Relatively Certain
36 episodes - English - Latest episode: 8 months ago - ★★★★★ - 8 ratingsHear the latest news about everything from quantum computers to astrophysics, all straight from scientists at the University of Maryland.
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Episodes
Putting On a Particle Play
August 18, 2023 13:50 - 17 minutes - 24.5 MBBack in the 1950s, theoretical physicists postulated that the kinds of particles we actually see in nature are just the tip of the iceberg. Many other types of particles with weird properties, which they termed paraparticles, were popping out of the math as theoretical possibilities. But as physicists discovered more about the fundamental particles seen in nature, they found no evidence for paraparticles. In 2016 Cinthia Alderete, then a graduate student in theoretical physics, discovered a w...
Quantum-Safe Algorithms Face Off in NIST’s Cryptography Showdown
August 23, 2022 10:59 - 19 minutes - 27 MBWhile browsing the web, you might not realize that the security of your online transactions is guaranteed by a hard-to-crack math problem called factoring. But this security could evaporate in an instant—if a big enough quantum computer is built. Computers that store information in quantum hardware—like individual ions, atoms or photons—would make quick work of the factoring problem and threaten the safety of current protocols. To thwart the threat posed by possible quantum computers, the Nat...
Science in Quarantine: A Rush to Go Remote
May 18, 2022 14:47 - 11 minutes - 16.3 MBIn this episode, we look back at the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, when impending lab closures were threatening scientific progress and graduate student careers. We sit down with Laird Egan, then a graduate student in physics at JQI, and hear about how he and his lab mates managed to turn their ion-based quantum computer into a remote-controlled experiment in a matter of weeks. We also learn how they used their newly remote lab to achieve a milestone in quantum computing.
Diamonds Are a Quantum Sensing Scientist’s Best Friend
October 11, 2021 10:14 - 19 minutes - 44.7 MBWe all know that diamonds can hold great sentimental (and monetary) value. As luck may have it, diamonds—particularly defective ones, with little errors in their crystal structure—also hold great scientific value. The defects have properties that can only be described by quantum mechanics, and researchers are working on harnessing these properties to pick up on tiny signals coming from individual biological cells.
The Secrets Atoms Hold, Part 2: Gravity
May 19, 2021 13:35 - 19 minutes - 10.4 MBIn this episode of Relatively Certain, JQI Adjunct Fellow Marianna Safronova and JQI Fellow Charles Clark return to discuss the limits of our understanding of gravity, and how new experiments with atom interferometers may be the key to not only a higher-precision understanding of gravity but also possible new physics.
Science in Quarantine: Microscopy Migrates from Lab to Living Room
December 22, 2020 17:55 - 10 minutes - 13.8 MBIn the midst of the global coronavirus pandemic, the luckiest among us have simply been relegated to working from home. And many people have had to find creative ways to turn their home into an office, a classroom, or—in the case of experimental physicists—a makeshift lab.In this episode of Relatively Certain, we bring you a story of one such physicist—University of Maryland physics graduate student Francisco Salces. Before the pandemic, he was developing a new way to measure how good a micro...
The Secrets Atoms Hold, Part 1: Search for Dark Matter
September 25, 2020 14:46 - 15 minutes - 21 MBIn this episode of Relatively Certain, Dina Genkina sits down with JQI Adjunct Fellow Marianna Safronova, a physics professor at the University of Delaware, and JQI Fellow Charles Clark, an adjunct professor of physics at UMD and a fellow of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, to talk about how precision measurements with atoms might shed some light on matter that’s otherwise dark.
Donuts, Donut Holes and Topological Superconductors
April 09, 2020 18:28 - 16 minutes - 23.2 MBIn this episode of Relatively Certain, Dina Genkina sits down with JQI Fellow Jay Sau, an associate professor of physics at UMD, and Johnpierre Paglione, a professor of physics at UMD and the director of the Quantum Materials Center.
Labs IRL: A Craving for Code
February 03, 2020 18:30 - 14 minutes - 19.4 MBSoftware just might be the unsung hero of physics labs. In this episode of Relatively Certain, Dina sits down with JQI postdoctoral researcher and programming aficionado Chris Billington to talk about his passion project—a piece of experimental control software that’s gaining popularity in labs here at the University of Maryland and around the world.
Black holes: The ultimate cosmic whisks
October 09, 2018 01:00 - 9 minutes - 13.3 MBChaos. Time travel. Quantum entanglement. Each may play a role in figuring out whether black holes are the universe’s ultimate information scramblers. In this episode of Relatively Certain, Chris sits down with Brian Swingle, a QuICS Fellow and assistant professor of physics at UMD, to learn about some of the latest theoretical research on black holes—and how experiments to test some of these theories are getting tantalizingly close.
Life at the edge of the world
June 01, 2018 02:49 - 12 minutes - 16.6 MBWhat's it like living and working in Antarctica? Upon returning from a five-week trip to the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, UMD graduate student Liz Friedman sat down with Chris and Emily to chat about her experience. In this episode, Friedman shares some of her memories of station life and explains how plans at the pole don't always pan out. This episode of Relatively Certain was produced by Chris Cesare, Emily Edwards and Dina Genkina. It features music by Dave Depper. Relatively Certai...
