Jarzynski Wins APS Onsager Prize

jarzynski by levine 23Christopher Jarzynski. Photo: Faye Levine The American Physical Society awarded its 2019 Lars Onsager Prize in Theoretical Statistical Physics, to Chris Jarzynski,  a Distinguished University Professor in the University of Maryland’s Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Department of Physics, and Institute for Physical Science and Technology (IPST). Jarzynski will receive the prize, which recognizes outstanding research in theoretical statistical physics, at the society’s March Meeting 2019 in Boston.

“This particular award is very special to me because it’s named after Onsager, who was a real giant in theoretical statistical physics and is viewed as a founder of nonequilibrium statistical physics—the field that I work in,” Jarzynski said.

The award also demonstrates UMD’s strength in statistical physics, as the first Lars Onsager Prize was awarded in 1995 to Michael Fisher, a Distinguished University Professor Emeritus in IPST.

Statistical physicists use the tools of mathematics and statistics to investigate how atoms and molecules physically behave at extremely small scales, such as in quantum systems. More specifically, Jarzynski analyzes artificial molecular machines, develops efficient ways to compute the thermodynamic properties of complex systems and applies statistical physics to problems in biophysics.

“Because my work lies on the border of chemistry and physics, it’s been really helpful for me to be at an institute where there are other people with interdisciplinary interests,” said Jarzynski, who is also director of IPST. “IPST brings together really wonderful colleagues who are generous with their time and effort.”

In May 2018, Jarzynski co-authored a study published in the journal Nature Physics that devised and demonstrated a new way to measure “free energy”—the energy available to any system to perform useful work—in extremely small systems. By using microscopy to track and analyze the fluctuating motion or configuration of single molecules or other small objects, the new method can be applied to a greater variety of systems than previous techniques.

Going forward, Jarzynski plans to conduct research at the intersection of statistical mechanics—using probability and statistics to model the behavior of particles—and quantum physics. He will examine the fundamental constraints that the laws of thermodynamics place on information processing in quantum systems as well as investigate how to control and manipulate quantum systems.

Of the nearly 100 papers that Jarzynski has published, the most cited is a 1997 paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters. In this paper, Jarzynski described a method of expressing the second law of thermodynamics—which states that the level of disorder in the universe can only increase—for systems at the molecular scale.

“That was my very first paper in statistical physics,” said Jarzynski, who wrote and submitted the sole-author paper while a research associate at the Institute for Nuclear Theory based at the University of Washington. “After I published that result, I came up with further questions and I’ve stayed in that field for the last 20 years.”

The paper proved influential for the field of statistical physics: thousands of papers cite it and an equation in the paper became known as the Jarzynski equality.

“At first, there was some question of whether my paper was just a theoretical prediction,” Jarzynski said. “But a few years later, experiments started verifying my work.”

Then, when the 2018 Nobel Prize in physics was awarded for inventions in laser physics, the Nobel Committee for Physics specifically cited testing the Jarzynski equality as an application of one of the winning inventions—optical tweezers. Optical tweezers use laser beams to manipulate extremely small objects such as biological molecules.

The equality has now been verified in many systems, including quantum mechanical systems. In 2014, scientists helped verify the Jarzynski equality with a trapped ion system and published the results in the journal Nature Physics. The study’s authors included two former UMD postdocs—Kihwan Kim, an associate professor in the Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences at Tsinghua University in Beijing, and Haitao Quan, an assistant professor of physics at Beijing’s Peking University.

The opportunity to recruit postdocs like Quan and promising graduate students to his lab was a key reason that Jarzynski moved to UMD in 2006 from the Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he worked for the preceding decade.

“The thing I’m most proud of here at Maryland is having built my own research group,” Jarzynski said. “I’ve been very fortunate in having terrific students and postdocs, many of whom are now in academic positions.”

One of those students will also be honored at the March Meeting alongside Jarzynski. Jordan Horowitz (Ph.D. ’10, physics), who is now a postdoctoral fellow in physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and will soon start a position as an assistant professor at the University of Michigan, will receive the Irwin Oppenheim Award, which recognizes outstanding contributions to physics by early career scientists who publish in the journal Physical Review E.

