Time Dilation - News Roundup - Fall 2021

New model accurately describes COVID-19 waves and plateaus: adding random nature of social activity to traditional model, graphs match waves and plateaus of regional U.S. data

SIV SCHWINK for Illinois Physics 
Dec 14—A team of scientists has developed an epidemiological model that encompasses the randomness and dynamic variability of individual social interactions, as well as individual differences in the size of social networks. The new model shows COVID-19 will be endemic, sticking around like the flu and the common cold.

Elizabeth Goldschmidt: creating quantum memories

LEAH HESLA for Q-NEXT
Dec 2—In their quest to make the perfect qubit for storage, Professor Elizabeth Goldschmidt and her team are identifying and growing new kinds of crystals containing different rare-earth atoms, tracking how they respond to the passage of photons, assessing their memory-storage capabilities, and improving them. This story was first published on the Q-NEXT website at https://www.q-next.org/.

Limitless: Celebrating women in science and condensed matter physics 

DANIEL INAFUKU for Illinois Physics
Nov 23—Limitless, a mural designed by celebrated artist Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya and painted with the help of local high school students, is inspired by Illinois Physics Professor Nadya Mason. The work is part of a series titled FINDINGS, created in partnership with the Heising–Simons Foundation (HSF). The series celebrates the contributions of women in science and examines the convergence of identity and community through a fusion of artistic and scientific lenses.

Self-annealing photon detector brings global quantum internet one step closer to feasibility 

SIV SCHWINK for Illinois Physics
Oct 13—A quantum communications experiment was launched into low orbit around Earth from the International Space Station (ISS). CAPSat (Cool Annealing Payload Satellite) contains single-photon detectors, which can be used as receivers for unhackable quantum communications. The experiment is a collaboration of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the University of Waterloo.

University of Illinois researchers part of $15M institute developing real-time artificial intelligence to accelerate discovery in data-driven science 

Illinois Physics 
Sept 28—The National Science Foundation (NSF) announced its launch of the $15M Accelerated AI Algorithms for Data-Driven Discovery (A3D3) Institute, as part of its $75M investment in five new Harnessing the Data Revolution Institutes across the U.S. The primary mission of the A3D3 Institute is to lead a paradigm shift in the application of real-time artificial intelligence at scale to advance scientific knowledge and accelerate discovery.

ICASU researchers awarded $4.4 million for cyberinfrastructure to solve long-standing problems in fundamental physics 

JESSICA RALEY for ICASU
Sept 17—Three Illinois Physics and Illinois Center for Advanced Studies of the Universe (ICASU) professors lead a team of researchers who recently received a $4.4 million grant from the Office of Cyberinfrastructure for Sustained Scientific Innovation (CSSI) of the National Science Foundation (NSF).  The Modular Unified Solver of the Equation of State, or MUSES, will provide scientists with an open-source cyberinfrastructure that can be used to generate equations of state (EoS). The new cyberinfrastructure will provide novel tools for answering interdisciplinary questions in nuclear physics, gravitational wave astrophysics, and heavy-ion physics.

FUTURE-MINDS-QB to increase participation from underrepresented groups in biomedical data science and quantitative biology

SIV SCHWINK for Illinois Physics 
July 8—FUTURE-MINDS-QB, a bridge program streamlining a path from a master’s degree at Fisk University, a historically Black university in Nashville, to a doctoral degree at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, has received a T32 training grant from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).