Adil Hassam

Professor Emeritus Adil Hassam died on September 30, 2026. 

Hassam was a distinguished theoretical plasma physicist whose research advanced understanding of plasma confinement, magnetohydrodynamics, controlled thermonuclear fusion, and solar-terrestrial plasmas.

Adil Hassam was honored as the department's Outstanding Advisor in 2015.

He earned his B.S. and M.S. degrees in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his Ph.D. in astrophysical sciences from Princeton University.  He joined the University of Maryland in 1978 as a postdoc and rose through the ranks to full professor, while building a long and productive career as a researcher, mentor, and teacher. His work on magnetic and centrifugal confinement contributed to the broader effort to develop practical fusion energy, and he published extensively in plasma physics and related fields. A Fellow of the American Physical Society, Hassam was also recognized for his commitment to teaching and mentoring students. In 2015, he was named an outstanding graduate advisor in the Department of Physics. 

Hassam was a devoted and talented classroom teacher, consistently receiving superlative praise from students, e.g., Professor Hassam was a phenomenal professor, and he should teach all courses always; The teaching style was flawless; and I DONT KNOW HOW IT COULD GET BETTER.

Through his scholarship, collegiality, and dedication to physics, he made lasting contributions to the University of Maryland community and to the field of plasma physics.

Services will be held on October 7 in Carrollton, TX.

A team led by faculty at the Duke Quantum Center (DQC), in collaboration with researchers at the JQI, has used a small number of atoms to simulate an aspect of the extreme physics at play in modern particle colliders and in the chaotic environment that existed shortly after the big bang.

This approach, described in a paper published in the journal Nature Physics on Sept. 23, 2026, demonstrates the viability of trapped-ion quantum computers to begin probing fundamental questions about the universe. The experiment emulates a phenomenon called string breaking in which two connected fundamental building blocks of matter stretch apart, eventually creating so much energy that new particles “pop into existence” when the connection snaps.  

“Quantum computer simulations provide the best platform to investigate complex questions like matter formation, short of having witnessed the big bang itself,” says Christopher Monroe, a professor of electrical and computer engineering and physics at Duke and a College Park Professor of Physics at the University of Maryland (UMD), who led this research. “These findings signal a marked development in the quantum science field and open new avenues for us to understand string-breaking dynamics.”

This research was conducted by an international collaboration that also included researchers working at Oxford University, the California Institute of Technology, Cornell University and KU Leuven. The results join two similar published findings, led by other research teams in the field, which simulated the same phenomenon on different quantum computer platforms.

"This beautiful experiment builds on an earlier collaboration with Chris Monroe, in which we demonstrated the closely related phenomenon of confinement,” says JQI Fellow Alexey Gorshkov, who is also a theoretical physicist at the National Institute for Standards and Technology, a Fellow of the Joint Center for Quantum Information and Computer Science (QuICS) and a Senior Investigator at the National Science Foundation Quantum Leap Challenge Institute for Robust Quantum Simulation (RQS). “My graduate student Fangli Liu was the one who first got me interested in simulating high-energy physics with trapped-ion chains. Bringing together experimentalists and theorists with different areas of expertise has been incredibly rewarding."

The Building Blocks of Matter

The fundamental building blocks of matter, quarks, only exist when bound together inside particles such as protons and neutrons. They are about a billion times smaller than an atom and can’t currently be observed directly. Pairs of these tiny, charged particles are held together by a force that acts like a taut string; quarks want to stick together, and it takes quite a bit of energy to pull them apart. 

But once they are forced apart, the energy built up in their connection can be enough to create more charged particles. When this happens, the string snaps, leaving two or more pairs of particles rather than one. This process requires so much energy, however, that it only happens in extreme environments like the Large Hadron Collider or the aftermath of the big bang. 

In the new study, the team successfully observed analogous string-breaking dynamics on a trapped-ion quantum platform. Quantum simulators, with their high degree of controllability, can be programmed to recreate the real-world processes occurring at the atomic or even subatomic quantum scales.

“Working at the intersection of quantum simulation and high-energy physics is incredibly exciting,” said Arinjoy De, the first author on the paper and a former JQI and Duke graduate student who now works at QuEra Computing. “By simulating quark confinement and string-breaking phenomena in a controlled lab environment, we're opening up new pathways for experimental investigations into the behavior of matter at its most fundamental level.”

How the Simulation Worked

To perform the simulation, the team encoded a string-breaking model into a chain of 13 trapped ions. Using precisely controlled laser beams, researchers were able to tune the interactions among the ions. These interactions effectively control the energy to the system in a way that mimics the stretching and eventual breaking of a string. 

