In Memoriam

Details

Published: Thursday, September 07 2023 09:24

It is with much sadness that the Department of Physics announces the passing of several members of our community.

• Donald Robert Benton (Ph.D., '85) died on May 5, 2023.
• Larry Lambert Burton (Ph.D., '77) died on March 23, 2023.
• Richard Durkin (M.S., '72) died on April 22, 2023. 
• Lewis Fulcher, a former postdoctoral associate, died on May 9, 2023.
• Professor Emeritus Charles William Misner died on July 24, 2023. A memorial service is planned for November 10 & 11.  More
• Sherman Poultney, a faculty member who worked on the Lunar Laser Ranging Reflector for Apollo 11, died on February 9, 2023.
• Bruce Rowley, a talented machinist in the Department of Physics from 2004 until his retirement in 2022,, died on July 19.
• Arthur W. Ruff (Ph.D., '64), died on April 24, 2023.
• Philip DiLavore III, a who served as an Assistant Professsor before moving to Indiana State University in 1971, on died July 16, 2023.
• Jonathan San Miguel (B.S., '17), died on April 16, 2023, in Stanford, CA.

Faculty, Staff, Student and Alumni Awards & Notes

Details

Published: Wednesday, September 06 2023 11:18

We proudly recognize members of our community who recently garnered major honors, began new positions and more.

Faculty and Staff 

• Maissam Barkeshli was quoted on in a Washington Post story on the purported new superconductor LK-99, and in Quanta magazine on quantum technology.
• Alessandro Buonanno was elected to the Italian National Academy of Sciences.
• Sankar Das Sarma was quoted in the Financial Times regarding the race to build a quantum computer and in The Washington Post about LK-99.
• Jim Drake was quoted in Quanta and the New York Times about solar physics. 
• Chaille DuBois joined the HR department.
• Cheryl Ekstrom retired from the purchasing department after 23 years of service.
• Manuel Franco Sevilla was interviewed about the LHCb on German national radio. 
• Jim Gates was quoted in the American Council of Trustees and Alumni newsletter. He wrote an essay on college admissions in Science magazine. 
• Daniel Gottesman was quoted in Quanta magazine.
• Rick Greene was quoted in Popular Science on room-temperature superconductors. He was interviewed by Preet Bahara on the Cafe podcast and on NPR. 
• Adil Hassam retired on Sept. 1.
• Wendell Hill was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
• Julia John joined the payroll department.
• Paul Julienne was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.
• Sumerum Lehri joined the HR office.
• Wolfgang Losert's work was featured in Maryland Today.
• John Mather was elected to the American Philosophical Society.
• Howard Milchberg was featured in Optics and Photonics News. 
• Grégory Moille discussed frequency combs in Interesting Engineering.
• Carmen Morrison joined the sponsored research department.
• Johnpierre Paglione was interviewed on room-temperature superconductors  on NPR.
• Sasha Philippov's work on neutron stars was written up in Physics.
• Bill Phillips appeared in Maryland Today.
• Ellen Williams was honored at the 2023 Maryland Research Excellence Celebration. Her work with the $3 million Grand Challenges Institutional Grant was featured in Maryland Today.
• Roald Sagdeev hosted a symposium on theFuture of Nuclear Deterrence and Arms Control.  Video of the event is available here. 
• Work by Steve Sclafani was featured in the New York Times.
• Ron Walsworth was quoted in PhysOrg.
• Nicole Yunger Halpern was quoted in Quanta  magazine and contributed to a Scientific American piece on surprising physics discoveries.

 Students

• Yuca Chen was a top presenter at the APS April Meeting.
• Joseph Durbak co-authored a paper on the brightest gamma-ray burst of all time.
• Fred Angelo Batan Garcia's work was published in Astrobites.
• Dmitri Krymski was a top presenter at the APS March Meeting.

 Alumni

• Kenneth Arnold (B.S., ’22) co-authored a paper on exoplanet GJ 1214b.
• Valerie Browning, a M.S. recipient, was named to the Board of Directors of the American Institute of Physics.
• Mirjam Cvetič (Ph.D., '84) was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. 
• Argen Gian Detoito (B.S., '23) was selected as a Senior Marshal at the May 2023 commencement.
• Chris Fleming (Ph.D., '11) is an Assistant Professor of Biology at the University of Central Florida.
• Ruth Kastner (M.S., '92) published a paper on entropic gravity. 
• Luis Nasser (Ph.D., 01) was promoted to the rank of full professor at Columbia College.
• David Stork (Ph.D., '84) published Pixels & paintings:  Foundations of computer-assisted connoisseurship.
• Gina Quan (Ph.D., '17) is an Assistant Professor at San Jose State University.
• Ana Maria Rey (Ph.D., '04) was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.
• Julia Ruth (B.S., '14) was featured in Maryland Today.
• John Silk, (B.S., '15; Ph.D., 2023, joined the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA) as a research staff member.
• Dimitrios Vassiliadis (Ph.D., '92) researches space weather at NOAA's National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service.
• Yong Zhao (Ph.D., '15) received the 2023 Guido Altarelli Award in theory from the CERN collaboration.

