From The Department of Mechanical Engineering In The College of Engineering At The University of Washington : “A tiny break into toughness”

From The Department of Mechanical Engineering

In

The College of Engineering

At

The University of Washington

5.22.23

A beetle shell might look like solid armor to us but it’s actually composed of tiny fibers woven together in complex structures. These nanofibers that comprise many natural materials from shell to skin to cartilage are surprisingly tough and are able to handle force without fracturing.

UW researchers tested the twisted nanostructures they created by applying very small loads with nanometer precision (shown here) and visualizing when cracks began to form. From the obtained data, the researchers measured the growth of cracks and thus calculated a material toughness. UWash.

Inspired by natural nanostructured materials, the Meza Research Group recently investigated how these tiny structures make materials resistant to breaking. The team’s research sheds light on how methods like reducing fiber size and increasing fiber twist can improve durability.

Using additively manufactured polymer nanofibers as a building block, the lab, led by ME Assistant Professor Lucas Meza, creates nanostructured materials that are about 400 nanometers wide, similar to the smallest features found in natural materials. In their most recent work, they used these polymer nanofibers to create twisted “Bouligand” structures, a common twisted-fiber motif found in arthropod shells. The final test samples they made were about 80 micrometers wide – similar to the width of a piece of paper.

“The novelty of our work is in the scale at which we can study toughness. We expect tiny, lightweight materials to be less tough than denser materials,” Meza says. “Instead, we see nanostructured materials can be 50% lighter while maintaining their toughness.”

The Meza group recently published a paper about the lab’s findings in the journal Small [below]. Zainab Patel, a Ph.D. student in materials science and engineering, led the study, and ME Ph.D. student Kush Dwivedi also contributed to the research.

To make their materials the researchers used “two-photon lithography” an additive manufacturing technique that shines a laser into a photosensitive polymer to cure it. By tracing the laser around in space, they can create tiny beams with fibers that are either joined together or separate. They designed samples with layers of these nanofibers that have different twists and spacings, creating the desired spiraling Bouligand pattern found in nature.

To test these materials, the researchers placed a “nanoindenter”, an instrument that measures the mechanical properties of tiny materials, inside a scanning electron microscope to both apply very small loads with nanometer precision and to visualize when cracks began to form. From the obtained load displacement data, the researchers can measure the growth of cracks and thus calculate a material toughness.

The researchers discovered two methods for toughening the materials: isolating the fibers and twisting the fibers. They found isolated nanofibers had greater ductility, or ability to stretch further before breaking, meaning they could absorb more energy to prevent cracks from growing. Twisting the nanofibers at different angles creates different soft and stiff regions between the layers. Because of this Bouligand-style architecture, cracks then get “stuck” between the soft and stiff layers and have more difficulty progressing, making the material tougher.

These discoveries have implications for the printing of more resilient additively manufactured materials, and for objects created using nanomaterials, such as composites and electronics. For example, nanofibers could be used to make tougher clothing, or incorporated into carbon fiber composites to make them more resistant to fracture and delamination, or layer separation.

“Nanomaterials are all around us, whether it’s in the beetles we see outside our window or the transistors that make up our computer chips,” Meza says. “By understanding how fracture happens at the smallest length scales, we can develop new ways to make tougher, more resilient materials at any scale.”

Small

See the full article here .

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

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Mechanical engineering is one of the broadest and oldest of the engineering disciplines and therefore provides some of the strongest interdisciplinary opportunities in the engineering profession. Power utilization (and power generation) is often used to describe the focus of mechanical engineering. Within this focus are such diverse topics as thermodynamics, heat transfer, fluid mechanics, machine design, mechanics of materials, manufacturing, stress analysis, system dynamics, numerical modeling, vibrations, turbomachinery, combustion, heating, ventilating, and air conditioning. Degrees in mechanical engineering open doors to careers not only in the engineering profession but also in business, law, medicine, finance, and other non-technical professions.

About The University of Washington College of Engineering

Mission, Facts, and Stats

Our mission is to develop outstanding engineers and ideas that change the world.

Faculty:
275 faculty (25.2% women)
Achievements:

128 NSF Young Investigator/Early Career Awards since 1984
32 Sloan Foundation Research Awards
2 MacArthur Foundation Fellows (2007 and 2011)

A national leader in educating engineers, each year the College turns out new discoveries, inventions and top-flight graduates, all contributing to the strength of our economy and the vitality of our community.