By preparing the system out of equilibrium and tracking its evolution over time, the researchers observed the emergence of effective charges and reconstructed the resulting string dynamics.

The team also simulated the process on a classical computer and confirmed that their experimental results were accurate. As the problem size grows in future experiments, however, only quantum computers will be able to solve these problems. 

The string-breaking process in other models was also recreated by teams led by Google and QuEra Computing on platforms built using superconducting circuits and neutral atoms, respectively, which each have their own advantages and challenges.

“These are the three platforms leading the charge in quantum computing, so it’s a nice benchmark and comparison for the quantum community,” Monroe says.

The authors say that the trapped-ion platform results mark an exciting step forward in building quantum simulations complex enough to exceed the capabilities of even the largest supercomputers, which will eventually allow researchers to explore the most fundamental questions of the universe, like matter evolution after the big bang. 

“As a physicist, it is incredibly exciting to investigate the conditions of the early universe in an atomic-level computing machine,” says Zohreh Davoudi, an associate professor of physics at UMD, who was part of the research team and is also a QuICS Fellow and a Senior Investigator at RQS. “Even the slightest insights from an out-of-equilibrium physics model will guide us in the future.”

This story was written by Andrew Tie and originally published by the Duke Pratt School of Engineering. It has been adapted here with minor changes.

This work was supported by the Department of Energy (DE-SC0020312, DE-SC0025341, DESC0019040, DE-SC0024220, DE-SC0020271), National Science Foundation (OMA-2120757), Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and Amazon Web Services.

University of Maryland Associate Professor of Physics Zohreh Davoudi is one of eight academics around the globe named a 2026 Schmidt Polymath. 

Founded in 2021, the Schmidt Sciences Polymath Program recognizes risky, cross-disciplinary work undertaken by researchers who push the boundaries of their fields to achieve scientific breakthroughs. Davoudi and the other awardees will each receive up to $2.5 million over five years to support their research. 

“The flexibility and freedom offered by this award is a dream come true,” Davoudi said. “It allows one to explore the wildest ideas and not be afraid of crossing traditional boundaries set within institutions and funding agencies.” 

To date, the Polymath award has been awarded to 43 researchers at 31 institutions across nine countries.Zohreh Davoudi. Credit: Riley Sims.

“We are elated to hear of this prestigious and well-deserved acknowledgment of Dr. Davoudi’s considerable talent,” said Kara Hoffman, chair of UMD’s Department of Physics. “We are proud of her accomplishments and look forward to hearing about the many findings that this generous award will enable.”

Since joining UMD in 2017, Davoudi has worked at the intersection of nuclear physics, particle physics, and computer science. Her research explores how to build the universe from the bottom up: physicists have a good description of nature’s basic ingredients, but translating those fundamental equations into concrete predictions—about the structure of an atomic nucleus or the matter inside a neutron star—is enormously difficult. 

“Most researchers specialize in one or a few tools to close that gap,” Davoudi said. “But my approach has always been that I would pick any means that would help me solve these problems.”

Davoudi began her career as a pure theorist, working through equations with analytical methods. Her results showed how real-world quantities—the fusion reactions that power the sun and a rare nuclear decay that would prove our current theory of physics incomplete—could be extracted from numerical calculations. Then, Davoudi moved on to results obtained from supercomputers, helping to produce some of the first calculations of nuclear interactions, reactions and structure derived from first principles. But she concluded that even these large, powerful computing machines would never be enough.

“No matter how large these computers are, eventually they will come to a point where they can’t solve certain problems for us,” Davoudi said. 

That realization led her to quantum computing. Unlike classical computers, which store information as simple on/off switches, quantum computers exploit the strange rules of quantum mechanics to process certain types of problems far more efficiently. Davoudi is now considered a pioneer in the subfield that applies quantum computing to nuclear and particle physics.

When physicists try to simulate how large numbers of subatomic particles interact and evolve, the amount of information involved grows faster than any classical computer can handle. That bottleneck affects research connected to some of the world's leading facilities, including the Large Hadron Collider and the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, where particles are smashed together at extreme energies to reveal the fundamental nature of matter. Davoudi's work is building the tools to run those simulations on quantum computers instead.

“I develop theoretical foundations, quantum algorithms, and experimental proposals for simulating quantum systems that increasingly resemble the subatomic systems we ultimately like to simulate. This endeavor has put me in the sphere of several amazing theoretical and experimental researchers from across physics, computer sciences, and engineering at the UMD and beyond, and turned my research into an exciting multidisciplinary journey,” Davoudi said.

