From The College of Engineering At Cornell University Via “phys.org” : “Researchers flip the switch on electric control of crystal symmetry”

From The College of Engineering

At

Cornell University

Via

“phys.org”

1.19.23
David Nutt

Atomic-resolution images of the BFO/TSO superlattice. Simultaneous a) HAADF-STEM and b) annular bright-field (ABF-) STEM image of the [(BFO)20/(TSO)10]20//TSO superlattice along the [100]pc zone axis corresponding to Fig. 1f in the main text. Drastic contrast differences in ABF-STEM are observed between the antipolar Pnma-AFE (left) and polar (right) phases. Zoomed in regions for the c) polar and d) anti-polar phases from red and blue boxes in (a), respectively. We note the presence of Bi dumbbells in the polar phase, which is not observed in the ground-state polar R3c phase of BiFeO3. Credit: Nature Materials (2022).

By bringing together the right materials duking it out, a Cornell-led collaboration has for the first time used voltage to turn on and off a material’s crystal symmetry, thereby controlling its electronic, optical and other properties—a discovery that could have a profound impact on building future memory and logic devices.

The group’s paper, “Non-Volatile Electric-Field Control of Inversion Symmetry,” was published Dec. 19, 2022, in Nature Materials [below]. The paper’s co-lead authors are former postdoctoral researcher Yu-Tsun Shao, now a professor at the University of Southern California, and Lucas Caretta of University of California-Berkeley.

The technique is made possible by leveraging the rivalry between the atomic arrangements of two materials: bismuth ferrite and terbium scandate.

“We like to arrange a boxing match between different materials that compete with each other, and at their interface, they’re having a nice struggle,” said co-senior author Darrell Schlom, the Herbert Fisk Johnson Professor of Industrial Chemistry in Cornell Engineering.

“We make each material just a few atomic layers thick so they can have great influence on each other, and then make slight adjustments to the thicknesses of the layers to make it an even match. When neither layer dominates and suffers significant perturbation from the other material, interesting things can happen. By setting up this frustration, this tug of war or boxing match, the emergent phenomenon turned out to be electrical control of symmetry, which is unheard of, and we’re really excited about it.”

Schlom’s team used molecular-beam epitaxy to create a sandwich of alternating layers of bismuth ferrite—a ferroelectric with the highest polarization of any known material—and terbium scandate, which is not a ferroelectric. Next, Shao and co-senior author David Muller, the Samuel B. Eckert Professor of Engineering, used their lab’s electron microscope pixel array detector (EMPAD)—which is capable of seeing atoms at record resolution—to understand the atomic structure of the sandwich of layers and its polar and nonpolar phases.

“To robustly image this material is quite tricky because systematic artifacts occur when the atoms don’t line up perfectly along a column,” Shao said. “We had to develop a new imaging mode using the EMPAD to decouple the structural information from those errors.”

A group led by co-senior author Ramamoorthy Ramesh at UC Berkeley and The DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory then determined how to electrically switch on and off its inversion symmetry.

Control of such symmetry is an important feature because the behavior of all solid materials is determined by the specific arrangement of their atoms. Inversion symmetry is essentially the characteristic of an object that can be turned inside out without changing its properties, such as a bag or balloon, whereas a left-handed glove that is reversed becomes right-handed and its symmetry is broken.

“Generally, symmetry influences properties. So to be able to control symmetry with an electric field is really powerful,” Schlom said. “It could influence lower-power microelectronics in the area of logic and memory. Because these things don’t forget when you turn off the voltage. It’s nonvolatile. So it wakes up and it knows exactly what state it’s in.”

Bismuth ferrite is usually an insulator, but applying an electric field to the superlattice changes its resistivity by five orders of magnitude, turning it into a semiconductor. The technique also generates changes in the material’s nonlinear optical response of over three orders of magnitude and can “erase” its polarization.

Until now, voltage has almost always broken or removed symmetry. The researchers say it’s unprecedented to find a system that can also turn it on or bring it back.

The team is hopeful the electrical control of symmetry will lead to discoveries in other areas.

“Bismith ferrite is a ferroelectric, and it’s a weak antiferromagnet. So it has both, which is kind of rare in nature already,” Shao said. “Now that we can turn on and off the ferroelectricity, we’re thinking: Can we turn on and off the magnetism as well?”

Nature Materials

See the full article here .

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The College of Engineering is a division of Cornell University that was founded in 1870 as the Sibley College of Mechanical Engineering and Mechanic Arts. It is one of four private undergraduate colleges at Cornell that are not statutory colleges.

It currently grants bachelors, masters, and doctoral degrees in a variety of engineering and applied science fields, and is the third largest undergraduate college at Cornell by student enrollment. The college offers over 450 engineering courses, and has an annual research budget exceeding US$112 million.

The College of Engineering was founded in 1870 as the Sibley College of Mechanical Engineering and Mechanic Arts. The program was housed in Sibley Hall on what has since become the Arts Quad, both of which are named for Hiram Sibley, the original benefactor whose contributions were used to establish the program. The college took its current name in 1919 when the Sibley College merged with the College of Civil Engineering. It was housed in Sibley, Lincoln, Franklin, Rand, and Morse Halls. In the 1950s the college moved to the southern end of Cornell’s campus.

The college is known for a number of firsts. In 1889, the college took over electrical engineering from the Department of Physics, establishing the first department in the United States in this field. The college awarded the nation’s first doctorates in both electrical engineering and industrial engineering. The Department of Computer Science, established in 1965 jointly under the College of Engineering and the College of Arts and Sciences, is also one of the oldest in the country.

For many years, the college offered a five-year undergraduate degree program. However, in the 1960s, the course was shortened to four years for a B.S. degree with an optional fifth year leading to a masters of engineering degree. From the 1950s to the 1970s, Cornell offered a Master of Nuclear Engineering program, with graduates gaining employment in the nuclear industry. However, after the 1979 accident at Three Mile Island, employment opportunities in that field dimmed and the program was dropped. Cornell continued to operate its on-campus nuclear reactor as a research facility following the close of the program. For most of Cornell’s history, Geology was taught in the College of Arts and Sciences. However, in the 1970s, the department was shifted to the engineering college and Snee Hall was built to house the program. After World War II, the Graduate School of Aerospace Engineering was founded as a separate academic unit, but later merged into the engineering college.

Cornell Engineering is home to many teams that compete in student design competitions and other engineering competitions. Presently, there are teams that compete in the Baja SAE, Automotive X-Prize (see Cornell 100+ MPG Team), UNP Satellite Program, DARPA Grand Challenge, AUVSI Unmanned Aerial Systems and Underwater Vehicle Competition, Formula SAE, RoboCup, Solar Decathlon, Genetically Engineered Machines, and others.

Cornell’s College of Engineering is currently ranked 12th nationally by U.S. News and World Report, making it ranked 1st among engineering schools/programs in the Ivy League. The engineering physics program at Cornell was ranked as being No. 1 by U.S. News and World Report in 2008. Cornell’s operations research and industrial engineering program ranked fourth in nation, along with the master’s program in financial engineering. Cornell’s computer science program ranks among the top five in the world, and it ranks fourth in the quality of graduate education.

The college is a leader in nanotechnology. In a survey done by a nanotechnology magazine Cornell University was ranked as being the best at nanotechnology commercialization, 2nd best in terms of nanotechnology facilities, the 4th best at nanotechnology research and the 10th best at nanotechnology industrial outreach.

Departments and schools

With about 3,000 undergraduates and 1,300 graduate students, the college is the third-largest undergraduate college at Cornell by student enrollment. It is divided into twelve departments and schools:

School of Applied and Engineering Physics
Department of Biological and Environmental Engineering
Meinig School of Biomedical Engineering
Smith School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering
School of Civil & Environmental Engineering
Department of Computer Science
Department of Earth & Atmospheric Sciences
School of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Department of Materials Science and Engineering
Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
School of Operations Research and Information Engineering
Department of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics
Department of Systems Engineering

Once called “the first American university” by educational historian Frederick Rudolph, Cornell University represents a distinctive mix of eminent scholarship and democratic ideals. Adding practical subjects to the classics and admitting qualified students regardless of nationality, race, social circumstance, gender, or religion was quite a departure when Cornell was founded in 1865.

Today’s Cornell reflects this heritage of egalitarian excellence. It is home to the nation’s first colleges devoted to hotel administration, industrial and labor relations, and veterinary medicine. Both a private university and the land-grant institution of New York State, Cornell University is the most educationally diverse member of the Ivy League.

On the Ithaca campus alone nearly 20,000 students representing every state and 120 countries choose from among 4,000 courses in 11 undergraduate, graduate, and professional schools. Many undergraduates participate in a wide range of interdisciplinary programs, play meaningful roles in original research, and study in Cornell programs in Washington, New York City, and the world over.

Cornell University is a private, statutory, Ivy League and land-grant research university in Ithaca, New York. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, the university was intended to teach and make contributions in all fields of knowledge—from the classics to the sciences, and from the theoretical to the applied. These ideals, unconventional for the time, are captured in Cornell’s founding principle, a popular 1868 quotation from founder Ezra Cornell: “I would found an institution where any person can find instruction in any study.”

The university is broadly organized into seven undergraduate colleges and seven graduate divisions at its main Ithaca campus, with each college and division defining its specific admission standards and academic programs in near autonomy. The university also administers two satellite medical campuses, one in New York City and one in Education City, Qatar, and Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute 8in New York City, a graduate program that incorporates technology, business, and creative thinking. The program moved from Google’s Chelsea Building in New York City to its permanent campus on Roosevelt Island in September 2017.

Cornell is one of the few private land-grant universities in the United States. Of its seven undergraduate colleges, three are state-supported statutory or contract colleges through the SUNY – The State University of New York system, including its Agricultural and Human Ecology colleges as well as its Industrial Labor Relations school. Of Cornell’s graduate schools, only the veterinary college is state-supported. As a land grant college, Cornell operates a cooperative extension outreach program in every county of New York and receives annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions. The Cornell University Ithaca Campus comprises 745 acres, but is much larger when the Cornell Botanic Gardens (more than 4,300 acres) and the numerous university-owned lands in New York City are considered.

Alumni and affiliates of Cornell have reached many notable and influential positions in politics, media, and science. As of January 2021, 61 Nobel laureates, four Turing Award winners and one Fields Medalist have been affiliated with Cornell. Cornell counts more than 250,000 living alumni, and its former and present faculty and alumni include 34 Marshall Scholars, 33 Rhodes Scholars, 29 Truman Scholars, 7 Gates Scholars, 55 Olympic Medalists, 10 current Fortune 500 CEOs, and 35 billionaire alumni. Since its founding, Cornell has been a co-educational, non-sectarian institution where admission has not been restricted by religion or race. The student body consists of more than 15,000 undergraduate and 9,000 graduate students from all 50 American states and 119 countries.

History

Cornell University was founded on April 27, 1865; the New York State (NYS) Senate authorized the university as the state’s land grant institution. Senator Ezra Cornell offered his farm in Ithaca, New York, as a site and $500,000 of his personal fortune as an initial endowment. Fellow senator and educator Andrew Dickson White agreed to be the first president. During the next three years, White oversaw the construction of the first two buildings and traveled to attract students and faculty. The university was inaugurated on October 7, 1868, and 412 men were enrolled the next day.

Cornell developed as a technologically innovative institution, applying its research to its own campus and to outreach efforts. For example, in 1883 it was one of the first university campuses to use electricity from a water-powered dynamo to light the grounds. Since 1894, Cornell has included colleges that are state funded and fulfill statutory requirements; it has also administered research and extension activities that have been jointly funded by state and federal matching programs.

Cornell has had active alumni since its earliest classes. It was one of the first universities to include alumni-elected representatives on its Board of Trustees. Cornell was also among the Ivies that had heightened student activism during the 1960s related to cultural issues; civil rights; and opposition to the Vietnam War, with protests and occupations resulting in the resignation of Cornell’s president and the restructuring of university governance. Today the university has more than 4,000 courses. Cornell is also known for the Residential Club Fire of 1967, a fire in the Residential Club building that killed eight students and one professor.

Since 2000, Cornell has been expanding its international programs. In 2004, the university opened the Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar. It has partnerships with institutions in India, Singapore, and the People’s Republic of China. Former president Jeffrey S. Lehman described the university, with its high international profile, a “transnational university”. On March 9, 2004, Cornell and Stanford University laid the cornerstone for a new ‘Bridging the Rift Center’ to be built and jointly operated for education on the Israel–Jordan border.

Research

Cornell, a research university, is ranked fourth in the world in producing the largest number of graduates who go on to pursue PhDs in engineering or the natural sciences at American institutions, and fifth in the world in producing graduates who pursue PhDs at American institutions in any field. Research is a central element of the university’s mission; in 2009 Cornell spent $671 million on science and engineering research and development, the 16th highest in the United States. Cornell is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity”.

For the 2016–17 fiscal year, the university spent $984.5 million on research. Federal sources constitute the largest source of research funding, with total federal investment of $438.2 million. The agencies contributing the largest share of that investment are the Department of Health and Human Services and the National Science Foundation, accounting for 49.6% and 24.4% of all federal investment, respectively. Cornell was on the top-ten list of U.S. universities receiving the most patents in 2003, and was one of the nation’s top five institutions in forming start-up companies. In 2004–05, Cornell received 200 invention disclosures; filed 203 U.S. patent applications; completed 77 commercial license agreements; and distributed royalties of more than $4.1 million to Cornell units and inventors.

Since 1962, Cornell has been involved in unmanned missions to Mars. In the 21st century, Cornell had a hand in the Mars Exploration Rover Mission. Cornell’s Steve Squyres, Principal Investigator for the Athena Science Payload, led the selection of the landing zones and requested data collection features for the Spirit and Opportunity rovers. NASA-JPL/Caltech engineers took those requests and designed the rovers to meet them. The rovers, both of which have operated long past their original life expectancies, are responsible for the discoveries that were awarded 2004 Breakthrough of the Year honors by Science. Control of the Mars rovers has shifted between National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s JPL-Caltech and Cornell’s Space Sciences Building.