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The paper, “Equilibrium free energies from non-equilibrium trajectories with relaxation fluctuation spectroscopy,” David Ross, Elizabeth Strychalski, Christopher Jarzynski and Samuel Stavis, was published in the journal Nature Physics on May 28, 2018.

The paper, “Experimental test of the quantum Jarzynski equality with a trapped-ion system,” Shuoming An, Jing-Ning Zhang, Mark Um, Dingshun Lv, Yao Lu, Junhua Zhang, Zhang-Qi Yin, Haitao Quan and Kihwan Kim, was published in the journal Nature Physics on December 22, 2014.

The paper, “Nonequilibrium equality for free energy differences,” Christopher Jarzynski, was published in the journal Physical Review Letters on April 7, 1997.

Media Relations Contact: Irene Ying, 301-405-5204, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

For a full listing of 2019 APS Award Recipients visit: http://www.aps.org/programs/honors/new-recipients.cfm

 

 

 

 

UMD Alumnus Wins Breakthrough New Horizons Prize

Aron Wall, who received his UMD Ph.D. in 2011, has been awarded the 2019 Breakthrough New Horizons in Physics Prize for fundamental insights about quantum information, quantum field theory and gravity. The $100,000 prize is given each year to up to three “promising junior researchers who have already produced important work.” In addition to the Breakthrough Prize, Wall has also recently received the Philippe Meyer Prize in Theoretical Physics and the Young Scientist Prize for the International Commission on General Relativity & Gravitation.

Wall’s UMD dissertation was awarded the Bergmann-Wheeler Thesis Prize, given every three years by the International Society on General Relativity and Gravitation. Distinguished University Professor Ted Jacobson was Wall’s advisor.

After completing his doctorate, Wall held positions at the University of California at Santa Barbara, the Institute for Advanced Study and the Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics. In January, he will join the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge.

Manuel Franco Sevilla Joins UMD Physics

Manuel Franco Sevilla installs ODMB modules into the CMS detector at CERN. (Photo: Jeff Richman)

Manuel Franco Sevilla has joined the Department of Physics as an assistant professor. He recently completed a postdoctoral appointment at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

Franco Sevilla received his Ph.D. in experimental particle physics at Stanford University, working on the BaBar experiment at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. At SLAC he did seminal work on lepton universality, a fundamental assumption within the Standard Model (SM) of particle physics that states that the interactions of all charged leptons differ only because of their different masses. Franco Sevilla’s work challenges this assumption and helped launch a new area of studies in the experimental programs at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and B factories, stimulating many possible interpretations based on physics beyond the SM.

As a postdoctoral researcher, Dr. Franco Sevilla moved to the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment at the LHC, where he made major contributions both to the development of particle detector instruments as well as to the physics analysis of the data in the area of Supersymmetry. In 2014 he was recognized with a CMS Achievement Award for “outstanding design and construction of the 72 Optical Data MotherBoards (ODMB) that control and read out” the complex electronics needed in this part of the operation, and during 2016-2018 he was appointed Coordinator of the CMS Cathode Strip Chambers (CSCs) upgrade for the high luminosity LHC and Deputy Project Manager of the CSC group.

He now joins the LHCb experiment at CERN and looks forward to continuing his research on lepton universality violation and engaging students in the study of today’s open questions in fundamental physics. Additionally, he will contribute to the development of the electronics for a new tracker detector to be installed in LHCb in 2020.

 MFS CERN 2smManuel Franco Sevilla installs ODMB modules into the CMS detector at CERN. (Photo credit: Jeff Richman)

Juan Maldacena Awarded Prange Prize

Juan Maldacena of the Institute for Advanced Study has been named the 2018 recipient of the Richard E. Prange Prize and Lectureship in Condensed Matter Theory and Related Areas. Dr. Maldacena will receive a $10,000 honorarium. He delivered a public lecture entitled "Black Holes and the Structure of Spacetime” at the University of Maryland, College Park on October 2, 2018, and also gave a Condensed Matter Theory Center/Joint Quantum Institute seminar entitled “Wormholes and Entangled States” on Monday, October 1.

