How Pokémon and Anime Inspired a Career in Physics

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Published: Wednesday, February 04 2026 01:40

For some people, numbers just make sense. That’s always been the case for Samuel Márquez González (B.S. ’25, physics).

Márquez remembers his quantitative curiosity first sparking while he was playing Pokémon video games in elementary school. Inspired by his favorite character, Pancham, a pubescent dark- and fighting-type panda, Márquez wanted to come up with a formula that could calculate how much damage an attack would do based on each Pokémon’s level and type.

“I was never able to do it, if I’m being honest,” Márquez said, laughing.

Samuel Márquez

Nonetheless, that quantitative penchant grew to new heights at the University of Maryland. Márquez spent his undergraduate career researching materials science and quantum physics. Now, he seeks Ph.D. opportunities in quantum information, where he hopes to forge new and surprising interdisciplinary connections—as he once did playing Pokémon.

“I challenge myself to think of creative ideas where I take two different topics and try to unify them,” Márquez said. “That’s what motivates my science.”

An anime, a new country and a devastating blackout

Márquez grew up in Venezuela. His family was familiar with ambitious, quantitative endeavors: His father was a computer scientist, his mother studied law and his sister became a civil engineer.

It was Márquez’s father who first got him interested in physics through an anime called “Evangelion.”

“My dad—he introduced me to the world of anime. In ‘Evangelion’, there's a governmental institution called NERV,” Márquez said. “I wanted to study physics because I wanted to work for NERV.”

When Márquez was in high school, his family moved to Brazil, where his dad found contract work. There, navigating academics through a new language in Portuguese, he developed his physics intuition. He remembers walking through town, using kinematic laws and trigonometry to estimate how fast an airplane was moving from the size of its shadow.

Márquez’s family returned to Venezuela once his dad’s contract ended and he finished high school. But shortly after, the country suffered a devastating blackout that led to dozens of deaths. The Guri Dam—the primary electricity source for more than 70% of the country—failed. The Márquez family was without power for a week.

“It was a crazy time I had to live through,” Márquez said.

Even after power was restored, intermittent blackouts persisted. His dad, who was employed by Nokia at the time, couldn’t work consistently, so the family traveled to Florida to live with an aunt in what they thought would be a temporary arrangement.

“I remember my bag was only five pounds. My plan was to come here, buy stuff, and then bring it back with me to Venezuela,” Márquez said. “But then, we ended up staying here.”

A circuitous path to UMD

With little English knowledge, Márquez moved to Bethesda, Maryland, to be near his sister, who was enrolled in a civil engineering master’s program nearby. His family eventually to Rockville, where he lives to this day. He wanted to study physics in college, but first, he had to learn the language.

“I only knew very basic English, like the ‘to be’ verbs,” Márquez said. “Six years ago, I wouldn't have been able to have a conversation.”

So, he enrolled in a one-year program for non-native English speakers called English Language for Academic Purposes at Montgomery College , where he developed a working fluency before continuing to earn an associate’s degree in physics and computer science.

It was during community college that Márquez began his physics research. He worked for a year at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, where he researched organic semiconductors that could improve solar cells and quantum technologies. He continued doing physics research at UMD’s Quantum Materials Center at UMD after transferring to College Park in spring 2024.

At UMD, Márquez worked with Physics Adjunct Professor Nicholas Butch and graduate student Gicela Saucedo Salas to study the material properties of crystals made of nickel and varying amounts of scandium and yttrium.

Altering the chemical composition of these crystals changes the magnetic and physical properties. Because these materials are used in superconductors, MRIs, and quantum computers, this research could help technology developers select the best composition for their specific needs.

“There are so many applications,” Márquez said.

Now, Márquez is applying for Ph.D. programs in quantum information science. He’s interested in quantum decoherence—a phenomenon where quantum particles begin to lose their “quantumness” and behave more like classical systems.

Meanwhile, he is independently writing a paper on how decoherence affects quantum entanglement, a property describing how the states of quantum particles are linked, which he will soon submit for peer review.

Márquez believes his captivation with numbers will always drive his work. But he doesn’t do scientific research just to satisfy a curiosity. He pursues discoveries that can improve the world—and sees quantum physics as potentially transformational.

“Technology can't advance without advancements in science,” he said. “I want to make a change in society by discovering something big.”

Written by Jason P. Dinh

UMD Physicist Shrinks Down Massive Particle Accelerators with Laser-Driven Plasma

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Published: Wednesday, February 04 2026 01:40

Particle accelerators are among the largest and most complex scientific projects ever built. The Large Hadron Collider spans 16 miles deep beneath Switzerland. Stanford’s linear accelerator stretches more than two miles. These massive, billion-dollar machines can probe the fundamental nature of reality—but their size and cost put them out of reach for most.

University of Maryland physics postdoctoral researcher Jaron Shrock (Ph.D. ’23, physics) is helping to change that.Jaron Shrock holds newly-developed equipment.

In 2025, Shrock won the American Physical Society's Marshall N. Rosenbluth Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Award for demonstrating the first multi-GeV laser wakefield acceleration using optically generated plasma waveguides. In simpler terms, he figured out how to shrink a kilometers-long accelerator down to the size of a conference table.

“Getting a kilometers-long machine to fit inside a university lab, a manufacturing facility or a hospital room has enormous potential to bring advanced light and radiation sources to a variety of applications,” explained Shrock, who works with Distinguished University Professor of Physics Howard Milchberg in the Intense Laser Matter Interactions lab at UMD.

Traditional particle accelerators are already mainstays in research: scientists use them to study the universe’s origins, discover new particles, produce isotopes for medical imaging, manufacture computer chips and much more. Shrock says that overcoming the limitations that come with their massive size could open doors for other applications and users, allowing more people to access the benefits of accelerators on a more portable and more cost and energy-efficient level.

“This is a major step to really democratizing the capabilities of this kind of tech,” Shrock explained. “Our findings help make this more accessible to a whole variety of people, including researchers, hospitals and industries.”

From musical harmonics to plasma physics

Shrock’s current success is a long way from where his journey began in a high school physics classroom when a music project about harmonics suddenly made the universe click into place.

“I saw the connection between the musical training I had and physics,” Shrock recalled. “There are really fascinating, deep relationships that govern all these things around us, and I realized I wanted to learn more.”

Always a tactile person, Shrock excelled at working with his hands. After graduating from high school, he attended Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania to play baseball and study physics.

“I got to work in a plasma physics lab there, and I discovered that I wanted to be in a lab where I get to touch stuff, make things, have physical connections to the experiment,” Shrock said. “My then-advisor told me to go and meet Howard Milchberg at UMD, see what they do with intense lasers. I did and got hooked on it immediately.”

Since that initial visit to College Park in 2018, Shrock never looked back. He became fascinated by the idea of using lasers to accelerate electrons through plasma, a special state of matter found in lightning and the sun.

“Traditional particle accelerators face fundamental limits: they push particles using electromagnetic fields inside vacuum chambers, but those fields can only be so strong before destroying the machine’s walls,” Shrock explained. “The only solution was to just build longer and longer, which is why conventional accelerators span kilometers.”

Shrock’s laser-driven approach sidesteps this entirely. Ultrapowerful laser pulses—lasting just femtoseconds (a millionth of a billionth of a second)—can rip through plasma like a snowplow, separating electrons from ions. This creates a wave that accelerates trapped electrons with forces a thousand times stronger than conventional accelerators.

“We could push particles a thousand times harder with this laser method, so it meant that we only need to push them a thousand times shorter distance,” Shrock said. “All of a sudden, a kilometer-size machine becomes a meter-scale machine.”

