News and Events

Bard College Awarded Department of Energy Grant for Quantum Computation Research Project

Bard College Assistant Professor of Physics Abhinav Prem has received a two-year research award from the US Department of Energy to develop new methods that make quantum computers more stable and reliable. The project, “Leveraging Novel Symmetries for Noise-Resilient Topological Quantum Computation,” is a joint collaboration with professor Stephan Haas at the University of Southern California. Bard is the lead institution and recipient of $300,006 of the $500,000 award.

Article by Astrophysicist Clara Sousa-Silva Featured in the New York Times

Clara Sousa-Silva, assistant professor of physics at Bard College, was interviewed in the New York Times about an article she coauthored in the Science journal. The article explains how the detection of the molecule phosphine in the atmosphere of a brown dwarf may help astronomers in their search for life elsewhere in the Milky Way. Finding phosphine in places that cannot sustain life “will be a critical piece of the puzzle for figuring out what business phosphine has anywhere else, including in a potentially habitable environment,” Sousa-Silva told the New York Times.

International Year of Quantum, Co-coordinated by Physicist Paul Cadden-Zimansky, Recognized at the Quantum World Congress

The International Year of Quantum Science and Technology, managed in part by Associate Professor Paul Cadden-Zimansky, who is a global coordinator for the event, was recognized by the Quantum World Congress in Washington DC. “I think everyone who is putting in time and effort to make it a reality [can] share in this award and can take it as an encouragement to continue the mission of illuminating quantum science and technology for all," he said.

More Alumni/ae News

Bard College Junior Lauren Mendoza ’26 Wins Goldwater Scholarship

Bard College Junior Lauren Mendoza ’26 Wins Goldwater Scholarship

Bard College is pleased to announce that Bard junior Lauren Mendoza ’26, a double major in physics and philosophy, has been announced as a recipient of the 2025 Barry Goldwater Scholarship. The scholarship supports college sophomores and juniors who intend to pursue research careers in the natural sciences, mathematics, and engineering.

Mendoza currently conducts research in astrophysics with Professor Clara Sousa-Silva and had previously conducted research in nanofabrication with Professor Paul Cadden-Zimansky. After graduating from Bard, she hopes to pursue a Ph.D. in astronomy with a focus on the solar system and instrumentation, and aims to promote effective scientific communication between academics and the wider public.

The Barry Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Foundation, established by Congress in 1986 in honor of Senator Barry Goldwater, aims to ensure that the U.S. is producing highly-qualified professionals in the natural sciences, mathematics and engineering. Over its 30-year history, Goldwater Scholarships have been awarded to thousands of undergraduates, many of whom have gone on to win other prestigious awards such as the National Science Foundation’s Graduate Fellowship, Rhodes Scholarship, Churchill Scholarship and the National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship that support the graduate school work of Goldwater scholars. Learn more at https://goldwaterscholarship.gov/

Post Date: 04-02-2025

Bard Physicist Paul Cadden-Zimansky Asks “What is Quantum?” at QuantumFest 2025

Bard Physicist Paul Cadden-Zimansky Asks “What is Quantum?” at QuantumFest 2025

Professor of Physics Paul Cadden-Zimansky hosted a video tour of the Global Physics Summit, a “public celebration of all things quantum,” in partnership with the American Physical Society. The video tour was part of Cadden-Zimanski’s responsibility as Global Coordinator for the UN’s International Year of Quantum Science and Technology, a position he was appointed to in January. Participants at the Summit showed experiments related to Quantum science like static electricity and UV light. “The idea of this year is to have everybody who knows something about Quantum help people who don’t learn a little more about it,” Cadden-Zimansky said.

At the Summit, Cadden-Zimansky spoke with scientists from around the world about the importance of Quantum mechanics at 100. He also spoke with Nobel Laureate Barry Barish, an expert on gravitational waves, about why scientists should engage in public outreach about scientific topics. “As individuals, you or I can only do so much,” Barish said. “But one thing that actually multiplies what we do… is to get young kids interested in science. I think it makes it worthwhile.”

