Director's Colloquium is Wednesday
Tuson Park of Condensed Matter and Thermal Physics (MPA-10) and Rolando Somma of Biological and Quantum Physics (P-21) and Complex Systems (T-13) are recipients of the annual Postdoctoral Distinguished Performance Awards.
Park and Somma will discuss their work at a Director’s Colloquium on Wednesday in the Physics Building Auditorium. The colloquium will not be broadcast on LABNET Channel 9.
The Postdoctoral Distinguished Performance Awards recognize outstanding and unique contributions by Lab postdocs that result in a positive and significant impact on the Laboratory’s programmatic scientific efforts and status in the scientific community.
Park has made significant discoveries in three areas. In 2005, he discovered glassy charge dynamics in a hole-doped insulating copper oxide, a discovery that led to new theoretical and experimental approaches. Later, Park explained unusual behavior of charge scattering in a Landau Fermi liquid, which forced scientists to re-examine assumptions governing such physics. Finally, Park discovered that the magnetic boundary, which suddenly disappeared in pressure-induced superconductivity, re-emerged with increasing magnetic field.
Somma has made significant contributions to quantum information theory and quantum metrology. He demonstrated a long-standing conjecture that entanglement is a necessary but not sufficient condition for a quantum algorithm to outperform a classical one. He established a general correspondence between finite temperature classical systems and zero temperature quantum systems, with implications for optimization theory. He also developed explicit quantum algorithms for optimal parameter estimation. This is a significant contribution to the emerging field of quantum metrology, according to review committee members.
For more information about the Postdoctoral Distinguished Performance Awards or about the Lab’s postdoctoral program, contact Mary Anne With of the Education and Postdoc Office (STBPO-EPDO) at 5-5306 or with@lanl.gov by e-mail.
For more information, see the May 2 Daily Newsbulletin.
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