UMD Physicist Helps Sculpt Quantum Mechanics into Reality

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Published: Wednesday, January 29 2025 01:40

In 2020, physicist Nicole Yunger Halpern received a rather unusual email out of the blue. Bruce Rosenbaum, a Massachusetts-based artist dubbed “the steampunk guru” by The Wall Street Journal, watched one of her lectures about quantum thermodynamics and was interested in collaborating with her. Rosenbaum saw something extraordinary in Yunger Halpern’s work—in terms of cutting-edge science and artistic possibility. 

For Yunger Halpern, who coined the term “quantum steampunk” while earning her Ph.D. in theoretical physics at the California Institute of Technology, it almost felt like scientific serendipity. 

“It’s been a privilege to interact with someone who is based in such a different world. I’m in physics, Bruce is in art. And yet, we both have a very strong shared interest in connecting the steam-powered world of the Industrial Revolution to today,” said Yunger Halpern, who is a theoretical physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, a fellow of the Joint Center for Quantum Information and Computer Science, and an adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Physics and the Institute for Physical Science and Technology at the University of Maryland.Quantum steampunk sketch by Jim Su

The unusual partnership kicked off a multi-year quest to craft a piece of art that could represent two very different worlds. For weeks, Yunger Halpern and Rosenbaum worked over weekend Zooms and emails to brainstorm before enlisting others to help bring their ideas to life. 

In late 2024, they finally created their masterpiece: an eight-inch diameter sculpture that marries steampunk (a popular genre that combines Victorian-era aesthetics like brass, gears and steam with modern technology) with quantum physics (a rapidly evolving field that deals with how things work at the tiniest possible scales). At these tiny levels, objects don’t behave the same way as they do in our everyday world—for example, things can exist in multiple states at once, like a coin that, in some ways, behaves as though it were both heads-up and tails-up simultaneously.

Inspired by these strange behaviors present in quantum physics, Yunger Halpern and Rosenbaum focused their project on the concept of quantum engines, devices that convert energy from one form to another. According to Yunger Halpern, even a single atom can function as an engine, transforming random microscopic motion into useful energy. 

“Our sculpture depicts an engine that can operate at the atomic scale to convert heat energy— which is random, the energy of particles alwaysQuantum steampunk jiggling around—into useful work. Work is coordinated energy, the kind that charges our computers and powers our factories,” Yunger Halpern explained. “Like the steam-powered tech of the Victorian era, this engine relies on thermodynamic properties to make its conversion. We wanted to bring those two themes from very different periods of history together.”

Linking quantum and art for all

Creating this visual representation of the invisible quantum world required an unusual team with varied skills. Rosenbaum brought in illustrator Jim Su for the initial designs and design engineering company Empire Group fabricated the sculpture. Rosenbaum and Yunger Halpern coordinated a careful balance between artistic vision and scientific accuracy at every stage of the project. Gradually, the team grew to include other UMD faculty and staff members, including Distinguished University Professors Christopher Jarzynski and William Phillips, Senior Faculty Specialist Daniel Serrano and Scientific Development Officer Alfredo Nava-Tudela. The UMD Quantum Startup Foundry and Caltech’s Institute for Quantum Information and Matter also pitched in.

The result was a metallic, partially 3D-printed sculpture measuring eight inches in diameter, an eclectic mashup of both quantum science principles and artistic sensibilities. 

“Everyone shared their expertise to create our final product, whether they offered scientific or artistic contributions,” Yunger Halpern said. “It’s something we are all very proud of.”

Supported by UMD’s Arts for All program, the sculpture will make its debut at the American Physical Society’s Global Physics Summit in March 2025 in honor of the United Nations’ Year of Quantum Science and Technology. After its premiere, the sculpture will head to Caltech before finding a home at UMD. 

But Yunger Halpern and her partners have ambitions beyond this first tabletop creation. They hope to create a much larger and grander version of their steampunk sculpture in the near future—complete with antique brasses, lasers, touchscreens and other high-tech interactive and moving elements.

“We have plans for our sculpture’s next iteration, but it’s still early in the fund-gathering process,” Yunger Halpern said. “For now, we’re focusing on sharing our tabletop quantum engine with the world and creating a tangible connection to what’s usually an invisible world. We hope that it’ll capture that sense of adventure in quantum thermodynamics for scientists and art enthusiasts alike.”

