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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Erin Marshall|

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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Chaos is all around us, a fact that weather forecasters know all too well.

Their job is notoriously difficult because small changes in air pressure or temperature, which ultimately drive winds and weather systems, can have huge consequences on a global scale. This sensitivity to tiny differences is commonly called the butterfly effect, and it makes weather patterns chaotic and hard to predict.

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Distinguished University Professor Ed Ott (ECE/Physics/IREAP) has been honored by two professional societies for his decades-long career in nonlinear science and chaos theory. The Lewis Fry Richardson Medal of the European Geosciences Union (EGU) commemorates the work of Richardson, a mathematician and physicist who pioneered the science of fractal theory and weather forecasting.  Prof. Ott was cited for "...pioneering contributions in the theory of chaos with applications to the motion of tracers in fluids, kinematic dynamos, and data assimilation for weather forecasting."  

The Jürgen Moser Lecture, sponsored by the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), recognizes Prof. Ott's distinguished and sustained contributions to nonlinear science, citing "seminal work in chaos theory and the dynamics of physical systems." Prof. Ott will deliver the lecture at the May 2017 SIAM Meeting on Dynamical Systems in Snowbird, Utah.

Professor Ott is a fellow of the American Physical Society, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. He is the recipient of the APS Julius Edgar Lilienfield Prize for 2014. He was selected as a 2016 Thomson Reuters Citation Laureate in physics.

The W. J. Carr Lecture Series on Superconductivity and Advanced Materials was established by Dr. James L. Carr ' 89, and attracts some of the best researchers in this field each year. This year's distinguished Lecturer is Dr. Stuart Parkin, Director of the Max Planck Institute of Microstructure Physics and Professor at the Institute of Physics of the University of Halle-Wittenberg. Parkin is a pioneer in the science and application of spintronic materials, and has made discoveries into the behavior of thin-film magnetic structures that were critical in enabling recent increases in the data density and capacity of computer hard-disk drives. For these discoveries, he was awarded the 2014 Millennium Technology Prize.

Prof. Parkin will present both a department colloquium and technical seminar. His colloquium will be presented on Tuesday February 28th at 4pm in room 1410 of the John S. Toll Physics Building.

Title: Beyond charge currents: spin and ion currents for future computing technologies

Abstract: The era of computing technologies based on charge currents is coming to an end after more than 40 years of exponential increases in computing power that have been largely based on shrinking devices in two dimensions. A new era of "Beyond charge!" will evolve over the next decade that will likely be based on several new concepts. Firstly, devices whose innate properties are derived not from the electron's charge but from spin currents and from ion currents. In some cases new functionality will arise that can extend charge based devices but in other cases fundamentally new computing paradigms will evolve. Secondly, devices will inevitably become three-dimensional: novel means of constructing devices, both from bottom-up and top-down, will become increasingly important. Thirdly, bio-inspired devices that may mimic the extremely energy efficient computation systems in the biological world are compelling. In this talk I will discuss possible spintronic and ionitronic devices and how they may lead to novel computing technologies.

Bio:  Professor Stuart Parkin's research interests include oxide thin film heterostructures, high-temperature superconductors, and, magnetic thin film structures and spintronic materials and devices for advanced sensor, memory, and logic applications. Parkin's discoveries in magneto-resistive thin film structures enabled a more than 1000 fold increase in the storage capacity of magnetic disk drives for which he was awarded the Millennium Technology Award from the Technology Academy Finland in 2014. Most recently, Parkin has proposed and demonstrated a novel storage-class memory device, "Racetrack Memory", that is an innately 3D solid-state device with the storage capacity of a disk drive but with much higher performance and reliability. Parkin's other major research interest is cognitive - bio-inspired materials - that could enable ultra-low power computing technologies. Parkin is a Fellow/Member of several Academies, including: the Royal Society (London), National Academy of Sciences (USA), National Academy of Engineering (USA), German National Academy of Science - Leopoldina, Royal Society of Edinburgh, Indian Academy of Sciences, and TWAS, the academy of sciences for the developing world. Parkin is the recipient of numerous awards and honors including, the American Physical Society International Prize for New Materials, the Europhysics Prize for Outstanding Achievement in Solid State Physics, and the American Institute of Physics (AIP) Prize for Industrial Application of Physics. Parkin has received Honorary Doctorates from RWTH Aachen, Eindhoven University of Science and Technology, University of Regensburg, and University of Kaiserslautern. Parkin received the IEEE Daniel E. Noble Award for his work on MRAM, the IUPAP Magnetism Prize and Neel Medal for outstanding contributions to the science of magnetism, the APS David Adler Lectureship Award, the von Hippel Award from the Materials Research Society, the Swan Medal of the Institute of Physics (London), the Millennium Technology Prize and an Alexander von Humboldt Professorship − International Award for Research (2014).