Awards

Gates to Receive National Medal of Science

University of Maryland Professor of Physics Sylvester James "Jim" Gates Jr. will receive the nation's highest award in science, it was announced on December 21, 2012. Gates, the John S. Toll Professor of Physics, is Director of the Center for String and Particle Theory.
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UMD Physics Efforts Cited Among 2012's Most Important

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-position beams at SLAC. Jawahery served as the physics analysis coordinator and later as spokesperson (overall leader) of the experiment.

JQI and CNAM Researchers Uncover New Exotic Insulator

Topological insulators have recently emerged as a new and exciting form of quantum matter, in which topologies of the system (rather than symmetries) dictate the physical properties much like the situation found for the quantum Hall effect. To date, the majority of research has focused on non-interacting electron materials such as the bismuth-dichalcogenides, where the nearly free-electron model is sufficient to explain the non-trivial electronic structures that give rise to the observed topological states. An extension of this approach to strongly-correlated electron systems is challenging owing to the difficulty in determining the correct band structure by calculation, and remains as the next grand challenge in condensed matter physics.Read more