Physics at the edge of the world
March 09, 2018 17:46 - 10 minutes - 14.6 MBDeep within the ice covering the South Pole, thousands of sensitive cameras strain their digital eyes in search of a faint blue glow—light that betrays the presence of high-energy neutrinos. For this episode, Chris sat down with UMD graduate student Liz Friedman and physics professor Kara Hoffman to learn more about IceCube, the massive underground neutrino observatory located in one of the most desolate spots on Earth. It turns out that IceCube is blind to the highest-energy neutrinos, and F...
Ancient timekeeping with a modern twist
December 21, 2017 17:00 - 10 minutes - 14.6 MBTrey Porto, a NIST physicist and Fellow of the Joint Quantum Institute, spends his days using atoms and lasers to study quantum physics. But even outside of the lab, he views the world as one great physics problem to tackle. So one morning when he spotted some sunlight dancing across his wall, he couldn’t help but dive in and calculate its movements. He then took his project a step further and began constructing a sundial. Emily sat down with Porto to hear about his clock-making hobby and how...
The Nobel Prize: A LIGO Q&A
October 04, 2017 01:15 - 9 minutes - 13.2 MBA little more than a hundred years ago, Albert Einstein worked out a consequence of his new theory of gravity: Much like waves traveling through water, ripples can undulate through space and time, distorting the fabric of the universe itself. Today, Rainer Weiss, Barry C. Barish and Kip S. Thorne were awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics for decades of work that culminated in the detection of gravitational waves in 2015—and several times since—by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wav...
Long live MATHUSLA
August 01, 2017 03:50 - 11 minutes - 16.2 MBMore than 300 feet underground, looping underneath both France and Switzerland on the outskirts of Geneva, a 16-mile-long ring called the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) smashes protons together at nearly the speed of light. Sifting through the wreckage, scientists have made some profound discoveries about the fundamental nature of our universe. But what if all that chaos underground is shrouding subtle hints of new physics? David Curtin, a postdoctoral researcher at the Maryland Center for Funda...
Labs IRL: Boxing up atomic ions
July 10, 2017 18:37 - 8 minutes - 11.7 MBWhat makes a university physics lab tick? Sean Kelley grabs a mic and heads to a lab that's trying to build an early quantum computer out of atomic ions. Marko Cetina and Kai Hudek, two research scientists at the University of Maryland who run the lab, explain what it takes to keep things from burning down and muse about the future of quantum computers. This is the first installment of Labs in Real Life—Labs IRL, for short—a recurring segment on Relatively Certain that will explore what it's ...
The limits of computation
May 19, 2017 03:51 - 12 minutes - 16.9 MBModern computers, which dwarf their forebears in speed and efficiency, still can't conquer some of the hardest computational problems. Making them even faster probably won't change that. Computer scientists working in the field of computational complexity theory explore the ultimate limits of computers, cataloguing and classifying a universe of computational problems. For decades, they’ve been stuck on a particular nagging question, which boils down to this: What’s the relationship between so...
JQI Podcast Episode 12 : HAWC and the high-energy gamma rays
April 05, 2017 03:29 - 14 minutes - 19.8 MBIn our own galaxy and beyond, violent collisions fling a never-ending stream of stuff at the earth, and astrophysicists are eager to learn more about the processes that produce this cosmic barrage.
JQI Podcast Episode 12
April 04, 2017 15:29 - 14 minutes - 19.8 MBIn our own galaxy and beyond, violent collisions fling a never-ending stream of stuff at the earth, and astrophysicists are eager to learn more about the processes that produce this cosmic barrage.Researchers from around the world have teamed up to build the High-Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) gammy-ray observatory, an array of hundreds of huge water tanks on a mountain in Mexico. HAWC helps astrophysicists spot active cosmic neighborhoods by capturing the shower of particles created when hi...
Taming chaos with physics and AI
September 06, 2016 15:36 - 15 minutes - 21.2 MBIn many situations, chaos makes it nearly impossible to predict what will happen next. Nowhere is this more apparent than in weather forecasts, which are notorious for their unreliability. But the clever application of artificial intelligence can help reign in some chaotic systems, making them more predictable than ever before. In this episode of Relatively Certain, Dina sits down with Michelle Girvan, a physics professor at the University of Maryland (UMD), to talk about how artificial intel...
JQI Podcast Episode 11 - Discovery of heavy water makes waves
October 31, 2013 01:29 - 19 minutes - 44.2 MBThis past March, NIST Fellows Joseph Reader and Charles Clark co-authored an article in Physics Today: "1932, a watershed year in nuclear physics." In a small detour from our typical quantum conversation, Charles sat down with Phil to recount some remarkable nuclear physics discoveries made that year. This podcast details the search for an isotope of hydrogen, culminating in the discovery of deuterium (heavy water).