Written by Georgia Jiang

Finding the Beauty in Physics

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Published: Wednesday, January 29 2025 01:40

Phoebe Hamilton’s (M.S. ’11, Ph.D. ’13, physics) research career at the University of Maryland could have ended when she earned her Ph.D. Instead, it marked the start of an exciting challenge—for Hamilton and her fellow high-energy physics researchers in UMD’s Department of Physics.
Phoebe Hamilton, Elizabeth Kowalczyk and Othello Gomes check a photodetector.In fall 2012, Distinguished University Professor and Gus T. Zorn Professor Hassan Jawahery eyed a new opportunity after his research group wrapped up with BaBar, a collider experiment in California.

“BaBar had finished collecting new data and we were looking for the next gig for the group,” Hamilton recalled. “Hassan was my Ph.D. advisor and we talked about how exciting it would be to move to the Large Hadron Collider beauty—LHCb—experiment.”

Just two months before Hamilton defended her dissertation, Jawahery’s group learned that they had been formally accepted into the LHCb experiment, which is named after its primary research subject: a particle called the beauty quark, also known as a bottom quark or b quark. By studying bottom quarks produced by proton-proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider located near Geneva, Switzerland, researchers hope to come closer to understanding why there is so much matter but so little antimatter in the universe.

Excited by the opportunity to discover new physics at the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, Hamilton stayed at UMD. As a postdoctoral researcher from 2012 to 2020 and a faculty specialist from 2020 to 2023, she developed tools that enabled the LHCb to take measurements previously thought “impossible” by some scientists.

Now, as an assistant professor of physics, her contributions continue to level up the LHCb’s abilities, improving its chances of making groundbreaking findings.

“Getting to stay a postdoc as long as I did at Maryland was a real blessing,” Hamilton said. “I wasn’t sure I’d actually have the chance to become an assistant professor, but I'm very happy to get to do it. Maryland is such a home and such a family to me.”

Raising the BaBar

Hamilton’s interest in physics began in high school and she nurtured it with books about string theory by physicist Brian Greene. After graduating, she enrolled at Youngstown State University to pursue computer science, another one of her interests, but switched to physics after realizing that it inspired and challenged her more than any other subject.

“I like knowing how things work,” said Hamilton, who also enjoys learning new musical instruments for similar reasons. “The fact that physics is orderly and follows these predictable rules has always been fascinating to me.”

Hamilton quickly took to particle physics, and after earning her bachelor’s degree in 2007, she decided to pursue particle theory research in UMD’s graduate program. She chose UMD because of its wide range of research possibilities, which allowed her to try out different specializations before committing.

“I thought I knew what I wanted to do, but there was doubt,” she said. “With UMD, I thought to myself, ‘This is where I’m going to be able to thrive no matter what I do.’”

Hamilton soon discovered she enjoyed the experimental side of particle physics much more than theory. So when Associate Professor Doug Roberts put up flyers seeking student researchers for the BaBar experiment, Hamilton jumped at the chance.

BaBar was Hamilton’s introduction to experimental studies of CP violation, which occurs when two conservation laws of particle physics—charge conjugation and parity—are broken. By measuring CP violation at experiments like BaBar, researchers can begin to understand the differences between matter and antimatter.

“I fell in love with it very quickly,” Hamilton said of BaBar. “It was a fantastic machine and a fantastic experiment.”

Hamilton’s research contributed to the first measurement of how Bs mesons, a family of subatomic particles called mesons that contain a bottom quark and a strange antiquark, are produced at different collision energies. Ultimately, the BaBar experiment shed light on how antimatter is produced and set the stage for Hamilton’s participation in an even bigger—but messier—collider.

“The beautiful thing at BaBar was that you would get two hadrons containing bottom quarks and nothing else, so it was very clean and very easy to measure what was going on,” Hamilton said. “Here [at the LHCb], colliding protons is like colliding handfuls of rock salt. You get 100 reconstructed particles in every event and you have to sort through it.”

Achieving the ‘impossible’

For the last 12 years, Hamilton has been working to make those messy collisions a little easier to interpret. UMD’s contribution to the LHCb experiment falls within the realm of lepton flavor universality: a physics principle stating that the only difference between different “flavors,” or types, of leptons—including electrons, muons and tau leptons—is their mass. 

The LHCb is a good fit for this type of research because it analyzes a large number of particles containing b quarks, which transform, or decay, into leptons. In the beginning, though, some scientists thought that lepton flavor universality couldn’t be done at the LHCb because either one or three neutrinos escape undetected during collisions, making it difficult to determine all of the energies and momenta needed to distinguish muons from tau leptons. 

“Because of the messy nature of these proton-proton collisions, the consensus was that this was too hard for LHCb to do,” Hamilton said. “But Jawahery and I worked together on a technique to make some wild approximations and figure out a way to do it anyway.”

And they did figure out a way. Developed from 2013 to 2015 in collaboration with LHCb researcher Greg Ciezarek, their method of analyzing decays led to measurements of lepton flavor universality between muons and tau leptons that were previously thought impossible. 

“It was interesting to go from ‘This is probably another dead-end’ to ‘Oh, this might actually be worth something’ to ‘This is actually the star of the experiment right now,’” Hamilton said. “This is still an active area of research for us. We extended and superseded the 2015 measurement in 2023 and are working on the next generation of this in the data from the second run of the LHC.”

Cracking the K-pi puzzle

Over the years, Hamilton has also played a key role in making the LHCb’s equipment more durable and better at discerning different particles. She helped develop electronics for the Upstream Tracker sub-detector for the experiment’s first upgrade from 2022 to 2023 and is now testing new photodetectors in her lab. These new detectors would measure the light produced in upgraded modules for the LHCb’s calorimeter, which stops particles as they pass through and enables researchers to measure the energy deposited. 

This planned upgrade to the calorimeter aims to make energy measurements more precise, which can ultimately help researchers determine which particles were produced in a collision event.

“One of the big motivations for upgrading the calorimeter is making some of the granularity smaller so that you can tell different particles apart,” Hamilton explained. “Along with the ability to precisely measure the time different particles arrive, it should in principle be able to cope with five times the collision rate.”

Whether Hamilton is toiling in the lab or analyzing data from the LHCb, she continues to find inspiration in physics’ most puzzling questions. She recently submitted a research proposal to dive deeper into matter-antimatter asymmetries and continues to work on developing new and improved techniques for her research. 

From 2014 to 2015, she and her colleagues at UMD developed a way to study b-hadron decays with only one reconstructed trajectory, meaning that certain key information is missing. She believes this technique can now be applied to a persistent challenge in physics called the K-pi puzzle.

“The K-pi puzzle is the possibility that the Standard Model fails to explain the pattern of matter-antimatter asymmetry in b-hadron decays to two pseudo-stable mesons, pions or kaons—or one of each. The Standard Model predicts specific patterns to their CP asymmetries, which we can use to check the Standard Model’s validity, but theorists need measurements of them all,” Hamilton explained. “Some of these involve two trajectories to reconstruct and identify the b-hadron but many do not, and these tend to be the less understood ones.”

Going forward, Hamilton hopes to make more “impossible measurements”—and perhaps challenge or reshape the Standard Model of physics in the process.

“We have an opportunity to contribute to understanding this puzzle in some of the areas that are fuzziest right now,” Hamilton said, “and I think there's exciting things to be tried there.”

Written by Emily Nunez

From Space Science to Science Fiction

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Published: Wednesday, January 29 2025 01:40

From her earliest years, Adeena Mignogna (B.S. ’97, physics; B.S. ’97, astronomy) always saw space in her future. It started with “Star Wars.”

“I have memories of watching the first ‘Star Wars’ movie with R2-D2 and C-3PO when I was about 6 years old and I really connected with the robots, wanting to know how we make this a reality,” she recalled. “For a while, I thought I was going to grow up and have my own company that would make humanoid robots, but the twist was, we were going to live and work on the moon. I could even picture my corner office and the view of the moon out the window.”Adeena Mignogna

For Mignogna, that boundless imagination and her childhood fascination with space and science launched two successful and very different careers—one in aerospace as a mission architect at Northrop Grumman, developing software and systems for satellites, and the other as a science fiction writer, spinning stories of robots, androids and galactic adventures in her many popular books. For Mignogna, space science and science fiction turned out to be a perfect combination. 

“I think of it as kind of like a circular thing—science fiction feeds our imagination, which possibly inspires us to do things in science. And science feeds the science fiction,” Mignogna explained. “Working in the space industry is something that I always wanted to do, and I always wanted to write as well, so I’m glad that I'm really doing it.”

Drawn to science

The daughter of an engineer, Mignogna was always drawn to science and technology.

“I am my father's daughter,” she said. “My dad brought home computers, and I learned to program in BASIC, so it was kind of always obvious that I was always going to do something STEM-ish.” 

Inspired by the real-life missions of NASA’s space shuttle and the Magellan deep space probe and popular space dramas like “Star Wars” and “Star Trek,” Mignogna’s interest in aerospace blossomed into a full-on career plan. As she prepared to start college at the University of Maryland in the early ’90s, she began steering toward two majors.

“At first, I thought maybe I'm going to major in astronomy because I loved space and space exploration,” Mignogna recalled. “But my high school physics teacher had degrees in physics, and he had done a lot of different things. He had worked at Grumman during the Apollo era, he had done astronomy work, and so I was like, ‘Okay, if I major in physics, I could do space stuff, I could do anything.’ So in the end, I majored in both.”

Surprisingly—at least to her—at UMD, Mignogna discovered she loved physics.

“What do I love about physics? It's very fundamental to how everything works,” she explained. “I used to tease my friends in college who majored in other sciences that at the end of the day, they were all just studying other branches of physics—like math is just the tool we use to describe physics and chemistry is an offshoot of atomic physics and thermodynamics. And even though I was making fun, I do probably think there's some truth to that, and that might be why I like physics so much.”

Hands-on with satellites

By her sophomore year, Mignogna got her first hands-on experience with aerospace technology.  

“I wound up getting a job in the Space Physics Group, and they built instrumentation for satellites,” Mignogna explained. “I happened to learn about this at the right time when they were looking for students for a new mission, and I worked on that mission from day one till we turned the instrument over to [NASA’s] Goddard Space Flight Center, which was very cool.”

Working in that very hands-on lab assembling and sometimes reassembling science instruments that would eventually fly in space, Mignogna realized she was on the right path. 

“I was touching spaceflight hardware. I was touching stuff that was going into space,” she recalled. “It was really exciting.”

For Mignogna, working side by side with space scientists at UMD and getting hands-on training in skills like CAD drafting gave her the tools she needed to land her first job at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

Mignogna eventually landed at Orbital Sciences Corporation, which later became part of Northrop Grumman. For the next 16 years—earning her master’s degree in computer science from the Georgia Institute of Technology along the way—she expanded her space software and systems expertise and became a leader in Northrop’s satellite engineering program.

“On the software side, I worked on our command and control software. We have a software suite that controls the satellites, and what I loved was that it gave me exposure and insight into so many different kinds of satellites,” Mignogna said. “With systems engineering, I’m able to go through what we call the full life cycle of the mission. When NASA says, ‘Hey, we need a satellite that's going to do X, Y, Z,’ as a systems engineer, we’re the ones who break that down, and I’m kind of the end-to-end broader picture person in that process. The group that I'm closely associated with today is responsible for Cygnus, which is one of the resupply capsules to the International Space Station.”

From science to science fiction

Over the years, as Mignogna’s career reached new heights so did her work as a science fiction writer, a creative effort that started when she was in high school.

“My dad was a fan of Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein, so I knew they were engineers and scientists who also wrote science fiction, and that was something I always wanted to do,” Mignogna said. “At first, I didn't think I could write novels, I thought I could only do short stories. But around 2009, I figured out I could, and I’ve been doing it ever since.”

With titles like “Crazy Foolish Robots” and “Robots, Robots Everywhere,” Mignogna’s Robot Galaxy Series combines science fiction with humor, philosophy and, of course, robots. Her latest book “Lunar Logic” is set on the moon, 100 years from now.

“There are humanoid robots, built and manufactured on the moon, and they live on the moon. And they don't know anything about humans or why they're there,” Mignogna explained. “And then little things happen and they start to question what's going on and why they're there and eventually they kind of figure it all out.”

In Mignogna’s sci-fi worlds, the only limit is her own imagination, which is exactly what makes her work as a writer so enjoyable. 

“In my science fiction work, it’s my way or the highway,” she said. “I can write whatever I want, and I can make it however I want, and there's some satisfaction in that.”

For Mignogna, writing science fiction also provides an opportunity to advance another mission—to get more people interested and excited about science. In regular appearances at sci-fi conferences and other gatherings, Mignogna shares her passion for STEM, hoping to inspire the next generation of scientists—and everyone else.

“All this technology we have today comes from generations upon generations of fundamental science, technology, engineering, mathematics,” she explained, “so if we're going to do more things, we need people to go into these fields. “

As someone who’s always seen the importance of science in her own life, it’s a message she’s committed to sharing.

“You don't have to understand everything about science, but you can appreciate it,” Mignogna noted. “My hope is maybe if I can just connect with a few people indirectly or directly, I can make a difference.” 

Written by Leslie Miller

Zohreh Davoudi Awarded Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers

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Published: Thursday, January 16 2025 00:01

Zohreh Davoudi, an associate professor of physics at the University of Maryland and Maryland Center for Fundamental Physics, received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. The award, which was established in 1996 to recognize young professionals who have demonstrated exceptional potential for leadership in their fields, is the highest honor the U.S. government bestows on early-career scientists and engineers.Zohreh Davoudi

Davoudi, who is also a Fellow of the Joint Center for Quantum Information and Computer Science and the Associate Director for Education at the NSF Quantum Leap Challenge Institute for Robust Quantum Simulation, is one of 398 scientists and engineers nationwide to be acknowledged by President Biden.

“I am truly honored by this recognition,” Davoudi says. “This award signifies that the President and the U.S. government appreciate the important role scientists and engineers play in advancing society. I am excited to continue exploring the frontiers of nuclear physics and quantum information science using advanced classical- and quantum-computational methods and to continue building a community of amazing junior and senior collaborators who share the same or similar goals.”

Davoudi’s research focuses on strongly interacting quantum systems and investigates how elementary particles, like quarks and gluons, come together and form the matter that makes up our world. Her work to understand the foundations of matter includes developing theoretical frameworks and applying cutting-edge tools, like quantum simulations, to studying problems in nuclear and high-energy physics. Ultimately, she hopes to describe the evolution of mater into steady states that occurred in the early universe and that happens at a smaller scale in the aftermath of high-energy particle collisions, like those in experiments at the Large Hadron Collider.

Davoudi has also been acknowledged by other awards, including a Simons Emmy Noether Faculty Research Fellowship, an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, a Department of Energy's Early Career Award and a Kenneth Wilson Award in Lattice Gauge Theory.

“Zohreh is an exceptionally agile physicist and an expert in nuclear theory,” says Steve Rolston, a professor and chair of the Department of Physics at the University of Maryland. “She has embraced the new world of quantum computing and is now a leader in figuring out how to use quantum computation to solve challenging nuclear and high-energy physics problems.”

Original story by Bailey Bedford

Next Gen Retroreflectors Launch to the Moon

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Published: Wednesday, January 15 2025 14:02

On January 15, 2025, a precision prism reflector devised by UMD physicists once again headed to the moon, continuing a tradition begun in 1969, when the Apollo 11 crew positioned still-functioning Lunar Laser Ranging Retroreflectors (LLRR). The new lunar lander reached the Moon on March 2, 2025, and the next day successfully communicated with French Lunar Laser Ranging Observatory at Grasse, France. A single 10 cm diameter corner cube retroreflector. Credit: Doug Currie

One of the physicists responsible for the original retroreflectors, Doug Currie, is the PI for the current version, Next Generation Lunar Retroreflectors (NGLR).  Using intense, brief lasers pulses, scientists on Earth will reflect light off the instrument, allowing measurements of the earth-moon distance to within 1 mm of accuracy. Such precision will allow better understanding of the moon’s liquid corA SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost Mission One lander on January 15, 2024. Credit: NASA/Frank Michauxe and of general relativity.

Currie’s proposal was accepted as part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) project, utilizing partnerships with private industry to facilitate space launches.  Blue Ghost Mission 1 by Firefly Aerospace launched at 1:11 a.m. on January 15 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from NASA’ Kennedy Space Center in Florida, with NGLR-1 and nine other experiments. 

Currie’s storied career and the preparation for the NGLR were detailed in the September 2024 issue of Terp magazine.

He was a UMD Assistant Professor, working with LLRR PI Professor Carroll Alley, at the time of the historic first venture of humans to the moon. In 2019, he was interviewed on the 50^th anniversary of Apollo 11, and was also selected for further work on retroreflectors. While the Apollo 11 retroreflectors were an array of small precision mirrors, the NGLR-1 is is a single 10 cm diameter corner cube retroreflector.

In addition to Currie, the UMD team on NGLR-1 included co-PI Drew Baden, deputy PI Dennis Wellnitz, Project Manager Ruth Chiang Carter and researchers Martin Peckerar, Chensheng Wu and Laila Wise.

Liftoff occurs at 43:01.