Further, Cornell researchers discovered the rings around the planet Uranus, and Cornell built and operated the telescope at Arecibo Observatory located in Arecibo, Puerto Rico until 2011, when they transferred the operations to SRI International, the Universities Space Research Association and the Metropolitan University of Puerto Rico [Universidad Metropolitana de Puerto Rico].

The Automotive Crash Injury Research Project was begun in 1952. It pioneered the use of crash testing, originally using corpses rather than dummies. The project discovered that improved door locks; energy-absorbing steering wheels; padded dashboards; and seat belts could prevent an extraordinary percentage of injuries.

In the early 1980s, Cornell deployed the first IBM 3090-400VF and coupled two IBM 3090-600E systems to investigate coarse-grained parallel computing. In 1984, the National Science Foundation began work on establishing five new supercomputer centers, including the Cornell Center for Advanced Computing, to provide high-speed computing resources for research within the United States. As an National Science Foundation center, Cornell deployed the first IBM Scalable Parallel supercomputer.

In the 1990s, Cornell developed scheduling software and deployed the first supercomputer built by Dell. Most recently, Cornell deployed Red Cloud, one of the first cloud computing services designed specifically for research. Today, the center is a partner on the National Science Foundation XSEDE-Extreme Science Engineering Discovery Environment supercomputing program, providing coordination for XSEDE architecture and design, systems reliability testing, and online training using the Cornell Virtual Workshop learning platform.

Cornell scientists have researched the fundamental particles of nature for more than 70 years. Cornell physicists, such as Hans Bethe, contributed not only to the foundations of nuclear physics but also participated in the Manhattan Project. In the 1930s, Cornell built the second cyclotron in the United States. In the 1950s, Cornell physicists became the first to study synchrotron radiation.

During the 1990s, the Cornell Electron Storage Ring, located beneath Alumni Field, was the world’s highest-luminosity electron-positron collider. After building the synchrotron at Cornell, Robert R. Wilson took a leave of absence to become the founding director of DOE’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, which involved designing and building the largest accelerator in the United States.

Cornell’s accelerator and high-energy physics groups are involved in the design of the proposed ILC-International Linear Collider(JP) and plan to participate in its construction and operation. The International Linear Collider(JP), to be completed in the late 2010s, will complement the The European Organization for Nuclear Research [La Organización Europea para la Investigación Nuclear][Organisation européenne pour la recherche nucléaire] [Europäische Organisation für Kernforschung](CH)[CERN] <a href="http://“>Large Hadron Collider(CH) and shed light on questions such as the identity of dark matter and the existence of extra dimensions.

As part of its research work, Cornell has established several research collaborations with universities around the globe. For example, a partnership with the University of Sussex(UK) (including the Institute of Development Studies at Sussex) allows research and teaching collaboration between the two institutions.

From “The Chronicle” At Cornell University: “Multicollege department to bridge design and technology”

From “The Chronicle”

At

Cornell University

12.14.22
James Dean | Cornell Chronicle
jad534@cornell.edu

Media Contact
Rebecca Valli
rv234@cornell.edu
607-255-6035

During the Cornell Tech Open Studio Fall 2022 event on Dec. 6, master’s students Thanut Sakdanaraseth, Kseniya Yerakhavets and Thomas Wallace discuss their interdisciplinary project, Automata Mangrove, with Jenny Sabin, associate professor in architecture and chair of the new multicollege Department of Design Tech. Credit: Jesse Winter/Provided.

Recognizing design’s integral role in the development of technologies reshaping the built environment and how we live and work, Cornell has established the multicollege and transdisciplinary Department of Design Tech.

The new department seeks to bridge and enhance design and technology disciplines and departments across the university, complementing and building upon strengths in the design arts, design science, design engineering and design professions.

The College of Architecture, Art and Planning (AAP) will administer the Department of Design Tech in partnership with the College of Human Ecology (CHE), Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science, Cornell Engineering and Cornell Tech in New York City.

The department is the product of more than two years of discussions by the deans of those colleges and a faculty task force that also includes representatives from the College of Arts and Sciences and Cornell SC Johnson College of Business. They were charged by Provost Michael I. Kotlikoff’s Radical Collaboration initiative – which identified Design + Technology as one of 10 strategic areas – to assess how best to strengthen and expand design education and research in emerging technologies at Cornell.

“The relationship between design and technology has never been more important to society,” Kotlikoff said. “The Department of Design Tech will foster collaborations across disciplines and campuses that promise to advance design education and research at Cornell and beyond.”

J. Meejin Yoon, B.Arch. ’95, the Gale and Ira Drukier Dean of AAP and lead dean for Design Tech, said the collaborating colleges recognized that each could benefit from, and contribute to, an integrated vision for design and technology that moved beyond disciplinary barriers.

Partnering with Yoon are Rachel Dunifon, the Rebecca Q. and James C. Morgan Dean of CHE; Kavita Bala, inaugural dean of Cornell Bowers CIS; Lynden Archer, the Joseph Silbert Dean of Engineering; and Greg Morrisett, the Jack and Rilla Neafsey Dean and Vice Provost of Cornell Tech.

“Synergy advancements in design and technology is not only imperative to design education at Cornell, but critical for preparing the next generation of designers, engineers, scientists, technologists and creatives to take on some of the most complex challenges of our time,” Yoon said. “Design Tech will pose, develop and answer questions with applied design and technology that can define new models for transdisciplinary design and thought.”

Design Tech’s inaugural chair is Jenny Sabin, the Arthur L. and Isabel B. Wiesenberger Professor in Architecture. Sabin co-chaired the 12-member Design + Technology faculty task force with Wendy Ju, associate professor at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech.

From additive manufacturing to artificial intelligence, Sabin said, we are seeing a contemporary paradigm shift and fusion across scales of the digital, physical and biological. In that context, she said, design and technology increasingly rely on each other to innovate.

Examples of Cornell research at the intersection of design and technology, Sabin said, include designing for human behavior in the context of autonomous vehicles; origami-inspired robots; additive manufacturing in space; 3D printing of programmable and sometimes living architectural materials; and the development of wearable interfaces responsive to changes in biodata.

“Design Tech will not only bridge our fields and faculty, but fill gaps in emerging, high-demand areas such as product design, interaction design, materials design and digital media design,” Sabin said. “At Cornell, we are uniquely positioned to be pioneers in this burgeoning space given our expertise in design, robotics, nanotech and materials science, computer science and beyond.”

The department’s first degree offering, pending approval from New York state, will be an interdisciplinary master’s in design technology anticipated for the 2024-25 academic year. Straddling the Ithaca campus and Cornell Tech, the two-year program will build upon AAP’s existing master’s in Matter Design Computation and incorporate lessons learned from “Design and Making Across Disciplines,” a four-year collaboration with Cornell Tech piloting transdisciplinary, studio-based teaching models that intersect with design tech research. Additional degrees and undergraduate courses may be proposed.

During a planning year ahead, a faculty steering committee drawn from the Design + Technology task force will work to launch the department and formalize the new master’s program.

The Radical Collaboration initiative will facilitate hiring by the partner colleges of core faculty members in design, science and engineering who will co-teach courses and engage in collaborative research.

In addition to Sabin and Ju, Design Tech’s inaugural faculty will include Heeju Park, associate professor in the Department of Human Centered Design (CHE); Timur Dogan, associate professor of architecture (AAP); François Guimbretière, professor of information science (Cornell Bowers CIS); and Uli Wiesner, the Spencer T. Olin Professor of Engineering in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering (Cornell Engineering).

“It’s extremely exciting to realize this new model that is truly transdisciplinary and collaborative with support from the university’s leadership and five colleges that are all aligned,” Sabin said. “We’re grateful to be a part of it.”

See the full article here .

Comments are invited and will be appreciated, especially if the reader finds any errors which I can correct. Use “Reply”.

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

Once called “the first American university” by educational historian Frederick Rudolph, Cornell University represents a distinctive mix of eminent scholarship and democratic ideals. Adding practical subjects to the classics and admitting qualified students regardless of nationality, race, social circumstance, gender, or religion was quite a departure when Cornell was founded in 1865.

Today’s Cornell reflects this heritage of egalitarian excellence. It is home to the nation’s first colleges devoted to hotel administration, industrial and labor relations, and veterinary medicine. Both a private university and the land-grant institution of New York State, Cornell University is the most educationally diverse member of the Ivy League.

On the Ithaca campus alone nearly 20,000 students representing every state and 120 countries choose from among 4,000 courses in 11 undergraduate, graduate, and professional schools. Many undergraduates participate in a wide range of interdisciplinary programs, play meaningful roles in original research, and study in Cornell programs in Washington, New York City, and the world over.

Cornell University is a private, statutory, Ivy League and land-grant research university in Ithaca, New York. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, the university was intended to teach and make contributions in all fields of knowledge—from the classics to the sciences, and from the theoretical to the applied. These ideals, unconventional for the time, are captured in Cornell’s founding principle, a popular 1868 quotation from founder Ezra Cornell: “I would found an institution where any person can find instruction in any study.”

The university is broadly organized into seven undergraduate colleges and seven graduate divisions at its main Ithaca campus, with each college and division defining its specific admission standards and academic programs in near autonomy. The university also administers two satellite medical campuses, one in New York City and one in Education City, Qatar, and Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute in New York City, a graduate program that incorporates technology, business, and creative thinking. The program moved from Google’s Chelsea Building in New York City to its permanent campus on Roosevelt Island in September 2017.

Cornell is one of the few private land grant universities in the United States. Of its seven undergraduate colleges, three are state-supported statutory or contract colleges through the SUNY – The State University of New York system, including its Agricultural and Human Ecology colleges as well as its Industrial Labor Relations school. Of Cornell’s graduate schools, only the veterinary college is state-supported. As a land grant college, Cornell operates a cooperative extension outreach program in every county of New York and receives annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions. The Cornell University Ithaca Campus comprises 745 acres, but is much larger when the Cornell Botanic Gardens (more than 4,300 acres) and the numerous university-owned lands in New York City are considered.

Alumni and affiliates of Cornell have reached many notable and influential positions in politics, media, and science. As of January 2021, 61 Nobel laureates, four Turing Award winners and one Fields Medalist have been affiliated with Cornell. Cornell counts more than 250,000 living alumni, and its former and present faculty and alumni include 34 Marshall Scholars, 33 Rhodes Scholars, 29 Truman Scholars, 7 Gates Scholars, 55 Olympic Medalists, 10 current Fortune 500 CEOs, and 35 billionaire alumni. Since its founding, Cornell has been a co-educational, non-sectarian institution where admission has not been restricted by religion or race. The student body consists of more than 15,000 undergraduate and 9,000 graduate students from all 50 American states and 119 countries.

History

Cornell University was founded on April 27, 1865; the New York State (NYS) Senate authorized the university as the state’s land grant institution. Senator Ezra Cornell offered his farm in Ithaca, New York, as a site and $500,000 of his personal fortune as an initial endowment. Fellow senator and educator Andrew Dickson White agreed to be the first president. During the next three years, White oversaw the construction of the first two buildings and traveled to attract students and faculty. The university was inaugurated on October 7, 1868, and 412 men were enrolled the next day.

Cornell developed as a technologically innovative institution, applying its research to its own campus and to outreach efforts. For example, in 1883 it was one of the first university campuses to use electricity from a water-powered dynamo to light the grounds. Since 1894, Cornell has included colleges that are state funded and fulfill statutory requirements; it has also administered research and extension activities that have been jointly funded by state and federal matching programs.

Cornell has had active alumni since its earliest classes. It was one of the first universities to include alumni-elected representatives on its Board of Trustees. Cornell was also among the Ivies that had heightened student activism during the 1960s related to cultural issues; civil rights; and opposition to the Vietnam War, with protests and occupations resulting in the resignation of Cornell’s president and the restructuring of university governance. Today the university has more than 4,000 courses. Cornell is also known for the Residential Club Fire of 1967, a fire in the Residential Club building that killed eight students and one professor.

Since 2000, Cornell has been expanding its international programs. In 2004, the university opened the Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar. It has partnerships with institutions in India, Singapore, and the People’s Republic of China. Former president Jeffrey S. Lehman described the university, with its high international profile, a “transnational university”. On March 9, 2004, Cornell and Stanford University laid the cornerstone for a new ‘Bridging the Rift Center’ to be built and jointly operated for education on the Israel–Jordan border.

Research

Cornell, a research university, is ranked fourth in the world in producing the largest number of graduates who go on to pursue PhDs in engineering or the natural sciences at American institutions, and fifth in the world in producing graduates who pursue PhDs at American institutions in any field. Research is a central element of the university’s mission; in 2009 Cornell spent $671 million on science and engineering research and development, the 16th highest in the United States. Cornell is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity”.

For the 2016–17 fiscal year, the university spent $984.5 million on research. Federal sources constitute the largest source of research funding, with total federal investment of $438.2 million. The agencies contributing the largest share of that investment are The Department of Health and Human Services and the National Science Foundation, accounting for 49.6% and 24.4% of all federal investment, respectively. Cornell was on the top-ten list of U.S. universities receiving the most patents in 2003, and was one of the nation’s top five institutions in forming start-up companies. In 2004–05, Cornell received 200 invention disclosures; filed 203 U.S. patent applications; completed 77 commercial license agreements; and distributed royalties of more than $4.1 million to Cornell units and inventors.

Since 1962, Cornell has been involved in unmanned missions to Mars. In the 21st century, Cornell had a hand in the Mars Exploration Rover Mission. Cornell’s Steve Squyres, Principal Investigator for the Athena Science Payload, led the selection of the landing zones and requested data collection features for the Spirit and Opportunity rovers. NASA-JPL/Caltech engineers took those requests and designed the rovers to meet them. The rovers, both of which have operated long past their original life expectancies, are responsible for the discoveries that were awarded 2004 Breakthrough of the Year honors by Science. Control of the Mars rovers has shifted between National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s JPL-Caltech and Cornell’s Space Sciences Building.

