President Obama presented the National Medal of Science to Professor Sylvester James "Jim" Gates Jr. on Friday, Feb. 1.

Gates, the John S. Toll Professor of Physics and Director of the Center for String & Particle Theory, is a UMD Distinguished Scholar-Teacher and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) and the Maryland State Board of Education. In addition to his seminal work in supersymmetry, supergravity and string theory, Professor Gates is a well-known advocate for science and science education here and abroad. He has been a frequent guest on NOVA productions on PBS and a featured presenter at the World Science Festivals. He has delivered the annual Karplus Lecture to the National Science Teachers Association and has received the Public Understanding of Science and Technology Award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

The National Medal--the nation's highest award in science--was established in 1959 and is administered by the National Science Foundation.

In addition, Professor Gates was recently named a University System of Maryland Regents Professor.

For more images from the Friday medal ceremony, see the links below.

Credit: Ryan K Morris/National Science & Technology Medals Foundation

Washington Examiner photos

Getty Images

CRI

Yahoo/Reuters

Physics World's compilation of the year's biggest discoveries included the work of several UMD physicists. The highest-rated discovery was that of the Higgs particle reported by the ATLAS and CMS collaborations at CERN. Professors Drew Baden, Sarah Eno, Nick Hadley and Andris Skuja are all collaborators on CMS, and have made significant contributions in the building, running, and analysis of the data. Professor Alberto Belloni will join the department from ATLAS in January, and will become the fifth faculty member on CMS, an international collaboration.

One of the next highest-rated discoveries was attributed to Leo Kouwenhoven and colleagues at Delft University for confirmation of the Majorana fermion, closely following a prediction by Sankar Das Sarma and UMD/JQI colleagues in 2010.

The BaBar experiment's discovery of time-reversal invariance in the quark sector also made the top-10 list. Professors Hassan Jawahery and Doug Roberts played key roles on BaBar, another large international experiment using electron-positron beams at SLAC. Jawahery served as the physics analysis coordinator and later as spokesperson (overall leader) of the experiment.

The Dec. 21 edition of Science named the Higgs boson as the year's top discovery and also cited the importance of the Majorana fermion. 

Topological insulators have recently emerged as a new and exciting form of quantum matter, in which topologies of the system (rather than symmetries) dictate the physical properties much like the situation found for the quantum Hall effect. To date, the majority of research has focused on non-interacting electron materials such as the bismuth-dichalcogenides, where the nearly free-electron model is sufficient to explain the non-trivial electronic structures that give rise to the observed topological states. An extension of this approach to strongly-correlated electron systems is challenging owing to the difficulty in determining the correct band structure by calculation, and remains as the next grand challenge in condensed matter physics.

A pioneering advance in this direction was made in 2009 by the team of Victor Galitski, who showed that a particularly simple type of heavy-electron material called a Kondo insulator, in which a filled band of heavy quasiparticles gives rise to a narrow band insulator, can host a three-dimensional topological insulating phase analogous to the non-interacting systems such as Bi2Se3. They developed a topological classification scheme for the emergent band structures of these systems, and predicted that at least one compound, samarium hexaboride, may be an ideal candidate.

Recently, this work and experiments performed in the Center for Nanophysics and Advanced Materials by the teams of Johnpierre Paglione and Richard Greene were highlighted in Nature [vol. 492, 165 (2012)] and Scientific American [December 12, 2012]. The experiments, using a technique called point-contact spectroscopy, explored the nature of the Kondo insulator SmB6 and found that the material indeed hosts an unusual metallic surface state as predicted by Dzero and co-workers, even though the bulk of the material becomes insulating upon cooling. Confirmed by other groups studying the properties of the surface state transport, this observation paves the way for the discovery of a new class of strongly-correlated topological insulator materials.

December 14, 2012

Assistant Professor Jon McKinney's article, Alignment of Magnetized Accretion Disks and Relativistic Jets with Spinning Black Holes (with Alexander Tchekhovskoy and Roger D. Blandford) was published in Science Express. 

November 15, 2012