The key innovation is a plasma waveguide—essentially a fiber optic cable made of plasma that keeps ultra-intense lasers focused over meter-long distances. Although Milchberg pioneered these waveguides at UMD in the 1990s, the laser tech wasn’t ready to test at that time. But when Shrock joined Milchberg’s lab in 2018 as a physics Ph.D. student, they finally made it happen.

After spending months in Colorado running experiments, Shrock and Milchberg’s team produced the breakthrough that would anchor Shrock’s award-winning thesis—the first single-shot muon radiography using a laser-driven source.

“Muons are subatomic particles that can penetrate dense materials, but while they’ve been used to successfully discover hidden chambers in Egyptian pyramids, those applications relied on cosmic rays and took weeks,” Shrock explained. “We rolled a rental truck loaded with detectors into the beam path and were able to see, on single shots, shadows of the material we were scanning. If the accelerator fits on a truck, then you can take it directly to the feature that you want to image, quick and easy.”

Small team, massive impact

Shrock says these breakthroughs would’ve been impossible without a uniquely supportive research environment.

“The culture here at UMD, I think, makes a big difference,” Shrock said. “Students don’t just run experiments—they design equipment, fabricate optics, engineer gas jets and intimately understand every component.”

Shrock believes that the deep technical expertise, combined with Milchberg’s mentorship style, allowed him and his groupmates to thrive. The team’s success in Colorado wasn’t a massive national laboratory or industry effort but simply a handful of dedicated graduate students—now postdocs—working closely together. Despite the limited personnel, their work completely transformed the trajectory of particle accelerator technology around the world, including research at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the birthplace of particle accelerator technology.

In 2021, Shrock led a multi-institutional collaboration with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) as a graduate student. He directed a team of senior scientists—an unusual level of responsibility that reflected Milchberg’s commitment to developing the next generation of physicists.

“Howard really empowers young scientists,” Shrock noted. “Whenever our lab receives invitations to give talks, he always passes it to graduate students. He’s never stingy about opportunities, and it’s led to our work being widely recognized. I’m the fourth person from his group to receive the Rosenbluth Award, which reflects his efforts to support us.”

This year, as UMD’s upgraded 100-terawatt laser system comes online, the campus will have its very own compact particle accelerator, thanks to foundational work from Milchberg’s group. Faculty members are already designing experiments to take advantage of its unprecedented capabilities.

“There's a whole lot that will come out of reconsidering the economic calculation for what you can do with a high-energy particle beam,” Shrock said. “It saves a lot of time, money and effort if you can just walk across campus to use an accelerator rather than needing to go someplace far away.”

Looking ahead, Shrock envisions compact accelerators taking on research and production to the next level, beyond what conventional accelerators have provided in fields such as medical isotope production, advanced manufacturing and fusion research diagnostics.

“It's been both incredibly thrilling and exhausting to see this platform grow from ideas developed by our small team to the centerpiece of international research efforts,” Shrock reflected. “I believe we're only scratching the surface of what these accelerators can do.”

Written by Georgia Jiang

Conducting Quantum Experiments in the ‘Coolest’ Lab on Campus

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Published: Tuesday, February 03 2026 01:40

When University of Maryland physics Ph.D. candidate Yanda Geng tells people he works at the ‘coolest’ lab on campus, he’s not exaggerating. In his laboratory at the Joint Quantum Institute (JQI), atoms are cooled to 100 nanokelvin—about one billionth of a degree above absolute zero and roughly 1,000 times colder than the quantum systems used in superconducting quantum computers.Yanda Geng at work in the lab. Credit: Rahul Shrestha

In these extreme conditions, something bizarre happens. Atoms stop acting like individual particles and instead merge into a single quantum blob called a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC). BECs contain millions of atoms that behave according to quantum mechanics rather than classical physics, and they reveal quantum dynamics on a scale large enough to observe without the extreme difficulty of studying single atoms or photons. 

“Simply put, we use laser cooling and trapping techniques to cool atoms down to a very cold temperature, changing the atoms into a different type of matter,” Geng said. 

