Both of the twin Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) detectors—located in Livingston, Louisiana, and Hanford, Washington—detected the gravitational wave event, named GW151226. The LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC) and the Virgo Collaboration used data from the twin LIGO detectors to make the discovery, which is accepted for publication in the journal Physical Review Letters.

Gravitational waves carry information about their origins and about the nature of gravity that cannot otherwise be obtained. Physicists on the LIGO and Virgo teams concluded that the final moments of a black hole merger produced the gravitational waves observed on December 26, 2015.

LIGO’s historic first detection on September 14, 2015 resulted from a merger of two black holes 36 and 29 times the mass of the sun. In contrast, the black holes that created the second event were relative flyweights, tipping the scales at 14 and eight times the mass of the sun. Their merger produced a single, more massive spinning black hole that is 21 times the mass of the sun, and transformed an additional sun’s worth of mass into gravitational energy.

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University College Cork—National University of Ireland, Cork (UCC) named Patrick O’Shea, Affiliate Professor and VP for Research, as its 15th President.

Nanomaterials have the potential to improve many next-generation technologies. They promise to speed up computer chips, increase the resolution of medical imaging devices and make electronics more energy efficient. But imbuing nanomaterials with the right properties can be time consuming and costly. A new, quick and inexpensive method for constructing diamond-based hybrid nanomaterials could soon launch the field forward.

University of Maryland researchers developed a method to build diamond-based hybrid nanoparticles in large quantities from the ground up, thereby circumventing many of the problems with current methods. The technique is described in the June 8 issue of the journal Nature Communications.

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Nature doesn’t have the best memory. If you fill a box with air and divide it in half with a barrier, it’s easy to tell molecules on the left from molecules on the right. But after removing the barrier and waiting a short while, the molecules get mixed together, and it becomes impossible to tell where a given molecule started. The air-in-a-box system loses any memory of its initial conditions.

The universe has been forgetting its own initial state since the Big Bang, a fact linked to the unrelenting forward march of time. Systems that forget where they started are said to have thermalized, since it is often—but not always—an exchange of heat and energy with some other system that causes the memory loss. For example, a melting ice cube forgets its orderly arrangement of water molecules when heat from its surroundings splits the cube’s crystal bonds. In some sense, the initial information about the ice cube—the structure of the crystal, the distance between molecules, etc.—leaks away.

The opposite case is localization, where information about the initial arrangement sticks around. Such a situation is rare, like an ice cube that never melts, but one example is Anderson localization, in which particles or waves in a crystal are trapped near impurities. They tend to bounce off defects in the crystal and scatter in random directions, yielding no net movement. If there are enough impurities in a region, the particles or waves never escape.

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Congratulations to the Spring 2016 semester Dean's List awardees from the University of Maryland College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences.