Eno Elected to Leadership Line

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Published: Friday, November 10 2023 00:53

Sarah Eno has been elected to the leadership track of the American Physical Society Division of Particles and Fields (APS DPF). She will serve as vice-chair from 2024-26, followed by two years as division chair.Eno has worked on several collider experiments. In 1993, she joined UMD as an Assistant Professor, and began research at the DØ experiment at Fermilab.  The discovery of the top quark—announced by the CDF and DØ teams in 1995—was a milestone in particle physics. Eno’s precise measurement of the decay width and mass of the electroweak W boson helped predict the mass of the top quark. 

Sarah Eno

Since 1999, Eno has worked on the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. In 2012, CERN announced experimental verification of the Higgs boson, and the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to François Englert and Peter W. Higgs, whose 1960s calculations determined that mass could not exist without the presence of such a particle.  Since 2020 she has participated in the development of experiments for a potential new electron-positron collider at CERN (FCC-ee). She is also exploring improvement and simulations of calorimeters to better study the momentums of jets and of missing transverse energy, and studies of radiation damage in plastic scintillators.

Eno is a University of Maryland Distinguished ScholarTeacher and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Physical Society (APS).

Milchberg Receives APS Schawlow Prize

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Published: Wednesday, October 25 2023 05:33

Professor Howard Milchberg has been awarded the 2024 Arthur L. Schawlow Prize in Laser Science, presented by the American Physical Society (APS), for “pioneering contributions in the fields of plasma optics, guiding the ultra-intense laser beams, and developing compact, high-gradient laser-driven accelerators”. Howard Milchberg

Over the past year, Milchberg has had numerous research successes.  Recent results have included:

• Record all-optical laser-based acceleration of electrons to 5 billion electron volts, published in the September 2022 issue of Physical Review X.
• Demonstration of a continuously operating optical fiber made of thin air by creating an optical guiding method using auxiliary ultrashort laser pulses to sculpt fiber optic waveguides in the air itself.  This allows high-power laser beams to be guided without using common optical fibers made of strands of glass that can be damaged by high power beams.  This experiment was published in the April 2023 issue of Optica.
• Setting a record with a nearly 50-meter long air waveguide in an effort to use pulsed air waveguiding to temporarily transfigure thin air into a fiber optic cable, published in the Jan.  2023 issue of Physical Review X.
• Recognition for his Lab for Intense Laser-Matter Interactions by being chosen as one of ten LaserNetUS  nodes, providing funding for collaboration with US and international researchers

The APS Honors Program recognizes outstanding achievements in research, education, and public service.  The Arthur L. Schawlow Prize in Laser Science “recognizes contributions to basic research using lasers to advance our knowledge of the fundamental physical properties of materials and their interactions with light.”  Previous winners include College Park Professors Chris Monroe and Bill Phillips. 

Original story: https://ece.umd.edu/news/story/professor-milchberg-to-receive-aps-award

Pablo Jarillo-Herrero to Give Prange Prize Lecture on Oct. 24

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Published: Monday, October 09 2023 01:34

Pablo Jarillo-Herrero, the Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has been named the recipient of the Richard E. Prange Prize and Lectureship in Condensed Matter Theory and Related Areas for 2023. He will give his lecture, "The Magic of Moiré Quantum Matter," on Tues., Oct. 24 at 4 p.m. in room 1410 of the John S. Toll Physics Building. Refreshments will be served at 3:30 p.m. 

The Prange Prize, established by the UMD Department of Physics and Condensed Matter Theory Center (CMTC), honors the late Professor Richard E. Prange, whose distinguished professorial career at Maryland spanned four decades (1961-2000). The Prange Prize is made possible by a gift from Dr. Prange's wife, Dr. Madeleine Joullié, a professor of chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania.Pablo Jarillo-Herrero (courtesy of MIT)

Richard E. PrangeDr. Prange was a member of the Maryland condensed matter theory group for more than 40 years and was an affiliate of CMTC with its inception in 2002. He edited a highly-respected book on the quantum Hall effect and made important theoretical contributions to the subject. His interests extended into all aspects of theoretical physics, and continued after his retirement, recalled Sankar Das Sarma, who holds the Richard E. Prange Chair in Physics at UMD and is also a Distinguished University Professor and director of the CMTC.

While earning his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago under Nobelist Yoichiro Nambu, Prange also worked with Murray Gell-Mann and Marvin Goldberger. 

Jarillo-Herrero joined MIT in 2008, and has received an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, a David and Lucile Packard Fellowship, a DOE Early Career Award, a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, an ONR Young Investigator Award, a Moore Foundation Experimental Physics in Quantum Systems Investigator Award, the Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Physics Prize and the 2020 Wolf Prize in Physics. His work showing that slight rotations of adjacent layers of graphene allowed control of its electronic properties was named the Physics World 2018 Breakthrough of the Year. 