Advised by Adjunct Professor of Physics Ian Spielman and Associate Vice President for Quantum Research and Education Gretchen Campbell, Geng used microwaves to split the BEC into two different superfluids—liquids that flow without friction. 

“Unlike regular fluids that eventually stop moving because of friction, superfluids can flow forever,” Geng explained. “For example, if you have superfluid in a bucket and rotate that bucket, the superfluid inside won’t follow the bucket because it doesn’t really ‘feel’ the motion of the wall.” 

Like oil and water, these two superfluids cannot mix. But Geng and postdoctoral researcher Junheng Tao discovered interesting swirling patterns as they pushed the superfluids together—the distinctive mushroom-shaped plumes were eerily similar to what happens when galaxies collide, volcanoes erupt or nuclear fusion occurs. Called the Rayleigh-Taylor instability (RTI), this phenomenon had been observed in classical fluids before, but never in superfluids.

“I remember quite distinctly when this data was presented at group meeting: it was a surprise,” noted Spielman. “Several of the cold atom students had been talking with me about measuring fluid dynamical instabilities for some time, but the first RTI data was taken in secret on a weekend, and neither Gretchen nor I knew it was coming!”

For Geng, the findings confirm something profound about the universe: some laws of physics are so fundamental that they work the same everywhere, from cosmic scales to the quantum realm. Finding the same patterns in the quantum world and the everyday world helps scientists understand where the rules of classical physics end and where unique quantum behaviors begin. Geng and the team published the discovery in the journal Sciences Advances in August 2025. 

“It’s kind of amazing to see that this [Rayleigh-Taylor instability] is everywhere, and that the ingredients you need to make it happen aren’t that difficult to put together,” Geng noted. “It’s a pattern with extremely simple origins, something you can find in countless other systems under countless different conditions.”

The journey to cold atom physics

Growing up, Geng was inspired by his uncle, a high-energy physicist, to pursue fundamental questions about how the universe works. After earning his undergraduate degree in physics at Nanjing University in 2020, Geng began looking for graduate schools with atomic physics programs. UMD quickly became a top choice.

“UMD was really a dream school because of its collaboration with [the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology] through JQI,” Geng recalled. “I was happy to accept an offer from UMD. Even when a Berkeley professor during my search warned that what I was interested in—ultracold neutral atoms—was ‘really difficult physics,’ I was more confident than ever that this is what I want to do.”

When he began working with Spielman and Campbell in his second year, Geng inherited an experiment from previous students that quickly needed major repairs and upgrades. The experiment itself was a marvel of complexity: four laser tables spanning a 20-foot-by-30-foot lab, requiring expertise in optics, vacuum systems, electronics and even plumbing for the water-cooling system. Everything was controlled by Python programs and code largely written by Geng himself, drawing on the programming skills he learned in high school.

“You have to make sure all subsystems work, and they have to all work at the same time. For the first two years, I worked to optimize each component to achieve the reliability needed for publishable research,” Geng said.

Advocacy in academia

Over the years, Geng has also embraced a leadership role, serving on the department’s Graduate Student Committee, where he organized outreach and social events to help bridge communication gaps between students and faculty members. Geng is particularly committed to supporting new graduate students studying cold atomic physics, emphasizing both the immense challenges and rewards in the field. 

“I remember how I was when I first started here,” Geng explained. “Having some guidance about what to expect as a graduate researcher in cold atomic physics would have really helped me, so I try to pass along my experiences about things like how to interact with a PI and how to be patient with projects. It’s my goal to be transparent and give everyone a realistic picture of what academic research environments can look like.” 

As he approaches his graduation, Geng plans to continue doing research that makes an impact beyond the lab.

“I want to see my work directly connected to people’s lives,” Geng said. “Even though my research is very fundamental, what I’ve found is actually very universal in some ways. I like fundamental research that explores the secrets of the universe, but I’m also interested in photonics applications like with biosensors or precision measurement work like atomic clocks—research that can potentially change people’s lives.”