Department News

The department was ranked highly by US News.

The JQI released a new podcast.

Buonanno Elected to Italian National Academy of Sciences

Details

Published: Thursday, August 31 2023 02:46

Alessandra Buonanno has been elected a member of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, the Italian National Academy of Sciences. 

Buonanno is the director of the Astrophysical and Cosmological Relativity Department at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics  (Albert Einstein Institute) in Potsdam and a Research Professor at the University of Maryland.

Buonanno's research has spanned several topics in gravitational wave theory, data analysis and cosmology. She is a Principal Investigator of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, and her waveform modeling of cosmological events has been crucial in the experiment’s many successes. Her work has merited election to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and Leopoldina, the German National Academy of Sciences.

In 2018, Buonanno received the Leibniz Prize, Germany's prestigious research award. Other accolades include the Galileo Galilei Medal of the National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN), the Tomalla Prize, the Dirac Medal (with Thibault Damour, Frans Pretorius, and Saul Teukolsky) and the Balzan Prize (with Damour).

Alessandra Buonanno © A. Klaer

She is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the International Society of General Relativity and Gravitation and a recipient of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship and the Richard A. Ferrell Distinguished Faculty Fellowship.

Buonanno, Charlie Misner, Peter Shawhan and others detailed UMD's contributions to gravitational studies in a 2016 forum, A Celebration of Gravitational Waves. 

UMD Lab to Become Major Laser Research Center

Details

Published: Tuesday, August 08 2023 08:17

Led by Professor Howard Milchberg, the Lab for Intense Laser-Matter Interactions has been chosen as one of ten LaserNetUS nodes.  The lab will receive an annual award for three years to fund laser lab research staff, postdocs and graduate students.

LaserNetUS was established in 2018 by the US Department of Energy (DOE) and is funded through the DOE’s Office of Fusion Energy Sciences (FES).  The purpose of the network is to allow US and international researchers without access to high powered and unique lasers the ability to  do experiments in cooperation with the network’s facilities.  In return, this leads to the advancement of research and  stimulates collaboration between various research groups.Professor Milchberg's Laser Matter Interactions Group

This year, UMD is one of three new nodes.  As a collaborative node, Milchberg’s lab will accept proposals from other research groups and will have the opportunity to collaborate with those that best fit its scientific agenda.

Milchberg notes that ”this award recognizes our lab’s broad array of laser sources and techniques and its commitment to fundamental physics understanding and student education. This has been the recipe for many well-known Maryland innovations and discoveries” 

Read here for more information on LaserNetUS. 

Original story: https://ece.umd.edu/news/story/umd-lab-to-become-major-laser-research-center

Charles W. Misner, 1932 - 2023

Details

Published: Tuesday, July 25 2023 09:38

Charles W. Misner, an eminent theorist and co-author of the classic textbook Gravitation, died on July 24, 2023. He was 91.

Misner received a bachelor’s degree at the University of Notre Dame before his doctoral studies at Princeton University with John Archibald Wheeler.  Following conferral of his Ph.D. in 1957, he remained at Princeton. A Sloan Fellowship enabled him to study at Niels Bohr’s Institute for Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen, and while there, he met and fell in love with Susanne Kemp, a friend of the Bohr family.  John S. Toll, also in Denmark that spring, greeted the couple as they emerged from their wedding at the Copenhagen cathedral to convince them to move to UMD. Toll's powers of persuasion prevailed, and Misner served on the Maryland faculty from 1963 until his 2000 retirement. 

Misner enjoyed a distinguished career in general relativity, devising with Richard Arnowitt and Stanley Deser the ADM formalism, which earned them the American Physical Society Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics in 1994, and was commended by the Albert Einstein Society with its Einstein Medal in 2015. Misner was an elected Fellowand was an elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Physical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Royal Astronomical Society. 

He is also well-known as the co-author, with Wheeler and Nobel laureate Kip Thorne, of the acclaimed 1973 textbook, Gravitation. The authoritative opus, known universally as MTW, was so comprehensive and unique in its vivid pedagogical style that it has remained a valued resource despite subsequent developments, and was republished in 2017. Earlier this year, the International Society on General Relativity and Gravitation (ISGRG) celebrated the book’s 50th anniversary with an online forum; the milestone was also marked in Physics Today.

Following LIGO’s confirmation of Einstein’s theory of relativity, Misner contributed to UMD's popular Nov. 1, 2016 symposium, A Celebration of Gravitational Waves.  When Rainer Weiss, Kip Thorne and Barry Barish received the 2017 Nobel Prize for LIGO, Misner was quoted in Nature 's writeup.  His student Richard Isaacson (Ph.D., 1967), was noted as an "unsung hero" of LIGO, along with former UMD physicist Joe Weber and Alessandra Buonanno, in a separate article in Nature. 

