‘‘The Martian’’ is the most prescient science fiction movie I have seen in some years. I don't say this lightly. And as is the case with many in my field, my own awakening to the very existence of science was spurred by science fiction — a 1953 film called ‘‘Spaceways," which I saw at a very young age, living on a U.S. military base near St. John’s, Newfoundland in Canada. Read More

The White House is honoring Robert Fischell, a scientist and inventor whose 2005 donation established the University of Maryland's Fischell Department of Bioengineering, with the National Medal of Technology and Innovation for his work developing medical devices. Read More

A team of researchers led by Duke University and the University of Maryland has been tapped by the nation’s “Q Branch” to take quantum computing efforts to the next level using one of the field’s leading technologies—ion traps. Read More

A team of researchers led by Duke University and the University of Maryland has been tapped by the nation’s “Q Branch” to take quantum computing efforts to the next level using one of the field’s leading technologies—ion traps.

The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) invests in high-risk, high-payoff research programs to tackle some of the most difficult challenges in the intelligence community. One of these challenges is dealing with encryption. Codes considered unbreakable by today’s best supercomputers could be handled in a matter of hours by quantum computers.

The basic building blocks of a quantum device are qubits. These are the quantum mechanical analogue of a traditional logical bit, which can be in a “1” or a “0” state. Quantum physics allows for qubits to take on multiple configurations simultaneously (e.g. an equally-weighted superposition of 0 and 1), which is forbidden in conventional computing. When scientists in the 1990s proved that this strange property could be harnessed for solving certain tasks, such as decryption, the quantum information revolution began.

While researchers have proven that robust qubits can be built, scaling them into large networks while detecting and correcting errors remains a challenge.

IARPA awarded the Duke/Maryland/Georgia Tech partnership a five-year, $31.9 million grant through its program dubbed LogiQ. Their goal is to bring together a large number of atomic qubits to realize modular “super-qubits” that can be scaled up while correcting for errors. This major multi-year award is led by Jungsang Kim (Duke University), Christopher Monroe (University of Maryland and the Joint Quantum Institute) and Ken Brown (Georgia Tech).

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UMD Research Scientist Erik Blaufuss, Distinguished University Professor Jordan Goodman and Professor Greg Sullivan will be sharing the 2016 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics award for their studies in neutrino oscillations. The $3 million prize will be shared equally among five experiments comprised of more than 1,300 physicists;Daya Bay, KamLAND, K2k/T2K,Sudbury Neutrino Observatory and Super-Kamiokande.

The University of Maryland physicists were part of the team of scientists that built and participated on the Super-Kamiokande experiment (for which Takaaki Kajita shared the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics).The team’s experimental data demonstrated that neutrinos change identities. This metamorphosis requires that neutrinos have mass. The discovery has changed our understanding of the innermost workings of matter and can prove crucial to our view of the universe.

The Breakthrough Prizes were established by Yuri Milner, Julia Milner, Sergey Brin, Anne Wojcicki, Mark Zuckerberg, Priscilla Chan, Jack Ma, and Cathy Zhang. Their goal is to bring important figures of the science and technology communities into the public eye.