The DFG announced today that Professor Alessandra Buonanno will be honoured with the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz prize for her key role in the first direct observations of gravitational waves. This long-awaited discovery is a historic scientific milestone, and was awarded this year’s Nobel prize in Physics. Alessandra Buonanno is one of the scientists who made the detection possible.  

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Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) tops the charts for the 2017 Breakthrough of the Year with Physics World with the first multimessenger observation of a neutron-star merger.  UMD Professors Alessandra Buonanno and Peter Shawhan are both collaborators with LIGO and have contributed to the detection of the fourth gravitational wave. 

Professor Chris Monroe and his colleagues have also been included in the Physics World Top Ten Breakthroughs of 2017 for their research on time crystals.  The study of time crystals was first envisioned five years ago when Nobel Laureate Frank Wilczek proposed the idea.  Chris Monroe has one of the leading experiments.  His group uses trapped ions to create time crystals in their lab. Physics World also recognizes Mikhail Lukin and his collaborators at Harvard University who have been simultaneously working with time crystals using diamond defects.

Alumnus Charles L. Bennett (B.S. Physics and Astronomy, 1978) has received the 2018 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics “for detailed maps of the early universe that greatly improved our knowledge of the evolution of the cosmos and the fluctuations that seeded the formation of galaxies.” Bennett, the Bloomberg Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University, led the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) mission. Members of the WMAP team will share the $3 million prize for their measurements and insights into the young universe.

Prof. Bennett also received the 2017 Institute of Physics (IOP) Isaac Newton Medal and Prize, the Caterina Tomassoni and Felice Pietro Chisesi Prize, the Gruber Cosmology Prize, the Shaw Prize in Astronomy and the National Academy of Sciences’ Draper Medal and Comstock Prize in Physics. He was the Department of Physics Alumnus of the Year in 2003.

If you holler at someone across your yard, the sound travels on the bustling movement of air molecules. But over long distances your voice needs help to reach its destination—help provided by a telephone or the Internet. Atoms don’t yell, but they can share information through light. And they also need help connecting over long distances.

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