Gretchen Campbell Receives PECASE

Gretchen CampbellThe 2013 Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers were announced on Monday, December 23rd. Gretchen Campbell, Adjunct Assistant Professor, was among the honorees. Campbell currently runs two experiments on ultracold atoms. One currently focuses on using a toroidal shaped Bose-Einstein condensate to build atomic analogs to electron-based superconducting circuits--so-called atomtronics. Her other experiment, currently in the building phase, will use strontium atoms to perform quantum simulations.

Campbell received a Ph.D from MIT in 2006, where she worked with Wolfgang Ketterle and Dave Pritchard. There, she used Rb BECs in optical lattices to study atom interferometry, nonlinear atom optics and the superfluid – Mott insulator phase transition. These experiments included the first direct observation of the atomic recoil momentum in dispersive media. More recently, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher with Jun Ye on precision measurements and frequency metrology with an 87Sr optical lattice clock.

See more at: http://jqi.umd.edu/news/jqi-fellow-gretchen-campbell-receives-pecase#sthash.7nceQz8C.dpuf

Cosmic neutrinos named Physics World 2013 Breakthrough of the Year

The Physics World award for the 2013 Breakthrough of the Year goes to "the IceCube South Pole Neutrino Observatory for making the first observations of cosmic neutrinos."

UMD contributors to the IceCube collaboration include Greg Sullivan and Kara Hoffman; faculty and staff members Erik Blaufuss, John Felde, Jordan Goodman, Henrike Wissing, Alex Olivas, Donald La Dieu, and Torsten Schmidt; and graduate students Elim Cheung, Robert Hellauer, Ryan Maunu, and Michael Richman.