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Curious About the Cosmos

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Published: Wednesday, September 11 2024 06:24

For the last four years, Aneesh Anandanatarajan has kept a running list of “big questions” about the universe and how it works. He started the list in high school but shows no signs of slowing down in his senior year as an astronomy and physics dual-degree student at the University of Maryland.Aneesh AnandanatarajanAneesh Anandanatarajan

“I am the type of person to ask questions until someone tells me to stop,” Anandanatarajan said. “I have about 40 questions on my list, and I like to return to them to see how I’ve progressed in terms of what I've learned and what I’m interested in.”

One of his early questions—how are electricity and magnetism related?—was written at a time when Anandanatarajan knew little about plasma astrophysics. Now, he’s conducting research in Physics Assistant Professor Sasha Philippov’s lab, where he uses physics-based simulations to study the turbulent environment and complex electromagnetic interactions around supermassive black holes.

While Anandanatarajan loves asking questions, he’s happiest sharing what he learned with others. As the tutoring chair for UMD’s Society of Physics Students, Anandanatarajan has become a physics ambassador while strengthening his knowledge of the subject.Aneesh Anandanatarajan and Othello GomesAneesh Anandanatarajan and Othello Gomes

“As a tutor and as the tutoring chair, it has been important to me to know physics well. I want to fully understand where these different concepts and equations come from,” Anandanatarajan said. “One of the things I'm most excited about is sharing physics with other people.”

Virtually hooked

Anandanatarajan has been interested in exotic objects like black holes and neutron stars since middle school, but he didn’t discover this passion in a lab or a planetarium. While watching YouTube one day, he found a channel with buzzy animated videos about popular science topics, including astronomy and physics. A few videos later, he was hooked.

“It captured my interest in more ways than I expected because I didn’t really know much about those subjects before middle school,” he said. “Over time, I watched more videos and realized that astronomy might be something I’d like to learn more about at an academic and professional level.”

Anandanatarajan said he was initially attracted to UMD’s “great astronomy program,” but he was thrilled to learn that he could add a second degree in physics by taking a few more classes. He’s enjoyed learning from professors who are exploring diverse fields of research.

“There are a lot of really great research topics here at Maryland and professors that are doing active research in those fields,” he said. “I’ve had a lot of great experiences with professors that want me to succeed and have pushed me to succeed.”

One of those professors is Philippov, whom Anandanatarajan started working with in spring 2024. Philippov studies high-energy astrophysics through a blend of theory and computer modeling with a focus on the physics of plasmas—hot, ionized gas surrounding black holes, neutron stars and other celestial objects. 

Anandanatarajan is using computer simulations to study how plasmas composed of electrons and positrons interact with other particles in the corona, an extremely hot and highly magnetized region that surrounds black holes, our sun and other space objects. Through a process called annihilation, these interactions can produce gamma rays, a type of radiation that astronomers can study to learn more about the universe.

“The corona is a very mysterious region that a lot of astronomers are very interested in probing,” Anandanatarajan said. “It’s essentially a breeding ground for electromagnetic activity, so we'd like to understand the phenomena that occur in that region because there are a lot of unknowns when it comes to our observations.”

Through this research, Anandanatarajan learned how to run Monte Carlo simulations that predict the probability of different outcomes—a skill that proved useful on other projects, like the up-and-coming study of high-energy particle collisions.

When interests collide

During the spring 2024 semester, a project in Physics Assistant Professor Christopher Palmer’s PHYS 441: “Introduction to Particle Physics” course let Anandanatarajan play an unexpected role in the next Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

During the course, Palmer teamed up with faculty at MIT to give students a front-row seat to discussions involving the Future Circular Collider (FCC), a proposed collider that would push the boundaries of particle physics beyond the capabilities of the LHC. The hope is that an upgraded collider could discover new particles or find evidence that deviates from the Standard Model of physics, which describes the fundamental forces that shape the universe.

Anandanatarajan and other students at UMD and MIT analyzed Monte Carlo simulations to determine how to precisely measure novel processes produced in electron-positron collisions from the FCCee accelerator, the first stage of the FCC.

“Essentially what we wanted to do was characterize different kinematic properties, such as the energy, momentum and angles at which these produced particles came out,” Anandanatarajan explained.

In March, this culminated in a visit to the second annual FCC workshop, where students presented their projects and spoke with leaders in the field.

“We learned a lot about how high-energy physics is conducted and the planning that is needed for a mega collider that may or may not be built 30 years from now,” Anandanatarajan said. “We talked to many different experts in the field who were thankfully friendly and willing to talk to undergrads about these types of topics.”

