NSF Renews Maryland-Led Quantum Simulation Institute

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Category: Department News

Published: Tuesday, August 25 2026 15:17

A quantum chip developed in the laboratory of University of Maryland physicist Alicia Kollár, a senior investigator with the NSF Quantum Leap Challenge Institute for Robust Quantum Simulation (NSF RQS). The institute’s renewed award will support the next phase of research in robust quantum simulation. Photo by John T. Consoli / University of MarylandThe National Science Foundation has renewed the University of Maryland-led NSF Quantum Leap Challenge Institute for Robust Quantum Simulation (RQS) with a five-year award expected to total $36.5 million, effective Sept. 1, launching a new phase of quantum simulation research.

“This renewed support from the National Science Foundation reflects our long-term commitment to advancing quantum computing to take on society’s grand challenges and spark a new era of scientific, technological and economic development,” said UMD President Darryll J. Pines. “Our researchers in quantum simulation are an important part of the vibrant quantum ecosystem we've built, helping establish our campus and the surrounding region as the Capital of Quantum and making our Discovery District a dynamic hub where research, industry and community combine for real-world impact on the public good.”

Established in 2021 with a $25 million NSF award, RQS has developed novel ways to verify quantum systems, reduce errors and demonstrate increasingly sophisticated quantum simulations while building a collaborative community of scientists, engineers, educators and students.

The new award expands the institute’s scientific agenda, sustains education and workforce development programs, strengthens partnerships across academia, federal laboratories and industry, and positions RQS to pursue the next generation of challenges in quantum simulation. Harvard University also will join the RQS consortium, expanding the collaboration among UMD, Duke University, Princeton University, Yale University and researchers from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

RQS is part of the NSF Quantum Leap Challenge Institutes (QLCI) program, a network of interdisciplinary research centers created to accelerate advances in quantum information science through collaborative research, education and workforce development.

During its first funding cycle, RQS researchers advanced the science of robust quantum simulation through breakthroughs in fault-tolerant quantum simulation with neutral atoms, new methods for verifying quantum advantage on analog quantum simulators, erasure detection in Rydberg atoms, and quantum simulations of gauge theories and quantum materials. Together, these advances brought robust quantum simulation closer to becoming a practical tool for scientific discovery.

That progress was matched by the institute’s growth as a national research enterprise. Researchers produced more than 600 papers, generating nearly 17,000 citations, while building collaborations across universities, industry and national laboratories. Along the way, RQS trained more than 400 graduate students and postdoctoral researchers while developing programs designed to strengthen the nation's future quantum workforce.

Quantum simulation is widely viewed as one of the first practical applications of quantum computing. Rather than trying to make every type of computation faster, quantum simulators are designed to model extraordinarily complex quantum systems that overwhelm even today’s most powerful conventional computers.

The challenge is making those simulations trustworthy. Today’s quantum hardware is inherently fragile, with environmental disturbances introducing errors that can undermine calculations. RQS was established to develop ways to verify quantum simulations, mitigate those errors and, in some cases, even harness them, ultimately making quantum simulation a more reliable research tool.

“NSF’s investment in the QLCIs established hubs for research on critical topics in quantum information science at a time when the field is rapidly advancing,” said Andrew Childs, a UMD professor of computer science who directed RQS during its first five years. “I'm grateful for all the collaborations it enabled and proud of the progress RQS researchers made in just five short years.”

The institute’s next phase also brings new leadership.

Childs will step down as director after guiding the institute through its formative years. Mohammad Hafezi, a UMD Minta Martin Professor with joint appointments in physics and electrical and computer engineering, will become director. Michael Gullans, a physicist at NIST and an adjunct assistant professor in physics and the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS), will serve as deputy director.

“Our institute’s first five years helped establish the scientific foundation for robust quantum simulation,” Hafezi said. “This renewal allows us to tackle increasingly complex scientific problems while advancing quantum technologies capable of answering fundamental questions about nature.”

