Long-Distance Teleportation Between Atoms

Details

Category: Research News

Published: Friday, January 23 2009 08:54

For the first time, scientists have successfully teleported information between two separate atoms in unconnected enclosures a meter apart – a significant milestone in the global quest for practical quantum information processing.

Teleportation may be nature’s most mysterious form of transport: Quantum information, such as the spin of a particle or the polarization of a photon, is transferred from one place to another, but without traveling through any physical medium. It has previously been achieved between photons over very large distances, between photons and ensembles of atoms, and between two nearby atoms through the intermediary action of a third. None of those, however, provides a feasible means of holding and managing quantum information over long distances. 

Read More

UMD Physicists Play Major Roles in Four of AIP's Top Ten Physics Discoveries of 2008

Details

Category: Research News

Published: Wednesday, January 07 2009 09:28

Editors and science writers at the American Institute of Physics and the American Physical Society selected a list of Top Ten Physics Stories in 2008. The selections were released on December 22, 2008 and included four discoveries in which UMD Physicists had major roles (Large Hadron Collider, Quarks , Ultracold Molecules and Cosmic Rays).

To view the full article, visit: http://www.aip.org/pnu/2008/split/879-1.html

Robert Gluckstern: 1924 - 2008

Details

Category: Department News

Published: Friday, December 19 2008 15:22

Bob Gluckstern passed away December 17, 2008.

Bob was a brilliant physicist and superb administrator. He received his PhD from MIT in 1948, was a postdoc/assistant professor/associate professor at Yale until 1964, and a Professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, as Chair of the Physics Department for 5 years, and Provost until 1975. He was Chancellor here (the same position is called President now) from 1975 to 1982, when he stepped down to return to full-time teaching and research. He did research in many fields, from early work in coulomb scattering, nucleon scattering, relativistic electrodynamics, to more recent work in accelerator theory and non- linear dynamics. As an aside, he was a long time participant in the Maryland Choir. As another aside, Bob once wrote a paper on how to calculate the uncertainties in the measurement of the curvature (and hence the momentum) of charged tracks in magnetic fields due to multiple scattering and measurement errors. This paper had a huge impact in the field of particle physics.

Bob was an extraordinary physicist who had a pure and deep understanding of the material. In the past few years, true to form, Bob played an important role in the Slawsky clinic. He really enjoyed having contact with the students. Indeed, while Chancellor, he was also a TA in Physics and Math (assisting both Jordan Goodman and Vic Korenman). He was a superb teacher and human being to the end, and he fought a hard fight with cancer. We will miss him, his rich New Yawk accent, his good nature, his perspective, his brilliance, and his friendship.

--Drew Baden, Chair
Obituary in The Washington Post.

Nicholas Hadley Elected Fellow of AAAS

Details

Category: Department News

Published: Thursday, December 18 2008 15:45

Nicholas Hadley, Professor and Associate Chair of Undergraduate Studies, has been named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Election as a Fellow is an honor bestowed upon AAAS members by their peers.

This year 486 members have been awarded this honor by AAAS because of their scientifically or socially distinguished efforts to advance science or its applications. New Fellows will be presented with an official certificate and a gold and blue (representing science and engineering, respectively) rosette pin on Saturday, 14 February from 8 to 10 a.m. at the AAAS Fellows Forum during the 2009 AAAS Annual Meeting in Chicago.

As part of the Section on Physics, Dr. Hadley was elected as an AAAS Fellow for his leadership role in the discovery of the top quark and his contributions to searches for phenomena beyond the standard model of particle physics.

Dr. Hadley joined the University of Maryland as an Associate Professor in 1988. He is an experimental physicist working in the field of High Energy Physics (HEP). Skilled in the development and construction of detectors for the primary observation of charged and neutral particles, he has been very successful in data analysis and physics interpretation of HEP data. He did important work at Brookhaven on rare decays of “strange” particles, published the first paper at the Fermilab Dzero experiment on “leptoquarks,” and spearheaded the analysis efforts at Dzero that led to the discovery of the top quark at Dzero in 1995. He is internationally recognized for his many important leadership roles in the large collaboration of physicists and technical personnel that constitute an active HEP physics experiment, having been on the program advisory committees of Brookhaven and Fermilab, among other leadership positions

The tradition of AAAS Fellows began in 1874. Currently, members can be considered for the rank of Fellow if nominated by the steering groups of the Association’s 24 sections, or by any three Fellows who are current AAAS members (so long as two of the three sponsors are not affiliated with nominee’s institution) , or by the AAAS chief executive officer. For more information regarding the non-profit AAAS, visit www.aaas.org .