Further, Cornell researchers discovered the rings around the planet Uranus, and Cornell built and operated the telescope at Arecibo Observatory located in Arecibo, Puerto Rico until 2011, when they transferred the operations to SRI International, the Universities Space Research Association and the Metropolitan University of Puerto Rico [Universidad Metropolitana de Puerto Rico].

The Automotive Crash Injury Research Project was begun in 1952. It pioneered the use of crash testing, originally using corpses rather than dummies. The project discovered that improved door locks; energy-absorbing steering wheels; padded dashboards; and seat belts could prevent an extraordinary percentage of injuries.

In the early 1980s, Cornell deployed the first IBM 3090-400VF and coupled two IBM 3090-600E systems to investigate coarse-grained parallel computing. In 1984, the National Science Foundation began work on establishing five new supercomputer centers, including the Cornell Center for Advanced Computing, to provide high-speed computing resources for research within the United States. As a National Science Foundation center, Cornell deployed the first IBM Scalable Parallel supercomputer.

In the 1990s, Cornell developed scheduling software and deployed the first supercomputer built by Dell. Most recently, Cornell deployed Red Cloud, one of the first cloud computing services designed specifically for research. Today, the center is a partner on the National Science Foundation XSEDE-Extreme Science Engineering Discovery Environment supercomputing program, providing coordination for XSEDE architecture and design, systems reliability testing, and online training using the Cornell Virtual Workshop learning platform.

Cornell scientists have researched the fundamental particles of nature for more than 70 years. Cornell physicists, such as Hans Bethe, contributed not only to the foundations of nuclear physics but also participated in the Manhattan Project. In the 1930s, Cornell built the second cyclotron in the United States. In the 1950s, Cornell physicists became the first to study synchrotron radiation.

During the 1990s, the Cornell Electron Storage Ring, located beneath Alumni Field, was the world’s highest-luminosity electron-positron collider. After building the synchrotron at Cornell, Robert R. Wilson took a leave of absence to become the founding director of DOE’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, which involved designing and building the largest accelerator in the United States.

Cornell’s accelerator and high-energy physics groups are involved in the design of the proposed ILC-International Linear Collider(JP) and plan to participate in its construction and operation. The International Linear Collider(JP), to be completed in the late 2010s, will complement the CERN Large Hadron Collider(CH) and shed light on questions such as the identity of dark matter and the existence of extra dimensions.

As part of its research work, Cornell has established several research collaborations with universities around the globe. For example, a partnership with the University of Sussex(UK) (including the Institute of Development Studies at Sussex) allows research and teaching collaboration between the two institutions.

From “The Chronicle” At Cornell University: “Students design robot to collect microplastics from beaches”

From “The Chronicle”

At

Cornell University

12.6.22
Linda Copman
cunews@cornell.edu

When Angela Loh ’23 was 10 years old, she and her family moved to Shanghai from Michigan. She was immediately struck by how much more pollution she saw in Shanghai.

“When I stepped outside my home, the skies were grey and I could smell the stench of PM2.5 particles hanging in the air. I would walk on certain local streets and see litter everywhere,” she says. She noticed that most residents seemed complacent. “Nobody seemed to care.”

But Loh did care, deeply, about environmental sustainability.

As a freshman, Loh and Alan Hsiao ’21 founded Cornell Nexus, a group of students from diverse colleges and majors who are designing and building an autonomous robot that will remove microplastics from the sand on beaches. The team hopes to have a working land-based prototype built by spring 2023, when they will turn their attention to creating a submersible robot that will remove microplastics from sea water.

“We are a team of individuals who want to step outside the boundaries of university competitions to make a difference on our planet,” Loh says.

Angela Loh ’23 wires a component of the autonomous robot prototype. Provided.

Microplastics, tiny bits of plastic the size of a sesame seed or smaller, are proliferating and pose a significant risk to ecosystems and to human and animal health. “There are 50 trillion pieces of microplastics embedded in our sand, our marine life, our oceans and even in our drinking water,” Loh says. A recent survey of the sea floor in the Mediterranean west of Italy found 1.9 million microplastics in one square meter. “This is just one layer of sand in a single square meter of the Mediterranean,” she says. “Imagine how much microplastic has accumulated in all of our bodies, our water and our land.”

Beach cleaning operations focus on removing the waste we can see, such as plastic water bottles and trash, often using gas-powered tractors that bury microplastics beneath the top layer of sand. In contrast, the Cornell Nexus robot will use renewable solar energy to collect and remove microplastic waste. “We believe that Nexus’ focus on autonomy and microplastics will revolutionize the technology for waste removal from beaches and bodies of water,” Loh says.
===
Planting the seed

Loh recalls making hand-drawn posters promoting recycling and distributing them to her neighbors when she was in elementary school. Moving to Shanghai – a city she loves – was a wake-up call. “I realized what big issues plastics, and pollution and waste in general, are on our planet,” she says, “and I really wanted to do something about them.”

In the summer after graduating from high school, Loh read a biography of Elon Musk and the founding of Tesla. “Reading this allowed me to realize the boundless possibilities there are in the field of engineering,” she says. Loh spent the next few months binge-reading biographies about inventors, entrepreneurs and engineers, from Steve Jobs to Leonardo da Vinci and Nike founder Phil Knight. She realized that engineering would be her springboard for creating change.

After perusing the College of Engineering website, Loh switched her major from environmental science to electrical and computer engineering and computer science. “Reading about the engineering project teams before I arrived at Cornell planted a seed in my brain that maybe one day it wouldn’t be impossible to start my own,” Loh says.

Alan Hsiao was a junior and one of the first people Loh met as a freshman at Cornell. “When we first started Nexus, I didn’t know anything – not even basic knowledge about programming or wiring circuit boards – let alone building an entire vehicle that was going to traverse beaches and charge itself,” Loh says. “Alan would spend hours and hours mentoring me and teaching me concepts that I hadn’t even heard of. … Through his kindness, wisdom and compassion, he has definitely left his impact on me, our Nexus team, the Cornell campus and our planet.”

Unleashing creativity, with help from alumni

Nexus team members are now building a prototype with a multilayered filtering system to catch a range of different sizes of microplastics. When full, the robot will return to its docking station to offload the collected plastics and recharge.

“Creating our robot requires knowledge about concepts and implementation mechanisms that are usually taught in graduate-level courses,” Loh says. Team members conduct their own in-depth research and seek out faculty who can guide their work. Joseph Skovira, Ph.D. ’90, senior lecturer in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the group’s faculty adviser, is helping them refine their product.Greg Whelan ’83 of Greywale Advisors and part of the McCarthy’s Venture Mentoring Network has been helping them navigate business outreach and fundraising.

Alan Hsiao ’21 solders a component of the autonomous robot prototype. Provided.

To ensure they have funding to purchase specialized hardware and software components, Nexus members have been developing relationships with companies that might sponsor the project once they have a prototype. In spring 2021, Nexus won first prize in the Cornell Engineering Innovation Competition. The Yunni and Maxine Pao Social Innovation Award, funded by Carolyn Wang ’00 and Jeff Pao ’00, allowed them to buy better wheels, a more robust material for the robot’s frame, filtration nets and more accurate sensors.
===
Doing the greatest good

Nexus is testing and refining their prototype in the 2022-2023 academic year, using a sand bed to test the robot’s moving, digging and filtering mechanisms. Then they will place their robot at several beaches, including some recommended by alumni from the Cornell Peter and Stephanie Nolan School of Hotel Administration.

This rendering illustrates what the Cornell Nexus robot will look like when completed. Provided.

Once the land-based robot is completed, the team hopes to launch their robot into the water, where the vast majority of microplastics are. “Our vision is to expand our technology to address the heart of the microplastics problem, which is underwater,” Loh says. “Very few commercial robots are tackling this issue, on a macro and micro scale.”

There are multiple design possibilities for a seafaring robot, including a water-based recharging and waste removal station, which could be more efficient than returning the robot to land.

The Nexus team plans to make their design freely available to the public. “This includes all of our software code, mechanical CAD files, electrical circuit board designs, and so forth,” Loh says. “Our goal is to make an impact and do our part to save our planet.”

See the full article here .

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Once called “the first American university” by educational historian Frederick Rudolph, Cornell University represents a distinctive mix of eminent scholarship and democratic ideals. Adding practical subjects to the classics and admitting qualified students regardless of nationality, race, social circumstance, gender, or religion was quite a departure when Cornell was founded in 1865.

Today’s Cornell reflects this heritage of egalitarian excellence. It is home to the nation’s first colleges devoted to hotel administration, industrial and labor relations, and veterinary medicine. Both a private university and the land-grant institution of New York State, Cornell University is the most educationally diverse member of the Ivy League.

On the Ithaca campus alone nearly 20,000 students representing every state and 120 countries choose from among 4,000 courses in 11 undergraduate, graduate, and professional schools. Many undergraduates participate in a wide range of interdisciplinary programs, play meaningful roles in original research, and study in Cornell programs in Washington, New York City, and the world over.

Cornell University is a private, statutory, Ivy League and land-grant research university in Ithaca, New York. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, the university was intended to teach and make contributions in all fields of knowledge—from the classics to the sciences, and from the theoretical to the applied. These ideals, unconventional for the time, are captured in Cornell’s founding principle, a popular 1868 quotation from founder Ezra Cornell: “I would found an institution where any person can find instruction in any study.”

The university is broadly organized into seven undergraduate colleges and seven graduate divisions at its main Ithaca campus, with each college and division defining its specific admission standards and academic programs in near autonomy. The university also administers two satellite medical campuses, one in New York City and one in Education City, Qatar, and Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute in New York City, a graduate program that incorporates technology, business, and creative thinking. The program moved from Google’s Chelsea Building in New York City to its permanent campus on Roosevelt Island in September 2017.

Cornell is one of the few private land grant universities in the United States. Of its seven undergraduate colleges, three are state-supported statutory or contract colleges through the SUNY – The State University of New York system, including its Agricultural and Human Ecology colleges as well as its Industrial Labor Relations school. Of Cornell’s graduate schools, only the veterinary college is state-supported. As a land grant college, Cornell operates a cooperative extension outreach program in every county of New York and receives annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions. The Cornell University Ithaca Campus comprises 745 acres, but is much larger when the Cornell Botanic Gardens (more than 4,300 acres) and the numerous university-owned lands in New York City are considered.

Alumni and affiliates of Cornell have reached many notable and influential positions in politics, media, and science. As of January 2021, 61 Nobel laureates, four Turing Award winners and one Fields Medalist have been affiliated with Cornell. Cornell counts more than 250,000 living alumni, and its former and present faculty and alumni include 34 Marshall Scholars, 33 Rhodes Scholars, 29 Truman Scholars, 7 Gates Scholars, 55 Olympic Medalists, 10 current Fortune 500 CEOs, and 35 billionaire alumni. Since its founding, Cornell has been a co-educational, non-sectarian institution where admission has not been restricted by religion or race. The student body consists of more than 15,000 undergraduate and 9,000 graduate students from all 50 American states and 119 countries.

History

Cornell University was founded on April 27, 1865; the New York State (NYS) Senate authorized the university as the state’s land grant institution. Senator Ezra Cornell offered his farm in Ithaca, New York, as a site and $500,000 of his personal fortune as an initial endowment. Fellow senator and educator Andrew Dickson White agreed to be the first president. During the next three years, White oversaw the construction of the first two buildings and traveled to attract students and faculty. The university was inaugurated on October 7, 1868, and 412 men were enrolled the next day.

Cornell developed as a technologically innovative institution, applying its research to its own campus and to outreach efforts. For example, in 1883 it was one of the first university campuses to use electricity from a water-powered dynamo to light the grounds. Since 1894, Cornell has included colleges that are state funded and fulfill statutory requirements; it has also administered research and extension activities that have been jointly funded by state and federal matching programs.

Cornell has had active alumni since its earliest classes. It was one of the first universities to include alumni-elected representatives on its Board of Trustees. Cornell was also among the Ivies that had heightened student activism during the 1960s related to cultural issues; civil rights; and opposition to the Vietnam War, with protests and occupations resulting in the resignation of Cornell’s president and the restructuring of university governance. Today the university has more than 4,000 courses. Cornell is also known for the Residential Club Fire of 1967, a fire in the Residential Club building that killed eight students and one professor.

Since 2000, Cornell has been expanding its international programs. In 2004, the university opened the Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar. It has partnerships with institutions in India, Singapore, and the People’s Republic of China. Former president Jeffrey S. Lehman described the university, with its high international profile, a “transnational university”. On March 9, 2004, Cornell and Stanford University laid the cornerstone for a new ‘Bridging the Rift Center’ to be built and jointly operated for education on the Israel–Jordan border.

Research

Cornell, a research university, is ranked fourth in the world in producing the largest number of graduates who go on to pursue PhDs in engineering or the natural sciences at American institutions, and fifth in the world in producing graduates who pursue PhDs at American institutions in any field. Research is a central element of the university’s mission; in 2009 Cornell spent $671 million on science and engineering research and development, the 16th highest in the United States. Cornell is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity”.

For the 2016–17 fiscal year, the university spent $984.5 million on research. Federal sources constitute the largest source of research funding, with total federal investment of $438.2 million. The agencies contributing the largest share of that investment are The Department of Health and Human Services and the National Science Foundation, accounting for 49.6% and 24.4% of all federal investment, respectively. Cornell was on the top-ten list of U.S. universities receiving the most patents in 2003, and was one of the nation’s top five institutions in forming start-up companies. In 2004–05, Cornell received 200 invention disclosures; filed 203 U.S. patent applications; completed 77 commercial license agreements; and distributed royalties of more than $4.1 million to Cornell units and inventors.