The Prange Prize, established by the UMD Department of Physics and Condensed Matter Theory Center (CMTC), honors the late Professor Richard E. Prange, whose distinguished professorial career at Maryland spanned four decades (1961-2000). The Prange Prize is made possible by a gift from Dr. Prange's wife, Dr. Madeleine Joullié, a professor of chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania.

Maldacena received his Ph.D. in 1996 at Princeton University, focusing on black holes in string theory. Just a few years later, he received a MacArthur Fellowship and tenure at Harvard University. He studies quantum gravity, string theory, quantum field theory and quantum entanglement. Among his honors are the Albert Einstein Medal, the Lorentz Medal, the Fundamental Physics Prize, the Dirac Prize and Medal, the Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics, the Sackler Prize, a Packard Fellowship and a Sloan Fellowship. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

Maldacena is most known for his 1997 solo theoretical discovery of a deep connection between gauge theories, which describe the world of particle physics at the microscopic scale, and quantum gravity, which describes the physics of gravitational forces holding the universe together. This famous Maldacena gauge-gravity (or AdS/CFT) duality, arguably the most important theoretical physics result of the last 30 years, has remained a topic of great fundamental interest in particle physics, string theory, gravity, nuclear physics, and condensed matter physics, and is one of the most actively-studied topics in theoretical physics. In particular, Maldacena conjectured that certain strongly-interacting quantum field theories are equivalent to certain weakly-interacting theories of gravity, leading to new insights in all of physics. This work of Maldacena, receiving in excess of 10,000 citations, is among the most cited papers in all of science over the last 20 years.

Maldacena’s Prange Prize lecture was given in Room 1412 of UMD’s John S. Toll Physics Building at 4:00 p.m. on Tuesday, October 2.

At the University of Chicago, Richard Prange received his Ph.D. under Nobelist Yoichiro Nambu and also worked with Murray Gell-Mann and Marvin Goldberger. At the University of Maryland, he edited a highly-respected book on the quantum Hall effect and made important theoretical contributions to the subject. His interests extended into all aspects of theoretical physics, and continued after his retirement. Dr. Prange was a member of the Maryland condensed matter theory group for more than 40 years and was an affiliate of CMTC since its inception in 2002.

"Richard enjoyed a fascinating and fulfilling career at the University of Maryland exploring condensed matter physics, and even after retirement was active in the department," said Dr. Joullié. "He spent the very last afternoon of his life in the lecture hall for a colloquium on graphene, followed by a vigorous discussion. And so I was happy to institute the Prange Prize, to generate its own robust discussions in condensed matter theory."

"The Prange Prize provides a unique opportunity to acknowledge transformative work in condensed matter theory, a field that has proven to be an inexhaustible source of insights and discoveries in both fundamental and applied physics,” said Dr. Sankar Das Sarma, who holds the Richard E. Prange Chair in Physics at UMD and is also a Distinguished University Professor and director of the CMTC.

Since its initiation in 2009, the Prange Prize has been awarded to Philip W. Anderson, Walter Kohn, Daniel Tsui, Andre Geim, David Gross, Klaus von Klitzing, and Frank Wilczek.

 

    

 

 

 

 

Jeffrey I. Mechanick, M.D. Quantum Biology Lecture

Jeffrey I. Mechanick (B.S. biology, 1981) established the Mechanick Quantum Biology Endowment fund to facilitate the dissemination of research findings on quantum mechanics and life sciences. Dr. Mechanick is a physician specializing in endocrinology, diabetes and bone disease, and is a Professor at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. He is the past president of the American College of Endocrinology, the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists and the American Board of Physician Nutrition Specialists.

Mechanick Lectures:

2019-20   Ron Walsworth, University of Maryland: Quantum Tools for the Life Sciences
2018-19   Martin Plenio, Ulm University: Vibrations, Quanta & Biology