The idea of a pump is at least as old as the ancient Greek philosopher and scientist Archimedes. More than 2000 years ago, Archimedes allegedly invented a corkscrew pump (link is external) that could lift water up an incline with the turn of a handle. Versions of the ancient invention still bear his name and are used today in agriculture and industry.

Modern pumps have achieved loftier feats. For instance, in the late 1990s, NIST developed a device that could pump individual electrons, part of a potential new standard for measuring capacitance (link is external).

While pumps can be operated mechanically, electrically or via any other source of energy, they all share the common feature of being driven by a periodic action. In the Archimedean pump, that action is a full rotation of the handle, which draws up a certain volume of water. For the NIST electron pump, it is a repeating pattern of voltage signals, which causes electrons to hop one at a time between metallic islands.

But physicists have sought for decades to build a different kind of pump—one driven by the same kind of periodic action but made possible only by the bizarre rules of quantum mechanics. Owing to their physics, these pumps would be immune to certain imperfections in their fabrication.

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Sydney Robinson, a rising junior double majoring in physics and French, was awarded the U.S. Department of State Critical Language Scholarship (CLS) to study abroad. The competitive program provides fully funded, group-based intensive language instruction and structured cultural enrichment experiences over a period of seven to 10 weeks.

Robinson will travel to Lucknow, India, to study Urdu, a language spoken in northern India and Pakistan. Robinson hopes to build new relationships, experience a new culture and connect with family members.

“I think the most important part of adapting to new cultures and situations is to ask questions and be open to whatever answers you may receive, even if they are not what you expected,” says Robinson.

With language skills in English, French and Urdu, Robinson hopes to facilitate a research and training exchange between students at the National Centre for Physics in Pakistan and students at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, headquartered in Switzerland.

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University of Maryland Gemstone Team TESLA had a very successful time at the 2016 IEEE Wireless Power Transfer Conference May 5-6, 2016 in Aveiro, Portugal. This international conference brought together the leading experts in the emerging technology of providing wireless power to everything from TV remotes and cell phones to electric vehicles. Three of the 10 team members are physics majors: Scott Roman, Tyler Grover and Ben Philip. Roman and Frank Cangialosi represented the team at the conference. Both gave invited talks, and with their mentor Steven M. Anlage, presented a poster on their concept for a wireless power transfer system based on time-reversed electromagnetic waves. Anlage, a Professor of Physics, a member of CNAM and a Faculty Affiliate in ECE, was recently named a UMD Distinguished Scholar-Teacher.

Gemstone Team TESLA has spent the last three years investigating basic questions related to a radical new method to deliver wireless power to devices in an enclosed environment. Their idea is to harness the time-reversal properties of wave propagation to deliver microwave energy to a precise location in space. This energy is then rectified and used to power the device. Team TESLA has carried out a series of experiments and simulations to show that this technology is feasible, and they have developed new ideas to overcome some of the challenges that the technology faces.

The talks (and associated papers and US patent applications) were:

Time Reversed Electromagnetic Wave Propagation as a Novel Method of Wireless Power Transfer, by Frank Cangialosi, Tyler Grover, Patrick Healey, Tim Furman, Andrew Simon, Steven M. Anlage. This work has resulted in an invention disclosure PS-2016-011 made to the UMD Office of Technology Commercialization on 14 February, 2016. “Method of Delivering Power to a Moving Target Wirelessly via Electromagnetic Time Reversal”. A provisional US Patent Application was filed on 25 April, 2016, Application No.: 62/327,346.

Selective Collapse of Nonlinear Time Reversed Electromagnetic Waves, by Scott Roman, Rahul Gogna, Steven Anlage. This work has resulted in an invention disclosure PS-2016-012 made to the UMD Office of Technology Commercialization on 14 February, 2016. “Selective Collapse of Nonlinear Time Reversed Electromagnetic Waves”. A provisional US Patent Application was filed on 25 April, 2016, Application No.: 62/327,349.

The poster presentation was entitled Time-Reversed Electromagnetic Wave Propagation as a Novel Method of Wireless Power Transfer, by Frank Cangialosi, Anu Challa, Tim Furman, Tyler Grover, Patrick Healey, Ben Philip, Scott Roman, Andrew Simon, Liangcheng Tao, and Alex Tabatabai. The associated paper won the Best Paper Award for the entire conference (about 200 submissions). The award includes a framed certificate, a book from Cambridge University Press, and a €400 cash award.

Most people do not give much thought to the Earth’s magnetic field, yet it is every bit as essential to life as air, water and sunlight. The magnetic field provides an invisible, but crucial, barrier that protects Earth from the sun’s magnetic field, which drives a stream of charged particles known as the solar wind outward from the sun’s outer layers. The interaction between these two magnetic fields can cause explosive storms in the space near Earth, which can knock out satellites and cause problems here on Earth’s surface, despite the protection offered by Earth’s magnetic field.

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After months of winter hibernation the world’s most powerful particle accelerator is once again smashing protons and taking data. The Large Hadron Collider will run around the clock for the next six months and produce roughly 2 quadrillion high-quality proton collisions, six times more than in 2015 and just shy of the total number of collisions recorded during the nearly three years of the collider’s first run.

Between 2010 and 2013 the LHC produced proton-proton collisions with 8 teraelectronvolts of energy. In the spring of 2015, after a two-year shutdown, LHC operators ramped up the collision energy to 13 TeV. This increase in energy enables scientists to explore a new realm of physics that was previously inaccessible. Run II collisions also produce Higgs bosons – the groundbreaking particle discovered in LHC Run I – 25 percent faster than Run I collisions and increase the chances of finding new massive particles by more than 40 percent.

During this run, University of Maryland physicists will continue looking for new particles, including those that make up dark matter. Although the nature of dark matter and its counterpart, dark energy, remain a complete mystery, taken together they make up a total of around 95 percent of the universe.

The signature that will indicate the dark matter particle is known as missing transverse energy. UMD physicists are very familiar with this measurement, as they are a leading institution in the missing transverse energy group of the LHC’s Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) detector.

Members of the Maryland group will also study collisions of nuclei with the CMS detector as well as the details of the interactions of the particles responsible for the sun’s energy. UMD physicists will also harness the LHC to investigate the origin of matter-antimatter asymmetry in the universe. When the Big Bang created matter, it also created an equal quantity of antimatter, made up of particles with identical mass but an opposite electrical charge. For as-yet unknown reasons, antimatter is no longer common in the universe, but can be recreated in particle accelerators such as the LHC.

UMD’s Hassan Jawahery leads a group that will use the LHCb detector to study the “beauty” or “bottom” quark— hence the “b” in the detector’s name. The collider will also produce the antimatter counterpart to the beauty quark. Comparing the properties of these two complementary particles could reveal laws of nature that treat matter and antimatter differently.

Key members of the University of Maryland LHC Team are available to comment on their work:
Drew Baden, Chair and Professor
Alberto Belloni, Assistant Professor
Sarah Eno, Professor
Nicholas Hadley, Professor
Hassan Jawahery, Distinguished University Professor and Gus T. Zorn Professor
Alice Mignery, Professor
Andris Skuja, Professor