Engineering innovation

Engineers drive the innovation economy and are vital to solving society’s most challenging problems. The College of Engineering is a key part of a world-class research university in a thriving hub of aerospace, biotechnology, global health and information technology innovation. Over 50% of The University of Washington startups in FY18 came from the College of Engineering.

Commitment to diversity and access

The College of Engineering is committed to developing and supporting a diverse student body and faculty that reflect and elevate the populations we serve. We are a national leader in women in engineering; 25.5% of our faculty are women compared to 17.4% nationally. We offer a robust set of diversity programs for students and faculty.

Research and commercialization

The University of Washington is an engine of economic growth, today ranked third in the nation for the number of startups launched each year, with 65 companies having been started in the last five years alone by UW students and faculty, or with technology developed here. The College of Engineering is a key contributor to these innovations, and engineering faculty, students or technology are behind half of all UW startups. In FY19, UW received $1.58 billion in total research awards from federal and nonfederal sources.

The University of Washington is one of the world’s preeminent public universities. Our impact on individuals, on our region, and on the world is profound — whether we are launching young people into a boundless future or confronting the grand challenges of our time through undaunted research and scholarship. Ranked number 10 in the world in Shanghai Jiao Tong University rankings and educating more than 54,000 students annually, our students and faculty work together to turn ideas into impact and in the process transform lives and our world. For more about our impact on the world, every day.

So, what defines us —the students, faculty and community members at The University of Washington? Above all, it’s our belief in possibility and our unshakable optimism. It’s a connection to others, both near and far. It’s a hunger that pushes us to tackle challenges and pursue progress. It’s the conviction that together we can create a world of good. Join us on the journey.

The University of Washington is a public research university in Seattle, Washington, United States. Founded in 1861, The University of Washington is one of the oldest universities on the West Coast; it was established in downtown Seattle approximately a decade after the city’s founding to aid its economic development. Today, The University of Washington’s 703-acre main Seattle campus is in the University District above the Montlake Cut, within the urban Puget Sound region of the Pacific Northwest. The university has additional campuses in Tacoma and Bothell. Overall, The University of Washington encompasses over 500 buildings and over 20 million gross square footage of space, including one of the largest library systems in the world with more than 26 university libraries, as well as the UW Tower, lecture halls, art centers, museums, laboratories, stadiums, and conference centers. The University of Washington offers bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees through 140 departments in various colleges and schools, sees a total student enrollment of roughly 46,000 annually, and functions on a quarter system.

The University of Washington is a member of the Association of American Universities and is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity”. According to the National Science Foundation, UW spent $1.41 billion on research and development in 2018, ranking it 5th in the nation. As the flagship institution of the six public universities in Washington state, it is known for its medical, engineering and scientific research as well as its highly competitive computer science and engineering programs. Additionally, The University of Washington continues to benefit from its deep historic ties and major collaborations with numerous technology giants in the region, such as Amazon, Boeing, Nintendo, and particularly Microsoft. Paul G. Allen, Bill Gates and others spent significant time at Washington computer labs for a startup venture before founding Microsoft and other ventures. The University of Washington’s 22 varsity sports teams are also highly competitive, competing as the Huskies in the Pac-12 Conference of the NCAA Division I, representing the United States at the Olympic Games, and other major competitions.

The University of Washington has been affiliated with many notable alumni and faculty, including 21 Nobel Prize laureates and numerous Pulitzer Prize winners, Fulbright Scholars, Rhodes Scholars and Marshall Scholars.

In 1854, territorial governor Isaac Stevens recommended the establishment of a university in the Washington Territory. Prominent Seattle-area residents, including Methodist preacher Daniel Bagley, saw this as a chance to add to the city’s potential and prestige. Bagley learned of a law that allowed United States territories to sell land to raise money in support of public schools. At the time, Arthur A. Denny, one of the founders of Seattle and a member of the territorial legislature, aimed to increase the city’s importance by moving the territory’s capital from Olympia to Seattle. However, Bagley eventually convinced Denny that the establishment of a university would assist more in the development of Seattle’s economy. Two universities were initially chartered, but later the decision was repealed in favor of a single university in Lewis County provided that locally donated land was available. When no site emerged, Denny successfully petitioned the legislature to reconsider Seattle as a location in 1858.

