Thomas Ferbel, 1937- 2022

Thomas Ferbel, a UMD visiting professor since 2013, died at his home on Saturday, March 12. He was 84.

Ferbel was born in 1937 in Radom, Poland. During the tumult of World War II, he and his family endured exile in a Russian gulag and later, a camp for displaced persons in Stuttgart. Eventually, Ferbel arrived in New York and received a B.A. in Chemistry from Queens College, CUNY, and his and Ph.D. in Physics from Yale University (where his favorite professor was Bob Gluckstern, later the chancellor of this campus and a professor of physics).Thomas FerbelThomas Ferbel

After a postdoctoral appointment at Yale, Ferbel accepted a faculty position at the University of Rochester in 1965.  While there, he received an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, a John S. Guggenheim Fellowship and an Alexander von Humboldt Prize.

He was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 1984, and served as the U.S. program manager for the Large Hadron Collider from 2004-08.

In 2020, Ferbel described both his early years and his life as a physicist as part of the American Institute of Physics Oral History project. The transcript is available here: https://www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/oral-histories/46304

Bennewitz Named Finalist for Hertz Fellowship

Elizabeth Bennewitz, a first-year physics graduate student at JQI and QuICS, has been named a finalist for a 2022 Hertz Fellowship. Out of more than 650 applicants, Bennewitz is one of 45 finalists with a chance of receiving up to $250,000 in support from the Fannie and John Hertz Foundation.

The fellowships provide up to five years of funding for recipients pursuing a Ph.D. The foundation seeks(link is external) individuals who intend to tackle “major, near-term problems facing society.”Elizabeth Bennewitz (credit:  Dan Spencer)Elizabeth Bennewitz (credit: Dan Spencer)

“This whole group of finalists have accomplished so much, and I’m very humbled to be among other people starting their Ph.D.s who are also pursuing big problems in science,” says Bennewitz. “I'm very honored to be part of this finalist group.”

Bennewitz is working with JQI and QuICS Fellow Alexey Gorshkov and is interested in researching large collections of interacting quantum particles—what scientists call many-body quantum systems. These systems are important to understanding cutting-edge physics and quantum computer technologies and can also be the basis of simulations that could provide insights into complex problems in physics, material science and chemistry.

“During my PhD, I want to develop tools and techniques that help harness the computational power of quantum devices in order to simulate these large quantum many-body systems,” Bennewitz says. “I’m excited to be pursuing this research at Maryland because of its commitment to quantum information and quantum computing research as well as its rich collaboration between theorists and experimentalists.”

Bennewitz is just at the beginning of her graduate student career, but she has already started investigating how quantum simulators might be used to understand the interactions of the particles that are responsible for holding the nuclei of atoms together.

“I'm very happy for Elizabeth, and I'm honored and excited that she chose to work with my group,” Gorshkov says.

An announcement of the winning fellows is expected to be made in May.

“I'm very thankful for all the opportunities I had before I got here,” Bennewitz says. “I would not be where I am today without the support and guidance I received from my professors and peers at Bowdoin College and Perimeter.”

Original story by Bailey Bedford: https://jqi.umd.edu/news/jqi-graduate-student-finalist-hertz-fellowship

Kollár Awarded Sloan Research Fellowship

Assistant Professor Alicia Kollár has been awarded a prestigious 2022 Sloan Research Fellowship. This award is given to early career researchers by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to recognize distinguished performance and the potential to make substantial contributions to their field. Each fellowship provides $75,000 to support the fellow’s research over two years.

Kollár will use the fellowship to support her research into creating new synthetic materials that are designed using quantum physics and applied mathematics. These synthetic materials can reveal physics that is difficult or impossible to observe in traditional materials.

“What really excites me about this award is to see support for the more interdisciplinary side of my research,” Kollár says. “My original background is in quantum physics and that's been where my grant support has come from so far, but this Sloan award is focused on looking at questions at the intersection of math and physics.”Alicia Kollár Alicia Kollár

This line of Kollár’s research uses mathematical tools based on the field of graph theory—the study of relationships between objects (in terms of a “graph” made of “vertices” that are connected by “edges”). Researchers use the tools to produce stripped down descriptions of materials in terms of just nodes and their connections—like if there is a connection where electrons can hop between specific points in a material. These descriptions don’t care about the exact distance between atoms or molecules or their precise orientation relative to each other but only about what connections exist between points. This approach is useful for identifying overarching features of different types of materials and is especially helpful in sorting out which material properties are derived from the basic connections being investigated, as opposed to those related to the quirks of a material’s particular components.

This mathematical perspective allows researchers, like Kollár, to design abstract connections that should produce unique properties, but it isn’t easy to then translate the idea on a page into a material that has the exact desired connections. Going from pure math to a real material is much harder than the reverse process of stripping details away from a well-studied material; to do so requires the exhaustive work of recognizing and juggling all the idiosyncrasies of real chemistry. The details of all the possible choices of atoms and how they interact and arrange themselves makes matching the elegant mathematical design to a physical material prohibitively challenging.