This experience initially felt disparate from his other projects, but Anandanatarajan realized that electron-positron collisions and large Monte Carlo simulations play an important role in astrophysics, too. After he earns his undergraduate degree, Anandanatarajan plans to continue studying astrophysics in a Ph.D. program that will allow him to keep asking—and answering—those big questions he’s carried with him for years.

Until then, he looks forward to spending his senior year sharing his passion with anyone willing to listen. He has several ideas for the Society of Physics Students—including a possible YouTube channel, harking back to his initial inspiration—to get students more engaged in physics.

“Making people excited about physics has always been a passion of mine,” he said. “I feel like I enjoy physics more than the average person, so I want to share those feelings with others and show them all of the cool things that physics has to offer.”

Faculty, Staff, Student and Alumni Awards & Notes

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Published: Wednesday, September 11 2024 05:24

We proudly recognize members of our community who recently garnered major honors, began new positions and more.

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Kasra Sardashti Brings Summer Program to UMD to Promote Diversity in Quantum Research

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Published: Wednesday, September 11 2024 05:24

Quantum research involves many challenges, from building tiny intricate devices and interpreting the unintuitive microscopic world to grappling with unwieldy calculations. The community of quantum researchers also has to contend with societal issues, like the long-established racial and gender disparities in physics and trends that overhype or mystify quantum technologies. 

As a quantum researcher, Kasra Sardashti, who joined the UMD Department of Physics in March as an assistant research professor and a principal investigator at the Laboratory for Physical Sciences (LPS), takes a practical, hands-on approach to problem solving. His research focuses on removing bottlenecks that limit the development of practical quantum devices. He’s also tackling another problem he believes is holding back quantum research: a lack of diversity in the researchers joining the field.

“I have a strong commitment to promoting diversity in STEM,” Sardashti said. “I've always found it surprising that there is such a significant underrepresentation of women and minorities in physics and engineering.”

According to data through 2021 from the American Physics Society, the American Institute of Physics and the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, women received fewer than 22% of physics doctoral degrees annually in the U.S. And the five-year average of data through 2021 shows that while communities marginalized by race or ethnicity made up about 37% of the U.S. college-age population, members of those communities earned only 15% of the physics bachelor’s degrees and 8% of the doctoral degrees and held only 5% of physics faculty position.

Sardashti has seen colleagues from diverse backgrounds bring valuable new ideas and perspectives to the quantum research community—a field that is steadily growing. He wants to ensure it has a robust, diverse workforce to support its growing needs, and he doesn’t believe that getting more people into physics or math classes will be sufficient to get enough people working in the field. Getting people interested in quantum research often requires getting them past a discomfort with quantum physics, which Sardashti calls “quantumphobia.” 

Sardashti believes the most effective way to counter quantumphobia is letting students perform experiments themselves so they can see the practical side of the field and have fun getting their hands on real projects. He decided to apply that approach in his efforts to attract students from underrepresented groups into the field. Last year, he and his colleagues started the Summer Quantum Engineering Internship Program (SQEIP) to give diverse groups of undergraduate students the chance to get their hands on equipment in real quantum research labs and gain practical experience with quantum engineering.

When Sardashti moved to UMD, SQEIP came with him. The facilities and researchers at the LPS Qubit Collaboratory and UMD’s Quantum Materials Center (QMC) created a new home for the program, and this summer they introduced 15 students to quantum research. 

“I think that the part that drew me to science and engineering was actually doing things with my hands and getting a hands-on experience—experiential learning,” Sardashti said. “I think we should provide that to students. And this is how we jump started the program.”

Sardashti’s own path to quantum physics started from a practical, hands-on background. As a kid, he enjoyed working on things, like fixing computers and working on the wiring in the walls of his family’s home in Tehran.

Pursuing his practical interest, he attended Tehran Polytechnic where he studied materials engineering. Physics classes were required for the major, and the quantum physics ideas from the classes ensnared his imagination. So, he added extra physics courses to his schedule. 

He continued studying materials science while pursuing his master’s degree at the University of Erlangen in Germany and his doctoral degree at the University of California, San Diego. During this time, his interest in physics attracted him to the intersection of material engineering and applied physics, and he studied the materials that make solar panels function. After that, he dove into quantum research as a postdoctoral researcher at the New York University Center for Quantum Phenomena and then as an assistant physics professor at Clemson University.

