Thirty-two exceptional graduate students, including physics PhD student Lekshmi Thulasidharan, have been selected as recipients of the 2025-26 Campus-Wide Teaching Assistant Awards, recognizing their strengths and commitment surrounding the craft of teaching.
UW–Madison employs over 2,400 teaching assistants (TAs) across a wide range of disciplines. Their contributions to the classroom, lab, and field are essential to the university’s educational mission. To recognize the excellence of TAs across campus, the Graduate School, the College of Letters & Science, and the Morgridge Center sponsor these annual awards.
Volunteer judges selected awardees for four categories: early excellence, advanced achievement, capstone teaching, and community-based learning.
Thulasidharan earned both a Capstone Teaching Award and a Dorothy Powelson Award. The Capstone Teaching Award recognizes dissertators at the end of their graduate program with an outstanding teaching record over the course of their UW–Madison tenure. The Dorothy Powelson Awards recognize outstanding performance by TAs in the natural sciences.
Thulasidharan is a student in astronomy professor and physics affiliate professor Elena D’Onghia’s group. Her research focus is on galactic dynamics. She has taught quite a few courses during her years at UW–Madison, with her favorite being Modern Physics. She has also really enjoyed teaching the physics course about Mechanics.
As a teacher, her favorite thing is working closely with students as they learn to tackle difficult physics problems.
“Many students start out feeling intimidated by the material, but through discussions and guided problem-solving sessions they begin to see the logic behind it and grow more confident. Watching that growth over the semester is the most rewarding part of teaching,” she said. “Over the years, teaching has also helped me grow as a person. It has helped me develop confidence and strengthened my communication and mentoring skills.”
Mark Saffman named “Outstanding Referee” for American Physical Society journals
Posted on
Mark Saffman
Congrats to Prof. Mark Saffman on being named a 2026 Outstanding Referee of the American Physical Society journals!
The highly selective Outstanding Referee program annually recognizes about 150 of the roughly 56,000 referees who have been asked to review one or more papers in the last twelve months. Like Fellowship in the APS, this is a lifetime award.
In this year, 2026, 156 Outstanding Referees were selected. APS Editors select the honorees based on the quality, number, and timeliness of their reports, without regard for membership in the APS, country of origin, or field of research. Referees are rewarded for their work carried out since 1978, the earliest year for which we have accurate data on referee reports returned. The decisions are difficult and there are many excellent referees who are still to be recognized.
The Outstanding Referee program was instituted in 2008 to recognize scientists who have been exceptionally helpful in assessing manuscripts for publication in the APS journals. By means of the program, APS expresses its appreciation to all referees, whose efforts in peer review not only keep the standards of the journals at a high level, but in many cases also help authors to improve the quality and readability of their articles – even those that are not published by APS.
Other current UW–Madison physics department members who are recipients of this honor include Baha Balantekin (2024), Mark Friesen (2023), Lisa Everett (2021), Deniz Yavuz (2013), and Thad Walker (2009).
Tiancheng Song earns DOE Early Career award
Posted on
Tiancheng Song
Professor Tiancheng Song has been selected for an Early Career Research Program (ECRP) award by the U.S. Department of Energy. Established in 2010, this prestigious program aims to support outstanding scientists early in their careers and stimulate cutting-edge research. This award will fund the Song Lab’s work on exploring novel superconductors based on two-dimensional (2D) materials for designing next-generation quantum devices.
Developing superconductors and superconducting devices is crucial for quantum information science, ranging from building superconducting qubits based on Josephson junctions to exploring topological qubits via the superconducting proximity effect. Complementary to conventional material systems, 2D materials and their van der Waals (vdW) heterostructures provide an emerging material platform for designing new superconducting quantum devices.
“Leveraging the recent breakthroughs in 2D quantum materials, we will discover new vdW superconductors, fabricate Josephson junctions, and engineer hybrid superconducting systems,” Song says.
The Song Lab will employ 2D superconductors to fabricate Josephson junctions and investigate unconventional Josephson effects enabled by the highly crystalline nature of junction materials, which can even unlock new opportunities in topological quantum computation.
“We are excited to leverage the recent advances in the two rapidly developing fields, 2D materials and quantum information science, to harness unique opportunities enabled by their synergistic combination,” Song says.
Mark Saffman wins Bell Prize
Posted on
This post is derived from content originally published by the University of Toronto
Mark Saffman
Congrats to Mark Saffman, the Johannes Rydberg Professor of Physics and director of the Wisconsin Quantum Institute, on earning the ninth Biennial John Stewart Bell Prize for Research on Fundamental Issues in Quantum Mechanics and Their Applications.
He shares the prize with Antoine Browaeys (CNRS, Université Paris-Saclay) and Mikhail Lukin (Harvard) for their pioneering contributions to quantum simulation and quantum computing with neutral atoms in optical tweezer arrays, including the development of large-scale programmable arrays for scalable quantum computation. The prize will be given at the eleventh international conference on Quantum Information and Quantum Control, University of Toronto.
Saffman’s career-spanning work was also recognized last month with the American Physical Society’s Ramsey Prize in AMO Physics and in Precision Tests of Fundamental Laws and Symmetries, a prize he shares with Browaeys.
The John Stewart Bell Prize for Research on Fundamental Issues in Quantum Mechanics and their Applications (short form: “Bell Prize”) was established in 2009, and is awarded every other year, for significant contributions first published in the preceding 6 years. The award is meant to recognize major advances relating to the foundations of quantum mechanics and to the applications of these principles – this covers, but is not limited to, quantum information theory, quantum computation, quantum foundations, quantum cryptography, and quantum control. The award is not intended as a “lifetime achievement” award, but rather to highlight the continuing rapid pace of research in these areas, and the fruitful interplay of fundamental research and potential applications. It is intended to cover even-handedly both of these aspects, and to include both theoretical and experimental contributions.
Francis Halzen wins 2026 APS Medal for Exceptional Achievement in Research
Mark Saffman, the Johannes Rydberg Professor of Physics and director of the Wisconsin Quantum Institute, won the American Physical Society’s 2026 Norman F. Ramsey Prize in Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics, and in Precision Tests of Fundamental Laws and Symmetries.
The Ramsey prize recognizes outstanding accomplishments in the two fields of Norman Ramsey: atomic, molecular, and optical (AMO) physics; and precision tests of fundamental laws and symmetries. Saffman won “for seminal developments of quantum information processing with neutral atoms that allow the investigation of many-body problems that are intractable by classical computing.” He shares the prize with Antoine Browaeys at the Institut d’Optique in France.
Mark Saffman
Saffman joined the UW–Madison physics faculty in 1999 with ideas for his research program but struggled to acquire enough funding. Then, he started reading theory papers about the relatively new field of quantum computing and how to develop qubits, or quantum bits.
“This was in an era when people were proposing all these different ideas for qubits,” Saffman says. “I read this paper about using Rydberg gates to entangle atomic qubits and thought, ‘This looks interesting, let’s do that.’ That was the smartest decision I ever made in my career.”
An atom can be induced into a Rydberg state by a strong laser, when one of its outer shell electrons is excited into a very high energy state. The atom is effectively much larger than usual, and can lead to interesting quantum properties. Relatively inexperienced in experimental atomic physics, Saffman approached Thad Walker, a professor in the department and an expert on how to laser cool atoms, about collaborating. A decade later, they had their major success: a Rydberg blockade.
“The basic interaction is that you excite one atom to a Rydberg state and then you cannot excite a second one close by,” Saffman says. “That blockade interaction lies behind the ability to do a logic gate — a CNOT gate — and entangle two qubits.”
A year later, Saffman and Walker demonstrated the first CNOT gate for atomic qubits. These qubits, also called neutral atom qubits, quickly are now one of the leading platforms for achieving fault tolerant quantum computing.
Over the next decade Saffman started to realize that building a fully functional quantum computer was not just a scientific effort, it was a major engineering effort, one that was likely outside the scope of an academic research group.
“It became clear to me that to compete at the forefront, I needed more resources. I wanted to go faster,” Saffman says. “So, I ended up joining forces with ColdQuanta (now Infleqtion), an existing small cold atom sensing and components company .”