For Davoudi, the Polymath award will help support her next ventures into uncharted territory. She plans to bring tools she has never used before—quantum sensing and artificial intelligence—into her research, and to apply her existing expertise to fields she has not yet explored, including cosmology and even bioscience.

Davoudi sees a hidden thread connecting some of the most extreme environments in science, from the universe in its earliest moments to collisions inside particle accelerators to even the chemistry of living cells. At each scale, quantum mechanics governs the underlying physics. But at some point, those quantum effects give way to the ordinary rules of classical physics. Davoudi believes that this transition holds untapped scientific potential.

“Can we trace the ‘quantumness’ in these systems? Can we leverage it to discover new phenomena and new applications?" Davoudi said. “New simulation and sensing strategies can reach far beyond what scientists consider possible today, and artificial intelligence could accelerate that process beyond our imagination. It’s exciting to think about these directions and discover both answers and new questions in the process.”

The Polymath award will allow Davoudi to build new collaborations with scientists in quantum sensing, artificial intelligence, cosmology and beyond, and to launch new activities alongside the talent this award will support.

“I’m not an expert in any of these fields. But I am an expert in nuclear and particle physics and its intersections with quantum information science. And I am passionate about seeking answers from many different angles. That’s what I bring to the table,” Davoudi said. “I am grateful to Schmidt Sciences for placing their trust in researchers like me to explore freely in pursuit of science.”

Original story by Georgia Jiang: University of Maryland Physicist Zohreh Davoudi Named 2026 Schmidt Polymath | College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences | University of Maryland

Distinguished University Professor James F. Drake has been selected for the John Adam Fleming Medal of the American Geophysical Union (AGU). The medal is awarded for original research and technical leadership in geomagnetism, atmospheric electricity, aeronomy, space physics, and/or related sciences. Drake was cited for pioneering theoretical investigations of space plasmas leading to discovery of fundamental properties and effects of magnetic reconnection.

James Drake

Drake received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles, and held appointments there before joining the University of Maryland as a postdoctoral associate in 1978. He became a full professor in 1990, jointly with the Institute for Physical Sciences and Technology. At UMD, he has served as co-director of the Joint Space-Science Institute, a research partnership between the UMD Astronomy and Physics departments and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. He was named a UMD Distinguished University Professor in 2014.  

Drake is a Fellow of the AGU and the American Physical Society, and in 2010, received the APS James Clerk Maxwell Prize for Plasma Physics for pioneering investigations of plasma instabilities in magnetically-confined, astrophysical and laser-driven plasmas; in particular, explication of the fundamental mechanism of fast reconnection of magnetic fields in plasmas; and leadership in promoting plasma science.

He has also received the Popular Writing Award of the Solar Physics Division of the American Astronomical Society.

During his career, Drake has investigated many aspects of plasma physics, including the solar corona, the earth's magnetosphere and ionosphere, magnetically confined plasma, and the interaction of intense lasers with plasma. He is now a co-Principal Investigator on the NASA Parker Solar Probe (PSP) mission, which in 2024 came within 10 solar radii of the sun. Data from the PSP will help scientists determine the mechanism that heats the solar corona and drives the solar wind. Drake is also active in the NASA Magnetospheric Multiscale Mission, which is a four-satellite effort launched in 2015 to explore the physics of magnetic reconnection at exceedingly small spatial scales.

The Fleming Medal honors geophysicist John Adam Fleming (1877–1956), who made notable contributions to the establishment of magnetic standards. It will be awarded in December at the AGU’s annual meeting in San Francisco, California.

If you use a leading quantum computer today, you probably have Hanhee Paik (M.S. ’05, Ph.D. ’07, physics) to thank. 

The University of Maryland alum helped pioneer the transmon, a superconducting qubit that many quantum computing companies use today. For the past two decades, she’s been a quantum computing physicist, working on quantum processors and systems development—including helping build IBM’s first 16-qubit quantum computer in 2017. Hanhee Paik (M.S. ’05, Ph.D. ’07, physics) helped pioneer the transmon qubit and built IBM’s first 16-qubit quantum computer. Photo courtesy of Hanhee Paik

Now, as IBM’s superconducting quantum computers have surpassed 100 qubits, Paik leads initiatives to help researchers find impactful ways to use them. In March 2025, she became a director of IBM’s Quantum Algorithm Centers and Academic Collaboration Program at IBM Research, where she works with universities and research institutions around the world to develop new ways to use quantum computers to solve challenging computational problems. These scientific algorithms and applications are already yielding breakthroughs that seemed impossible a decade ago. 

