Assistant Professor Johnpierre Paglione has received the 2012 Richard A. Ferrell Distinguished Faculty Fellowship, which recognizes outstanding personal effort and expertise in physics as well as dedicated service to the UMD Department of Physics. The Fellowship, established in 2001, honors Dr. Richard A. Ferrell, a deeply-respected physicist who joined the University in 1953, served 40 years, and remained active in the department even after his retirement. Dr. Ferrell died in 2005 at his nearby University Park home.

Professor Paglione is a condensed matter experimentalist and a member of the Center for Nanophysics and Advanced Materials (CNAM). His research interests include cuprate and iron-based superconductivity and magnetism, quantum criticality and strongly correlated electron phenomena, and the new field of topological insulator research. He will give a physics colloquium on September 18 at 4 pm in room 1410 entitled Quantum Materials: From Superconductors to Insulators... and Back!

Professor Sarah Eno was noted in the September 2012 Washingtonian magazine, in a column called “Guest List – A monthly roundup of people we’d like to have over for drinks, food, and conversation.” Eno was first on the list, ahead of Robert Griffin III, the Redskins’ new quarterback. Eno was described as “part of a team of University of Maryland scientists working on the complicated machinery that recently discovered the Higgs boson.”

Dan Lathrop was selected as the recipient of the American Physical Society's 2012 Stanley Corrsin Award. The award was established to recognize and encourage a particularly influential contribution to fundamental fluid dynamics. 

Professor Lathrop was chosen for, "his striking observations of flow in a quantum fluid including detection of counter-flow that confirmed the two-fluid picture of quantum fluid, observation and characterization of reconnections of quantized vortices, and the discovery of an inverse-cube tail in the velocity distribution of superfluid turbulence."

Nicholas Hadley was elected to a third term as the Chair of the US CMS Collaboration Board. In this position, he will represent and lead the nearly 700 scientists, from 49 universities and national laboratories in the United States, who are members of the CMS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. The United States is the largest national group in the CMS collaboration. US groups have made significant contributions to nearly every aspect of the detector throughout all phases of the experiment including construction, installation and physics analysis.

The Large Hadron Collider at CERN smashes protons together at close to the speed of light with four times the energy of the most powerful accelerators built up to now. Some of the collision energy is turned into mass, creating new particles, which can be observed in the CMS particle detector. CMS data is analyzed by scientists around the world to build up a picture of what happened at the heart of the collision. This experiment will help us answer questions such as: "what is the Universe really made of and what forces act within it?" and "what gives everything substance?" Such research increases our basic understanding and may also spark new technologies.

Jake Taylor, Physics Adjunct Professor and JQI Fellow, has recently been nominated as a finalist for the 2012 Samuel J. Heyman Service to America Medal. There are a total of nine medals issued, and Taylor is one of three finalists for the Call to Service Medal. According to the Partnership for Public Service, this award is intended to “recognize a federal employee whose professional achievements reflect the important contributions that a new generation brings to public service.” The nomination specifically cites Taylor’s theoretical research efforts that relate to medical imaging and information transfer protocols. The Washington Post profiled Taylor as part of a series covering the nominees. Taylor works on a range of quantum information research projects and teaches atomic physics. The medal recipients will be announced on September 13, 2012.