Since 1962, Cornell has been involved in unmanned missions to Mars. In the 21st century, Cornell had a hand in the Mars Exploration Rover Mission. Cornell’s Steve Squyres, Principal Investigator for the Athena Science Payload, led the selection of the landing zones and requested data collection features for the Spirit and Opportunity rovers. NASA-JPL/Caltech engineers took those requests and designed the rovers to meet them. The rovers, both of which have operated long past their original life expectancies, are responsible for the discoveries that were awarded 2004 Breakthrough of the Year honors by Science. Control of the Mars rovers has shifted between National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s JPL-Caltech and Cornell’s Space Sciences Building.

Further, Cornell researchers discovered the rings around the planet Uranus, and Cornell built and operated the telescope at Arecibo Observatory located in Arecibo, Puerto Rico until 2011, when they transferred the operations to SRI International, the Universities Space Research Association and the Metropolitan University of Puerto Rico [Universidad Metropolitana de Puerto Rico].

The Automotive Crash Injury Research Project was begun in 1952. It pioneered the use of crash testing, originally using corpses rather than dummies. The project discovered that improved door locks; energy-absorbing steering wheels; padded dashboards; and seat belts could prevent an extraordinary percentage of injuries.

In the early 1980s, Cornell deployed the first IBM 3090-400VF and coupled two IBM 3090-600E systems to investigate coarse-grained parallel computing. In 1984, the National Science Foundation began work on establishing five new supercomputer centers, including the Cornell Center for Advanced Computing, to provide high-speed computing resources for research within the United States. As a National Science Foundation center, Cornell deployed the first IBM Scalable Parallel supercomputer.

In the 1990s, Cornell developed scheduling software and deployed the first supercomputer built by Dell. Most recently, Cornell deployed Red Cloud, one of the first cloud computing services designed specifically for research. Today, the center is a partner on the National Science Foundation XSEDE-Extreme Science Engineering Discovery Environment supercomputing program, providing coordination for XSEDE architecture and design, systems reliability testing, and online training using the Cornell Virtual Workshop learning platform.

Cornell scientists have researched the fundamental particles of nature for more than 70 years. Cornell physicists, such as Hans Bethe, contributed not only to the foundations of nuclear physics but also participated in the Manhattan Project. In the 1930s, Cornell built the second cyclotron in the United States. In the 1950s, Cornell physicists became the first to study synchrotron radiation.

During the 1990s, the Cornell Electron Storage Ring, located beneath Alumni Field, was the world’s highest-luminosity electron-positron collider. After building the synchrotron at Cornell, Robert R. Wilson took a leave of absence to become the founding director of DOE’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, which involved designing and building the largest accelerator in the United States.

Cornell’s accelerator and high-energy physics groups are involved in the design of the proposed ILC-International Linear Collider(JP) and plan to participate in its construction and operation. The International Linear Collider(JP), to be completed in the late 2010s, will complement the CERN Large Hadron Collider(CH) and shed light on questions such as the identity of dark matter and the existence of extra dimensions.

As part of its research work, Cornell has established several research collaborations with universities around the globe. For example, a partnership with the University of Sussex(UK) (including the Institute of Development Studies at Sussex) allows research and teaching collaboration between the two institutions.

From “Q-NEXT” At The DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory: “The Entanglement Advantage”

From

From “Q-NEXT”

At

The DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory

11.28.22
Leah Hesla

Researchers affiliated with the Q-NEXT quantum research center show how to create quantum-entangled networks of atomic clocks and accelerometers — and they demonstrate the setup’s superior, high-precision performance.

Entanglement, a special property of nature at the quantum level, is a correlation between two or more objects. A research team recently harnessed entanglement to develop more precise networked quantum sensors. (Image by Brookhaven National Laboratory.)

What happened

For the first time, scientists have entangled atoms for use as networked quantum sensors, specifically, atomic clocks and accelerometers.

The research team’s experimental setup yielded ultraprecise measurements of time and acceleration. Compared to a similar setup that does not draw on quantum entanglement, their time measurements were 3.5 times more precise, and acceleration measurements exhibited 1.2 times greater precision.

The result, published in Nature [below], is supported by Q-NEXT, a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) National Quantum Information Science Research Center led by DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory. The research was conducted by scientists currently working at Stanford University, Cornell University and The DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory.

“The impact of using entanglement in this configuration was that it produced better sensor network performance than would have been available if quantum entanglement were not used as a resource,” said Mark Kasevich, lead author of the paper, a member of Q-NEXT, the William R. Kenan, Jr. professor in the Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences and professor of physics and of applied physics. ​“For atomic clocks and accelerometers, ours is a pioneering demonstration.”

What is quantum entanglement? How does it apply to sensors?

Entanglement, a special property of nature at the quantum level, is a correlation between two or more objects. When two atoms are entangled, one can measure the properties of both atoms by observing only one. This is true no matter how much distance — even if it’s light-years — separates the entangled atoms.
A helpful everyday analogy: A red marble and a blue marble are placed in a box. If you draw a red marble from the box, you know, without having to look at the other one, that it’s blue. The color of the marbles is correlated, or entangled.
In the quantum realm, entanglement is subtler. An atom can take on multiple states (colors) at once. If our marbles were like atoms, each marble would be both red and blue at the same time. Neither is fully red or blue while it sits the box. The quantum marble ​“decides” its color only at the moment of revelation. And once you draw one marble of ​“decided” color, you know the color of its entangled partner.
To take a measurement of one member of an entangled pair is effectively to take a simultaneous reading of both.
Taking this further: Two entangled clocks are practically equivalent to a single clock with two displays. Time measurements taken using entangled clocks can be more precise than measurements from two separate, synchronized clocks. 

Why it matters

Greater sensitivity in atomic clocks and accelerometers would lead to more precise timekeeping and navigation systems, such as those used in global positioning systems, in defense and in broadcast communications. Ultraprecise clocks are also used in finance and trading.

“GPS tells me where I am to about a meter right now,” Kasevich said. ​“But what if I wanted to know where I was to within 10 centimeters? That’s what the impact of better clocks would be.” 

A note on ultraprecise clocks

One can mark the passage of time by counting the number of pulses in an electromagnetic wave, just as you would count the ticks of a clock. If you know that a particular wave pulses 6 billion times per second, you know that, once you count 6 billion crests of the wave, one second has passed. So knowing the exact frequency of a microwave gives one a precise way to track time.

How it works

The entanglement: Rubidium atoms, trapped inside a cavity, are separated into two groups of about 100,000 atoms each. The groups sit between two mirrors. Light is made to bounce back and forth between the mirrors, tracing its way through the groups of atoms with every shot. The ricocheting light entangles them.

The sensing: A microwave ripples through the two groups of atoms. The atoms that happen to resonate with the microwave’s particular frequency respond by changing to a different state, like the wine glass that vibrates when a soprano hits just the right note.

Similarly, when a particular acceleration is applied to the atomic groups, some fraction of the atoms in each group responds by changing state.

The measurement: The two entangled atomic groups behave like two faces of a single clock, or two readings of one accelerometer.

The research team measured the number of atoms that changed state — the ones that vibrated like a wine glass — in each group.

Then they used the numbers to calculate the difference in the microwave frequencies applied to the two groups, and therefore the difference in the groups’ readings of time or acceleration.

Increased precision: The Kasevich team found that entanglement improves the precision in the frequency or acceleration difference read by the displays. 

In their setup, the measurement of time in two locations was 3.5 times more precise when the clocks were entangled than if they were operating independently. For acceleration, the measurement was 1.2 times more precise with entanglement.

Impact

“If you want to know how long something takes, you might look at one clock as a starting point and then run to another room to look at another clock, the end point,” Kasevich said. ​“Our method exploits the entanglement principle to make that comparison as precise as possible.”

The researchers also successfully networked four groups of atoms in four separate locations using this configuration.

In the team’s experiment, the two groups of atoms were separated by about 20 micrometers, close to the average width of a human hair.

Their work means that time or acceleration can be compared, with unprecedented sensitivity, between four separate, albeit close-together, locations.

“In the future, we want to push them out to longer distances. The world wants clocks whose time can be compared. It’s the same with accelerometers. There are sensing configurations where you want to be able to read out the difference in the acceleration of one group with respect to another. We were able to show how to do that,” Kasevich said.

“This is a tour de force result from Mark and his team,” said Q-NEXT Deputy Director JoAnne Hewett, who is also The DOE’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory associate director of fundamental physics and chief research officer as well as a Stanford professor of particle physics and astrophysics. ​“This means we can harness entanglement to develop sensors that are far more powerful than those we use today. We are another step closer to wielding quantum phenomena to improve our everyday lives.”

This work was supported by the DOE’s Office of Science National Quantum Information Science Research Centers as part of the Q-NEXT center.

Science paper:
Nature

See the full article here .

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Q-NEXT brings together the world’s leading minds from the national laboratories, universities and technology companies to solve cutting-edge challenges in quantum information science.

Led by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory, Q-NEXT focuses on how to reliably control, store and transmit quantum information at distances that could be as small as the width of a computer chip or as large as the distance between Chicago and San Francisco.

Advances in quantum information science have the potential to revolutionize how we process and share information, with profound impacts such as advanced medical imaging, the creation of novel materials and ultrasecure communication networks.

Through its partnerships, Q-NEXT is creating an innovation ecosystem that enables the translation of discovery science into technologies for science and society.

The DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory seeks solutions to pressing national problems in science and technology. The nation’s first national laboratory, Argonne conducts leading-edge basic and applied scientific research in virtually every scientific discipline. Argonne researchers work closely with researchers from hundreds of companies, universities, and federal, state and municipal agencies to help them solve their is a science and engineering research national laboratory operated by UChicago Argonne LLC for the United States Department of Energy. The facility is located in Lemont, Illinois, outside of Chicago, and is the largest national laboratory by size and scope in the Midwest.

Argonne had its beginnings in the Metallurgical Laboratory of the University of Chicago, formed in part to carry out Enrico Fermi’s work on nuclear reactors for the Manhattan Project during World War II. After the war, it was designated as the first national laboratory in the United States on July 1, 1946. In the post-war era the lab focused primarily on non-weapon related nuclear physics, designing and building the first power-producing nuclear reactors, helping design the reactors used by the United States’ nuclear navy, and a wide variety of similar projects. In 1994, the lab’s nuclear mission ended, and today it maintains a broad portfolio in basic science research, energy storage and renewable energy, environmental sustainability, supercomputing, and national security.

UChicago Argonne, LLC, the operator of the laboratory, “brings together the expertise of the University of Chicago (the sole member of the LLC) with Jacobs Engineering Group Inc.” Argonne is a part of the expanding Illinois Technology and Research Corridor. Argonne formerly ran a smaller facility called Argonne National Laboratory-West (or simply Argonne-West) in Idaho next to the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory. In 2005, the two Idaho-based laboratories merged to become the DOE’s Idaho National Laboratory.

What would become Argonne began in 1942 as the Metallurgical Laboratory at the University of Chicago, which had become part of the Manhattan Project. The Met Lab built Chicago Pile-1, the world’s first nuclear reactor, under the stands of the University of Chicago sports stadium. Considered unsafe, in 1943, CP-1 was reconstructed as CP-2, in what is today known as Red Gate Woods but was then the Argonne Forest of the Cook County Forest Preserve District near Palos Hills. The lab was named after the surrounding forest, which in turn was named after the Forest of Argonne in France where U.S. troops fought in World War I. Fermi’s pile was originally going to be constructed in the Argonne forest, and construction plans were set in motion, but a labor dispute brought the project to a halt. Since speed was paramount, the project was moved to the squash court under Stagg Field, the football stadium on the campus of the University of Chicago. Fermi told them that he was sure of his calculations, which said that it would not lead to a runaway reaction, which would have contaminated the city.

Other activities were added to Argonne over the next five years. On July 1, 1946, the “Metallurgical Laboratory” was formally re-chartered as Argonne National Laboratory for “cooperative research in nucleonics.” At the request of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, it began developing nuclear reactors for the nation’s peaceful nuclear energy program. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the laboratory moved to a larger location in unincorporated DuPage County, Illinois and established a remote location in Idaho, called “Argonne-West,” to conduct further nuclear research.

In quick succession, the laboratory designed and built Chicago Pile 3 (1944), the world’s first heavy-water moderated reactor, and the Experimental Breeder Reactor I (Chicago Pile 4), built-in Idaho, which lit a string of four light bulbs with the world’s first nuclear-generated electricity in 1951. A complete list of the reactors designed and, in most cases, built and operated by Argonne can be viewed in the, Reactors Designed by Argonne page. The knowledge gained from the Argonne experiments conducted with these reactors 1) formed the foundation for the designs of most of the commercial reactors currently used throughout the world for electric power generation and 2) inform the current evolving designs of liquid-metal reactors for future commercial power stations.

Conducting classified research, the laboratory was heavily secured; all employees and visitors needed badges to pass a checkpoint, many of the buildings were classified, and the laboratory itself was fenced and guarded. Such alluring secrecy drew visitors both authorized—including King Leopold III of Belgium and Queen Frederica of Greece—and unauthorized. Shortly past 1 a.m. on February 6, 1951, Argonne guards discovered reporter Paul Harvey near the 10-foot (3.0 m) perimeter fence, his coat tangled in the barbed wire. Searching his car, guards found a previously prepared four-page broadcast detailing the saga of his unauthorized entrance into a classified “hot zone”. He was brought before a federal grand jury on charges of conspiracy to obtain information on national security and transmit it to the public, but was not indicted.