Now, Sardashti specializes in improving quantum devices and enabling new uses for the technology. His work includes studying how superconductor fabrication processes affect the resulting properties, designing voltage-tunable superconducting quantum devices, and proposing experiments to demonstrate non-Abelian statistics using quantum devices. 

As Sardashti carried out his research, he kept noticing a lack of diversity around him and began searching for a way to address the issue. He decided he needed help to reach students who are underserved by the current system, so he began contacting professors at historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) looking for someone interested in working with him. After several dead ends, John Yi, a chemistry professor at Winston-Salem State University (WSSU) responded, and they started collaborating. 

“A lot of it was John's drive,” Sardashti said. “It's not that easy to go into an HBCU, pull a professor away from their four-course semester schedule, and be like, ‘Hey, can you just do something on the side?’ But he was willing to do it. He really wanted to get engaged. He's really passionate about training his students.”

Together Sardashti and Yi obtained funding from the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy and launched SQEIP to give students, particularly those from underrepresented backgrounds, firsthand quantum engineering experience. The program gathered its first group of 11 students at Clemson University in summer 2023.

Yi is instrumental in running the program and takes a lead role in recruiting and selecting students from underrepresented backgrounds from both his own university and across the country. 

SQEIP hit a road bump when Sardashti joined UMD in March, just a couple of months before the program’s second summer. Even though it was a tight schedule, Sardashti and Yi decided to relocate the program and take advantage of the experts and labs at UMD. In just a couple of months, they had to get local scientists and faculty to buy into the effort and agree to share their time, expertise and resources with visiting students. They also had to arrange student financial support, travel and housing. Fortunately, they connected with UMD Physics Professor and QMC Director Johnpierre Paglione, who helped run the program, recruit other colleagues and arrange for the students to work in QMC labs. 

“After learning about SQEIP, I was delighted to participate by incorporating quantum materials training into the program,” Paglione said. “This was quite natural for us, since we run a condensed version each year as part of our Fundamentals of Quantum Materials Winter School, and QMC has the facilities to accommodate such a group.”

This year SQEIP included five students from WSSU and 10 students from nine other universities. Once the students arrived at UMD in May, they were split into two groups, which each spent three weeks at either QMC or LPS before swapping for another three weeks. 

At QMC, the students explored how materials used in quantum devices are created and studied. For example, they used ultra-high-temperature furnaces and arc melting station (which can reach temperatures up to about 2,000 F and 3,600 F, respectively) to make their own crystal materials by carefully combining chemicals they had measured and mixed together. They were also trained to use techniques, like X-ray diffraction and X-ray fluorescence, to observe the structures of materials they had fabricated. They also measured the physical and magnetic properties of materials in very high magnetic fields and ultra-low temperatures.

“It’s really amazing to see students come into QMC without any experience and learn to synthesize novel materials like topological insulators and superconductors, all in a matter of a few weeks!” Paglione said. “Growing crystals is one of those things that’s fun and exciting, while also crucial to helping nurture a deep appreciation for the materials that will form the next generation of quantum devices.”

At LPS the students tackled several projects that introduced them to the basics of quantum device research. For instance, they dipped electric circuits into liquid nitrogen (which is below −321 F) to observe how the electrical conductivity changed with temperature. They then explored even colder temperatures using laboratory equipment, like a dilution refrigerator, which can produce temperatures less than a tenth of a degree above absolute zero. Extremely cold temperatures are often essential to getting quantum devices to function, and the students used the frigid conditions when measuring the properties of superconductors and microwave cavities, which play crucial roles in many quantum devices. 

“I think the most beneficial part of the program is just the ability to utilize the resources that QMC and LPS had that you probably wouldn't get at your run-of-the-mill university,” said Taylor Williams, an information technology major at WSSU who participated in the program this year. “Working hands-on with the dilution refrigerator—that surprised me, just because it's so expensive. So, I was thinking we would tour it and look around, but I didn't think we'd actually get to play with it and analyze data off of it.”

By exposing the students to quantum engineering techniques, the program not only lets them connect with the field of quantum research but also provides them with context on how jobs in other fields might interact with or support quantum engineering. For instance, if participants end up going into chemistry and are producing new materials, their experiences during the program will provide insights into how those materials might be used in quantum devices. 

“It's a great learning experience and a great way to start off with a lot of different options and different directions for where you want to go,” said Brenan Palazzolo, a physics major from Clemson University who participated in the program this year. “Any STEM major should apply. It was really an amazing program to have such a broad spectrum of students.”