In 1861, scouting began for an appropriate 10 acres (4 ha) site in Seattle to serve as a new university campus. Arthur and Mary Denny donated eight acres, while fellow pioneers Edward Lander, and Charlie and Mary Terry, donated two acres on Denny’s Knoll in downtown Seattle. More specifically, this tract was bounded by 4th Avenue to the west, 6th Avenue to the east, Union Street to the north, and Seneca Streets to the south.

John Pike, for whom Pike Street is named, was the university’s architect and builder. It was opened on November 4, 1861, as the Territorial University of Washington. The legislature passed articles incorporating the University, and establishing its Board of Regents in 1862. The school initially struggled, closing three times: in 1863 for low enrollment, and again in 1867 and 1876 due to funds shortage. The University of Washington awarded its first graduate Clara Antoinette McCarty Wilt in 1876, with a bachelor’s degree in science.

19th century relocation

By the time Washington state entered the Union in 1889, both Seattle and The University of Washington had grown substantially. The University of Washington’s total undergraduate enrollment increased from 30 to nearly 300 students, and the campus’s relative isolation in downtown Seattle faced encroaching development. A special legislative committee, headed by The University of Washington graduate Edmond Meany, was created to find a new campus to better serve the growing student population and faculty. The committee eventually selected a site on the northeast of downtown Seattle called Union Bay, which was the land of the Duwamish, and the legislature appropriated funds for its purchase and construction. In 1895, The University of Washington relocated to the new campus by moving into the newly built Denny Hall. The University of Washington Regents tried and failed to sell the old campus, eventually settling with leasing the area. This would later become one of the University’s most valuable pieces of real estate in modern-day Seattle, generating millions in annual revenue with what is now called the Metropolitan Tract. The original Territorial University building was torn down in 1908, and its former site now houses the Fairmont Olympic Hotel.

The sole-surviving remnants of The University of Washington’s first building are four 24-foot (7.3 m), white, hand-fluted cedar, Ionic columns. They were salvaged by Edmond S. Meany, one of The University of Washington’s first graduates and former head of its history department. Meany and his colleague, Dean Herbert T. Condon, dubbed the columns as “Loyalty,” “Industry,” “Faith”, and “Efficiency”, or “LIFE.” The columns now stand in the Sylvan Grove Theater.

20th century expansion

Organizers of the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition eyed the still largely undeveloped campus as a prime setting for their world’s fair. They came to an agreement with The University of Washington ‘s Board of Regents that allowed them to use the campus grounds for the exposition, surrounding today’s Drumheller Fountain facing towards Mount Rainier. In exchange, organizers agreed Washington would take over the campus and its development after the fair’s conclusion. This arrangement led to a detailed site plan and several new buildings, prepared in part by John Charles Olmsted. The plan was later incorporated into the overall University of Washington campus master plan, permanently affecting the campus layout.

Both World Wars brought the military to campus, with certain facilities temporarily lent to the federal government. In spite of this, subsequent post-war periods were times of dramatic growth for The University of Washington. The period between the wars saw a significant expansion of the upper campus. Construction of the Liberal Arts Quadrangle, known to students as “The Quad,” began in 1916 and continued to 1939. The University’s architectural centerpiece, Suzzallo Library, was built in 1926 and expanded in 1935.

After World War II, further growth came with the G.I. Bill. Among the most important developments of this period was the opening of the School of Medicine in 1946, which is now consistently ranked as the top medical school in the United States. It would eventually lead to The University of Washington Medical Center, ranked by U.S. News and World Report as one of the top ten hospitals in the nation.

In 1942, all persons of Japanese ancestry in the Seattle area were forced into inland internment camps as part of Executive Order 9066 following the attack on Pearl Harbor. During this difficult time, university president Lee Paul Sieg took an active and sympathetic leadership role in advocating for and facilitating the transfer of Japanese American students to universities and colleges away from the Pacific Coast to help them avoid the mass incarceration. Nevertheless, many Japanese American students and “soon-to-be” graduates were unable to transfer successfully in the short time window or receive diplomas before being incarcerated. It was only many years later that they would be recognized for their accomplishments during The University of Washington’s Long Journey Home ceremonial event that was held in May 2008.

From 1958 to 1973, The University of Washington saw a tremendous growth in student enrollment, its faculties and operating budget, and also its prestige under the leadership of Charles Odegaard. The University of Washington student enrollment had more than doubled to 34,000 as the baby boom generation came of age. However, this era was also marked by high levels of student activism, as was the case at many American universities. Much of the unrest focused around civil rights and opposition to the Vietnam War. In response to anti-Vietnam War protests by the late 1960s, the University Safety and Security Division became The University of Washington Police Department.