Under the new award, researchers will focus on three research themes: interacting fermion simulation, which seeks to model the particles that make up matter; fermion-boson simulation, which examines how matter particles interact with force-carrying particles in complex quantum systems; and dissipative quantum simulation, which studies quantum systems interacting with their environments instead of treating environmental effects solely as unwanted noise. Together, the new themes reflect a shift toward what institute leaders call “quantum simulation engineering”—developing quantum technologies that are increasingly scalable and capable of addressing important scientific problems.

RQS benefits from technical and administrative support provided by UMIACS, which helps coordinate research activities across the institute's university and federal partners, Hafezi said.

The institute also will expand its educational mission alongside its research portfolio.

During its first funding cycle, RQS helped launch the University of Maryland’s quantum science and engineering minor, supported K–12 teacher professional development workshops that reached 75 educators, and developed innovative quantum activity toolkits used by 100 teachers to introduce more than 2,000 middle and high school students to concepts like superposition and measurement.

The institute also established an international QSim conference series that attracted more than 600 attendees and launched the Quantum Leap Career Nexus, which connects students with more than 50 companies, government laboratories and universities through career fairs and networking opportunities.

Gretchen Campbell, associate vice president for quantum research and education at UMD, will lead the institute's education and workforce development efforts moving forward.

“Preparing the future quantum workforce means creating opportunities at every stage—from K–12 classrooms to graduate education and professional careers,” Campbell said. “By connecting students, educators and researchers across that entire pipeline, we can help ensure the talent needed to advance quantum science and technology is ready when the next breakthroughs arrive.”

The renewed award will build on those efforts through additional teacher development workshops, public outreach, K–12 quantum education programs, research seminars and summer schools while creating new opportunities for students and postdoctoral researchers to prepare for careers throughout the quantum workforce.

“We are at the cusp of determining exactly what quantum computers can and cannot do in the near future,” Hafezi said. “Realizing that potential will require vibrant partnerships among universities, federal laboratories and private industry, and we're grateful for this renewed support to help lead that effort.”

Advancing Nuclear Safety, From UMD’s Reactor to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission

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Category: Department News

Published: Tuesday, August 18 2026 01:34

A glimpse at Mary Keen’s resume might suggest that she always wanted to work in nuclear energy—but that’s far from the case. 

UMD junior physics major Mary Keen is a summer intern at the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Photo courtesy of Mary Keen.

The junior physics major is president of the University of Maryland’s chapter of the American Nuclear Society and took a course designed to train students to operate UMD’s nuclear reactor. This summer as an intern at the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) headquarters in Rockville, Maryland, she’s working on licensing for nuclear waste storage and transportation. 

But Keen wasn’t always on this path. When she first came to UMD, she was unsure of her career trajectory. She chose to major in physics—despite having never taken a physics class in high school—because it offered a wide range of career possibilities. But it didn’t take long for her to find her way. UMD junior physics major Mary Keen is a summer intern at the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Photo courtesy of Mary Keen.

“I've become so passionate about nuclear energy,” Keen said. “Going into college with an open mind and being okay with whatever comes your way has been so fun.”

Keen’s path to a career in nuclear energy started when she joined UMD’s chapter of the American Nuclear Society during her first week as a freshman. Vaguely familiar with nuclear science from her high school chemistry class, she joined the club in an effort to make friends. Unexpectedly, she fell in love with the topic and joined the group’s executive board. 

As part of the club’s leadership team, Keen connected with the director of UMD’s nuclear reactor and enrolled in the introductory course for the reactor's operator training program. Located in the Chemical and Nuclear Engineering Building, the reactor is used for coursework, radiation experiments and neutron imaging. For Keen, the reactor provides a training ground to learn how to safely operate nuclear machinery. 

“Even though my parents, Ann Keen (B.S. '00, microbiology) and Edward Keen (B.S. '00, microbiology; B.A. '00, history), and grandparents went to UMD, none of us knew there was a reactor on campus,” she said. “For our reactor, there is a checklist with over 100 steps to make sure that all of the systems are functioning correctly.”

