News

Frustration crops up throughout nature when conflicting constraints on a physical system compete with one another. The way nature resolves these conflicts often leads to exotic phases of matter that are poorly understood. This week’s issue of Science Magazine features new results from the research group of Christopher Monroe at the JQI, where they explored how to frustrate a quantum magnet comprised of sixteen atomic ions – to date the largest ensemble of qubits to perform a simulation of quantum matter.

On April 3rd, students at Friends Community School in College Park had a special visitor. They learned about laser cooling from Nobel laureate, Phillips. In what has become his popular trademark, Phillips entertained with liquid nitrogen. The local paper, The Gazette took photos and covered the event. 

If you could peek at the inner workings of a computer processor you would see billions of transistors switching back and forth between two states. In optical communications, information from the switches can be encoded onto light, which then travels long distances through glass fiber. Researchers at the Joint Quantum Institute and the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering are working to harness the quantum nature of light and semiconductors to expand the capabilities of computers in remarkable ways.

In early March, the NIST chapter of Sigma Xi held the 20th annual postdoc poster presentation. JQI/NIST postdoc Matthew Beeler, who works for Ian Spielman, received first prize. He presented results on the spin Hall effect in a BEC. Charles Clark's post doc Ryan Wilson earned second prize in the same category: Physics, Engineering and Mathematics. His poster focused on dipolar interactions in BEC. For more information on the event visit Sigma Xi's site.