Written by Georgia Jiang

Young Suh Kim, 1935 - 2025

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Published: Monday, December 08 2025 05:19

Professor Emeritus Young Suh Kim died on October 25, 2025 at age 90.  Prof. Kim's research was dedicated to elucidating the connections between relativity, quantum mechanics, and the symmetries that underlie the laws of nature.

Born in Korea in 1935, Prof. Kim earned his Bachelor of Science degree from the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) and his Ph.D. in Physics from Princeton University in 1961. He stayed at Princeton to complete his postdoctoral research. At the invitation of Department Chair John S. Toll, Kim joined the University of Maryland faculty in 1962. At the time, he was the youngest person to become assistant professor at the university. He retired in 2007.

While at Princeton as a graduate student, he studied Eugene Wigner’s influential 1939 paper on the inhomogeneous Lorentz group, and had the privilege of asking questions directly to Wigner. At the start of Prof. Kim’s career at Maryland, Paul A. M. Dirac visited for one week, and Prof. Kim was assigned to serve as Dirac’s personal assistant. During this time, Dirac suggested to Kim that more physicists should study the relationship of Lorentz covariance to the internal symmetries of particles.

Prof. Kim’s early research centered on the representations of the Lorentz and Poincaré groups, the fundamental symmetries of special relativity. Together with Marilyn E. Noz, he developed the covariant harmonic oscillator model, providing a relativistically consistent description of the internal structure of bound systems. Their 1977 paper, “Covariant Harmonic Oscillators and the Parton Picture” (Physical Review D, 15, 335), offered an innovative framework linking the quark model of hadrons with Feynman’s parton picture of high-energy processes. This work sought to reconcile the static quark view with the dynamic, frame-dependent parton model through Lorentz-covariant formalism.

Professor Kim’s numerous papers appeared in leading journals including Physical Review, Physical Review Letters, and Journal of Mathematical Physics. His 1989 paper, “Observable Gauge Transformations in the Parton Picture,” offered an important contribution to the study of relativistic symmetries in hadron structure by showing that the parton picture of fast-moving hadrons can be understood as a Lorentz covariant effect with the use of Wigner’s little group formalism, an insightful complement to the dynamical consequence of QCD interactions.

He had a long collaboration with Wigner, co-authoring the 1990 paper “Space-time Geometry of Relativistic Particles” in the Journal of Mathematical Physics. In it he uses Wigner’s little group formalism to unify the space-time geometry of relativistic particles — from massive quarks to massless photons — within a single Lorentz-covariant framework. Again complementing QCD, it is a deep symmetry-based reinterpretation of how internal quantum states (spin, helicity) are tied to external Lorentz transformations. His influential book “Theory and Applications of the Poincare Group” is a key resource for understanding how symmetries underpin modern physics, with discussions of how Poincaré symmetries explain conservation laws via Noether’s theorem.

Prof. Kim is survived by his wife, son, daughter-in-law, two grandchildren, and a global community of former students, collaborators, and admirers. 

Y.S. Kim, Umirzak Makhmutovich Sultangazin, Richard Ferrell and Chuan S. Liu.

Y.S. Kim and Dieter Brill.

Y.S. Kim at a departmental holiday party. 

Gates Receives 2025 Barry Prize, Named Fellow of the American Mathematical Society and African Academy of Sciences

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Published: Thursday, December 04 2025 00:01

Distinguished University Professor Sylvester James Gates, Jr.  was recently named Fellow of both the American Mathematical Society and the African Academy of Sciences and received the 2025 Barry Prize for Distinguished Intellectual Achievement from the American Academy of Sciences & Letters. The Barry Prize honors “those whose work has made outstanding contributions to humanity’s knowledge, appreciation, and cultivation of the good, the true, and the beautiful.”

Original story: https://cmns.umd.edu/news-events/news/sylvester-james-gates-jr-barry-prize-fellow-ams-aas