“The IBM Quantum team's mission is to build a useful quantum computer. This year, IBM announced three examples of quantum advantage we achieved with our partners, which show the current state-of-the-art quantum computing systems solving some scientific problems faster, cheaper or easier.” Paik said. “For certain scientific computations, quantum computers are already useful right now.” 

From superconductivity to quantum computers

When Paik first arrived at UMD from South Korea, she didn’t plan to study quantum physics. She came to research superconductivity with Physics Professors Emeriti Frederick Wellstood and Christopher Lobb.

Around that time, Wellstood and Lobb began researching how to use superconductors to build qubits—the basic unit of computation for quantum computers. Quantum computers process information using quantum properties—like the ability to exist in a “superposition” of multiple states, or “entanglement,” where two or more qubits become deeply interconnected so that each qubit state cannot be described independently—making them powerful.

Paik became interested in the work, and her dissertation at UMD tackled a central challenge in the field called decoherence—a process in which the outside environment causes qubits to lose their quantum properties. For quantum computers to be useful, coherence is key: The longer qubits can maintain their quantum states, the more time users have to perform calculations. Paik’s Ph.D. research at UMD developed new designs and materials to improve coherence time for superconducting qubits. 

She continued that work as a postdoctoral researcher at the Laboratory for Physical Sciences and Yale University. At Yale, she helped improve the coherence of the transmon qubit—which was a superconducting qubit with one of the longest coherence times at the time but still too short for useful quantum computation.

Paik’s research revealed that transmons decohered quickly because they lost energy to surfaces and interfaces. She engineered a new transmon qubit architecture that lessened this energy loss by tweaking where energy is stored and improved transmon coherence times 100-fold. That qubit architecture became—and remains—the standard for quantum computers built by major companies, including IBM.

“That was the jumping-out-of-the-box moment for quantum computing,” Paik said. “That design is still the canonical design that everyone uses for transmons today.” 

Building a ‘useful’ quantum computer at IBM 

Shortly after her postdoctoral appointment ended at Yale, Paik joined IBM in 2014 as a senior research scientist, where she continued transmon qubit research. She helped construct the company’s first 16-qubit computer in 2017. Named ibm_albatross, this was the first superconducting quantum processor of more than 10 qubits. 

As quantum computers grew larger and more powerful, Paik saw another challenge emerging: to discover algorithms for the use of quantum computers. 

“I’d been building quantum computers for almost my entire career, and now that they were becoming more and more useful for addressing scientific problems, I thought I’d really like to try using them,” Paik said. “Even if you build one of the best computers in the world, if no one knows how to use it—if you don’t have algorithms to use your computing system in the best way—it’s not very useful.”

So, Paik joined the office of then-vice president of IBM Quantum and quantum algorithms expert Jay Gambetta as chief of staff, supporting the technical and business side of his operations. She further developed her business skills as a technical business development executive in 2023 and then moved to Japan for an assignment to organize the IBM Quantum Japan team in 2024 before assuming her current role in Chicago.

Progress has surged since then. This year, researchers at Cleveland Clinic, IBM and RIKEN successfully modeled a 12,635-atom protein complex—the largest ever simulated by quantum computers—using a hybrid approach of integrated quantum and high-performance computing (HPC). Known as quantum-centric supercomputing, this new computing architecture allows each form of computing to perform the tasks it does best. The researchers say it’s a promising advancement that will allow breakthroughs in many practical problems such as drug discovery, and for Paik, it signals an exciting future integrating quantum and HPC. 

“That’s what’s most exciting to me at the moment,” Paik said. “It’s quantum-centric supercomputing and its potential to solve many of the most challenging computational problems that are currently intractable.” 

As Paik helps to advance IBM’s quantum technology and business toward that future, she’s tapping back into lessons from UMD. For her, the most cherished learnings from graduate school weren’t technical skills, but values. She credits her Ph.D. advisors for modeling persistence, thoroughness and sincerity—qualities she brings to her own work and mentorship. 

“I learned a lot from both Fred and Chris that helped me become a good scientist,” Paik said. “I am living their legacy, trying to represent what I learned from them.”

She also seeks to recreate the sense of community she experienced at UMD, where students could interact freely and casually with researchers at the forefront of physics. She still remembers Nobel Laureate William Phillips having lunch with students after Joint Quantum Institute seminars—making a connection that left a lasting impression.

“At UMD, people were so nice and supportive. They provided unwavering support to help young students unleash their full potential.” Paik said. “That sense of community is really important to experience at an early age—especially as a student. It sets your view on life. I treasure those values and want to live them out.”

Original story by Jason P. Dinh: UMD Alum Hanhee Paik Helps to Shape the Future of Quantum Computing at IBM | College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences | University of Maryland