Not all nuclear technology went into developing reactors, however. While designing a scanner for reactor fuel elements in 1957, Argonne physicist William Nelson Beck put his own arm inside the scanner and obtained one of the first ultrasound images of the human body. Remote manipulators designed to handle radioactive materials laid the groundwork for more complex machines used to clean up contaminated areas, sealed laboratories or caves. In 1964, the “Janus” reactor opened to study the effects of neutron radiation on biological life, providing research for guidelines on safe exposure levels for workers at power plants, laboratories and hospitals. Scientists at Argonne pioneered a technique to analyze the moon’s surface using alpha radiation, which launched aboard the Surveyor 5 in 1967 and later analyzed lunar samples from the Apollo 11 mission.

In addition to nuclear work, the laboratory maintained a strong presence in the basic research of physics and chemistry. In 1955, Argonne chemists co-discovered the elements einsteinium and fermium, elements 99 and 100 in the periodic table. In 1962, laboratory chemists produced the first compound of the inert noble gas xenon, opening up a new field of chemical bonding research. In 1963, they discovered the hydrated electron.

High-energy physics made a leap forward when Argonne was chosen as the site of the 12.5 GeV Zero Gradient Synchrotron, a proton accelerator that opened in 1963. A bubble chamber allowed scientists to track the motions of subatomic particles as they zipped through the chamber; in 1970, they observed the neutrino in a hydrogen bubble chamber for the first time.

Meanwhile, the laboratory was also helping to design the reactor for the world’s first nuclear-powered submarine, the U.S.S. Nautilus, which steamed for more than 513,550 nautical miles (951,090 km). The next nuclear reactor model was Experimental Boiling Water Reactor, the forerunner of many modern nuclear plants, and Experimental Breeder Reactor II (EBR-II), which was sodium-cooled, and included a fuel recycling facility. EBR-II was later modified to test other reactor designs, including a fast-neutron reactor and, in 1982, the Integral Fast Reactor concept—a revolutionary design that reprocessed its own fuel, reduced its atomic waste and withstood safety tests of the same failures that triggered the Chernobyl and Three Mile Island disasters. In 1994, however, the U.S. Congress terminated funding for the bulk of Argonne’s nuclear programs.

Argonne moved to specialize in other areas, while capitalizing on its experience in physics, chemical sciences and metallurgy. In 1987, the laboratory was the first to successfully demonstrate a pioneering technique called plasma wakefield acceleration, which accelerates particles in much shorter distances than conventional accelerators. It also cultivated a strong battery research program.

Following a major push by then-director Alan Schriesheim, the laboratory was chosen as the site of the Advanced Photon Source, a major X-ray facility which was completed in 1995 and produced the brightest X-rays in the world at the time of its construction.

On 19 March 2019, it was reported in the Chicago Tribune that the laboratory was constructing the world’s most powerful supercomputer. Costing $500 million it will have the processing power of 1 quintillion flops. Applications will include the analysis of stars and improvements in the power grid.

With employees from more than 60 nations, Argonne is managed by UChicago Argonne, LLC for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science. For more visit http://www.anl.gov.

About the Advanced Photon Source

The U. S. Department of Energy Office of Science’s Advanced Photon Source (APS) at Argonne National Laboratory is one of the world’s most productive X-ray light source facilities. The APS provides high-brightness X-ray beams to a diverse community of researchers in materials science, chemistry, condensed matter physics, the life and environmental sciences, and applied research. These X-rays are ideally suited for explorations of materials and biological structures; elemental distribution; chemical, magnetic, electronic states; and a wide range of technologically important engineering systems from batteries to fuel injector sprays, all of which are the foundations of our nation’s economic, technological, and physical well-being. Each year, more than 5,000 researchers use the APS to produce over 2,000 publications detailing impactful discoveries, and solve more vital biological protein structures than users of any other X-ray light source research facility. APS scientists and engineers innovate technology that is at the heart of advancing accelerator and light-source operations. This includes the insertion devices that produce extreme-brightness X-rays prized by researchers, lenses that focus the X-rays down to a few nanometers, instrumentation that maximizes the way the X-rays interact with samples being studied, and software that gathers and manages the massive quantity of data resulting from discovery research at the APS.

With employees from more than 60 nations, Argonne is managed by UChicago Argonne, LLC for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science. For more visit http://www.anl.gov.

Argonne is managed by UChicago Argonne, LLC for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science

From Cornell University and The Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (CA) via phys.org: “Machine learning will be one of the best ways to identify habitable exoplanets”

From Cornell University

and

The Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (CA)

At

University of Toronto (CA)

via

phys.org

Artist’s impression of a multi-planet system where three are making a transit. Credit: The National Aeronautics and Space Agency

The field of extrasolar planet studies is undergoing a seismic shift. To date, 4,940 exoplanets have been confirmed in 3,711 planetary systems, with another 8,709 candidates awaiting confirmation. With so many planets available for study and improvements in telescope sensitivity and data analysis, the focus is transitioning from discovery to characterization. Instead of simply looking for more planets, astrobiologists will examine “potentially-habitable” worlds for potential “biosignatures.”

This refers to the chemical signatures associated with life and biological processes, one of the most important of which is water. As the only known solvent that life (as we know it) cannot exist without, water is considered the divining rod for finding life. In a recent study, astrophysicists Dang Pham and Lisa Kaltenegger explain how future surveys (when combined with machine learning) could discern the presence of water, snow, and clouds on distant exoplanets.

Dang Pham is a graduate student with the David A. Dunlap Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics at the University of Toronto, where he specializes in planetary dynamics research. Lisa Kaltenegger is an Associate Professor in Astronomy at Cornell University, the Director of the Carl Sagan Institute, and a world-leading expert in modeling potentially habitable worlds and characterizing their atmospheres.

Water is something that all life on Earth depends on, hence its importance for exoplanet and astrobiological surveys. As Lisa Kaltenegger told Universe Today via email, this importance is reflected in NASA’s slogan—”just follow the water”—which also inspired the title of their paper.

“Liquid water on a planet’s surface is one of the smoking guns for potential life—I say potential here because we don’t know what else we need to get life started. But liquid water is a great start. So we used NASA’s slogan of ‘just follow the water’ and asked, how can we find water on the surface of rocky exoplanets in the habitable zone? Doing spectroscopy is time intensive, thus we are searching for a faster way to initially identify promising planets—those with liquid water on them.”

Currently, astronomers have been limited to looking for Lyman-alpha line absorption, which indicates the presence of hydrogen gas in an exoplanet’s atmosphere. This is a byproduct of atmospheric water vapor that’s been exposed to solar ultraviolet radiation, causing it to become chemically disassociated into hydrogen and molecular oxygen (O2)—the former of which is lost to space while the latter is retained.

This is about to change, thanks to next-generation telescopes like the James Webb (JWST) and Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescopes (RST), as well as next-next-generation observatories like the Origins Space Telescope, the Habitable Exoplanet Observatory (HabEx), and the Large UV/Optical/IR Surveyor (LUVOIR). There are also ground-based telescopes like the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT), and the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT).

National Aeronautics Space Agency(US)/European Space Agency [La Agencia Espacial Europea] [Agence spatiale européenne][Europäische Weltraumorganisation](EU)/ Canadian Space Agency [Agence Spatiale Canadienne](CA) James Webb Infrared Space Telescope(US) annotated, finally launched December 25, 2021, ten years late.

National Aeronautics and Space Administration Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope [WFIRST] depiction.

NASA Origins Space telescope depiction.

NASA Habitable Exoplanet Imaging Mission (HabEx) The Planet Hunter depiction.

NASA vison of Large UV/Optical/IR Surveyor (LUVOIR) depiction.

European Southern Observatory(EU) ELT 39 meter telescope to be on top of Cerro Armazones in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile at an altitude of 3,060 metres (10,040 ft).

Giant Magellan Telescope(CL) 21 meters, to be at the Carnegie Institution for Science’s Las Campanas Observatory(CL) some 115 km (71 mi) north-northeast of La Serena, Chile, over 2,500 m (8,200 ft) high.

TMT-Thirty Meter Telescope International Observatory, Manua Kea, Hawai’i, Altitude 4,050 m [13,290 ft], the only giant 30 meter class telescope for the Northern hemisphere

Thanks to their large primary mirrors and advanced suite of spectrographs, chronographs, adaptive optics, these instruments will be able to conduct direct imaging studies of exoplanets. This consists of studying light reflected directly from an exoplanet’s atmosphere or surface to obtain spectra, allowing astronomers to see what chemical elements are present. But as they indicate in their paper, this is a time-intensive process.

Astronomers start by observing thousands of stars for periodic dips in brightness, then analyzing the light curves for signs of chemical signatures. Currently, exoplanet researchers and astrobiologists rely on amateur astronomers and machine algorithms to sort through the volumes of data their telescopes obtain. Looking ahead, Pham and Kaltenegger show how more advanced machine learning will be crucial.

As they indicate, ML techniques will allow astronomers to conduct the initial characterizations of exoplanets more rapidly, allowing astronomers to prioritize targets for follow-up observations. By “following the water,” astronomers will be able to dedicate more of an observatory’s valuable survey time to exoplanets that are more likely to provide significant returns.

“Next-generation telescopes will look for water vapor in the atmosphere of planets and water on the surface of planets,” said Kaltenegger. “Of course, to find water on the surface of planets, you should look [for water in its] liquid, solid, and gaseous forms, as we did in our paper.”

“Machine learning allows us to quickly identify optimal filters, as well as the trade-off in accuracy at various signal-to-noise ratios,” added Pham. “In the first task, using [the open-source algorithm] XGBoost, we get a ranking of which filters are most helpful for the algorithm in its tasks of detecting water, snow, or cloud. In the second task, we can observe how much better the algorithm performs with less noise. With that, we can draw a line where getting more signal would not correspond to much better accuracy.”

To make sure their algorithm was up to the task, Pham and Kaltenegger did some considerable calibrating. This consisted of creating 53,130 spectra profiles of a cold Earth with various surface components—including snow, water, and water clouds. They then simulated the spectra for this water in terms of atmosphere and surface reflectivity and assigned color profiles. As Pham explained:

“The atmosphere was modeled using Exo-Prime2—Exo-Prime2 has been validated by comparison to Earth in various missions. The reflectivity of surfaces like snow and water are measured on Earth by USGS. We then create colors from these spectra. We train XGBoost on these colors to perform three separate goals: detecting the existence of water, the existence of clouds, and the existence of snow.”

This trained XGBoost showed that clouds and snow are easier to identify than water, which is expected since clouds and snow have a much higher albedo (greater reflectivity of sunlight) than water. They further identified five optimal filters that worked extremely well for the algorithm, all of which were 0.2 micrometers broad and in the visible light range. The final step was to perform a mock probability assessment to evaluate their planet model regarding liquid water, snow, and clouds from the set of five optimal filters they identified.

“Finally, we [performed] a brief Bayesian analysis using Markov-Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) to do the same task on the five optimal filters, as a non-machine learning method to validate our finding,” said Pham. “Our findings there are similar: water is harder to detect, but identifying water, snow, and cloud through photometry is feasible.”

Similarly, they were surprised to see how well the trained XGBoost could identify water on the surface of rocky planets based on color alone. According to Kaltenegger, this is what filters really are: a means for separating light into discreet “bins.” “Imagine a bin for all red light (the “red” filter), then a bin for all the green light, from light to dark green (the “green” filter),” she said.

Their proposed method does not identify water in exoplanet atmospheres but on an exoplanet’s surface via photometry. In addition, it will not work with the Transit Method (aka. Transit Photometry), which is currently the most widely-used and effective means of exoplanet detection. This method consists of observing distant stars for periodic dips in luminosity attributed to exoplanets passing in front of the star (aka. transiting) relative to the observer.

On occasion, astronomers can obtain spectra from an exoplanet’s atmosphere as it makes a transit—a process known as “transit spectroscopy.” As the sun’s light passes through the exoplanet’s atmosphere relative to the observer, astronomers will analyze it with spectrometers to determine what chemicals are there. Using its sensitive optics and suite of spectrometers, the JWST will rely on this method to characterize exoplanet atmospheres.

Science paper submitted to MNRAS

See the full article here .

The Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics(CA) at University of Toronto(CA) is an endowed research institute with nearly 70 faculty, postdocs, students and staff, dedicated to innovative technology, ground-breaking research, world-class training, and public engagement. The research themes of its faculty and Dunlap Fellows span the Universe and include: optical, infrared and radio instrumentation; Dark Energy; large-scale structure; the Cosmic Microwave Background; the interstellar medium; galaxy evolution; cosmic magnetism; and time-domain science.

The Dunlap Institute (CA), University of Toronto Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics (CA), Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics (CA), and Centre for Planetary Sciences (CA) comprise the leading centre for astronomical research in Canada, at the leading research university in the country, the University of Toronto (CA).

The Dunlap Institute (CA) is committed to making its science, training and public outreach activities productive and enjoyable for everyone, regardless of gender, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, nationality or religion.

Our work is greatly enhanced through collaborations with the Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics (CA), Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics (CA), David Dunlap Observatory (CA), Ontario Science Centre (CA), Royal Astronomical Society of Canada (CA), the Toronto Public Library (CA), and many other partners.

U Toronto Dunlap Dragonfly telescope Array (CA) at its home at high-altitude observing location New Mexico Skies hosting facility at 7300′ altitude

NIROSETI team from left to right Rem Stone UCO Lick Observatory Dan Werthimer, UC Berkeley; Jérôme Maire, U Toronto; Shelley Wright, UCSD; Patrick Dorval, U Toronto; Richard Treffers, Starman Systems. (Image by Laurie Hatch).

The University of Toronto (CA) is a public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, located on the grounds that surround Queen’s Park. It was founded by royal charter in 1827 as King’s College, the oldest university in the province of Ontario.

Originally controlled by the Church of England, the university assumed its present name in 1850 upon becoming a secular institution.

As a collegiate university, it comprises eleven colleges each with substantial autonomy on financial and institutional affairs and significant differences in character and history. The university also operates two satellite campuses located in Scarborough and Mississauga.

University of Toronto has evolved into Canada’s leading institution of learning, discovery and knowledge creation. We are proud to be one of the world’s top research-intensive universities, driven to invent and innovate.