Mary Keen and other UMD researchers presented their work at the International Association for Probabilistic Safety Assessment and Management’s conference in Pittsburgh this summer. Photo courtesy of Mary Keen

Keen also conducts nuclear safety research with Civil and Environmental Engineering Associate Professor Michelle Bensi, who previously worked for the NRC and contributed to the agency's response to the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi reactor accidents. Working with Bensi and UMD Radiation Facilities Director Amber Johnson, Keen studies safety culture at research reactors, where she identifies errors that operators may be at risk for. She develops training modules that help reactor staff recognize risks before they become problems. 

Keen presented this work at the International Association for Probabilistic Safety Assessment and Management’s conference in Pittsburgh this summer, and her findings will be published in the conference proceedings. 

Now, as an intern at the NRC, Keen works in a licensing branch focused on the storage and transportation of spent nuclear fuel. Surprisingly, she said, her favorite part of the job doesn’t require getting close and personal with nuclear reactors at all. 

"I've absolutely fallen in love with making handbooks," Keen said, describing the internal guides she writes to help colleagues navigate agency databases and systems. "I remember I was about to go to sleep, and my coworker messaged me and said, 'Hey, I'm having a lot of trouble finding a document. Can you tell me how to use our search database?' So when I got to work the next morning, I whipped up a handbook and sent it to him."

Keen is still deciding whether she wants to work in regulation, research or industry in the future. But, whichever path she chooses, she’s moving forward with an open mind—just as she did at UMD. 

“Stepping out of your comfort zone is what is going to prepare you for anything in the future, and it’s not so scary once you learn that people are there for you,” Keen said. “I’ve had such wonderful people behind me at UMD. I’ve grown so much, and I don’t think I would trade that for anything.”

Original story by Jason P. Dinh: https://cmns.umd.edu/news-events/news/mary-keen-nuclear-safety-nrc-internship

Chasing Neutrinos at the ‘End of the World’

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Category: Department News

Published: Thursday, August 06 2026 01:34

It took one week, five flights and a slow ride on a six-wheeled bus for Rachel Procter-Murphy to arrive at her dream destination: the South Pole.

Rachel Procter-Murphy in Antarctica assisting with an installation at the IceCube observatory. Photo courtesy of same.

Last fall, the University of Maryland physics Ph.D. student went to Antarctica for two months in search of neutrinos—super-abundant but hard-to-detect subatomic particles created by violent events like exploding stars and radioactive decay. She was most excited to be in the presence of IceCube, a neutrino observatory outfitted with thousands of optical sensors suspended deep within the ice and spanning 35.3 billion cubic feet (about the volume of the Empire State Building 946 times over).

“It was an incredible opportunity to work with technology that very few people get to experience,” Procter-Murphy said. “I felt like I’d won the lottery.”

Pinpointing the invisible

Procter-Murphy’s Ph.D. research focuses not just on finding neutrinos in space but also figuring out where they’re coming from. 

“Trying to pinpoint things that are virtually invisible has its challenges,” she noted. 

Neutrinos have little mass, no electrical charge and don’t interact with much in the universe—they aren’t bent by magnetic fields or interruptedRachel Procter-Murphy in Antarctica assisting with an installation at the IceCube observatory. Photo courtesy of same. by dust clouds—so they streak through the Earth (and our bodies) in a straight line, mostly unnoticed. Despite their abundance, scientists can only detect them on the rare occasion that they interact with something—like ice.

“The South Pole is a great place to detect neutrinos because the ice target is so big and the ice is so clear, dark and mostly stable,” Procter-Murphy explained. When a rare neutrino collides with an atom in the ice, “it creates charged particles that emit a faint blue glow known as Cherenkov radiation. That light is what IceCube’s sensors detect.”

But neutrinos aren’t the only bits from afar being blasted out of the sky.

“Cosmic rays interact with the atmosphere and produce a lot of particles that also interact with the detector,” Procter-Murphy said. “And they send thousands per second, while the astrophysical neutrinos only occur around once every two weeks. So, there’s a lot of background noise that we’re trying to mitigate.”

