News

  • Georgetown team's work on world's most powerful quantum simulator appears in Nature

    A Georgetown team led by Prof. James Freericks, postdoctoral fellow Joseph Wang, and undergraduate REU student Adam Keith (NC State) provided theory and computational work to help understand a quantum simulator built at NIST in Boulder, CO, that approaches having the memory of one Googol bits (10100 bits). The work was published in the April 26, 2012 issue of Nature, one of the most prestigious general science journals.

  • Physics graduate student awarded ARCS fellowship

    Marguerite Brown, a second-year physics Ph.D. student, has been named a 2012-13 ARCS Fellow. The fellowship will support her research in the Blair lab on liquid-crystal formation. The mission of the ARCS Foundation is to advance science and technology in the US by awarding fellowships and scholarships to outstanding students in science and engineering.

  • Physics Ph.D. wins Glassman award

    Dr. Michael Helle, who received his Physics Ph.D. from Georgetown in 2011, has been announced as the winner of the 2012 Harold N. Glassman Dissertation Award in the Sciences. This award is given by the Georgetown Graduate School of Arts and Sciences to honor distinguished dissertations. Mike completed his Ph.D. work under the direction of Professor Ed Van Keuren and Dr. Antonio Ting at the Naval Research Lab in Washington, DC, where most of his research was carried out.

  • Public Lecture: "The Physics Of Cooking"

    image_preview_0.jpeg Do you want to understand how (and why) food foams are made or why the elasticity of steak matters? Why do some chefs use liquid nitrogen (at about -320 degrees F) to freeze ingredients? Have you ever wondered about the secrets behind the wild creations at Chef Jose Andres' world famous DC based Minibar? Have you ever heard of Soft Condensed Matter Physics? Want to learn more is the science behind these pioneering approaches to taste and presentation?

  • Senior thesis leads to scientific publication

    Recent Georgetown Physics graduate Mark Jreissaty (A.B. 2011) has turned his award-winning Senior Thesis into a scientific publication in the prestigious American Physical Society journal Physical Review A. Working with Prof. Marcos Rigol, a graduate student, and a post-doc, Mark studied how bosonic Mott insulators in optical lattices expand when a confining potential is turned off. In addition to advancing the understanding of these intriguing systems, the work provides the basis for a novel type of atom laser.

  • Georgetown physicists help demonstrate photon coalescence from distinct sources

    The development of practical devices for quantum computation will likely require interconnecting different types of subcomponents. Single photons are a promising means for this interconnection, but photons from different components need to be made indistinguishable in order to be able to carry out the computations.

  • The Eighth Mid-Atlantic Soft Matter workshop (MASM8)

    The eighth installment of the Mid-Atlantic Soft Matter workshop (MASM8) will be held at the NIST Center for Neutron Research (NCNR) on the 9th of December from 8:50am - 5:50 pm. To learn more about the workshop and to attend, you can go to the event website. This workshop is being sponsored by the Institute for Soft Matter Synthesis and Metrology and NIST.

  • Georgetown physicists discover highly sought for quantum liquid

    For nearly 70 years, physicists have speculated whether quantum fluctuations in two- or three-dimensional spin or boson systems can destabilize ordered phases. The resulting phase would then be a "quantum liquid". As emphasized in a Viewpoint by the journal Physics, postdoctoral fellow Christopher Varney and Prof. Marcos Rigol were part of a team that presented the first convincing example of a gapless quantum spin liquid in a realistic model in two dimensions.

  • Professor Dzakpasu named Engelhard Fellow

    The Department of Physics is pleased to announce that Rhonda Dzakpasu has been accepted as a Fall 2011 Fellow of the Engelhard Project for Connecting Life and Learning, which is housed in Georgetown’s Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship. Each semester, the Engelhard Project invites faculty fellows to consider ways that they might make meaningful connections between the academic content of a course and a health or wellness topic relevant to students' lives.

  • Georgetown team involved in scale-up of analog quantum computers toward measuring quantum critical points

    Prof. Jim Freericks and Postdoctoral Fellow Joseph Wang are part of a multidisciplinary team that has recently demonstrated the onset of a quantum phase transition in a quantum simulator made from up to nine trapped ions. The experimental team, led by the group of Chris Monroe at the University of Maryland and the Joint Quantum Institute, performed simulations of the transverse field Ising model on 2 to 9 trapped ion systems. The Georgetown team involved in theory and computation to help understand the experimental results.