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

Quantum computers hold great potential, but they remain hard to build because their basic components—individual quantum systems like atoms, electrons or photons—are fragile. A relentless and noisy background constantly bombards the computer’s data.

One promising theoretical approach, known as topological quantum computing, uses groups of special particles confined to a plane to combat this environmental onslaught. The particles, which arise only in carefully crafted materials, are held apart from each other so that the information they store is spread out in space. In this way, information is hidden from its noisy environment, which tends to disrupt small regions at a time. Such a computer would perform calculations by moving the particles around one another in a plane, creating intricate braids with the paths they trace in space and time.

Although evidence for these particles has been found in experiments, the most useful variety found so far appear only at the ends of tiny wires and cannot easily be braided around one another. Perhaps worse for the prospect of quantum computing is that these particles don’t support the full power of a general quantum computer—even in theory.

Now, researchers at JQI and the Condensed Matter Theory Center (CMTC) at the University of Maryland, including JQI Fellows Sankar Das Sarma and Jay Deep Sau, have proposed a way to dispense with both of these problems. By adding an extra process beyond ordinary braiding, they discovered a way to give a certain breed of topological particles all the tools needed to run any quantum calculation, all while circumventing the need for actual braiding. The team described their proposal last month in Physical Review X.

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Ian Appelbaum, who was promoted to the rank of Professor, joined UMD Physics in 2008. His experimental and theoretical research focuses on semiconductor device physics including spin-polarized electron transport and relaxation mechanisms, electronic properties of two-dimensional semiconductors, and novel phenomena in topological materials. He received his Ph.D. in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and won the 2011 Outstanding Young Scientist award of the Maryland Academy of Sciences.

Zackaria Chacko, who was promoted to the rank of Professor, is a theoretical physicist and a founding member of the Maryland Center for Fundamental Physics (MCFP). His research interests lie in elementary particle physics, the field that studies the fundamental constituents of matter and their interactions. The primary focus of Professor Chacko's research is the study of new theories that can explain some of the puzzles of the current Standard Model of particle physics, and that can be tested by current or upcoming experiments. He received his PhD at this University, where he received the Pelczar Award for Outstanding Graduate Study.

Chris Jarzynski, currently a Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry and Director of IPST, will hold a joint appointment with Physics. He received his PhD in physics at the University of California, Berkeley, and works on nonequilibrium behavior and computational methods for estimating thermodynamic properties. He is a Distinguished University Professor, and was recently elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Lennard Fisk, ​a member of the National Academy of Sciences and former NASA Associate Administrator for Space Science and Applications, has been appointed a College Park Professor. He received the NASA Distinguished Service Medal in 1992 and its Exceptional Public Service Medal in 2008. He is the Thomas M. Donahue Distinguished University Professor of Space Science at the University of Michigan.