People News

Lasers are often misunderstood, according to chemical physicist Yu Liu, one of JQI’s newest Fellows.

“People usually think of lasers as heating things up, but if you use the right frequency of lasers and target the right type of atoms, you can actually take energy away,” Liu says.

This story was originally posted by the UMD College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences and has been reposted here with permission.

Swarnav Banik’s (Ph.D. ’21, physics) parents were visiting from India when they saw a strange-looking car on a San Francisco street that stopped them in their tracks.

JQI Fellow Alexey Gorshkov is a finalist in the physical sciences and engineering category of the 2024 Blavatnik National Awards for Young Scientists.

Jason Youm, a high school student who performed summer research with JQI Fellow Alexey Gorshkov in 2023, placed in the top dozen competitors in the physics and astronomy category at the Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF).

JQI Fellow Alexey Gorshkov has won the 2024 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Photonics Society Quantum Electronics Award.

A team of JQI researchers and their colleagues have won in the quantum category of the UMD Invention of the Year Award. They are honored for developing a new method for counting particles of light—photons—without destroying them.

JQI alumnus Wes Campbell was elected vice chair of the American Physics Society (APS) Division of Atomic, Molecular & Optical Physics (DAMOP) executive committee.

Theoretical nuclear and particle physicists wield quantum field theory in their efforts to understand interactions between many particles or the behavior of particles with extremely large energies. This is no easy feat: At least theoretically, quantum field theory plays out in an infinite universe with particles constantly popping in and out of existence. Even the world’s biggest supercomputer would never be able to model it exactly. Fortunately, there are many computational tricks that can make the problem more tractable—like cutting up the infinite universe into a finite grid and taking judicious statistical samples instead of tracking every parameter of every particle—but they can only help so much. Over the past few years, a growing group of scientists has become wise to the potential of quantum computers to approach these calculations in a completely new way.

A big part of research is working with other scientists. As an undergraduate and JQI graduate student at the University of Maryland, Jacob Bringewatt has put in the work knocking on doors and connecting with professors, which has allowed him to explore a broad range of research projects and earned him accolades along the way.