ITAMP News
ITAMP has a funded program of summer fellowships for students and faculty from under-represented academic institutions. We will double our effort in the coming year to recruit more students and faculty advisors from HBCU and other minority-serving colleges.
ITAMP Fellow Nicole Yunger Halpern published a feature about her research in Scientific American this May. Yunger Halpern and colleagues re-envision 19th-century thermodynamics with 21st-century information theory. They use the combination as a new lens through which to view atomic, molecular, and optical physics; chemistry; condensed matter; high-energy physics; and biophysics. Yunger Halpern has dubbed this research program "quantum steampunk," after the steampunk movement that blends Victorian settings with futuristic technologies in art, film, and literature. The article has gained press in Popular Mechanics, Nature, the Fortune "Data Sheet" (April 22, 2020), and Wikipedia.
Rivka Bekenstein and colleagues new research on quantum metasurfaces appears in Nature Physics: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-020-0845-5
See You Next Year!
Phosphorus-calcium-oxygen clusters in the brain might contain 'quantum bits' for information processing, suggesting a novel contribution to cognition. Read about this new work by Nicole here:
https://www.journals.elsevier.com/annals-of-physics/highlighted-article/...
AMO physics and ITAMP lost a great friend in Anthony Starace last Thursday. We at ITAMP are saddened with the news. He served on the ITAMP advisory board and participated in its workshops and winter schools.
ITAMP postdocs Bihui Zhu and Rivka Bekenstein participated in “2019 Rising Stars in Physics Workshop” hosted by the Physics department at Stanford, which aimed to bring the next generation of physics academic leaders together for scientific discussions and informal sessions on navigating the early stages of the academic career. The two ITAMP post-docs were chosen to participate in the workshop out of more than 100 applicants.
We’re elated to announce that Nicole Yunger-Halpern has won the 2019 Ilya Prigogine Prize for Thermodynamics. She gave a talk on May 23 in Barcelona.
Great work, Nicole.
Follow this news here:
http://quantum-thermodynamics.unibs.it/PrigoginePrize/PrigoginePrize.htm.
Nicol’s thesis is at https://thesis.library.caltech.edu/10942/.