Parsing through those mixed signals, Procter-Murphy worked with IceCube data to search for the particles' origins by scouring  “catalogs of astrophysical sources,” enabling her to narrow down what might be producing these neutrinos—an effort that helps serve an even more ambitious aim. 

“Neutrinos aren’t going to cure cancer or solve hunger, but there’s value in adding detail to the big picture of how the universe works,” she said. “Understanding these major forces could help explain the existence of stars and planets and even the reason living things like us are made of matter.”Drilling into the ice to install a new string of neutrino sensors at the IceCube observatory. Photo courtesy of Rachel Procter-Murphy.

Hands-on education

Procter-Murphy’s main goal while at the South Pole was to help install an upgrade to IceCube. The observatory is made up of a hexagonal lattice of more than 85 cables or “strings,” each equipped with 60 digital optical modules (DOMs) that are suspended in the ice at depths between 4,760 and 8,200 feet. A rush of water kept hot by massive car-wash heaters lets installers drill down into the ice and unspool the DOM-laden strings into place. The ice then refreezes around the instruments, becoming part of the observatory.

“We installed five new strings, which had me at times standing over a huge hole in a glacier, with space heaters around me and cold air constantly blowing in my face from the hole as I’m monitoring these giant cables and tapping away on an iPad—it was a bit surreal,” she recalled. “Not your typical graduate school experience.”

But as noted by her advisor, Physics Professor and Chair Kara Hoffman, Procter-Murphy is not your typical graduate student.

“Rachel isn’t afraid to pursue what she wants,” Hoffman said. “Beds at the Pole are limited, with many of them occupied by the essential personnel who keep the station running and operate the heavy construction machinery. There's a lot of competition for the slots designated for scientists."

To get one of those slots, "she was a great advocate for herself, did the training and rose to the necessary level to be a good colleague on the ice,” Hoffman said. "What that means is being willing and able to do everything from scrub toilets to survey, drill and do high-level data analysis. Rachel stepped up and people praised her for filling so many gaps. Not everyone could have done what she did.”

Eyes on the skies

Working on IceCube was something Procter-Murphy feels she was destined to do.

“As a kid, I wanted to be an astronaut,” she said. “I was obsessed with space. I wanted to know about black holes, how things behave deep in the universe, science-y things like that.”

So, she zeroed in on physics, with astrophysics as her dream career.

“When I first interviewed at UMD, I remember Professor Hoffman saying she felt that students did their best work on things they were passionate about,” Procter-Murphy said. “For me, that meant trying to get to the Pole.”

As that trip became a reality, Procter-Murphy faced a slew of medical tests to ensure she could handle the difficult conditions, then the grueling days of travel ending in a mild sense of panic as she struggled to carry her own bag in the thin air at 10,000 feet. 

But once she acclimated to the conditions, Procter-Murphy dove into her work and thrived. 

“The two-month experience made me a more confident, capable person,” she said. “And I was surprised how much I enjoyed the installation. Now I can see adding an engineering aspect to whatever I do next.”

Warm memories 

Rachel Procter-Murphy leaps for joy at the South Pole. Photo courtesy of same.

Rachel Procter-Murphy leaps for joy at the South Pole. Photo courtesy of same.Procter-Murphy credits much of her Antarctic success to the people around her. 

“I was part of such a supportive group who thought I had good ideas and was worth listening to,” she said. “That helped me to grow and changed how I saw myself.” 

Among her most memorable moments: working with IceCube for the first time, scribbling her own name in the logbook signed by the original observatory installers and sledding down a giant glacier.

Oh, and standing at the end of the world.

“The end of the world is what people call the place beyond the research station and defunct buildings, where snow management ends,” she explained. “It feels like the edge of nothingness, just flat ice and open space under this eerie glow as far as you can see. It’s a view I’ll never forget.”

Researchers Unlock High-Res View of 2D Materials by Doing a Microscopic Twist

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Category: Research News

Published: Thursday, August 06 2026 01:34

By rapidly twisting a microscopically small tip back and forth, researchers at the University of Maryland (UMD) have unlocked a new way to detect subtle changes on the surface of a material flexing in response to infrared light.