JQI Podcast Episode 11
October 31, 2013 01:29 - 19 minutes - 44.2 MBThis past March, NIST Fellows Joseph Reader and Charles Clark co-authored an article in Physics Today: "1932, a watershed year in nuclear physics."In a small detour from our typical quantum conversation, Charles sat down with Phil to recount some remarkable nuclear physics discoveries made that year. This podcast details the search for an isotope of hydrogen, culminating in the discovery of deuterium (heavy water).
JQI Podcast Episode 10 - Energy Levels: This isn't your great-grandmother's plum pudding
September 20, 2013 01:19 - 19 minutes - 36.7 MBPhil Schewe discusses quantized energy levels with Steve Rolston (JQI) and Wes Campbell (former JQI postdoc and current UCLA professor). The concept of electronic energy levels in an atom has applications everywhere, from sodium lamps to brake lights to quantum information and atomic clocks.
JQI Podcast Episode 10
September 19, 2013 13:19 - 19 minutes - 36.7 MBPhil Schewe discusses quantized energy levels with Steve Rolston (JQI) and Wes Campbell (former JQI postdoc and current UCLA professor). The concept of electronic energy levels in an atom has applications everywhere, from sodium lamps to brake lights to quantum information and atomic clocks.
JQI Podcast Episode 9 - That's really tiny: Story of a photon
August 08, 2013 18:16 - 11 minutes - 21.2 MBCan you see a single photon? Does it weigh anything? Emily Edwards talks to Alan Migdall, an expert on single photon technology. Part 2 of three installments on photons.
JQI Podcast Episode 9
August 08, 2013 18:16 - 11 minutes - 21.2 MBCan you see a single photon? Does it weigh anything? Emily Edwards talks to Alan Migdall, an expert on single photon technology. Part 2 of three installments on photons.
JQI Podcast Episode 8
May 21, 2013 15:47 - 18 minutes - 35.1 MBPhil Schewe discusses how matter, such as atoms and electrons, can display wave-like properties. Steve Rolston describes early scattering experiments. Gretchen Campbell talks about matter waves in the context of modern Bose-Einstein condensate experiments.
JQI Podcast Episode 7 - A dual personality: What is a photon?
April 03, 2013 18:57 - 18 minutes - 33.8 MBEmily Edwards and guests Steve Rolston and Alan Migdall talk about the history of the photon. Photons sometimes behave both like particles and waves. The nature of light has intrigued scientists for centuries. Quantum physics provides clarity in the early twentieth century.
JQI Podcast Episode 8 - Waves Matter for Studying Matter
April 03, 2013 17:30 - 18 minutes - 35.1 MBPhil Schewe discusses how matter, such as atoms and electrons, can display wave-like properties. Steve Rolston describes early scattering experiments. Gretchen Campbell talks about matter waves in the context of modern Bose-Einstein condensate experiments.
JQI Podcast Episode 7
April 03, 2013 17:30 - 18 minutes - 33.8 MBEmily Edwards and guests Steve Rolston and Alan Migdall talk about the history of the photon. Photons sometimes behave both like particles and waves. The nature of light has intrigued scientists for centuries. Quantum physics provides clarity in the early twentieth century.
JQI Podcast Episode 6
March 05, 2013 14:30 - 22 minutes - 52.5 MBSolving the mystery of blackbody radiation brings on the quantum revolution. Phil Schewe, Emily Edwards, and Steve Rolston discuss this pivotal moment for modern physics. 2006 Nobel Prize laureate John Mather discusses how his work relates to blackbody radiation. (This audio was recorded prior to the announcement of the 2012 Nobel Prize in physics. For information on how blackbody relates to the Nobel Prize, see related links)
JQI Podcast Episode 5
August 08, 2010 18:00 - 30 minutes - 28.3 MBFifty years ago, Theodore Maiman invented the laser. Steve Rolston and two guest experts describe how the device has utterly transformed quantum information science.
JQI Podcast Episode 4
June 17, 2010 14:00 - 29 minutes - 26.8 MBModern timekeeping, and the ongoing effort to slice time into ever-thinner pieces, now depend critically on techniques of quantum information science.
JQI Podcast Episode 3
May 24, 2010 14:00 - 16 minutes - 14.8 MBTQW looks at recent research in the weird world of "ultracold" chemistry, where scientists have just discovered that chemical reactions can occur at only a few billionths of a degree above absolute zero.
JQI Podcast Episode 2
April 22, 2010 14:00 - 20 minutes - 19.3 MBA discussion of one of the most eerie aspects of quantum mechanics -- the utter randomness of measurements -- with guest Dr. Chris Monroe of JQI. Topics include the weird state called "entanglement," and the uses of quantum-mechanical systems for generating random numbers for data encryption and other purposes.
JQI Podcast Episode 1
March 18, 2010 14:00 - 19 minutes - 17.9 MBA primer on the fundamental terms and concepts of quantum information science, with guest Dr. Carl Williams, Chief of the Atomic Physics Division at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Topics include the bizarre condition called superposition, the nature of quantum bits ("qubits") and more.