Our students have the opportunity to learn from and work with preeminent thought leaders through our multidisciplinary network of teaching and research faculty, alumni and partners.

The ideas, innovations and actions of more than 560,000 graduates continue to have a positive impact on the world.

Academically, the University of Toronto is noted for movements and curricula in literary criticism and communication theory, known collectively as the Toronto School.

The university was the birthplace of insulin and stem cell research, and was the site of the first electron microscope in North America; the identification of the first black hole Cygnus X-1; multi-touch technology, and the development of the theory of NP-completeness.

The university was one of several universities involved in early research of deep learning. It receives the most annual scientific research funding of any Canadian university and is one of two members of the Association of American Universities outside the United States, the other being McGill(CA).

The Varsity Blues are the athletic teams that represent the university in intercollegiate league matches, with ties to gridiron football, rowing and ice hockey. The earliest recorded instance of gridiron football occurred at University of Toronto’s University College in November 1861.

The university’s Hart House is an early example of the North American student centre, simultaneously serving cultural, intellectual, and recreational interests within its large Gothic-revival complex.

The University of Toronto has educated three Governors General of Canada, four Prime Ministers of Canada, three foreign leaders, and fourteen Justices of the Supreme Court. As of March 2019, ten Nobel laureates, five Turing Award winners, 94 Rhodes Scholars, and one Fields Medalist have been affiliated with the university.

Early history

The founding of a colonial college had long been the desire of John Graves Simcoe, the first Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada and founder of York, the colonial capital. As an University of Oxford (UK)-educated military commander who had fought in the American Revolutionary War, Simcoe believed a college was needed to counter the spread of republicanism from the United States. The Upper Canada Executive Committee recommended in 1798 that a college be established in York.

On March 15, 1827, a royal charter was formally issued by King George IV, proclaiming “from this time one College, with the style and privileges of a University … for the education of youth in the principles of the Christian Religion, and for their instruction in the various branches of Science and Literature … to continue forever, to be called King’s College.” The granting of the charter was largely the result of intense lobbying by John Strachan, the influential Anglican Bishop of Toronto who took office as the college’s first president. The original three-story Greek Revival school building was built on the present site of Queen’s Park.

Under Strachan’s stewardship, King’s College was a religious institution closely aligned with the Church of England and the British colonial elite, known as the Family Compact. Reformist politicians opposed the clergy’s control over colonial institutions and fought to have the college secularized. In 1849, after a lengthy and heated debate, the newly elected responsible government of the Province of Canada voted to rename King’s College as the University of Toronto and severed the school’s ties with the church. Having anticipated this decision, the enraged Strachan had resigned a year earlier to open Trinity College as a private Anglican seminary. University College was created as the nondenominational teaching branch of the University of Toronto. During the American Civil War, the threat of Union blockade on British North America prompted the creation of the University Rifle Corps which saw battle in resisting the Fenian raids on the Niagara border in 1866. The Corps was part of the Reserve Militia lead by Professor Henry Croft.

Established in 1878, the School of Practical Science was the precursor to the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering which has been nicknamed Skule since its earliest days. While the Faculty of Medicine opened in 1843 medical teaching was conducted by proprietary schools from 1853 until 1887 when the faculty absorbed the Toronto School of Medicine. Meanwhile the university continued to set examinations and confer medical degrees. The university opened the Faculty of Law in 1887, followed by the Faculty of Dentistry in 1888 when the Royal College of Dental Surgeons became an affiliate. Women were first admitted to the university in 1884.

A devastating fire in 1890 gutted the interior of University College and destroyed 33,000 volumes from the library but the university restored the building and replenished its library within two years. Over the next two decades a collegiate system took shape as the university arranged federation with several ecclesiastical colleges including Strachan’s Trinity College in 1904. The university operated the Royal Conservatory of Music from 1896 to 1991 and the Royal Ontario Museum from 1912 to 1968; both still retain close ties with the university as independent institutions. The University of Toronto Press was founded in 1901 as Canada’s first academic publishing house. The Faculty of Forestry founded in 1907 with Bernhard Fernow as dean was Canada’s first university faculty devoted to forest science. In 1910, the Faculty of Education opened its laboratory school, the University of Toronto Schools.

World wars and post-war years

The First and Second World Wars curtailed some university activities as undergraduate and graduate men eagerly enlisted. Intercollegiate athletic competitions and the Hart House Debates were suspended although exhibition and interfaculty games were still held. The David Dunlap Observatory in Richmond Hill opened in 1935 followed by the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies in 1949. The university opened satellite campuses in Scarborough in 1964 and in Mississauga in 1967. The university’s former affiliated schools at the Ontario Agricultural College and Glendon Hall became fully independent of the University of Toronto and became part of University of Guelph (CA) in 1964 and York University (CA) in 1965 respectively. Beginning in the 1980s reductions in government funding prompted more rigorous fundraising efforts.

Since 2000

In 2000 Kin-Yip Chun was reinstated as a professor of the university after he launched an unsuccessful lawsuit against the university alleging racial discrimination. In 2017 a human rights application was filed against the University by one of its students for allegedly delaying the investigation of sexual assault and being dismissive of their concerns. In 2018 the university cleared one of its professors of allegations of discrimination and antisemitism in an internal investigation after a complaint was filed by one of its students.

The University of Toronto was the first Canadian university to amass a financial endowment greater than c. $1 billion in 2007. On September 24, 2020 the university announced a $250 million gift to the Faculty of Medicine from businessman and philanthropist James C. Temerty- the largest single philanthropic donation in Canadian history. This broke the previous record for the school set in 2019 when Gerry Schwartz and Heather Reisman jointly donated $100 million for the creation of a 750,000-square foot innovation and artificial intelligence centre.

Research

Since 1926 the University of Toronto has been a member of the Association of American Universities a consortium of the leading North American research universities. The university manages by far the largest annual research budget of any university in Canada with sponsored direct-cost expenditures of $878 million in 2010. In 2018 the University of Toronto was named the top research university in Canada by Research Infosource with a sponsored research income (external sources of funding) of $1,147.584 million in 2017. In the same year the university’s faculty averaged a sponsored research income of $428,200 while graduate students averaged a sponsored research income of $63,700. The federal government was the largest source of funding with grants from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research; the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council; and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council amounting to about one-third of the research budget. About eight percent of research funding came from corporations- mostly in the healthcare industry.

The first practical electron microscope was built by the physics department in 1938. During World War II the university developed the G-suit- a life-saving garment worn by Allied fighter plane pilots later adopted for use by astronauts. Development of the infrared chemiluminescence technique improved analyses of energy behaviors in chemical reactions. In 1963 the asteroid 2104 Toronto was discovered in the David Dunlap Observatory (CA) in Richmond Hill and is named after the university. In 1972 studies on Cygnus X-1 led to the publication of the first observational evidence proving the existence of black holes. Toronto astronomers have also discovered the Uranian moons of Caliban and Sycorax; the dwarf galaxies of Andromeda I, II and III; and the supernova SN 1987A. A pioneer in computing technology the university designed and built UTEC- one of the world’s first operational computers- and later purchased Ferut- the second commercial computer after UNIVAC I. Multi-touch technology was developed at Toronto with applications ranging from handheld devices to collaboration walls. The AeroVelo Atlas which won the Igor I. Sikorsky Human Powered Helicopter Competition in 2013 was developed by the university’s team of students and graduates and was tested in Vaughan.

The discovery of insulin at the University of Toronto in 1921 is considered among the most significant events in the history of medicine. The stem cell was discovered at the university in 1963 forming the basis for bone marrow transplantation and all subsequent research on adult and embryonic stem cells. This was the first of many findings at Toronto relating to stem cells including the identification of pancreatic and retinal stem cells. The cancer stem cell was first identified in 1997 by Toronto researchers who have since found stem cell associations in leukemia; brain tumors; and colorectal cancer. Medical inventions developed at Toronto include the glycaemic index; the infant cereal Pablum; the use of protective hypothermia in open heart surgery; and the first artificial cardiac pacemaker. The first successful single-lung transplant was performed at Toronto in 1981 followed by the first nerve transplant in 1988; and the first double-lung transplant in 1989. Researchers identified the maturation promoting factor that regulates cell division and discovered the T-cell receptor which triggers responses of the immune system. The university is credited with isolating the genes that cause Fanconi anemia; cystic fibrosis; and early-onset Alzheimer’s disease among numerous other diseases. Between 1914 and 1972 the university operated the Connaught Medical Research Laboratories- now part of the pharmaceutical corporation Sanofi-Aventis. Among the research conducted at the laboratory was the development of gel electrophoresis.

The University of Toronto is the primary research presence that supports one of the world’s largest concentrations of biotechnology firms. More than 5,000 principal investigators reside within 2 kilometres (1.2 mi) from the university grounds in Toronto’s Discovery District conducting $1 billion of medical research annually. MaRS Discovery District is a research park that serves commercial enterprises and the university’s technology transfer ventures. In 2008, the university disclosed 159 inventions and had 114 active start-up companies. Its SciNet Consortium operates the most powerful supercomputer in Canada.

Once called “the first American university” by educational historian Frederick Rudolph, Cornell University represents a distinctive mix of eminent scholarship and democratic ideals. Adding practical subjects to the classics and admitting qualified students regardless of nationality, race, social circumstance, gender, or religion was quite a departure when Cornell was founded in 1865.

Today’s Cornell reflects this heritage of egalitarian excellence. It is home to the nation’s first colleges devoted to hotel administration, industrial and labor relations, and veterinary medicine. Both a private university and the land-grant institution of New York State, Cornell University is the most educationally diverse member of the Ivy League.

On the Ithaca campus alone nearly 20,000 students representing every state and 120 countries choose from among 4,000 courses in 11 undergraduate, graduate, and professional schools. Many undergraduates participate in a wide range of interdisciplinary programs, play meaningful roles in original research, and study in Cornell programs in Washington, New York City, and the world over.

Cornell University is a private, statutory, Ivy League and land-grant research university in Ithaca, New York. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, the university was intended to teach and make contributions in all fields of knowledge—from the classics to the sciences, and from the theoretical to the applied. These ideals, unconventional for the time, are captured in Cornell’s founding principle, a popular 1868 quotation from founder Ezra Cornell: “I would found an institution where any person can find instruction in any study.”

The university is broadly organized into seven undergraduate colleges and seven graduate divisions at its main Ithaca campus, with each college and division defining its specific admission standards and academic programs in near autonomy. The university also administers two satellite medical campuses, one in New York City and one in Education City, Qatar, and Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute in New York City, a graduate program that incorporates technology, business, and creative thinking. The program moved from Google’s Chelsea Building in New York City to its permanent campus on Roosevelt Island in September 2017.

Cornell is one of the few private land grant universities in the United States. Of its seven undergraduate colleges, three are state-supported statutory or contract colleges through the SUNY – The State University of New York system, including its Agricultural and Human Ecology colleges as well as its Industrial Labor Relations school. Of Cornell’s graduate schools, only the veterinary college is state-supported. As a land grant college, Cornell operates a cooperative extension outreach program in every county of New York and receives annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions. The Cornell University Ithaca Campus comprises 745 acres, but is much larger when the Cornell Botanic Gardens (more than 4,300 acres) and the numerous university-owned lands in New York City are considered.

Alumni and affiliates of Cornell have reached many notable and influential positions in politics, media, and science. As of January 2021, 61 Nobel laureates, four Turing Award winners and one Fields Medalist have been affiliated with Cornell. Cornell counts more than 250,000 living alumni, and its former and present faculty and alumni include 34 Marshall Scholars, 33 Rhodes Scholars, 29 Truman Scholars, 7 Gates Scholars, 55 Olympic Medalists, 10 current Fortune 500 CEOs, and 35 billionaire alumni. Since its founding, Cornell has been a co-educational, non-sectarian institution where admission has not been restricted by religion or race. The student body consists of more than 15,000 undergraduate and 9,000 graduate students from all 50 American states and 119 countries.

History

Cornell University was founded on April 27, 1865; the New York State (NYS) Senate authorized the university as the state’s land grant institution. Senator Ezra Cornell offered his farm in Ithaca, New York, as a site and $500,000 of his personal fortune as an initial endowment. Fellow senator and educator Andrew Dickson White agreed to be the first president. During the next three years, White oversaw the construction of the first two buildings and traveled to attract students and faculty. The university was inaugurated on October 7, 1868, and 412 men were enrolled the next day.

Cornell developed as a technologically innovative institution, applying its research to its own campus and to outreach efforts. For example, in 1883 it was one of the first university campuses to use electricity from a water-powered dynamo to light the grounds. Since 1894, Cornell has included colleges that are state funded and fulfill statutory requirements; it has also administered research and extension activities that have been jointly funded by state and federal matching programs.

Cornell has had active alumni since its earliest classes. It was one of the first universities to include alumni-elected representatives on its Board of Trustees. Cornell was also among the Ivies that had heightened student activism during the 1960s related to cultural issues; civil rights; and opposition to the Vietnam War, with protests and occupations resulting in the resignation of Cornell’s president and the restructuring of university governance. Today the university has more than 4,000 courses. Cornell is also known for the Residential Club Fire of 1967, a fire in the Residential Club building that killed eight students and one professor.

Since 2000, Cornell has been expanding its international programs. In 2004, the university opened the Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar. It has partnerships with institutions in India, Singapore, and the People’s Republic of China. Former president Jeffrey S. Lehman described the university, with its high international profile, a “transnational university”. On March 9, 2004, Cornell and Stanford University(US) laid the cornerstone for a new ‘Bridging the Rift Center’ to be built and jointly operated for education on the Israel–Jordan border.

Research

Cornell, a research university, is ranked fourth in the world in producing the largest number of graduates who go on to pursue PhDs in engineering or the natural sciences at American institutions, and fifth in the world in producing graduates who pursue PhDs at American institutions in any field. Research is a central element of the university’s mission; in 2009 Cornell spent $671 million on science and engineering research and development, the 16th highest in the United States. Cornell is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity”.

