category: Department News

Published: Thursday, March 16 2017 10:54

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."

Ions sync up into world's first time crystal

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Category: Research News

Published: Wednesday, March 08 2017 14:41

Consider, for a moment, the humble puddle of water. If you dive down to nearly the scale of molecules, it will be hard to tell one spot in the puddle from any other. You can shift your gaze to the left or right, or tilt your head, and the microscopic bustle will be identical—a situation that physicists call highly symmetric.  

That all changes abruptly when the puddle freezes. In contrast to liquid water, ice is a crystal, and it gains a spontaneous rigid structure as the temperature drops. Freezing fastens neighboring water molecules together in a regular pattern, and a simple tilt of the head now creates a kaleidoscopic change.

In 2012, Nobel-prize winning physicist Frank Wilczek, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, proposed something that sounds pretty strange. It might be possible, Wilczek argued, to create crystals that are arranged in time instead of space. The suggestion prompted years of false starts and negative results that ruled out some of the most obvious places to look for these newly named time crystals.

Read more.