Odegaard instituted a vision of building a “community of scholars”, convincing the Washington State legislatures to increase investment in The University of Washington. Washington senators, such as Henry M. Jackson and Warren G. Magnuson, also used their political clout to gather research funds for the University of Washington. The results included an increase in the operating budget from $37 million in 1958 to over $400 million in 1973, solidifying The University of Washington as a top recipient of federal research funds in the United States. The establishment of technology giants such as Microsoft, Boeing and Amazon in the local area also proved to be highly influential in the University of Washington’s fortunes, not only improving graduate prospects but also helping to attract millions of dollars in university and research funding through its distinguished faculty and extensive alumni network.

21st century

In 1990, The University of Washington opened its additional campuses in Bothell and Tacoma. Although originally intended for students who have already completed two years of higher education, both schools have since become four-year universities with the authority to grant degrees. The first freshman classes at these campuses started in fall 2006. Today both Bothell and Tacoma also offer a selection of master’s degree programs.

In 2012, The University of Washington began exploring plans and governmental approval to expand the main Seattle campus, including significant increases in student housing, teaching facilities for the growing student body and faculty, as well as expanded public transit options. The University of Washington light rail station was completed in March 2015, connecting Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood to The University of Washington Husky Stadium within five minutes of rail travel time. It offers a previously unavailable option of transportation into and out of the campus, designed specifically to reduce dependence on private vehicles, bicycles and local King County buses.

The University of Washington has been listed as a “Public Ivy” in Greene’s Guides since 2001, and is an elected member of the American Association of Universities. Among the faculty by 2012, there have been 151 members of American Association for the Advancement of Science, 68 members of the National Academy of Sciences(US), 67 members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 53 members of the National Academy of Medicine, 29 winners of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, 21 members of the National Academy of Engineering, 15 Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigators, 15 MacArthur Fellows, 9 winners of the Gairdner Foundation International Award, 5 winners of the National Medal of Science, 7 Nobel Prize laureates, 5 winners of Albert Lasker Award for Clinical Medical Research, 4 members of the American Philosophical Society, 2 winners of the National Book Award, 2 winners of the National Medal of Arts, 2 Pulitzer Prize winners, 1 winner of the Fields Medal, and 1 member of the National Academy of Public Administration. Among The University of Washington students by 2012, there were 136 Fulbright Scholars, 35 Rhodes Scholars, 7 Marshall Scholars and 4 Gates Cambridge Scholars. UW is recognized as a top producer of Fulbright Scholars, ranking 2nd in the US in 2017.

The Academic Ranking of World Universities has consistently ranked The University of Washington as one of the top 20 universities worldwide every year since its first release. In 2019, The University of Washington ranked 14th worldwide out of 500 by the ARWU, 26th worldwide out of 981 in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings, and 28th worldwide out of 101 in the Times World Reputation Rankings. Meanwhile, QS World University Rankings ranked it 68th worldwide, out of over 900.

U.S. News & World Report ranked The University of Washington 8th out of nearly 1,500 universities worldwide for 2021, with The University of Washington’s undergraduate program tied for 58th among 389 national universities in the U.S. and tied for 19th among 209 public universities.

In 2019, it ranked 10th among the universities around the world by SCImago Institutions Rankings. In 2017, the Leiden Ranking, which focuses on science and the impact of scientific publications among the world’s 500 major universities, ranked The University of Washington 12th globally and 5th in the U.S.

In 2019, Kiplinger Magazine’s review of “top college values” named University of Washington 5th for in-state students and 10th for out-of-state students among U.S. public colleges, and 84th overall out of 500 schools. In the Washington Monthly National University Rankings The University of Washington was ranked 15th domestically in 2018, based on its contribution to the public good as measured by social mobility, research, and promoting public service.

From The DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory: “Watching Molecules Relax in Real Time”

From The DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

5.24.23
Rachel Berkowitz

Enrico Ridente (left) and Eric Haugen at Berkeley Lab. Credit: Enrico Ridente/Berkeley Lab.

An ultrafast x-ray imaging technique shows how the symmetry of methane’s structure evolves after rapid removal of an electron, providing insights into its physical and chemical properties.

