UMD physicists pioneered development of observatory that has located new high-energy sources in the universe and provided more detail on known sources in first year of full operation.

Recent alumnus Geoffrey Ji was awarded an NSF Graduate Research Fellowhip, which recognizes outstanding graduate students in science, technology, engineering and matematics fields.

Sylvester James Gates pens op-ed Supporting science as a core MD subject.

The swirling field of a magnet—rendered visible by a sprinkling of iron filings—emerges from the microscopic behavior of atoms and their electrons. In permanent magnets, neighboring atoms align and lock into place to create inseparable north and south poles. For other materials, magnetism can be induced by a field strong enough to coax atoms into alignment.

In both cases, atoms are typically arranged in the rigid structure of a solid, glued into a grid and prevented from moving. But the team of JQI Fellow Ian Spielman has been studying the magnetic properties of systems whose tiny constituents are free to roam around—a phenomenon called “itinerant magnetism."

“When we think of magnets, we usually think of some lattice,” says graduate student Ana Valdés-Curiel. Now, in a new experiment, Valdés-Curiel and her colleagues have seen the signatures of itinerant magnetism arise in a cold cloud of rubidium atoms.

The team mapped out the magnetic properties of their atomic cloud, probing the transition between unmagnetized and magnetized phases. Using interfering lasers, the researchers dialed in magnetic fields and observed the atoms’ responses. The experiment, which was the first to directly observe magnetic properties that result from the particles’ motion, was reported March 30 in Nature Communications. Read More

Professor Steven Anlage of the Department of Physics has been selected as a University of Maryland Distinguished Scholar-Teacher. He is a member of the Center for Nanophysics and Advanced Materials and an affiliate of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department in the College of Engineering. He is scheduled to give a Distinguished Scholar-Teacher Lecture, When Waves Meet Chaos: A Clash of Paradigms, on Tuesday, November 29 at 4 p.m. in the PSC Lobby.

After receiving his Ph.D. in applied physics from Caltech in 1988, Prof. Anlage did postdoctoral work at Stanford University before joining UMD in 1990. He has received a National Science Foundation “Young Investigator” award, as well as the “Outstanding Mentor” award within this College. He founded the field of superconducting metamaterials, and has made several advances in microwave microscopy, chaos, exotic materials, superconductivity, and experimental quantum chaos. In one year, he co-authored three articles on three different topics (fundamental superconductivity, metamaterials, quantum chaos) in Physical Review Letters. He is co-author of Focusing an arbitrary RF pulse at a distance using time-reversal techniques, which won the 2013 Alan Berman Research Publication Award at the Naval Research Laboratory, along with a second paper which won the 2014 version of the award.

Prof. Anlage has mentored more than 30 undergraduate and nearly 40 graduate students, as well as 14 postdoctoral researchers. As an advisor for the Honors College Gemstone program, Prof. Anlage oversees a four-year project to create a new wireless charging technology based on the nonlinear electromagnetic time-reversal idea that he developed. A US patent related to this technology was submitted in early 2014.