People News

Physics professor and JQI Fellow Fred Wellstood has been appointed the newest UMD Co-Director of JQI. He assumed the role on March 1.

"Fred has played a major role in the JQI since its founding," says Gretchen Campbell, the current NIST Co-Director of JQI. "Most recently, his tireless efforts helped to design and ultimately build the new Physical Sciences Center at Maryland that many JQI labs now call home. I look forward to working with him to carefully steward JQI’s future."

If the looming holiday lull leaves you yearning for news from the quantum world, JQI has you covered. Below we present an overivew of our major research and outreach activities from the past year, which marked JQI’s tenth anniversary.

For the third year running, JQI Fellow and Distinguished University Professor of Physics Sankar Das Sarma has been identified as a Highly Cited Researcher. The annual distinction, previously compiled by Thomson Reuters IP & Science and now assembled by Clarivate Analytics, honors scientists who publish extensively and whose citation counts rank in the top 1 percent in a given year and field.

From credit card numbers to bank account information, we transmit sensitive digital information over the internet every day. Since the 1990s, though, researchers have known that quantum computers threaten to disrupt the security of these transactions.

That’s because quantum physics predicts that these computers could do some calculations far faster than their conventional counterparts. This would let a quantum computer crack a common internet security system called public key cryptography.