During the first weekend of October 2016, the University of Maryland Department of Physics and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) held the inaugural Conference for Undergraduate Underrepresented Minorities in Physics (CU²MiP), bringing students from several universities to this campus for networking, career advice and discussion of research opportunities. In 2014, UMD Department's Director of Education, Donna Hammer and NIST's Katharine Blodgett Gebbie and Angela Hight-Walker organized a very successful Mid-Atlantic Conference of Undergraduate Women in Physics, which inspired their vision to establish CU²MiP.

Attracting students to science, technology and mathematics (STEM) has emerged as one of the nation's leading educational priorities. Historically, physics has had one of the lowest levels of women and racial and ethnic minorities among all STEM fields. Research by the American Institute of Physics has shown that women and minorities are consistently underrepresented among those receiving physics bachelor's degrees, compared to their portions of college enrollments. And only about four percent of PhDs awarded in this country go to underrepresented minority students, i.e., African Americans, Hispanics and Native Americans.

On Friday, Oct. 7, the CU²MiP opened at NIST with a welcoming address by Nobel Laureate and UMD Distinguished University Professor Bill Phillips. Phillips gave an inspiring and engaging talk on having fun while pursuing a career in physics, but also spoke with sadness of Gebbie, the retired Director of NIST's Physical Measurement Lab who had greatly looked forward to meeting the students of CU²MiP. Dr. Gebbie died August 17 at the age of 84.

After a full afternoon of NIST lab tours, the conference attendees enjoyed dinner and talks by UMD Distinguished University Professor Jordan Goodman, NIST Director Dr. Willie E. May and UMBC Professor of Physics Anthony Johnson. Saturday's activities included a welcome by alumna Delilah Gates, '15, now a graduate student at Harvard,and a talk by mathematician and UMBC President Freeman A. Hrabowski III, which received a standing ovation. Interactions with representatives from the AIP, APS and OSA, NASA, NSBP, NSHP, and workshops on graduate school, research opportunities and career paths ensued. A poster session preceded dinner, and Regents Professor Jim Gates gave the evening address. The UMD chapter of the Society of Physics Students then sponsored a physics trivia night.

Sunday's agenda included a talk by Dr. Tabbetha Dobbins of Rowan University, a community building session and an address by department Chair Steve Rolston. Several UMD physicists participated in "Exploring Careers in Physics," which highlighted the many ways that the analytical skills, knowledge and technical expertise that accompany physics degrees can be put to use in academia, government and industry. UMD undergraduates Paula Rodriquez and Myles Poole offered closing remarks.

Participant enthusiasm seemed very high, according to Hammer. "We were extremely happy with the energy the students brought, and with the rapport that developed over the weekend," she said. "Our speakers and panelists were all so encouraging and helpful to this next generation of scientists." Hammer stated, "The extremely positive responses we received fromCU²MiP have already have us excitedly working on planning for next year."

A survey of the CU²MiP students returned highly-favorable reviews and comments:

What struck me most were the speakers. They were truly inspiring and motivating.

It was more insightful than I had expected. The guest speakers all shared information that was unknown to me and offered motivation to continue in my physics studies.

I am leaving with new friends, great connections and an overall newfound love and appreciation for physics and the sciences.

Please accept my condolences on the passing of Dr. Gebbie. She is still having a positive influence on science through persons like you who carry on her philosophies through these kids of activities.

I enjoyed meeting so many people who have experienced being a minority STEM student and were willing to share their unique insight into navigating the academic world and beyond.

Honestly I have never had more fun doing anything in my entire life.

Read about the 2021 conference here: https://umdphysics.umd.edu/about-us/news/department-news/1681-2021-cu2mip.html

More information on CU²MiP can be found here: http://www.physics.umd.edu/cumip/index.html

Credit: Foundation L'Oréal

Karina Jiménez-García, a former visiting graduate student who worked with JQI Fellow Ian Spielman, was one of 30 young women scientists to receive a 2016 L'Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science fellowship. She was selected from a pool of more than 1,000 applicants and received the award for her ongoing research on the quantum behavior of ultra-cold atoms.

"This is a recognition that I owe to all those that have guided and inspired me and those who have supported me throughout my professional career, especially my family," says Jiménez-García, who is currently a postdoctoral researchers at the Kastler Brossel Laboratory at the Collège de France in Paris. She plans to use the funds from the fellowship to build a handful of physics demonstrations that will appeal to young students and to fund travel to conferences in Mexico, where she hopes to start her own research group in the future.

The award, which launched in 2007, has given fellowships to more than 140 women in France who are either studying toward a Ph.D. in the life or physical sciences or working as postdoctoral researchers. The criteria for selection include a proven academic track record and the ability to inspire the next generation of scientists. For the first time since the fellowship launched, L'Oréal organized a public event, held on October 12, that included lectures and interviews with this year's winners.

While at JQI, Jiménez-García worked on creating synthetic electric and magnetic fields for ultra-cold clouds of atoms. In a series of papers, she and a team of experimental colleagues showed that lasers could coax atoms without an electric charge into behaving like charged particles in magnetic and electric fields. The work is still a fertile area of research for Spielman and could enrich the toolkit for atomic physicists interested in simulating other quantum systems with clouds of atoms.

