LHCb experiment. Image courtesy of CERN.In November 2020, the LHCb collaboration announced a major new development, based on data collected during LHC Run 2, confirming and significantly strengthening an anomalous observation in decays of B mesons. 

Postdoc Will Parker and Distinguished University Professor Hassan Jawahery of the UMD flavor physics group recently discussed their work and "matter-antimatter weirdness" in Symmetry magazine. 

The 2020 result followed the LHCb's previous observation of CP violation in decays of D mesons. That finding was rated a Physics World Breakthrough of the Year finalist for 2019.

The Symmetry story is posted here: https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/lhcb-finds-more-matter-antimatter-weirdness-in-b-mesons

Assistant Professor Alicia Kollár has been awarded a grant by the Air Force’s Young Investigator Research Program (YIP). She is one of 36 early-career researchers around the US to receive the three-year, $450,000 award.

Kollár plans to develop a new breed of superconducting devices for studying quantum computing and quantum simulation. The devices will build upon an already successful platform—superconducting qubits connected together by photonic cavities—to create new interactions between qubits and new ways of connecting qubits together.

“These systems realize artificial photonic materials for microwave photons with unprecedented levels of versatility and control,” says Kollár. “They can even be used to make lattices which cannot be found in nature, including things as exotic as lattices in curved hyperbolic spaces. Thanks to the generous support of the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, we can now truly embark on harnessing this effect for new types of interactions and spin models.”

The YIP received more than 215 proposals this year, for research into everything from basic physics to machine learning and network science. Xiaodi Wu, a Fellow of the Joint Center for Quantum Information and Computer Science and an assistant professor of computer science at UMD, was also awarded a YIP grant this year.

Original story by Chris Cesare: https://jqi.umd.edu/news/kollar-receives-air-force-young-investigator-grant

Sankar Das Sarma and Chris Monroe are included on the Clarivate Web of Science Group’s 2020 roster of Highly Cited Researchers(link is external) r, which recognizes influential scientists for their highly cited papers over the preceding decade. Both are Distinguished University Professors and Fellows of the Joint Quantum Institute. 

Das Sarma is Director of the Condensed Matter Theory Center and holds the Richard E. Prange Chair. Monroe holds the Bice Zorn Professorship and is a Fellow of the Joint Center for Quantum Information and Computer Science.

Das Sarma has been included every year that the list has been released. This is Monroe’s second consecutive year receiving the distinction.

Das Sarma explores the theories behind condensed matter physics, statistical mechanics and quantum information, while Monroe performs experiments related to atomic physics and quantum information science. Both researchers have contributed new ideas that pushed the boundaries of the burgeoning field of quantum computing.

Original story by Bailey Bedford: https://jqi.umd.edu/news/two-jqi-fellows-named-2020-highly-cited-researchers

To mark the 50^th anniversary of Physical Review B, editors selected “milestone” papers that have made lasting contributions to condensed matter physics, including one co-written by Distinguished University Professor Sankar Das Sarma.

Das Sarma wrote the selected paper, Dielectric function, screening, and plasmons in two-dimensional graphene, with Euyheon Hwang. Hwang earned his doctorate in 1996 under Das Sarma, and after appointments as a UMD research associate and assistant research scientist, accepted a faculty post at Sungkyunkwan University (SKKU) in South Korea.  He is one of about 100 of Das Sarma’s students and postdocs who have gone on to faculty appointEuyheon Hwang (seated, yellow shirt) and Sankar Das Sarma (red shirt) with CMTC colleagues in 2003.ments.

Hwang and Das Sarma have written about 120 articles together, including 88 papers in PRB from 1994 to 2019.

The milestone paper was published in 2007 and has 1,744 citations. In it, the authors developed a many body theory for the dynamical dielectric function of doped graphene at an arbitrary wave vector and frequency.   The dielectric function directly determines many physical properties, including electrical and optical properties.  This ‘milestone’ publication by Hwang and Das Sarma has been instrumental not only in the development of the fundamental physics of graphene, but has also ushered in the technological field of ‘graphene plasmonics’ which is being widely pursued worldwide for practical engineering use in optics and photonics.

Das Sarma, the Richard E. Prange Chair in Physics, is a Distinguished University Professor, a Fellow of the Joint Quantum Institute, and the director of the Condensed Matter Theory Center. He is internationally known for his work on topological quantum computation, Majorana physics, spin quantum computation, many body phenomena, quantum localization and nonequlibrium statistical mechanics, and has recently entered into the study of twisted bilayer graphene and higher-order topological systems. Google Scholar counts 90,227 citations and calculates an h-index of 124.

Adjunct Associate Professor Nicholas Butch will receive the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s 2020 Samuel Wesley Stratton Award "for pioneering research into the exotic physics and extremely high-field re-entrant superconductivity in uranium ditelluride." The Stratton Award, named after the first director of the National Bureau of Standards, as NIST was then known, recognizes an unusually significant research contribution to science or engineering that merits the acclaim of the scientific world and supports NIST’s mission objectives.Nick Butch

Butch, a physicist at NIST’s Center for Neutron Research, is a member of the Quantum Materials Center (QMC). His first UMD appointment was as a Rolfe Glover Postdoctoral Fellow in 2008.

Among Butch’s research pursuits are quantum materials and superconductivity. In 2019, he and collaborators discovered superconductivity in the material uranium ditelluride (UTe₂) and then described a remarkable quirk: high magnetic fields seem to stabilize, not destroy, its superconducting state. This resilience could make UTe₂ a promising material for use in quantum computers.

Earlier in 2020, Butch and collaborators also announced that experiments with UTe₂ revealed that it might contain the long-sought Majorana fermion.

Butch earned his Ph.D. in 2008 at the University of California, San Diego. In 2017, he received a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the highest honor bestowed by the United States government on science and engineering professionals in the early stages of their research careers.