News

Scientists from the UChicago and Purdue University, including Professor of Chemistry David Mazziotti, collaborated on a new technique to construct a unique “fingerprint” of the noise on a quantum computer as it is seen by a program run on the computer. This approach, they say, shows promise for mitigating the noise problem—as well as suggesting ways that users could actually turn noise to their advantage.

Two PSD faculty members are among the nine UChicago faculty named 2021 fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Prof. Ed Blucher is a particle physicist and Prof. and Liew Family Chair of Computer Science Mike Franklin is an authority on computation and data science.

Soft matter physics research in granular matter clusters that assemble and diassemble will be present by sixth-year physics student, Melody Lim, and research scientist, Baudouin Saintvyes, both of Jaeger lab, at the APS 2022 Meeting taking place in downtown Chicago, March 14-18.

The Association for Computing Machinery, the world's largest and most prestigious society of computing professionals, elected UChicago CS Professor Ben Y. Zhao as a fellow in the organization’s 2021 class.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists announced on Jan. 20 that the hands of the Doomsday Clock—which resides on campus and was started by members of the Manhattan Project—remain at 100 seconds to midnight—the closest it has ever been to apocalypse. The Bulletin cited disinformation, global security threats including ‘nuclear saber rattling,’ lack of actionable climate policies, disruptive technology and insufficient worldwide COVID-19 response.

The work of computer scientists Bill Fefferman and Zachary Remscrim is discussed, as theories change regarding how hard it is to make intermediate measurements to quantify the complexity of quantum algorithms.

PSD's January spotlight is Judy Garza, Manager of the Department of Mathematics. Judy has been with the University of Chicago for 33 years. Read our interview with Judy.

Sophie Veys, a 4th-year computer science major working with Asst. Prof. Blase Ur’s SUPERgroup, received one of four Outstanding Undergraduate Research Awards from the Computing Research Association (CRA). Two additional undergraduates, Shriya Bansal and Shicheng Liu, received honorable mentions.

An award-winning collaboration between computer scientists and physicists at the University of Chicago broke through one of the key obstacles for large-scale quantum computing by figuring out how to move their control signals “inside the fridge.”

Prof. Emeritus Dietrich Müller, a renowned experimental physicist at the University of Chicago who spent half a century building instruments to study energetic particles from space called cosmic rays, died Dec. 22 at the age of 85.

Aided by sophisticated computational tools, the MICCoM team led by Prof. Giulia Galli reaped a harvest of pivotal discoveries that should pave the way for new quantum devices, like greatly improved control over the formation of vacancies in silicon carbide used for realizing qubits in quantum devices.

Astronomers including Asst. Prof. Alex Ji are one step closer to revealing dark matter enveloping our Milky Way galaxy, thanks to a new map of twelve streams of stars orbiting within our galactic halo. Using doppler calculations, the scientists measured the speeds of stars and their chemical compositions, telling us where they were born.

Professor Cheng Chin of the Department of Physics, the Enrico Fermi Institute, and the James Franck Institute has received the ’21–’22 Marian and Stuart Rice Research Award, a Divisional honor that provides $100,000 for intellectually exciting and innovative research ventures that enable new research directions. Professor Chin is a pioneer in using ultracold atoms to study the quantum phenomena that underlie the behavior of other particles in the universe.

Professor Hsiao-Wen Chen and Professor Emeritus Richard Kron in the University of Chicago Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics have been named 2022 American Astronomical Society Fellows.

In this installment of the UChicago News Explainer series, the question of how the Earth and moon formed is answered—as well as the questions of when, what they looked like, and how we know.