UMD Physics Efforts Cited Among 2012's Most Important

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Published: Monday, December 24 2012 00:00

Physics World's compilation of the year's biggest discoveries included the work of several UMD physicists. The highest-rated discovery was that of the Higgs particle reported by the ATLAS and CMS collaborations at CERN. Professors Drew Baden, Sarah Eno, Nick Hadley and Andris Skuja are all collaborators on CMS, and have made significant contributions in the building, running, and analysis of the data. Professor Alberto Belloni will join the department from ATLAS in January, and will become the fifth faculty member on CMS, an international collaboration.

One of the next highest-rated discoveries was attributed to Leo Kouwenhoven and colleagues at Delft University for confirmation of the Majorana fermion, closely following a prediction by Sankar Das Sarma and UMD/JQI colleagues in 2010.

The BaBar experiment's discovery of time-reversal invariance in the quark sector also made the top-10 list. Professors Hassan Jawahery and Doug Roberts played key roles on BaBar, another large international experiment using electron-positron beams at SLAC. Jawahery served as the physics analysis coordinator and later as spokesperson (overall leader) of the experiment.

The Dec. 21 edition of Science named the Higgs boson as the year's top discovery and also cited the importance of the Majorana fermion. 

Jon McKinney Publishes in Science Express

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Published: Thursday, December 13 2012 00:00

Assistant Professor Jon McKinney's article, Alignment of Magnetized Accretion Disks and Relativistic Jets with Spinning Black Holes (with Alexander Tchekhovskoy and Roger D. Blandford) was published in Science Express. 

November 15, 2012

Four UMD Physicists Named AAAS Fellows

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Published: Thursday, November 29 2012 00:00

Four UMD physicists have been named Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Election as a Fellow is an honor bestowed upon AAAS members by their peers. 

Drew Baden - For distinguished contributions to the field of experimental particle physics, particularly for ideas contributing to the discovery of the top quark and to searches for new particles.

Michael Fuhrer - For experimental studies of the fundamental electronic transport properties of nanostructured carbon materials.

Ted Jacobson - For contributions to quantum gravity, black hole thermodynamics, and the formulation and phenomenology of Lorentz-violating modifications of particle and gravitational physics.

Chris Monroe - For the development and demonstration of novel techniques for quantum information processing and quantum simulation with trapped ions.

Other UMD Fellows named were Millard Alexander, Marco Columbini, William Fagan, Cynthia Moss, Aravind Srinivasan and Raymond St. Leger. New Fellows will be presented with an official certificate and a gold and blue (representing science and engineering, respectively) rosette pin on Saturday, 16 February, at the AAAS Fellows Forum during the 2013 AAAS Annual Meeting in Boston, Mass.

November 29, 2012

Of Particles and Politics

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Published: Wednesday, October 31 2012 15:38

Drew Baden's article How the Hunt for the Higgs and Other Ambitious Science Projects Promote the 'General Welfare' of Our Nation, appeared in Science Progress on October 1, 2012.

Yu-Hsin Chen Awarded Marshall N. Rosenbluth Doctoral Thesis Award

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Published: Wednesday, September 26 2012 10:59

Howard Milchberg's Ph.D. student, Yu-Hsin Chen, was awarded a Marshall N. Rosenbluth Doctoral Thesis Award. This award recognizes exceptional young scientists who have performed original doctoral thesis research of outstanding scientific quality and achievement in the area of plasma physics. Chen is Professor Milchberg's third student to receive the award. His other two students, Thomas Clark and Ki-Yong Kim, received the award in 1999 and 2004, respectively.