For the 2016–17 fiscal year, the university spent $984.5 million on research. Federal sources constitute the largest source of research funding, with total federal investment of $438.2 million. The agencies contributing the largest share of that investment are the Department of Health and Human Services and the National Science Foundation, accounting for 49.6% and 24.4% of all federal investment, respectively. Cornell was on the top-ten list of U.S. universities receiving the most patents in 2003, and was one of the nation’s top five institutions in forming start-up companies. In 2004–05, Cornell received 200 invention disclosures; filed 203 U.S. patent applications; completed 77 commercial license agreements; and distributed royalties of more than $4.1 million to Cornell units and inventors.

Since 1962, Cornell has been involved in unmanned missions to Mars. In the 21st century, Cornell had a hand in the Mars Exploration Rover Mission. Cornell’s Steve Squyres, Principal Investigator for the Athena Science Payload, led the selection of the landing zones and requested data collection features for the Spirit and Opportunity rovers. NASA-JPL/Caltech engineers took those requests and designed the rovers to meet them. The rovers, both of which have operated long past their original life expectancies, are responsible for the discoveries that were awarded 2004 Breakthrough of the Year honors by Science. Control of the Mars rovers has shifted between National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s JPL-Caltech and Cornell’s Space Sciences Building.

Further, Cornell researchers discovered the rings around the planet Uranus, and Cornell built and operated the telescope at Arecibo Observatory located in Arecibo, Puerto Rico until 2011, when they transferred the operations to SRI International, the Universities Space Research Association and the Metropolitan University of Puerto Rico [Universidad Metropolitana de Puerto Rico].

The Automotive Crash Injury Research Project was begun in 1952. It pioneered the use of crash testing, originally using corpses rather than dummies. The project discovered that improved door locks; energy-absorbing steering wheels; padded dashboards; and seat belts could prevent an extraordinary percentage of injuries.

In the early 1980s, Cornell deployed the first IBM 3090-400VF and coupled two IBM 3090-600E systems to investigate coarse-grained parallel computing. In 1984, the National Science Foundation began work on establishing five new supercomputer centers, including the Cornell Center for Advanced Computing, to provide high-speed computing resources for research within the United States. As an National Science Foundation center, Cornell deployed the first IBM Scalable Parallel supercomputer.

In the 1990s, Cornell developed scheduling software and deployed the first supercomputer built by Dell. Most recently, Cornell deployed Red Cloud, one of the first cloud computing services designed specifically for research. Today, the center is a partner on the National Science Foundation XSEDE-Extreme Science Engineering Discovery Environment supercomputing program, providing coordination for XSEDE architecture and design, systems reliability testing, and online training using the Cornell Virtual Workshop learning platform.

Cornell scientists have researched the fundamental particles of nature for more than 70 years. Cornell physicists, such as Hans Bethe, contributed not only to the foundations of nuclear physics but also participated in the Manhattan Project. In the 1930s, Cornell built the second cyclotron in the United States. In the 1950s, Cornell physicists became the first to study synchrotron radiation.

During the 1990s, the Cornell Electron Storage Ring, located beneath Alumni Field, was the world’s highest-luminosity electron-positron collider. After building the synchrotron at Cornell, Robert R. Wilson took a leave of absence to become the founding director of DOE’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, which involved designing and building the largest accelerator in the United States.

Cornell’s accelerator and high-energy physics groups are involved in the design of the proposed ILC-International Linear Collider(JP) and plan to participate in its construction and operation. The International Linear Collider(JP), to be completed in the late 2010s, will complement the CERN Large Hadron Collider(CH) and shed light on questions such as the identity of dark matter and the existence of extra dimensions.

As part of its research work, Cornell has established several research collaborations with universities around the globe. For example, a partnership with the University of Sussex(UK) (including the Institute of Development Studies at Sussex) allows research and teaching collaboration between the two institutions.

From Cornell Chronicle: “New View of Nature’s Oldest Light Adds Twist to Debate Over Universe’s Age”

From Cornell Chronicle

January 4, 2021
Linda B. Glaser
cunews@cornell.edu

From an observatory high above Chile’s Atacama Desert, astronomers have taken a new look at the oldest light in the universe.

Their observations, plus a bit of cosmic geometry, suggest that the universe is 13.77 billion years old – give or take 40 million years. A Cornell researcher co-authored one of two papers* about the findings, which add a fresh twist to an ongoing debate in the astrophysics community.

The new estimate, using data gathered at the National Science Foundation’s Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT), matches the one provided by the standard model of the universe, as well as measurements of the same light made by the European Space Agency’s Planck satellite, which measured remnants of the Big Bang from 2009 to ’13.

Princeton Atacama Cosmology Telescope, on Cerro Toco in the Atacama Desert in the north of Chile, near the Llano de Chajnantor Observatory, Altitude 4,800 m (15,700 ft).

LBL The Simons Array in the Atacama in Chile, altitude 5,200 m (17,100 ft) with the 6 meter Atacama Cosmology Telescope.

CMB per ESA/Planck.

ESA/Planck 2009 to 2013

The research was published Dec. 30 in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics.

In 2019, a research team measuring the movements of galaxies calculated that the universe is hundreds of millions of years younger than the Planck team predicted. That discrepancy suggested a new model for the universe might be needed and sparked concerns that one of the sets of measurements might be incorrect.

“Now we’ve come up with an answer where Planck and ACT agree,” said Simone Aiola, a researcher at the Flatiron Institute’s Center for Computational Astrophysics and first author of one of two papers. “It speaks to the fact that these difficult measurements are reliable.”

A portion of a new picture of the oldest light in the universe taken by the Atacama Cosmology Telescope. Credit: ACT collaboration .

From The Cornell University article published July 15, 2020

The age of the universe also reveals how fast the cosmos is expanding, a number quantified by the Hubble constant. The ACT measurements suggest a Hubble constant of 67.6 kilometers per second per megaparsec. That means an object 1 megaparsec (around 3.26 million light-years) from Earth is moving away from us at 67.6 kilometers per second due to the expansion of the universe. This result agrees almost exactly with the previous estimate of 67.4 kilometers per second per megaparsec by the Planck satellite team, but it’s slower than the 74 kilometers per second per megaparsec inferred from the measurements of galaxies.

“I didn’t have a particular preference for any specific value — it was going to be interesting one way or another,” says Choi. “We find an expansion rate that is right on the estimate by the Planck satellite team. This gives us more confidence in measurements of the universe’s oldest light.”

Like the Planck satellite, ACT peers at the CMB [above], the afterglow of the Big Bang.

As ACT continues making observations, astronomers will have an even clearer picture of the CMB and a more exact idea of how long ago the cosmos began. The ACT team will also scour those observations for signs of physics that doesn’t fit the standard cosmological model. Such strange physics could resolve the disagreement between the predictions of the age and expansion rate of the universe arising from the measurements of the CMB and the motions of galaxies.

The ACT team is an international collaboration, with scientists from 41 institutions in seven countries, in which Cornell University plays an essential role. Cornell researchers helped develop the ACT optics, detector arrays, survey strategy, software infrastructure, and data analysis tools. Niemack led the development of the Advanced ACTPol detector arrays and serves on the ACT guiding board. ACT is supported by the National Science Foundation and contributions from member institutions.

*The article refers to two science papers but this article in Cornell Chronicle and the full article from July 15, 2020 only present the one paper included here.

See the full article here .

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Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

Once called “the first American university” by educational historian Frederick Rudolph, Cornell University represents a distinctive mix of eminent scholarship and democratic ideals. Adding practical subjects to the classics and admitting qualified students regardless of nationality, race, social circumstance, gender, or religion was quite a departure when Cornell was founded in 1865.

Today’s Cornell reflects this heritage of egalitarian excellence. It is home to the nation’s first colleges devoted to hotel administration, industrial and labor relations, and veterinary medicine. Both a private university and the land-grant institution of New York State, Cornell University is the most educationally diverse member of the Ivy League.

On the Ithaca campus alone nearly 20,000 students representing every state and 120 countries choose from among 4,000 courses in 11 undergraduate, graduate, and professional schools. Many undergraduates participate in a wide range of interdisciplinary programs, play meaningful roles in original research, and study in Cornell programs in Washington, New York City, and the world over.

From Cornell University via Science Alert (AU): “One of The Blackest Planets in The Galaxy Is Headed For a Fiery Death”

via

Science Alert (AU)

8 DECEMBER 2020
MICHELLE STARR

Artist’s impression of WASP-12b. Credit: NASA, ESA, and G. Bacon/STScI.

WASP-12b is one of the more interesting exoplanets we know of. Orbiting a yellow dwarf star a little bigger than the Sun 1,410 light-years away, the ultra-black planet is what’s known as a “hot Jupiter” – a gas giant exoplanet with similar mass and size to Jupiter, but so close to the star that it’s scorching hot.

WASP-12b has never exactly been in the most secure position. With an orbital period of just over a day, the gas giant exoplanet is so close to its star that a constant stream of material is being siphoned away from its atmosphere.

But its death won’t necessarily be by slow stellar slurping. Careful observations have found it’s also on a noticeably decaying orbit. And, according to new research, that orbit is decaying a bit faster than we initially thought.

Rather than the 3.25 million years initially estimated, WASP-12b will meet its fiery end in just 2.9 million years.

According to current models of planet formation, technically hot Jupiters shouldn’t exist. A gas giant can’t form that close to a star because the gravity, radiation, and intense stellar winds ought to keep the gas from clumping together. But they do exist – several hundred have been identified in the exoplanet data.

However they form, hot Jupiters that are particularly close to their star are some of the most studied exoplanets out there. This is because they can tell us a lot about the tidal interactions between a planet and a star.

WASP-12b is among the closest hot Jupiters to its star. And it’s been an excellent example for studying tidal interactions.

It was discovered in 2008, which means astronomers have been able to collect a relatively long-term dataset; and its short orbit means that we can observe a lot of transits. That’s when the exoplanet passes between us and the star, causing the latter’s light to ever so slightly dim.

It was in 2017 that astronomers noticed [The Astronomical Journal] something strange about WASP-12b’s transits. They were occurring just a fraction of a second off when they should have been, based on previous measurements of the orbital period.

That slight timing variation could have been the result of the exoplanet’s orbit changing direction, so a team of astronomers led by Samuel Yee of Princeton University decided to closely examine not just the transits, but the occultations, when the exoplanet passes behind the star. If WASP-12b was changing direction, the occultations should be slightly delayed.

A transit causes a faint dimming of the star’s light; an occultation causes an even fainter dimming.

Planet transit. NASA/Ames.

This is because the exoplanet, reflecting the star’s heat and light, adds to the system’s overall brightness when it’s not behind the star.

WASP-12b is very dark, optically; it absorbs 94 percent of all light that shines on it, making it blacker than asphalt.

Astronomers believe that this is because the exoplanet is so hot; at 2,600 degrees Celsius (4,700 degrees Fahrenheit) on its day side, hydrogen molecules are broken down into atomic hydrogen, causing its atmosphere to behave more like a low-mass star. But because it’s so hot, it glows in infrared.

Yee’s team used the Spitzer Space Telescope to try to observe occultations.

NASA/Spitzer Infrared telescope no longer in service. Launched in 2003 and retired on 30 January 2020. Credit: NASA.

Although they observed the star, WASP 12, for 16 orbital periods, they only managed to find four faint occultations in the data. It was enough, though.

These occultations could be matched to transits… and the researchers found that the occultations were occurring more quickly – consistent with an orbital decay of 29 milliseconds per year [The Astrophysical Journal Letters]. At that rate, the planet’s lifespan was, the astronomers calculated, around 3.25 million years.

Now, a new team of researchers led by Jake Turner of Cornell University has looked for signs of orbital decay in a different dataset – observations taken by NASA’s planet-hunting telescope TESS, specifically designed to observe transits and occultations.

NASA/MIT TESS replaced Kepler in search for exoplanets.

TESS studied the region of the sky that included WASP-12 from 24 December 2019 to 20 January 2020. In this data, the team found 21 transits. The occultations were too shallow to be detected individually, but the team was able to model them to find a best-fit for the TESS data.

These transit and occultation times were combined with the earlier data for a timing analysis. And Turner and his team were able to confirm that WASP-12b’s orbit is indeed decaying. But it’s doing so a little faster than we thought – at a rate of 32.53 milliseconds per year, for a total lifespan of 2.9 million years.

That sounds like a long time, but on cosmic timescales, it’s practically an eyeblink. And it has dramatically shortened the exoplanet’s lifespan from the estimated 10 million years it would take for the planet to die from atmospheric stripping.

But, although it doesn’t have long to live, studying WASP-12b has the potential to teach us a lot. And while it’s the only exoplanet for which we have robust evidence of orbital decay, there are other hot Jupiter exoplanets that are expected to exhibit similar rates of orbital decay.

“Hence, additional data could reveal whether [these exoplanets] indeed exhibit hitherto undetected tidal decay or whether the theoretical predictions need to be improved,” Turner and his team wrote.

“Timing observations of additional systems are warranted because they help us understand the formation, evolution and ultimate fate of hot Jupiters.”

The team’s research has been accepted into The Astronomical Journal.

See the full article here .

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

Once called “the first American university” by educational historian Frederick Rudolph, Cornell University represents a distinctive mix of eminent scholarship and democratic ideals. Adding practical subjects to the classics and admitting qualified students regardless of nationality, race, social circumstance, gender, or religion was quite a departure when Cornell was founded in 1865.

Today’s Cornell reflects this heritage of egalitarian excellence. It is home to the nation’s first colleges devoted to hotel administration, industrial and labor relations, and veterinary medicine. Both a private university and the land-grant institution of New York State, Cornell University is the most educationally diverse member of the Ivy League.