The program wasn’t all work. Projects weren’t scheduled on the weekends, so participants had a chance to explore the area and see tourist sites like the White House, Smithsonian museums and the Lincoln Memorial in nearby Washington, D.C. Students also found time to have fun in the labs, like a group that used a microscope to get an up-close look at colorful flecks in rocks they had bought at a Smithsonian gift shop. 

“I liked that we were really close to D.C.,” Palazzolo said. “It was kind of fun on the weekends and also really informative during the week. It wasn't just one thing that I was learning. I was learning the ins and outs of a lot of different parts of quantum research and the quantum processes for materials.”

Even after students return home, the program continues to provide advice to the participants and support their career progress. Alumni can request financial support to attend academic conferences where they can practice communicating about research, connect with scientists from other institutions, and get a sense of the broader opportunities available in the field. Alumni are also invited to apply for the following year’s program so that they can tackle more advanced projects using the techniques they learned the previous year.

“Johnpierre, myself, our leadership team at LPS, we actually believe in this,” Sardashti said. “I think this is a very good step—an important step—for people to get drawn to the field.”

Story by Bailey Bedford

Leaning into Lidar

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Published: Wednesday, September 11 2024 05:24

Swarnav Banik’s (Ph.D. ’21, physics) parents were visiting from India when they saw a strange-looking car on a San Francisco street that stopped them in their tracks.

“They asked what it was, and I said, ‘That’s a Waymo car. It has no driver in it. It drives itself.’ And they were so surprised,” Banik recalled. “They kept looking at the Waymo and taking pictures of it, they were so excited. And I said, ‘Yes, this technology is indeed exciting. Until a few years ago, we used to think of this as some future technology—now this is what I do.”Swarnav Banik Swarnav Banik

And what Banik does might just be the future of transportation. Since 2022, he’s been working on sensing technology for the next generation of autonomous vehicles.  He first worked as a senior photonics engineer at Aurora Innovation, a company that’s developing self-driving systems for semitrucks and other commercial vehicles; now he’s at Aeva, a Silicon Valley firm developing sensing and perception tools for driverless cars and industrial automation. 

In his work, Banik develops next-generation sensors that use lidar—light detection and ranging —technology to help autonomous vehicles “see” objects on the road ahead and safely avoid them.

“A typical autonomous vehicle has three kinds of sensors—a radar, a camera and a lidar,” Banik explained. “I have been working on frequency-modulated continuous wave lidar (FMCW), which has several advantages over the more commonly used time-of-flight lidar. Unlike time-of-flight lidars, FMCW lidar detects both the position and velocity of obstacles. This is extremely useful for highway driving where maneuvering decisions need to be made quickly.”

For Banik, working with lidar technology means putting his physics skill set to work in a way he never expected.

“Lidar is an interesting application of lasers. It uses many of the optical spectroscopy principles that I used as an atomic physics grad student, but I never thought I’d be doing anything like this,” he reflected. “It just kind of happened and I’m happy about it. I really like what I’m doing.”

The path to physics

Growing up in Mumbai, India, Banik was a curious and enthusiastic student, especially when he started taking high school physics.

“I really loved physics. It felt very logical, and I had a lot of fun solving physics problems,” he said. “In a way, it was like applying mathematics to real-world problems, and I believe that’s what interested me.”

In 2009, Banik entered the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi as an engineering physics major. As a sophomore, he landed an internship developing mathematical models for a cosmic ray experiment at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai. Then as a junior, he interned in the U.S. at Fermilab, near Chicago, where he tackled the challenges of avalanche silicon photodiodes that are used for detecting high-energy particles.

“The idea was that these photodiodes would eventually be used in the Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator, and I was involved in the development of the photodiodes,” Banik explained. “I wasn’t married to particle physics back then, but I enjoyed designing engineering solutions from first principles: I learned how to break complex problems into smaller pieces and tackle them one by one, and I really appreciated that.”

After earning his undergraduate degree in India in 2013, Banik headed back to the U.S. to begin graduate school at the University of Maryland, where he hoped to find his niche in physics.

The thrill of research

“The Department of Physics at Maryland does very good research in almost every possible field of physics,” Banik explained. “I thought it would be a great place to get exposure and decide what I want to do.”

Banik connected with as many grad students and faculty members as he could, exploring everything from plasma physics and condensed matter theory to atomic, molecular, and optical physics and quantum information. Atomic physics won him over.