Post Date: 03-31-2025

Professor Clara Sousa-Silva Interviewed About the Disappearance of Scientific Datasets

Professor Clara Sousa-Silva Interviewed About the Disappearance of Scientific Datasets

Clara Sousa-Silva, assistant professor of physics at Bard College, was interviewed in Jacobin about how crucial scientific data required for her research had vanished from federal government servers. Sousa-Silva’s research studying the atmospheres of other planets relies on climate monitoring data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). “This data disappearance coincides with the aggressive implementation of two intertwined initiatives from the Trump administration: the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), led by Elon Musk, and President Donald Trump’s campaign to purge the federal government of anything ‘woke,’ including efforts to combat climate change,” writes Meagan Day for Jacobin. “The consequences for my research on Venus are pretty bad,” said Sousa-Silva. “I will be a worse astrophysicist. But that feels pretty minor considering the importance of being able to monitor how our climate is changing. To climate science, this is absolutely disastrous.”

Read Professor Sousa-Silva's Full Interview

Post Date: 03-04-2025

Clara Sousa-Silva Gives Talk on the Search for Alien Life

Clara Sousa-Silva Gives Talk on the Search for Alien Life

Clara Sousa-Silva, assistant professor of physics at Bard College, delivered the presentation “Alien Life, and How to Find It” for the D&H Canal Historical Society in High Falls, New York. Sousa-Silva’s research looks for signs of life elsewhere in the universe using astronomical tools to detect faint signals emitted by potential alien biospheres. In her presentation, she discusses how molecules interact with light so that they can be detected on faraway worlds, and breaks down how those interactions can broadcast much about a planet—including how any molecule associated with life can leave specific signatures. “You can think of our atmosphere and its light as a planet-sized message communicating to the galaxy that we have oceans and forests and varied ecosystems with rich life cycles,” she said. “What are we looking for when we look for a planet and try to find out if it’s inhabited by something, anything? Well, we know the laws of physics are universal, and we know that chemistry is universal. We can and have tested many of these physical and chemical boundaries of the universe, and we know the rules that bind them. But what might be the universal laws of biology? Well, we don’t know, but we can start with what we do know.”

Post Date: 02-18-2025

Paul Cadden-Zimansky Named Global Coordinator for UN’s International Year of Quantum Science and Technology

Paul Cadden-Zimansky Named Global Coordinator for UN’s International Year of Quantum Science and Technology

To mark the occasion of 100 years of quantum mechanics and to inspire its future applications, the United Nations (UN) has proclaimed 2025 to be the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology (IYQ). The UN resolution recommends the year to be “observed through activities at all levels aimed at increasing public awareness of the importance of quantum science and applications.” UNESCO and the IYQ Secretariat have named Associate Professor of Physics Paul Cadden-Zimansky one of four Global Coordinators for IYQ in recognition of his involvement in bringing this year of international awareness to fruition and coordinating aspects of some of the highest profile global events, including the IYQ 2025 Opening Ceremony at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris this February. Professor Cadden-Zimansky is described as “the physicist at Bard College who set the ball rolling that eventually resulted in the UN declaration” in the cover story of the January 1, 2025 issue of Physics Today. “In physics, everyone understands how central quantum mechanics has become, but that’s not the case for the public,” said Cadden-Zimansky. Professor Cadden-Zimansky is also scheduled to speak about quantum at the Consumer Electronics Convention, the world’s largest annual tech event, in Las Vegas on January 9.

Learn about the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology

Post Date: 01-07-2025

Professor Clara Sousa-Silva Featured on PBS Show NOVA

Professor Clara Sousa-Silva Featured on PBS Show NOVA

Clara Sousa-Silva, assistant professor of physics at Bard College, appears in the PBS award-winning documentary series NOVA. The episode, “Solar System: Storm Worlds,” focuses on the dramatic forces creating spectacular weather on neighboring planets and moons. “In our solar system, wherever there’s an atmosphere, there’s weather, no matter how different an atmosphere from Earth’s,” said Sousa-Silva. The episode explores the strange and wonderful weather occurring across our solar system, from globe-spanning dust storms, to monsoons of liquid methane, to monstrous storms with lightning bolts ten times more energetic than anything on Earth.