Designing the next generation of efficient energy conversion devices for powering our electronics and heating our homes requires a detailed understanding of how molecules move and vibrate while undergoing light-induced chemical reactions. Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have now visualized the distortions of chemical bonds in a methane molecule after it absorbs light, loses an electron, and then relaxes. Their study provides insights into how molecules react to light, which can ultimately be useful for developing new methods to control chemical reactions.

Examining how a molecule responds to light on extremely fast timescales allows researchers to track how electrons move during a chemical reaction. “The big question is how a molecule dissipates energy without breaking apart,” said Enrico Ridente, a physicist at Berkeley Lab and lead author on the Science paper [below] reporting the work. This means examining how excess energy is redistributed in a molecule that has been excited by light, as the electrons and nuclei move about while the molecule relaxes to an equilibrium state.

Probing these fine-scale movements means making observations of processes that occur on timescales faster than a millionth of a billionth of a second. For decades, researchers have relied on theory to describe how excess energy affects the symmetry of – but does not break – the bonds of a molecule that’s been excited by light. This theory predicts how the bond lengths and angles between individual atoms should change while electrons shift position, and what intermediate structures it should adopt.

Now, using ultrafast x-ray spectroscopy facilities at Berkeley Lab’s Chemical Sciences Division, Ridente and his colleagues observed how the structure of ionized methane molecules evolves over time.

“Methane ions are an ideal system to address this question because they do not come apart when excited by light,” said Ridente.

The angles between atoms in an excited methane molecule change as the molecule relaxes, distorting its shape and redistributing the absorbed energy. (Credit: Diptarka Hait/Berkeley Lab)

By first using a laser to strip an electron from the neutral methane molecule, then taking ultrafast x-ray spectroscopic snapshots of the remaining ion, the researchers collected a time series of spectral signals. The signals revealed how the initially symmetric shape becomes distorted over a ten-femtosecond period (a femtosecond is one quadrillionth of a second) – observational evidence of a long-studied effect called Jahn-Teller distortion. Longer time observations showed that for another 58 femtoseconds, the distorted shape vibrates coherently in a scissoring-like motion while redistributing its energy via other vibrations through the structure’s geometric changes.

“Thanks to these measurements and the understanding gained from theory, we were able to time-resolve the full evolution of the distortion for the first time,” said Stephen Leone, a chemist at Berkeley Lab and the senior author on the Science paper.

The researchers used the Cori and Perlmutter systems at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), a DOE Office of Science user facility at Berkeley Lab, to perform calculations that confirmed their measurements of the molecule’s movements.

Cray Cori II supercomputer at National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center at DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, named after Gerty Cori, the first American woman to win a Nobel Prize in science.

Cray Shasta Perlmutter SC18 AMD Epyc Nvidia pre-exascale supercomputer. No.8 on the TOP500.

“We can now explain how the molecule distorts after losing an electron and how the energies of the electrons respond to these changes,” said Diptarka Hait, a graduate student at Berkeley Lab and the lead theoretical author of the study.

The study demonstrated the viability of an x-ray approach for studying ultrafast molecular dynamics. Methane is a fundamental yet simple molecule where one of the most basic types of distortions occurs as predicted, but with richer and more complicated dynamics than previously understood. “This research opens the door for studying more complex systems and other types of distortions,” says Ridente. Such insights about the dynamics of electrons and nuclei can lead to innovations in new energy conversion devices and photocatalysis applications.

This research was funded by the Department of Energy’s Office of Science.

Science
More instructive images are available in the science paper.

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”.

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LBNL campus

Berkeley Lab campus Aerial View

Bringing Science Solutions to the World

In the world of science, The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) is synonymous with “excellence.” Thirteen Nobel prizes are associated with Berkeley Lab. Seventy Lab scientists are members of the The National Academy of Sciences, one of the highest honors for a scientist in the United States. Thirteen of our scientists have won the National Medal of Science, our nation’s highest award for lifetime achievement in fields of scientific research. Eighteen of our engineers have been elected to the The National Academy of Engineering, and three of our scientists have been elected into The Institute of Medicine. In addition, Berkeley Lab has trained thousands of university science and engineering students who are advancing technological innovations across the nation and around the world.