“The quantum computing applications that come out of atomic physics experiments were very exciting to me,” he recalled. “I saw grad students building atomic physics labs and I saw all the skills they had developed just by doing this research. I was impressed, and I wanted to be one of them.”

Working in UMD’s Joint Quantum Institute (JQI), Banik’s Ph.D. research focused on simulating cosmological inflation, such as the expansion of the universe, using a Bose-Einstein condensate.

"We start with sodium atoms and cool them to ultra-low temperatures of less than 100 nanokelvin using techniques like laser and evaporative cooling," Banik explained. "These atoms then form a quantum degenerate gas known as a Bose-Einstein condensate, and we use this as a platform to simulate phenomena like cosmological Hubble friction, which is impossible to study experimentally due to the massive scale of the universe."

For Banik, the thrill of successfully simulating Hubble friction—and working in the collaborative culture of JQI—energized and inspired him.

“I was working with Gretchen Campbell and Ian Spielman and they were really great,” he said. “The whole JQI ecosystem is so supportive. There are so many people you can rely on—the professors, the older grad students, the postdocs, we were constantly exchanging equipment and ideas.”

Lidar on a chip

After earning his Ph.D. in 2021, Banik charted a course toward industry.  And he saw a unique opportunity at Aurora. 

“Aurora makes autonomous freight-hauling trucks, and they were looking for someone with a physics mindset, someone who would approach solving problems from first principles,” Banik said. “Most of the people there were electrical engineers, and they needed someone who could think about next-gen architecture because they were building a newer version of the lidar sensor for fleets of vehicles.” 

Over the next two years, Banik and his colleagues met that challenge, developing and patenting a cost-saving, integrated, chip-based lidar sensor system.

“Making a lidar sensor is not that tricky—but the company wanted to mass-produce them,” Banik explained. “These chip-based sensors have the same capability as the traditional bulk optic sensors, but they could be produced more cheaply and in volume, meaning more lidars for more trucks.”

When Banik took a test ride in an autonomous semitruck equipped with lidar and other sensors (and a human “operator” on board as a backup), he got a whole new perspective on what driverless technology could do.

“It was fascinating—I was in this big self-driving truck, not a simulation, this was the real thing,” he recalled. “It was highway driving, there was heavy traffic, and the operator wasn’t doing anything. He was just sitting there while the truck drove itself. And then when we weren’t on the highway, there was a pedestrian who came all of a sudden, and the truck stopped for the pedestrian—just like that. The truck did exactly what it was supposed to do.”

Earlier this year, Banik moved on from Aurora to become a senior photonics module engineer at Aeva, where he continues to work with lidar and sensing modules, advancing autonomous driving technology that could be on the road in the not-too-distant future. 

“I feel that, if not today, then in a few years this technology is pretty much within the reach of the companies that are trying to do it,” Banik explained. “Aurora will be launching its self-driving trucks commercially by the end of this year, and I know of some other companies that are also doing that at the end of this year or early next year.”

There are still plenty of challenges on the road ahead, but Banik wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.

“It feels very good to be making an impact,” Banik said. “That’s the thing that motivates you and keeps you going. It’s pretty exciting.”

In Memoriam

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Published: Wednesday, September 11 2024 05:24

It is with much sadness that the Department of Physics announces the passing of several members of our community.

  • Melanie Knouse Cline, a coordinator in the Maryland Center for Fundamental Physics (MCFP), died on June 3, 2024.
  • Robert Dewar, a former postdoctoral associate, died on April 5, 2024.
  • Robert Goldstein, an alumnus, died on Sept. 4, 2024.
  • Charles Hussar, an alumnus and donor, died on March 30, 2024.
  • Verne Kauppe (B.S., '71), who worked in multisensor and microwave remote sensing, died on September 8, 2024.
  • William Kuperman (Ph.D., '72), former Director of the Marine Physical Laboratory of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography,  died on June 30, 2024. 
  • Ernest Madsen (B.S. and M.S.), a medical physicist at the University of Wisconsin, died on August 24, 2024.
  • Martin Vol Moody, an experimentalist working on gravitation, died on August 18, 2024.  
  • Robert L. Parker, (Ph.D.,'60) who worked in metallurgy for the U.S. government, died on April 21, 2024.
  • Joseph Perez (Ph,D., '68), former head of the Auburn University Physics Department, died on July 25, 2024.
  • Edward "Joe" Redish, an acclaimed researcher and Professor Emeritus, died on August 24, 2024.
  • Paul Richardson, a physicist with the U.S. Bureau of Mines, died on May 29, 2024.

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