So instead Kollár has focused on synthetic materials made of circuits of resonators and superconducting qubits that house traveling microwaves. These circuits easily recreate the flexible connections of graph-theoretic descriptions and can let the complex physics play out, revealing features that current simulations can’t calculate. Essentially, Kollár can custom design the desired connections in a synthetic material and see if the results are interesting instead of going through the hassle of searching for a chemical structure that naturally has the connections every time she wants to do a new experiment. She has even been able to create connections that simulate a negatively curved space—a space impossible to create in the lab because they have “more space” than our normal space.

The insights from these synthetic materials have the potential to reveal new material behaviors and to give researchers a better understanding of how to best use graph-theoretic techniques.

Besides making these synthetic materials she is also working to push the mathematical side of this approach, including identifying new mathematical rules that govern one dimensional graphs that might provide insights into codes used in quantum computing.

 “This Sloan Fellowship will give my group the opportunity to really dig in to optimizing how synthetic materials are made in order to make them as versatile a tool as possible,” Kollár says.

The Sloan fellowships are awarded to untenured teaching faculty who work in the fields of chemistry, computer science, Earth system science, economics, mathematics, neuroscience, physics, or a related field. Candidates are nominated by their colleagues, and then fellows are selected by an independent committee of researchers in the relevant field based on the candidates’ “independent research accomplishments, creativity, and potential to become leaders in the scientific community through their contributions to their field,” according to the Sloan website. Other UMD winners this year are Lei Chen of mathematics and Pratyush Tiwary of chemistry/biochemisty and IPST. 

“Today’s Sloan Research Fellows represent the scientific leaders of tomorrow,” says Adam F. Falk, president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. “As formidable young scholars, they are already shaping the research agenda within their respective fields—and their trailblazing won’t end here.”

 

Original story by Bailey Bedford: https://jqi.umd.edu/news/jqi-fellow-kollar-awarded-sloan-research-fellowship

Eno Elected AAAS Fellow

Sarah Eno has been named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Election is an honor bestowed upon AAAS members by their peers in recognition of distinguished efforts to advance science or its applications.

Eno’s research has focused on precision studies of the properties of the W boson, tests of QCD using Z bosons, and searches for exotic particles predicted by theories of physics beyond the Standard Model. Other efforts have included improvement and simulations of calorimeters to better study the momentums of jets and of missing transverse energy, and studies of radiation damage in plastic scintillators.

Eno was cited by the AAAS for leadership and research in both detector and analysis development, enabling the discovery of the top quark and Higgs boson, and the search for new phenomena at high energy colliders.

"I am truly humbled that AAAS has decided my accomplishments are worthy of this honor," Eno said. "My work was enabled by the wonderful collaborations in which I worked and my wonderful colleagues and students here at U. Maryland.”Sarah EnoSarah Eno

Eno received her bachelor's degree from Gettysburg College and her Ph.D. from the University of Rochester for work on the AMY experiment in Tsukuba, Japan. She then accepted a post-doctoral appointment at the University of Chicago Enrico Fermi Institute, working on the CDF experiment. In 1993, Dr. Eno joined the University of Maryland as an Assistant Professor, and moved to the DØ experiment at Fermilab.  The discovery of the top quark—announced by the CDF and DØ teams in 1995—was a milestone in particle physics. Eno’s precise measurement of the decay width and mass of the electroweak W boson helped predict the mass of the top quark.

Since 1999, Eno has worked on the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. In 2012, CERN announced experimental verification of the Higgs boson, and the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to François Englert and Peter W. Higgs, whose 1960s calculations determined that mass could not exist without the presence of such a particle.  Since 2020 she is also participating in the development of experiments for a potential new electron-positron collider at CERN (FCC-ee).

Eno’s accolades include selection as an Outstanding Junior Investigator by the U.S. Department of Energy in 1995 and an Alumni Achievement Award from Gettysburg College in 1999. She is a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) and a University of Maryland Distinguished Scholar-Teacher.  She has also been cited by the APS as an Outstanding Referee for exceptional work in the assessment of manuscripts.

“Sarah Eno is widely known as a leader in high energy physics, and this recognition from the AAAS befits her extensive career achievements,” said Steve Rolston, chair of the University of Maryland Department of Physics.

The honor of being elected a Fellow of AAAS began in 1874 and is acknowledged with a certificate and rosette, presented at the annual Fellows Forum at the AAAS Annual Meeting, scheduled this year for February 19. In addition to Eno, physics affiliate professor John B. Kogut, entomology chair Leslie Pick and environmental science and technology chair William Bowerman IV were elected.