- Research News
Researchers Imagine Novel Quantum Foundations for Gravity
Questioning assumptions and imagining new explanations for familiar phenomena are often necessary steps on the way to scientific progress. For example, humanity’s understanding of gravity has been overturned multiple times. For ages, people assumed heavier objects always fall quicker than lighter objects. Eventually, Galileo… Read More - Research News
Researchers Spy Finish Line in Race for Majorana Qubits
Our computer age is built on a foundation of semiconductors. As researchers and engineers look toward a new generation of computers that harness quantum physics, they are exploring various foundations for the burgeoning technology. Almost every computer on earth, from a pocket calculator to… Read More - Research News
Superconductivity’s Halo: Physicists Map Rare High-field Phase
A puzzling form of superconductivity that arises only under strong magnetic fields has been mapped and explained by a research team of UMD, NIST and Rice University including professor of physics and astronomy at Rice University. Their findings, published in Science July 31, detail how uranium… Read More - Research News
A Cosmic Photographer: Decades of Work to Get the Perfect Shot
John Mather, a College Park Professor of Physics at the University of Maryland and a senior astrophysicist at NASA, has made a career of looking to the heavens. He has led projects that have revealed invisible stories written across the sky and helped us… Read More - Research News
New Protocol Demonstrates and Verifies Quantum Speedups in a Jiffy
While breakthrough results over the past few years have garnered headlines proclaiming the dawn of quantum supremacy, they have also masked a nagging problem that researchers have been staring at for decades: Demonstrating the advantages of a quantum computer is only half the battle;… Read More - Research News
Work on 2D Magnets Featured in Nature Physics Journal
University of Maryland Professor Cheng Gong (ECE), along with his postdocs Dr. Ti Xie, Dr. Jierui Liang and collaborators in Georgetown University (Professor Kai Liu group), UC Berkeley (Professor Ziqiang Qiu), University of Tennessee, Knoxville (Professor David Mandrus group) and UMD Physics (Professor Victor M. Yakovenko), have made… Read More - Research News
NASA’s Parker Solar Probe Reveals a Key Particle Accelerator Near the Sun
Flying closer to the sun than any spacecraft before it, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe uncovered a new source of energetic particles near Earth’s star, according to a new study co-authored by University of Maryland researchers. Published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters on May 29, 2025,… Read More - Research News
Time Crystal Research Enters a New Phase
Our world only exists thanks to the diverse properties of the many materials that make it up. The differences between all those materials result from more than just which atoms and molecules form them. A material’s properties also depend on how those basic building… Read More - Research News
Mysteriously Mundane Turbulence Revealed in 2D Superfluid
Despite existing everywhere, the quantum world is a foreign place where many of the rules of daily life don’t apply. Quantum objects jump through solid walls; quantum entanglement connects the fates of particles no matter how far they are separated; and quantum objects may… Read More
Department News
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Summer at Summit Station For most graduate students, research trips primarily mean conferences. For Aishwarya Vijai, it meant a month at Summit Station, Greenland, deep inside the Arctic Circle. Summit Station is located near the apex of the Greenland ice sheet at an elevation of ~10,000 feet above sea… Read More -
Jacob "Bob" Dorfman, 1937-2025 Professor Emeritus Jacob Robert Dorfman died on August 27, 2025. A native of Pittsburgh, Dorfman grew up in Baltimore and received his bachelor’s degree and doctorate at Johns Hopkins University. After three years of post-doctoral research at the Rockefeller University, he was appointed a UMD… Read More -
Solving a Decades-long Solar Flare Mystery For almost half a century, scientists have been scratching their heads over one of the strangest and most inexplicable phenomena to occur on the sun. During certain explosive events like solar flares, helium-3 (an extremely rare isotope normally found in tiny quantities) suddenly becomes dramatically… Read More -
Physicist Brings High Energy to UMD With Laser-Made Plasmas Will Fox credits his early research experiences with introducing him to the power of plasma, a state of matter that could overhaul the energy sector and demystify astrophysical phenomena like cosmic rays and solar flares. As an undergraduate researcher at Princeton University, Fox joined the… Read More
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