The American Institute of Physics interviewed Misner for its oral history collection in 1989, 2001 and in 2020.

In 2018, Susanne Misner spotted a New York Times story announcing that a signed copy of Stephen Hawking's doctoral thesis had sold for $760,000. The Misners authorized the sale of their Hawking correspondence, yielding $260,000 to benefit the Joseph Weber Fund for Gravitational Physics.

More recently, the Misner family established the Charles W. Misner Endowed Lectureship in Gravitational Physics, which debuted in Fall 2022. 

The Charles W. Misner Award, recognizing outstanding Ph.D. thesis work in gravitation and cosmology by a UMD graduate student, was established in his honor.

Susanne Misner died in 2019; the couple is survived by four children and five grandchildren.  Please see this link for further information from the Misner family.  

John Wheeler, Kip Thorne and Charlie Misner.

Front row: Dieter Brill, Bei-Lok Hu, Charlie Misner, Ted Jacobson. Behind them (left to right) are postdoc Jonathan Simon (now a UMD ECE/Biology Professor) and graduate students Tom Shiokawa, Alpan Raval, Greg Stevens, Stephen Ramsey, Nicholas Phillips, Steven Corley, and Gungwon Kang.

Susanne Kemp and Charles Misner at their Copenhagen wedding, June 13, 1959.

Margrethe and Niels Bohr at the Kemp-Misner wedding.

Charlie and Susanne Misner at the physics memorial for John S. Toll.

 

Charlie Misner, John Wheeler, John Toll and Mary Ridgell at the 2001 renaming of the physics building for John Toll. 

David Fiske, Misner and Wheeler at the the 2001 renaming of the physics building for John Toll. 

Misner as rendered by his graduate student, C. V. Vishveshwara. 

Misner with his graduate student, C. V. Vishveshwara. 

One of many physics cartoons produced by “Vishu” Vishveshwara

In 1970, John Wheeler organized a conference in honor of mathematician W.K. Clifford--who first posited that matter is a form of spatial curvature---at the new Jadwin Hall at Princeton U.

Participants included Wheeler, Robert Dicke, Eugene Wigner, Stephen Hawking, Brandon Carter, Cecile DeWitt, Charles Misner, Freeman Dyson, Bryce DeWitt, James York, Arthur Wightman. John Klauder, Tulio Regge, Kip Thorne, James Peebles, Bei-Lok Hu, Dieter Brill, Bill Unruh, Karel Kuchař, Jeffrey Cohen, Brandon Godfrey, Claudio (Teitelboim) Bunster, Remo Ruffini, David Sharp and Nicola Cabibbo.

At the International Symposium on Directions in General Relativity, May, 1993, John Wheeler and Cécile DeWitt-Morette, in front, surround a photo of mathematician W.K. Clifford. Second row: Bei-Lok Hu, Kip Thorne, Dieter Brill, Karel Kuchař, Charles Misner, Bryce DeWitt and James W. York.  (The people and their relative positions in this photo form a subset of those in the previous photo of the 1970 Clifford Conference.)

At his retirement celebration, Misner enjoys remarks by Bei-Lok Hu. Also visible are Jean-Paul Richard and Michael Fisher.

 Front row: Tsvi Piran, Murray Cantor, Deiter Brill, Vince Moncrief

Second row: John Wheeler, Doug Eardley, Charlie Misner, Bei-Lok Hu

Third row: ?, Jeeva Anandan, Jimmy York, Frank Tipler 

Back row: ?, Nick Tsamis, Richard Woodard

Richard Arnowitt, Charlie Misner, Stanley Deser

C.W. Misner, J.A. Wheeler, K.S. Thorne

Dieter Brill, Charlie Misner, Birgit Brill, Francis Misner

Detail from group portrait at the 60th Birthday Symposium honoring Dieter Brill and Charlie Misner. Second row, center: Dennis Sciama, Charles Misner, Dieter Brill, Stanley Deser, ?, John Toll

Dieter Brill, Ted Jacobson, Betty Alexander, Bei-Lok Hu, Charlie Misner, Jonathan Simon

Charles Misner, Claudio Teitelboim (Bunster)

Bei-Lok Hu, Susanne Misner, Charlie Misner, Phil Johnson, Veronika Hubeny, ?, Jorma Louko

Charles Misner, ?, Leslie Fishbone

At the 2016  Celebration of Gravitational Waves: Jim Gates, Kip Thorne, Alessandra Buonanno, Charlie Misner, Peter Shawhan and Rai Weiss.

Charlie Misner at the March 2019 dedication of the Weber Garden outside the PSC.