In a paper published Aug. 5, 2026 in the journal Nature Communications, the researchers describe a new way to take high-resolution images that they call infrared torsional force microscopy, or TFM-IR for short. It allows them to measure the surface of a material with near-nanometer precision as it stretches and warps in response to infrared light—invisible light readily absorbed by many kinds of chemical bonds that causes them to vibrate. It’s the first technique that can measure both the vertical and horizontal vibrations induced by light with such high precision.Caption: A schematic of a novel infrared torsional force microscopy (TFM-IR) experiment conducted at the University of Maryland. A material sample (located on the dark gray disc) is illuminated with pulses from an infrared laser. A microscopic tip, twisted rapidly back and forth on a long arm, scans the surface of the material to sense its response to the light. A second laser is bounced off the arm to measure small changes to its twisting motion, allowing researchers to capture a detailed image of the sample's surface. (Schematic courtesy of the authors.)

“We have overcome a long-standing limitation in optical imaging,” says Min Ouyang, a professor of physics at UMD and a member of the Quantum Materials Center and the Maryland NanoCenter who led the new project. “Modern quantum materials derive many remarkable properties from variation that happens over distances of only a few nanometers, or even less. Conventional optical microscopes cannot really resolve this.”

The method Ouyang and his colleagues developed builds on atomic force microscopy (AFM), which was first developed in the 1980s and has matured into a standard technique for measuring the surfaces of material samples with extreme precision. Unlike traditional microscopes, AFM works more like your fingertips than your eyes. Instead of creating an image by collecting light with a lens, AFM drags a tiny tip across a material to feel the forces from its bumps and ridges. The technique can spot features that are smaller than a nanometer and, under the right conditions, can even resolve individual atoms.

By itself, AFM only sees the topography of a surface: It can sense that it’s higher over here and lower over there, but it doesn’t provide any details about the chemical composition of a sample. To learn about the makeup of a material, researchers often excite vibrations in a sample with infrared light and use the AFM tip to sense how the surface changes. Because chemical bonds respond in predictable ways to infrared light, the combination of AFM and infrared light can identify the signatures of particular molecules, either to verify the composition of a sample or to detect the presence of unwanted contaminants.

“If you shine some light on your sample, you're going to get some very slight thermal expansion,” says Yonatan Gazit, a graduate student in physics at UMD who is also the lead author of the new paper. “AFM is essentially measuring that thermal expansion to understand how well your sample is absorbing or interacting with the light.”

Modern AFM devices feature a sharp tip suspended above a sample on the underside of a skinny arm. Electronics rapidly drive the arm up and down, which gently taps the tip against the sample at a regular rhythm. The tapping helps the tip avoid getting stuck on a ridge, which would potentially damage material being studied, and enhances the sensitivity to infrared vibrations by closely matching their frequency. As the tip traverses the surface, the rhythmic tapping is altered as the material flexes and pushes against it. Researchers measure these subtle changes in tapping frequency by bouncing laser light off the top of the vibrating arm to monitor its motion.

The tapping technique is excellent for making sensitive measurements of height, but it doesn’t do a good job sensing how a material expands or contracts horizontally. In a paper published in 2024 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team from Stanford University and their colleagues showed that twisting the AFM tip at a regular frequency instead of tapping it could measure previously undetectable variations along the surface of a double-decker stack of graphene, formed from two stacked layers of carbon atoms each arranged in a honeycomb pattern of repeating hexagons. They named their technique torsional force microscopy (TFM).

Caption: Two torsional force microscopy (TFM) images of bilayer graphene. On the left, standard TFM captures the material's signature honeycomb lattice. On the right, the new method (TFM-IR) captures much more detail about how the chemistry of the surface responds to infrared light. (Images courtesy of the authors.)Inspired by this result, Gazit, Ouyang and their colleagues designed an experiment that combined infrared illumination with the twisting technique. As the tip twists back and forth, pulses from an infrared laser periodically wash over a small sample of a material. Some energy from each pulse gets absorbed by the material, causing it to swell and vibrate. Choosing the frequency of the pulses—that is, how many pulses arrive at the sample per second— enables the tip to pick out either the vertical changes or the horizontal changes, similar to how a strobe light can selectively pick out or freeze certain kinds of motion.

