UND professor William Schwalm (left), student Pragalv Karki, student Albert Schmitz and professor Yen Lee Loh attended the American Physical Society’s March Meeting last month. Photo by Lucas Amundson/The Dakota Student. 

Two students and two professors represented UND at the American Physical Society’s annual March Meeting last month. This year’s event, which took place in Baltimore, hosted nearly 10,000 physicists, scientists and students.

The APS March Meeting is a chance to share groundbreaking research from industry, universities and major labs, according to the APS website.

For Pragalv Karki, this year’s meeting was his first. A doctoral student in UND’s physics program, Karki studies condensed matter physics, which includes solids and liquids.

In Baltimore, Karki heard about breakthroughs in superconductivity, his area of expertise. Specifically, he learned about research in increasing the operating temperature of high-temperature superconductors. In the world of superconductivity, high temperature can mean around minus 94.

“Superconductors work at really low temperatures, and the research has been focusing on how to bring that temperature up so we can have these superconductor materials at regular temperatures,” Karki said.

Karki, who moved to the U.S. from Nepal in 2008, earned a bachelor’s degree from Minnesota State University Moorhead. He became interested in UND after attending a presentation by UND professor Kanishka Marsinghe.

The small department size at UND suits Karki, who appreciates the high level of faculty-student interaction. He said he also appreciates the opportunity to attend events such as the APS March Meeting. This year’s trip was funded by UND’s Research Development & Compliance office, the School of Graduate Studies and Intercollegiate Academics Fund.

Karki’s interest in physics began in high school when he read Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos.” He said the book sparked a curiosity of how nature works.

“That really opened the door to so many questions I had in my mind,” Karki said. “That book was the point where I really wanted to do physics.”

Karki was joined at the March Meeting by fellow student Albert Schmitz and their professors, William Schwalm and Yen Lee Loh.

Loh, who earned a doctorate from Cambridge University, has attended nearly every APS March Meeting since 2005. He said it’s a great chance opportunity for networking and collaboration, especially for students.

“UND is still a small school, small department,” he said. “If you stay here, you get just a small cross section. But when you go to these meetings, you see all the stuff that’s going on across the U.S., all over the world.”

One of the biggest discoveries in physics this year was the detection of gravitational waves, something Albert Einstein predicted 100 years ago as part of his theory of general relativity.

Gravitational waves fall under astrophysics, but there also are exciting things happening in condensed matter physics, including discoveries in  high-temp superconductors.

This year’s March Meeting also had a friendlier atmosphere than usual, according to Loh.

“I’d say people were more collegial than usual,” Loh said. “Physicists can be pretty blunt about speaking their opinions. Usually you see some fights happening, but I really didn’t see that this time.”

Lucas Amundson is the features editor for The Dakota Student. He can be reached at [email protected]