Jarillo-Herrero joins a prestigious list of Prange Prize recipients: Philip W. Anderson, Walter Kohn, Daniel Tsui, Andre Geim, David Gross, Klaus von Klitzing, Frank Wilczek, Juan Maldacena and Charles Kane.

In addition to the Tuesday lecture, Jarillo-Herrero will deliver the CMTC JLDS Seminar on Wednesday, October 25 at 10 a.m. in room 4402 of the Atlantic Building. 

Thomas Antonsen Honored by the American Physical Society

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Published: Tuesday, September 19 2023 12:54

Distinguished University Professor Thomas M. Antonsen will receive the American Physical Society’s (APS) 2023 James Clerk Maxwell Prize for Plasma Physics for “pioneering contributions in the theory of magnetized plasma stability, RF, current drive, laser-plasma interactions, and charged particle beam dynamics”.  He will be honored at the 65^th Annual Meeting of the APS Division of Plasma Physics in October.Thomas Antonsen

The James Clerk Maxwell Prize annually recognizes outstanding contributions to the field of plasma physics.  The prize is named after a nineteenth century Scottish physicist known for his work with electricity, magnetism and light.

Antonsen joined the department, then known as the Department of Electrical Engineering and Physics, in 1984.  He is highly recognized in his esearch fields of plasma theory, nonlinear dynamics and chaos, and currently holds appointments in Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), the Institute for Research in Electronics and Applied Physics (IREAP), Physics, and the Maryland Energy Innovation Institute.

In 2017, he was appointed University of Maryland Distinguished University Professor, the highest recognition for faculty members.  Other awards include the Clark School of Engineering Outstanding Research Award, the IEEE Plasma Science and Applications Award, the John R. Pierce Award for Excellence in Vacuum Electronics, and the IEEE Marie Sklodowska-Curie Award for contributions to plasma science. He is a fellow of IEEE and APS.

Antonsen will receive $10,000 and recognition at the 65th Annual Meeting of the APS Division of Plasma Physics this fall in Denver, Colorado. 

Previous UMD physicists who have won the Maxwell Prize include Hans R. Griem, Roald Sagdeev, James Drake, Phillip A. Sprangle and Ronald C. Davidson.

Jean-Paul Richard, 1936 - 2023

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Published: Tuesday, September 12 2023 11:07

Professor Emeritus Jean-Paul Richard, an experimentalist with numerous contributions to the understanding of gravity, died on September 6, 2023. He was 87.

A native of Québec City, Québec, Richard studied at the Université Laval before moving to France for his graduate work. Following doctoral studies in theoretical physics and physical sciences at the Université de Paris, Richard accepted a postdoctoral position at the University of Maryland in 1965. At that time, Joseph Weber was working to detect gravitational waves, which had been predicted by Albert Einstein but never confirmed.  

Following his postdoctoral appointment, Richard accepted a position as an Assistant Professor at UMD, where he would spend his entire career. Over the next three decades, he contributed to several developments, including Apollo 17’s  Lunar Surface Gravimeter.  

In addition, Richard worked to increase the sensitivity of Weber’s aluminum bars by developing a resonant capacitor transducer using field-effect transistors. He also developed a multimode detector achieving higher sensitivity over a wide band of frequencies, and then calculated improvements in the multimode detector by using an optical sensor.

Richard enjoyed visiting appointments at Rome’s La Sapienza and the Université Laval. After his retirement in 1995, he continued his work for three years as a UMD research scientist.

Though early UMD efforts never captured gravitational waves, scientists adapted and persisted. In late 2015, the LIGO experiment succeeded in detecting gravitational waves generated by the merger of two unimaginably distant black holes.

Reflecting on his work after the announcement, Richard said, “When I heard the LIGO news, I was shocked and stunned for a couple of days. It gave new value to my work and justified my efforts. That’s a very big thing."

Funeral arrangements are shown here: https://www.collinsfuneralhome.com/obituaries/Dr-Jean-Paul-Richard?obId=29100466#/obituaryInfo

John Giganti, Jean-Paul Richard and Jerry Larson with the lunar lander in 1972.

Richard Prange and Jean-Paul Richard.

Jean-Paul Richard, Chuan Liu, Richard Ferrell and Michael Fisher. 

Carroll Alley and Jean-Paul Richard.

Charlie Misner, Jean-Paul Richard and Bei-Lok Hu.

Jean-Paul Richard, Joseph Sucher and Jogesh Pati.