Professor Bill Dorland will give his Distinguished Scholar-Teacher Lecture, The End of the Oil Economy, on November 16, 2010. The Distinguished Scholar-Teacher Program, established in 1978, honors a small number of faculty members each year who have demonstrated notable success in  both scholarship and teaching. By honoring the Distinguished-Scholar Teacher with this prestigious award, we reaffirm our commitment to excellence in teaching and scholarship.

The End of the Oil Economy
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
4:00 p.m.-5:00 p.m.
1412 Physics Building

Joint Quantum Institute (JQI) scientists have won a highly sought-after MURI award from the U.S. Department of Defense -- one of 32 projects selected for funding in the FY 2010 nationwide competition. The Pentagon will provide a total of $227 million over five years to awardees in the annual Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) program, whose winners were chosen from 152 proposals evaluated by expert merit-review panels.Read More

An article in The New York Times, on July 13, mentions Professor Ted Jacobson's thermodynamic derivation of Einstein's gravitational field equations.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/13/science/13gravity.html?_r=2&scp=1&sq=Jacobson&st=cse

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN has begun 18 to 24 months of running at a 7-TeV center-of-mass energy—more than three times that achieved at the Fermilab collider. Before they can start to look for signals of new physics, however, the four LHC experiments, ATLAS, CMS, ALICE, and LHCb, must understand the huge spectrum of background events.Read More

Using a unique hybrid nanostructure, University of Maryland researchers have shown a new type of light-matter interaction and also demonstrated the first full quantum control of qubit spin within very tiny colloidal nanostructures (a few nanometers), thus taking a key step forward in efforts to create a quantum computer.

Published in the July 1 issue of Nature, their research builds on work by the same Maryland research team published in March in the journal Science (3-26-10). According to the authors and outside experts, the new findings further advance the promise these new nanostructures hold for quantum computing and for new, more efficient, energy generation technologies (such as photovoltaic cells), as well as for other technologies that are based on light-matter interactions like biomarkers. Read More