Aravind Chandrasekaran, a chemistry Ph.D. student in the NCI-UMD Partnership program, published a first-author paper "Remarkable structural transformations of actin bundles are driven by their initial polarity, motor activity, crosslinking, and filament treadmilling" with co-authors Arpita Upadhyaya (Physics/IPST) and Garegin Papoian (Chemistry and Biochemistry/IPST). The paper was published on July 9, 2019, in the journal PLoS Computational Biology.
Professor Wolfgang Losert was appointed interim director of IPST, effective July 1, 2019.
Professor Daniel Lathrop (IPST / Physics) has been named a 2019 Distinguished Scholar-Teacher.
Samuel M. Brewer (Ph.D. '12, Chemical Physics) was featured in Physics World on June 6, 2019. A member of NIST’s Ion Storage Group, Brewer built a quantum-logic clock using a positive ion of aluminum-27 as its timekeeper. The group, located in Boulder, Colorado, conducts experiments on atomic ions that are confined in electromagnetic traps and laser-cooled, in some cases, to the ground state of motion.
A very rare piece of atomic history—a mysterious block of uranium metal—landed on the desk of Tim Koeth in 2013.
So marks the beginning of a years-long investigation into the many secrets of the two-inch square cube, and the intriguing note that came with it: Taken from the reactor that Hitler tried to build. Gift of Ninninger.
“I was stunned. I didn’t have words,” recalls Koeth, an associate research professor with the University of Maryland’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering and Institute for Research in Electronics and Applied Physics.
Chemical Physics Ph.D. Student Brandon Wilfong co-authored the paper "Magnetic order effects on the electronic structure of KMMnS2(M=Cu,Li) with the ThCr2Si2-type structure" with Efrain Rodriguez, associate professor of chemistry and biochemistry. The paper was published in the journal Physical Review Materials on April 30, 2019.
The College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences has always been driven by fearless science. Reaching back more than a half-century, the college highlighted some of the most exciting scientific discoveries made by its faculty members. One of those discoveries was Distinguished University Professor James Yorke's (Math/Physics/IPST) and Edward Ott (ECE/Physics/IREAP) co-authored paper in 1990 that described a method for stabilizing a chaotic system. By adjusting a carefully chosen parameter, the researchers showed that they could prod the system toward a desired outcome.
The College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences has always been driven by fearless science. Reaching back more than a half-century, the college highlighted some of the most exciting scientific discoveries made by its faculty members. One of those discoveries was from Russell Dickerson, currently a professor of atmospheric and oceanic science at UMD.
Researchers at the University of Maryland have created a heat-to-electricity device that runs on ions that could someday harness the body’s heat to provide energy.
University of Maryland researchers led by Howard Milchberg developed a powerful new method to detect radioactive material. By using an infrared laser beam to induce a phenomenon known as an electron avalanche breakdown near the material, the new technique is able to detect shielded material from a distance. The method improves upon current technologies that require close proximity to the radioactive material.