Post Date: 10-02-2024

Physics Events

4/24
Friday

Hall effects: Topological Physics in Quantum Materials
Friday, April 24, 2026
Zachariah Addison, Wellesley College
Brody Lab - Hegeman 107 12:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Here we explore the role of topology in the understanding of quantum phases of matter. We explore how these mathematical ideas impact the understanding of material properties by looking at quantum Hall effects. The canonical quantum Hall effect describe the conduction of electrons transverse to an applied electric field. In 1980 experiments were performed on insulating silicon-based metal-oxide-semiconductor that tracked these electron currents as a function of an applied magnetic field normal to the sample. They discovered that unlike most observations in nature, the resistivity was not a smooth function of the magnetic field but instead took on quantized values. These observations could be understood by exploring the topological nature of the dynamics of the system. Since then, topological physics has played a dominating role in understanding the electronic properties of materials, culminating in the 2016 Nobel Prize being awarded for theoretical discoveries of topological phase transitions and topological phases of matter. We will look to these effects and explore some still open question at the intersection of material physics and topology.

12:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 Brody Lab - Hegeman 107

2026

Friday, March 6, 2026

Greg Bentsen, The College of William & Mary
Brody Lab - Hegeman 107 12:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Quantum technologies promise to revolutionize information processing and precision measurement tasks. Key to these applications is the generation of many-body entanglement, which describes correlations between particles that cannot be explained classically. Whereas conventional quantum algorithms — such as Shor’s algorithm for factoring large numbers — rely on highly structured patterns of entanglement, in this talk I will introduce a class of `scrambled’ quantum states featuring entanglement that is random and unstructured. These scrambled states can be generated from short random quantum circuits with randomly chosen gates at each step. Despite their lack of structure, the resulting many-body states can be harnessed for precision metrology applications and for establishing tests of quantum advantage over classical hardware.

Prof. Bentsen is a theoretical physicist working at the intersection of Quantum Information Science (QIS) and Atomic Molecular & Optical physics (AMO). He obtained his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 2019 working in the Schleier-Smith lab, where he helped to design, build, and operate a Cavity QED experiment engineered to rapidly entangle ensembles of Rubidium 87 atoms for applications in precision metrology and fundamental studies of quantum many-body physics. During his postdoc in the Swingle group at Brandeis University he focused on theoretical models of quantum information scrambling including studies of entanglement phase transitions in random quantum circuits. He is currently a faculty member in the Physics Department at The College of William & Mary, where his research group focuses on applying random quantum circuit models to information processing and precision metrology applications.

Friday, February 20, 2026

Friday, February 13, 2026

Discover Physics at Bard

Antonios Kontos, Director
Physics Program
Bard College | PO Box 5000
Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 12504
[email protected]

News and Events

Bard College Awarded Department of Energy Grant for Quantum Computation Research Project

Bard College Awarded Department of Energy Grant for Quantum Computation Research Project

Article by Astrophysicist Clara Sousa-Silva Featured in the New York Times

Article by Astrophysicist Clara Sousa-Silva Featured in the New York Times

International Year of Quantum, Co-coordinated by Physicist Paul Cadden-Zimansky, Recognized at the Quantum World Congress

International Year of Quantum, Co-coordinated by Physicist Paul Cadden-Zimansky, Recognized at the Quantum World Congress

Bard College Junior Lauren Mendoza ’26 Wins Goldwater Scholarship

Bard Physicist Paul Cadden-Zimansky Asks “What is Quantum?” at QuantumFest 2025

Professor Clara Sousa-Silva Interviewed About the Disappearance of Scientific Datasets

Clara Sousa-Silva Gives Talk on the Search for Alien Life

Paul Cadden-Zimansky Named Global Coordinator for UN’s International Year of Quantum Science and Technology

Professor Clara Sousa-Silva Featured on PBS Show NOVA

Physics Events

Hall effects: Topological Physics in Quantum Materials

2026

Discover Physics at Bard