The glow of red and green lasers and an array of supporting electronics fill the Saffman lab | Jacob Scott, PhD’25
Saffman brought his quantum computing ideas to the company as Chief Scientist for Quantum Information at Colorado-based Infleqtion in 2018, and the company now has a satellite office in Madison.
The partnership with Infleqtion did, in fact, accelerate Saffman’s research. In 2022, his group, including long-time scientist and group member Trent Graham, co-authored a paper with engineers at Infleqtion where they demonstrated the first quantum algorithm to be run on an atomic quantum computer. It was a huge proof of principle and significant step forward in the field.
Quantum information research has emerged as a major topic within the AMO physics community. At UW–Madison, Saffman has been a key player in that shift. In 2019, he helped develop the Wisconsin Quantum Institute, an interdisciplinary effort of all quantum information science and engineering researchers on campus. That same year, he was named the institute’s director.
“UW–Madison was one of the first places to have multiple serious efforts in qubits: Thad and I pioneered neutral atoms, (physics professor) Mark Eriksson pioneered silicon spin qubits, (physics professor) Robert McDermott has superconducting qubits,” Saffman says. “Now, a huge fraction of new faculty coming out of academia and starting their own groups are working in quantum information-related science and engineering, including many of our new faculty. The state of quantum computing at UW–Madison is very strong.”
Deniz Yavuz elected Fellow of the American Physical Society
Posted on
Deniz Yavuz
Congratulations to Prof. Deniz Yavuz, who was elected a 2025 Fellow of the American Physical Society!
He was elected “for outstanding experimental and theoretical contributions to nanoscale localization of atoms with electromagnetically induced transparency and collective radiation effects in atomic ensembles,” and nominated by the Division of Atomic, Molecular & Optical Physics (DAMOP).
APS Fellowship is a distinct honor signifying recognition by one’s professional peers for outstanding contributions to physics. Each year, no more than one half of one percent of the Society’s membership is recognized by this honor.
Congrats to Vladimir Zhdankin, assistant professor of physics, on earning a Department of Energy Early Career award! The five-year award will fund his research on energy and entropy in collisionless, turbulent plasmas.
Systems in equilibrium are easy to describe, but often the most interesting questions in nature are complex and dynamic. Most plasmas, including astrophysical ones and manmade ones on earth, are not in equilibrium, so they are more difficult to characterize. Zhdankin’s research is working toward a more universal understanding of non-equilibrium plasmas, in the form of mathematical equations that can then be broadly applied.
“We think that our understanding of plasmas isn’t finished yet, and there are still some basic ingredients in the statistical mechanics which, once we understand better, we’ll have a more predictive framework for how plasmas should behave,” Zhdankin says.
Collisionless plasmas have a low enough particle density where the particles largely flow without bumping into each other. Instead, their trajectories are controlled by the electric and magnetic field, which leads to a generally chaotic flow, like the rapids of a river. It is that dynamic turbulence that causes these plasmas to be non-equilibrium, leading to interesting, if not straightforward, properties.
“In these systems, energy is conserved — it has to be,” Zhdankin says. “But we don’t quite have a handle on what’s happening with the entropy. We have reason to believe it’s increasing, consistent with the second law of thermodynamics, but it doesn’t seem to reach a maximum.”
Zhdankin’s goal is to better understand the energy and entropy in these complex plasmas through “particle-in-cell” simulations, where tens of billions of plasma particles — electrons and protons — are simulated in a small box, then manipulated in various ways.
“We imagine stirring the plasma to make it more turbulent and putting some energy into it, and then we want to see how it heats up and how the particles achieve higher energies,” Zhdankin says. “What if we increase or decrease the size of the box? Make the magnetic field stronger? Make the particles collide a little bit?”
The simulations can then be compared to real-world data, including measurements of the solar wind or laboratory plasmas. An ideal outcome would be obtaining formulae that better describe these complex, turbulent plasmas and can be applied across a broad range of systems, from laboratory experiments to the accretion flows of black holes.
“And there’s a chance we’re just not going to be able to get something predictive out of this work, if there’s just too big of a landscape of possibilities,” Zhdankin says. “But this topic, I consider it one of the most fundamental ones that could be studied in plasma physics.”
