Daniel Woodbury was awarded a prestigious DOE NNSA Stewardship Science Graduate Fellowship. The fellowship, administered by Krell Institute, provides financial benefits and professional development opportunities to students pursuing a Ph.D. in fields of study that solve complex science and engineering problems critical to stewardship science.
Woodbury is a first year graduate research student working with Howard Milchberg on intense laser-matter interactions. He received his B.S., in 2015, from Brigham Young University.
The behavior of a few rubidium atoms in a cloud of 40,000 hardly seems important. But a handful of the tiny particles with the wrong energy may cause a cascade of effects that could impact future quantum computers.
Some proposals for quantum devices use Rydberg atoms—atoms with highly excited electrons that roam far from the nucleus—because they interact strongly with each other and offer easy handles for controlling their individual and collective behavior. Rubidium is one of the most popular elements for experimenting with Rydberg physics.
Now, a team of researchers led by JQI Fellows Trey Porto, Steven Rolston and Alexey Gorshkov have discovered an unwanted side effect of trying to manipulate strongly interacting rubidium atoms: When they used lasers to drive some of the atoms into Rydberg states, they excited a much larger fraction than expected. The creation of too many of these high-energy atoms may result from overlooked “contaminant” states and could be problematic for proposals that rely on the controlled manipulation of Rydberg atoms to create quantum computers. The new results were published online March 16 in Physical Review Letters.
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences today announced the formation of a new initiative, The Public Face of Science. Over the next three years, with members drawn from among national leaders in communication, law, journalism, public affairs, and the physical, social and life sciences, The Public Face of Science initiative will examine public attitudes toward science and identify issues that require greater attention from scholars and practitioners alike.
Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring, Md., has again produced a national finalist — actually, two of the 40 nationwide — for the prestigious Intel Science Talent Search competition that started Friday in Washington.
Arnold Mong and Josephine Yu, 17-year-old seniors in Blair’s math-science-computer science magnet program, are vying for the competition’s top honors with research projects that sound well beyond their years. Take Yu’s “Lattice and Continuum Models of Solitons and Vortices in Bilayer Graphene,” an investigation in theoretical physics.