On the Ithaca campus alone nearly 20,000 students representing every state and 120 countries choose from among 4,000 courses in 11 undergraduate, graduate, and professional schools. Many undergraduates participate in a wide range of interdisciplinary programs, play meaningful roles in original research, and study in Cornell programs in Washington, New York City, and the world over.

From Cornell University via EarthSky: “Clues to Mars life in Earth’s Atacama Desert”

From Cornell University

via

EarthSky

November 17, 2020
Paul Scott Anderson

Researchers in the U.S. and Spain have discovered a plethora of previously unknown microbes living in wet clay layers below Chile’s arid Atacama Desert. The finding will help future rovers search for life on Mars.

Researchers from Cornell University in the U.S. and Spain’s Centro de Astrobiología have found a diverse ecosystem of microbes living in wet clay layers beneath the arid Atacama Desert in Chile. Could life be found in similar clay layers on Mars? Credit: Alberto Fairén/ Cornell Chronicle.

Mars is dry, dusty and desolate (albeit with some stunning scenery). The extremely arid landscape shares many similarities with deserts on Earth, and scientists have been studying these Earthly desert regions for years, to try to find clues to possible microbial life on Mars, either now or in the past.

Now, researchers at Cornell University and Spain’s Centro de Astrobiología have announced new findings that could have implications for subsurface microbial life on the red planet. The scientists have found microorganisms thriving in the clay-rich, shallow soil layers in the Atacama Desert in Chile. The finding suggests that microbes, either living or fossils, could be found in similar clay layers on Mars.

The intriguing peer-reviewed results were published in Scientific Reports .

Diagram of soil layers and photos of the pits dug for samples in the Atacama Desert. Credit: Azua-Bustos et al./ CC BY 4.0.

From the new paper:

“Here we report a layer enriched in smectites located just 30 cm [11.8 inches] below the surface of the hyperarid core of the Atacama. We discovered the clay-rich layer to be wet (a phenomenon never observed before in this region), keeping a high and constant relative humidity of 78% (aw [water activity] 0.780), and completely isolated from the changing and extremely dry subaerial conditions characteristic of the Atacama. The smectite-rich layer is inhabited by at least 30 halophilic (salt-loving) species of metabolically active bacteria and archaea, unveiling a previously unreported habitat for microbial life under the surface of the driest place on Earth. The discovery of a diverse microbial community in smectite-rich subsurface layers in the hyperarid core of the Atacama, and the collection of biosignatures we have identified within the clays, suggest that similar shallow clay deposits on Mars may contain biosignatures easily reachable by current rovers and landers.”

The surface of the soil in Atacama is extremely dry, but there is a layer of wet clay about a foot below, the researchers said. That clay is a home for microbes, protected from the harsher conditions above.

Fluorescence microscopy images of bacteria in subsurface clay samples from the pits dug in the Atacama Desert. Image via Azua-Bustos et al./ CC BY 4.0.

Corresponding author Alberto G. Fairén said in a statement:

“The clays are inhabited by microorganisms. Our discovery suggests that something similar may have occurred billions of years ago – or it still may be occurring – on Mars. If microbes still exist today, the latest possible Martian life still may be resting there.”

The researchers found at least 30 previously unknown salt-loving microbial species of metabolically active bacteria and archaea (single-cell organisms). That’s pretty significant, given how arid conditions are on the surface.

If any microbes, or their remains, do exist in such shallow clay layers on Mars as well, they could be easily found by future rovers or human crewed missions. That is an exciting possibility. The conditions on Mars’ surface today are drier and colder than those in Atacama, but we do know that clays are abundant in many areas. As well as being detected by orbiting spacecraft, rovers such as Spirit and Opportunity (MER) and Curiosity have found them also, although they were not equipped to find microbes or any other kind of life. Curiosity has found various organic molecules preserved in ancient mudstones, however, which could provide important clues about possible past life.

he discovery can help scientists decide what are the best places on Mars to search for evidence of past microscopic life, using the new paper as a guide. Fairén said:

“This paper helps guide the search, to inform where we should look and which instruments to use on a search for life.”

Gale Crater, where Curiosity landed, also has sediments and clays from a previous large lake. What the rover has found so far is tantalizing, but since it can’t detect signs of life directly, we still don’t know if there actually were any microbes calling that lake home. But two new rovers will be able to search for possible biosignatures: NASA’s Perseverance rover landing in February 2021, and the European Space Agency’s (ESA’s) Rosalind Franklin rover, which will land in 2023. Both rovers will examine clay layers, similar to those in Atacama, just below the surface.

As Fairén noted, clays are one of the best and most likely places to search for evidence of Martian life:

“That’s why clays are important. They preserve organic compounds and biomarkers extremely well and they are abundant on Mars.”

The discovery of such a vibrant ecosystem of microbial life in one of the most inhospitable places on Earth is exciting, and provides important clues about how and where to search for life on Mars. Do Martian clays also contain evidence of past or even present life? That is still an unanswered question, but we won’t know until we look!

See the full article here .

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

Once called “the first American university” by educational historian Frederick Rudolph, Cornell University represents a distinctive mix of eminent scholarship and democratic ideals. Adding practical subjects to the classics and admitting qualified students regardless of nationality, race, social circumstance, gender, or religion was quite a departure when Cornell was founded in 1865.

Today’s Cornell reflects this heritage of egalitarian excellence. It is home to the nation’s first colleges devoted to hotel administration, industrial and labor relations, and veterinary medicine. Both a private university and the land-grant institution of New York State, Cornell University is the most educationally diverse member of the Ivy League.

On the Ithaca campus alone nearly 20,000 students representing every state and 120 countries choose from among 4,000 courses in 11 undergraduate, graduate, and professional schools. Many undergraduates participate in a wide range of interdisciplinary programs, play meaningful roles in original research, and study in Cornell programs in Washington, New York City, and the world over.

From Simons Foundation: “Quantum physicists crack mystery of ‘strange metals,’ a new state of matter”

From Simons Foundation

July 23, 2020
Thomas Sumner

Strange metals have surprising connections to high-temperature superconductors and black holes.

A diagram showing different states of matter as a function of temperature, T, and interaction strength, U (normalized to the amplitude, t, of electrons hopping between sites). Strange metals emerge in a regime separating a metallic spin glass and a Fermi liquid. P. Cha et al./Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 2020.

Even by the standards of quantum physicists, strange metals are just plain odd. The materials are related to high-temperature superconductors and have surprising connections to the properties of black holes. Electrons in strange metals dissipate energy as fast as they’re allowed to under the laws of quantum mechanics, and the electrical resistivity of a strange metal, unlike that of ordinary metals, is proportional to the temperature.

Generating a theoretical understanding of strange metals is one of the biggest challenges in condensed matter physics. Now, using cutting-edge computational techniques, researchers from the Flatiron Institute in New York City and Cornell University have solved the first robust theoretical model of strange metals. The work reveals that strange metals are a new state of matter, the researchers report July 22 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“The fact that we call them strange metals should tell you how well we understand them,” says study co-author Olivier Parcollet, a senior research scientist at the Flatiron Institute’s Center for Computational Quantum Physics (CCQ). “Strange metals share remarkable properties with black holes, opening exciting new directions for theoretical physics.”

In addition to Parcollet, the research team consisted of Cornell doctoral student Peter Cha, CCQ associate data scientist Nils Wentzell, CCQ director Antoine Georges, and Cornell physics professor Eun-Ah Kim.

In the quantum mechanical world, electrical resistance is a byproduct of electrons bumping into things. As electrons flow through a metal, they bounce off other electrons or impurities in the metal. The more time there is between these collisions, the lower the material’s electrical resistance.

For typical metals, electrical resistance increases with temperature, following a complex equation. But in unusual cases, such as when a high-temperature superconductor is heated just above the point where it stops superconducting, the equation becomes much more straightforward. In a strange metal, electrical conductivity is linked directly to temperature and to two fundamental constants of the universe: Planck’s constant and Boltzmann’s constant. Consequently, strange metals are also known as Planckian metals.

Models of strange metals have existed for decades, but accurately solving such models proved out of reach with existing methods. Quantum entanglements between electrons mean that physicists can’t treat the electrons individually, and the sheer number of particles in a material makes the calculations even more daunting.

Cha and his colleagues employed two different methods to crack the problem. First, they used a quantum embedding method based on ideas developed by Georges in the early ’90s. With this method, instead of performing detailed computations across the whole quantum system, physicists perform detailed calculations on only a few atoms and treat the rest of the system more simply. They then used a quantum Monte Carlo algorithm (named for the Mediterranean casino), which uses random sampling to compute the answer to a problem. The researchers solved the model of strange metals down to absolute zero (minus 273.15 degrees Celsius), the unreachable lower limit for temperatures in the universe.

The resulting theoretical model reveals the existence of strange metals as a new state of matter bordering two previously known phases of matter: Mott insulating spin glasses and Fermi liquids. “We found there is a whole region in the phase space that is exhibiting a Planckian behavior that belongs to neither of the two phases that we’re transitioning between,” Kim says. “This quantum spin liquid state is not so locked down, but it’s also not completely free. It is a sluggish, soupy, slushy state. It is metallic but reluctantly metallic, and it’s pushing the degree of chaos to the limit of quantum mechanics.”

The new work could help physicists better understand the physics of higher-temperature superconductors. Perhaps surprisingly, the work has links to astrophysics. Like strange metals, black holes exhibit properties that depend only on temperature and the Planck and Boltzmann constants, such as the amount of time a black hole ‘rings’ after merging with another black hole. “The fact that you find this same scaling across all these different systems, from Planckian metals to black holes, is fascinating,” Parcollet says.

For more information, please contact Stacey Greenebaum at press@simonsfoundation.org.

See the full article here.

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Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

Mission and Model

The Simons Foundation’s mission is to advance the frontiers of research in mathematics and the basic sciences.

Co-founded in New York City by Jim and Marilyn Simons, the foundation exists to support basic — or discovery-driven — scientific research undertaken in the pursuit of understanding the phenomena of our world.

The Simons Foundation’s support of science takes two forms: We support research by making grants to individual investigators and their projects through academic institutions, and, with the launch of the Flatiron Institute in 2016, we now conduct scientific research in-house, supporting teams of top computational scientists.

From Cornell University: “New method predicts which black holes escape their galaxies”

From Cornell University

March 26, 2020
Linda B. Glaser

Shoot a rifle, and the recoil might knock you backward. Merge two black holes in a binary system, and the loss of momentum gives a similar recoil — a “kick” — to the merged black hole.

Cornell SXS, the Simulating eXtreme Spacetimes (SXS) project

“For some binaries, the kick can reach up to 5000 kilometers a second, which is larger than the escape velocity of most galaxies,” said Vijay Varma, an astrophysicist at the California Institute of Technology and an incoming inaugural Klarman Fellow at Cornell University’s College of Arts & Sciences.

Varma and his fellow researchers have developed a new method using gravitational wave measurements to predict when a final black hole will remain in its host galaxy and when it will be ejected. Such measurements could provide a crucial missing piece of the puzzle behind the origin of heavy black holes, said Varma, as well as offer insights into galaxy evolution and tests of general relativity. He is lead author of “Extracting the Gravitational Recoil from Black Hole Merger Signals,” published March 13 in Physical Review Letters and co-authored with Maximiliano Isi and Sylvia Biscoveanu of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

This simulation shows the merger of a 35 solar-mass black hole with a 25 solar-mass black hole, followed by the recoil (kick) of the final black hole. The movie is sped-up after the merger to highlight the kick. The arrows indicate the spins (rotation) of the black holes—these interact with the orbital angular momentum (pink arrow), causing the orbital plane to wobble as the binary evolves. The blue and red orbs indicate patterns of gravitational waves generated in the collision. Credit: Vijay Varma

As black holes orbit in a binary system, their gravitational waves carry away energy and angular momentum, which causes the binary system to shrink as it spirals inward. When a system has asymmetries, such as unequal masses, gravitational waves aren’t emitted equally in all directions, which causes a net loss of linear momentum, resulting in a recoil. Most of that recoil happens right near the merger which can result in a kick great enough to extract the newly merged black hole from its host galaxy.

The researchers’ models are based on supercomputer simulations that numerically solve Einstein’s equations of general relativity. The simulations were performed as part of a larger research effort under the Simulating eXtreme Spacetimes (SXS) Collaboration that includes research groups from Caltech and Cornell. Saul Teukolsky, Cornell’s Hans A. Bethe Professor of Physics, serves as the group leader.

“This research shows how gravitational wave signals can be used to learn about astrophysical phenomena in an unexpected way,” said Teukolsky. “It had been believed that we would have to wait more than a decade for detectors sensitive enough to do this kind of work, but this research shows we can in fact do it now – very exciting!”

While the existing publicly available gravitational wave signals announced by LIGO and Virgo were not strong enough for a good recoil measurement, according to the authors as these detectors improve over the next few years this method will be able to reliably measure the kick.

The research was made possible by support from the National Science Foundation, the NASA Hubble Fellowship and the Sherman Fairchild Foundation.

See the full article here .

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

Once called “the first American university” by educational historian Frederick Rudolph, Cornell University represents a distinctive mix of eminent scholarship and democratic ideals. Adding practical subjects to the classics and admitting qualified students regardless of nationality, race, social circumstance, gender, or religion was quite a departure when Cornell was founded in 1865.

Today’s Cornell reflects this heritage of egalitarian excellence. It is home to the nation’s first colleges devoted to hotel administration, industrial and labor relations, and veterinary medicine. Both a private university and the land-grant institution of New York State, Cornell University is the most educationally diverse member of the Ivy League.

On the Ithaca campus alone nearly 20,000 students representing every state and 120 countries choose from among 4,000 courses in 11 undergraduate, graduate, and professional schools. Many undergraduates participate in a wide range of interdisciplinary programs, play meaningful roles in original research, and study in Cornell programs in Washington, New York City, and the world over.