As a proof of concept, the researchers tested the new technique by studying the surface of a small piece of mica, a shiny and flaky mineral used in manufacturing everything from drywall to tires to fireproof material for industrial ovens. They chose mica both because it’s already well-understood and because the chemical bonds that hold it together point along different directions, making it a good candidate for measuring both the vertical and horizontal vibrations induced by infrared light.

The team showed that they could detect four vibration patterns in mica and demonstrated that they could distinguish the horizontal and vertical movement by using different infrared laser pulse rates. They zeroed in on a small bump—a mica nanobubble on the surface just a few nanometers tall—and carefully dragged the tip from the center of the bump to its edge. They compared the results of their measurements with simulations of the horizontal and vertical vibrations expected from the way the bubble strained and bulged, and they found that the locations of the strongest horizontal and vertical responses to infrared light lined up between theory and experiment.

The team next turned their attention toward a double layer of graphene, the same material studied in the paper that first introduced the torsional technique. On its own, graphene has intrigued scientists for more than two decades because of its unique electrical and mechanical properties. When it’s stacked into two layers, with one layer rotated by a small amount, it gets even more interesting. The two layers form what’s called a moiré material, and in 2018, researchers found that a very particular angle turned a moiré stacking of graphene into a perfect electrical conductor—a quantum effect that made the material a superconductor.

Researchers remained in the dark about the microscopic origins of the effect. Because a moiré material is only a couple of atoms thick, the tiny changes in the lattice that give rise to its remarkable properties cannot be revealed by simply scanning its height. The torsional trick introduced in 2024 pointed toward a new way to image these atomically thin materials.

In the new paper, the team examined a sample comprising two layers of graphene stacked together at a small angle. They compared a standard TFM image of the sample with an image taken using their TFM-IR approach—both taken of the same exact sample at the exact same spot. The standard TFM image clearly showed the material’s signature lattice of hexagons, but the TFM-IR image revealed a wealth of additional details. Instead of merely showing the shape of the lattice, TFM-IR showed for the first time how different chemical bonds in a single hexagon—including bonds within a single sheet of graphene and bonds between the two sheets—react to infrared light, revealing a unique vibrational fingerprint of the underlying material. Understanding this fingerprint and the way that it changes when the stacking angle changes could prove crucial to gaining a better understanding of moiré materials and their properties.

“Our technique combines three capabilities that are rarely available in a single measurement,” Ouyang says. “First, it brings optical imaging and spectroscopy to the nanoscale, providing spatial resolution down to nearly one nanometer. Second, it can distinguish directional responses within a material, allowing us to uncover anisotropic properties that conventional techniques cannot resolve, Third, it provides each material’s unique spectroscopic fingerprint. In other words, our technique doesn’t just show what a material looks like; it also identifies what it is and reveals the hidden physical processes that govern its behavior by mapping how it responds to light with nanometer-scale precision.”

Ouyang and the team hope that the technique will be a key tool in characterizing and even designing materials going forward, and they emphasize that it has the added benefit of working at room temperature. In particular, TFM-IR might be useful for semiconductor companies, who are on the hunt for techniques to spot defects in their chips. The authors say that a technique capable of mapping the mechanical signatures of local chemistry could guide the development of new advanced manufacturing processes and might even help researchers optimize next-generation nanoscale devices, including quantum sensors and photonic quantum computers.

Story by Chris Cesare

In addition to Ouyang and Gazit, the paper had three other authors: Son T. Le, an associate research scientist at the Laboratory for Physical Sciences (LPS) and in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UMD; Aubrey T. Hanbicki, a research physicist at LPS; and Adam L. Friedman, a physicist and technical director at LPS.