News

JQI Fellow Mohammad Hafezi has been named a 2020 Simons Investigator in Physics by the New York-based Simons Foundation. Simons Investigator Awards in Mathematics, Physics, Astrophysics and Computer Science support outstanding theoretical scientists in their most productive years, when they are establishing creative new research directions, providing leadership to the field and effectively mentoring junior scientists.

JQI Fellow Vladimir Manucharyan has received a 2019 Google Faculty Research Award. It is the second consecutive year that Manucharyan, who is also an Associate Professor of Physics at UMD, has earned the honor. This year’s award will continue to support research by Manucharyan and his team into quantum computing hardware based on superconducting circuits. They are pursuing the development of special quantum bits—called fluxonium qubits—for use in a new generation of computers.

Researchers have been pushing the frontiers of the quantum world for over a century. And time after time, spin has been a rich source of new physics. Spin is essential when delving into virtually any topic governed by quantum mechanics, from superconductors to the Higgs Boson. In the past couple years, researchers have discovered materials in which electrons behave like their spin has been bumped up, from 1/2 to 3/2. JQI postdoctoral researcher Igor Boettcher explored the new behaviors these spins might produce in a recent paper featured on the cover of Physical Review Letters.

Topology—the mathematical study of shapes that describes how a donut differs from a donut hole—has turned out to be remarkably relevant to understanding our physical world. For decades, it’s captured the hearts and minds of physicists, who have spent that time uncovering just how deep the connection between topology and physics runs. Among many other things, they’ve unearthed a prediction, born of topology, for a new particle with promising applications to quantum computing. In this episode of Relatively Certain, Dina Genkina sits down with JQI Fellow Jay Sau, an associate professor of physics at UMD, and Johnpierre Paglione, a professor of physics at UMD and the director of the Quantum Materials Center. They take a trip back to the 1980s, when the story of topology in physics began, and arrive at a recent discovery by Paglione and his collaborators of a (possible) topological superconductor.