This is part one of a two-part series on Weyl semimetals and Weyl fermions, newly discovered materials and particles that have drawn great interest from researchers at JQI and the Condensed Matter Theory Center at the University of Maryland. The first part focuses on the history and basic physics of these materials. Part two will focus on theoretical work at Maryland and will appear next week.

For decades, particle accelerators have grabbed headlines while smashing matter together at faster and faster speeds. But in recent years, alongside the progress in high-energy experiments, another realm of physics has been taking its own exciting strides forward.

That realm, which researchers call condensed matter physics, studies chunks of matter moving decidedly slower than the protons in the LHC. In fact, the materials under study—typically solids or liquids—are usually sitting still. That doesn't make them boring, though. Their calm appearance can often hide exotic physics that arises from their microscopic activity.

"In condensed matter physics, the energy scales are much lower," says Pallab Goswami, a postdoctoral researcher at JQI and the Condensed Matter Theory Center (CMTC) at the University of Maryland. "We want to go to lower energies and find new phenomena, which is exactly the opposite of what is done in particle physics."

Historically, that's been a fruitful approach. The field has explained the physics of semiconductors—like the silicon that makes computer chips—and many superconductors, which generate the large magnetic fields required for clinical MRI machines.

Over the past decade, that success has continued. In 2004, researchers at the University of Manchester in the UK discovered a way to make single-atom-thick sheets of carbon by sticking Scotch tape onto graphite and peeling it off. It was a shockingly low-tech way to make graphene, a material with stellar electrical properties and incredible strength, and it led quickly to a Nobel Prize in physics in 2010.

A few years later, researchers discovered topological insulators, materials that trap their internal electrons but let charges on the surface flow freely. It's a behavior that requires sophisticated math to explain—math that earned three researchers a share of the 2016 Nobel Prize in physics for theoretical discoveries that ultimately explain the physics of these and other materials.

In 2012, experimentalists studying the junction between a superconductor and a spotted evidence for Majorana fermions, particles that behave like uncharged electrons. Originally studied in the context of high-energy physics, these exotic particles never showed up in accelerators, but scientists at JQI predicted that they might make an appearance at much lower energies.

Last year, separate research groups at Princeton University, MIT and the Chinese Academy of Sciences discovered yet another exotic material—a Weyl semimetal—and with it yet another particle: the Weyl fermion. It brought an end to a decades-long search that began in the 1930s and earned acclaim as a top-10 discovery of the year, according to Physics World.

Like graphene, Weyl semimetals have appealing electrical properties and may one day make their way into electronic devices. But, perhaps more intriguingly for theorists, they also share some of the rich physics of topological insulators and have provoked a flurry new research. Scientists working with JQI Fellow Sankar Das Sarma, the Director of CMTC, have published 18 papers on the subject since 2014.

Das Sarma says that the progress in understanding solid state materials over the past decade has been astonishing, especially the discovery of phenomena researchers once thought were confined to high-energy physics. "It shows how clever nature is, as concepts and laws developed in one area of physics show up in a completely disparate area in unanticipated ways," he says.

An article next week will explore some of the work on Weyl materials at JQI and CMTC. This week's story will focus on the fundamental physics at play in these unusual materials.  

Take a closer look with part two of this series.

 Image credit: Nobelprize.org

A trio of researchers who laid the foundation for understanding numerous exotic phases of matter have split the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the prize "for theoretical discoveries of topological phase transitions and topological phases of matter" to three laureates: David Thouless of the University of Washington, Duncan Haldane of Princeton University and Michael Kosterlitz of Brown University.

The research behind the prize "illustrates, in a very nice way, the interplay between physics and mathematics," said Thors Hans Hansson, a physicist who introduced the mathematics behind the prize at the announcement ceremony using a cinnamon bun, a bagel and a pretzel.

Topology is the branch of mathematics that offers a coarse distinction between those three baked goods, often capturing differences by counting the number of holes that different objects have. In topology, a bagel and a pretzel are fundamentally different because there is no way to add more holes to a bagel without tearing the dough and reshaping it.

The application of topology to physics was a revelation in the late 1970s and 1980s. Many puzzling behaviors defied explanation until topology was considered. For example, experiments on thin materials subjected to low temperatures and enormous magnetic fields exhibited an odd behavior. Instead of their electrical current changing continuously as a magnetic field varied, it made discrete jumps. Now known as the quantum Hall effect, this behavior arose from the topological properties of electrons in the material. When confined to two dimensions and subjected to extreme conditions, the quantum behavior of electrons can get knotted up in topologically distinct ways. This realization explained where the jumps in current occurred and why they were stable even when samples were less than pristine.

Many researchers at JQI, CMTC and CNAM take advantage of the interplay between topology and physics, using it to guide light in novel ways or study how to build a quantum computer. They've even extended some of the early work by Thouless to create a quantum pump.

Stay tuned for updates as we continue to follow this year's Nobel Prize in Physics.  Please visit JQI to follow the updates.

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