Berkeley Lab is a member of the national laboratory system supported by The DOE through its Office of Science. It is managed by the University of California and is charged with conducting unclassified research across a wide range of scientific disciplines. Located on a 202-acre site in the hills above The University of California-Berkeley campus that offers spectacular views of the San Francisco Bay, Berkeley Lab employs approximately 3,232 scientists, engineers and support staff. The Lab’s total costs for FY 2014 were $785 million. A recent study estimates the Laboratory’s overall economic impact through direct, indirect and induced spending on the nine counties that make up the San Francisco Bay Area to be nearly $700 million annually. The Lab was also responsible for creating 5,600 jobs locally and 12,000 nationally. The overall economic impact on the national economy is estimated at $1.6 billion a year. Technologies developed at Berkeley Lab have generated billions of dollars in revenues, and thousands of jobs. Savings as a result of Berkeley Lab developments in lighting and windows, and other energy-efficient technologies, have also been in the billions of dollars.

Berkeley Lab was founded in 1931 by Ernest Orlando Lawrence, a University of California-Berkeley physicist who won the 1939 Nobel Prize in physics for his invention of the cyclotron, a circular particle accelerator that opened the door to high-energy physics. It was Lawrence’s belief that scientific research is best done through teams of individuals with different fields of expertise, working together. His teamwork concept is a Berkeley Lab legacy that continues today.

History

1931–1941

The laboratory was founded on August 26, 1931, by Ernest Lawrence, as the Radiation Laboratory of the University of California-Berkeley, associated with the Physics Department. It centered physics research around his new instrument, the cyclotron, a type of particle accelerator for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1939.

E.O. Lawrence’ first cyclotron.

LBNL 88 inch cyclotron.

LBNL 88 inch cyclotron.

Throughout the 1930s, Lawrence pushed to create larger and larger machines for physics research, courting private philanthropists for funding. He was the first to develop a large team to build big projects to make discoveries in basic research. Eventually these machines grew too large to be held on the university grounds, and in 1940 the lab moved to its current site atop the hill above campus. Part of the team put together during this period includes two other young scientists who went on to establish large laboratories; J. Robert Oppenheimer founded The DOE’s Los Alamos Laboratory, and Robert Wilson founded The DOE’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.

1942–1950

Leslie Groves visited Lawrence’s Radiation Laboratory in late 1942 as he was organizing the Manhattan Project, meeting J. Robert Oppenheimer for the first time. Oppenheimer was tasked with organizing the nuclear bomb development effort and founded today’s Los Alamos National Laboratory to help keep the work secret. At the RadLab, Lawrence and his colleagues developed the technique of electromagnetic enrichment of uranium using their experience with cyclotrons. The “calutrons” (named after the University) became the basic unit of the massive Y-12 facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Lawrence’s lab helped contribute to what have been judged to be the three most valuable technology developments of the war (the atomic bomb, proximity fuse, and radar). The cyclotron, whose construction was stalled during the war, was finished in November 1946. The Manhattan Project shut down two months later.

1951–2018

After the war, the Radiation Laboratory became one of the first laboratories to be incorporated into the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) (now The Department of Energy . The most highly classified work remained at Los Alamos, but the RadLab remained involved. Edward Teller suggested setting up a second lab similar to Los Alamos to compete with their designs. This led to the creation of an offshoot of the RadLab (now The DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) in 1952. Some of the RadLab’s work was transferred to the new lab, but some classified research continued at Berkeley Lab until the 1970s, when it became a laboratory dedicated only to unclassified scientific research.

Shortly after the death of Lawrence in August 1958, the UC Radiation Laboratory (both branches) was renamed the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory. The Berkeley location became the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in 1971, although many continued to call it the RadLab. Gradually, another shortened form came into common usage, LBNL. Its formal name was amended to Ernest Orlando Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in 1995, when “National” was added to the names of all DOE labs. “Ernest Orlando” was later dropped to shorten the name. Today, the lab is commonly referred to as “Berkeley Lab”.

The Alvarez Physics Memos are a set of informal working papers of the large group of physicists, engineers, computer programmers, and technicians led by Luis W. Alvarez from the early 1950s until his death in 1988. Over 1700 memos are available on-line, hosted by the Laboratory.

The lab remains owned by the Department of Energy , with management from the University of California. Companies such as Intel were funding the lab’s research into computing chips.

Science mission

From the 1950s through the present, Berkeley Lab has maintained its status as a major international center for physics research, and has also diversified its research program into almost every realm of scientific investigation. Its mission is to solve the most pressing and profound scientific problems facing humanity, conduct basic research for a secure energy future, understand living systems to improve the environment, health, and energy supply, understand matter and energy in the universe, build and safely operate leading scientific facilities for the nation, and train the next generation of scientists and engineers.

The Laboratory’s 20 scientific divisions are organized within six areas of research: Computing Sciences; Physical Sciences; Earth and Environmental Sciences; Biosciences; Energy Sciences; and Energy Technologies. Berkeley Lab has six main science thrusts: advancing integrated fundamental energy science; integrative biological and environmental system science; advanced computing for science impact; discovering the fundamental properties of matter and energy; accelerators for the future; and developing energy technology innovations for a sustainable future. It was Lawrence’s belief that scientific research is best done through teams of individuals with different fields of expertise, working together. His teamwork concept is a Berkeley Lab tradition that continues today.

Berkeley Lab operates five major National User Facilities for the DOE Office of Science:

The Advanced Light Source (ALS) is a synchrotron light source with 41 beam lines providing ultraviolet, soft x-ray, and hard x-ray light to scientific experiments.

The DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Advanced Light Source.
The ALS is one of the world’s brightest sources of soft x-rays, which are used to characterize the electronic structure of matter and to reveal microscopic structures with elemental and chemical specificity. About 2,500 scientist-users carry out research at ALS every year. Berkeley Lab is proposing an upgrade of ALS which would increase the coherent flux of soft x-rays by two-three orders of magnitude.

Berkeley Lab Laser Accelerator (BELLA) Center

A view of BELLA, the Berkeley Lab Laser Accelerator. Credit: Roy Kaltschmidt-Berkeley Lab.

The DOE Joint Genome Institute supports genomic research in support of the DOE missions in alternative energy, global carbon cycling, and environmental management. The JGI’s partner laboratories are Berkeley Lab, DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), DOE’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), and the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology . The JGI’s central role is the development of a diversity of large-scale experimental and computational capabilities to link sequence to biological insights relevant to energy and environmental research. Approximately 1,200 scientist-users take advantage of JGI’s capabilities for their research every year.

LBNL Molecular Foundry

The LBNL Molecular Foundry is a multidisciplinary nanoscience research facility. Its seven research facilities focus on Imaging and Manipulation of Nanostructures; Nanofabrication; Theory of Nanostructured Materials; Inorganic Nanostructures; Biological Nanostructures; Organic and Macromolecular Synthesis; and Electron Microscopy. Approximately 700 scientist-users make use of these facilities in their research every year.

The DOE’s NERSC National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center is the scientific computing facility that provides large-scale computing for the DOE’s unclassified research programs. Its current systems provide over 3 billion computational hours annually. NERSC supports 6,000 scientific users from universities, national laboratories, and industry.

DOE’s NERSC National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Cray Cori II supercomputer at National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center at DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, named after Gerty Cori, the first American woman to win a Nobel Prize in science.

NERSC Hopper Cray XE6 supercomputer.

NERSC Cray XC30 Edison supercomputer

NERSC GPFS for Life Sciences.

The Genepool system is a cluster dedicated to the DOE Joint Genome Institute’s computing needs. Denovo is a smaller test system for Genepool that is primarily used by NERSC staff to test new system configurations and software.

NERSC PDSF computer cluster in 2003.

PDSF is a networked distributed computing cluster designed primarily to meet the detector simulation and data analysis requirements of physics, astrophysics and nuclear science collaborations.

Cray Shasta Perlmutter SC18 AMD Epyc Nvidia pre-exascale supercomputer.

NERSC is a DOE Office of Science User Facility.

The DOE’s Energy Science Network is a high-speed network infrastructure optimized for very large scientific data flows. ESNet provides connectivity for all major DOE sites and facilities, and the network transports roughly 35 petabytes of traffic each month.

Berkeley Lab is the lead partner in the DOE’s Joint Bioenergy Institute (JBEI), located in Emeryville, California. Other partners are the DOE’s Sandia National Laboratory, the University of California (UC) campuses of Berkeley and Davis, the Carnegie Institution for Science , and DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). JBEI’s primary scientific mission is to advance the development of the next generation of biofuels – liquid fuels derived from the solar energy stored in plant biomass. JBEI is one of three new U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Bioenergy Research Centers (BRCs).

Berkeley Lab has a major role in two DOE Energy Innovation Hubs. The mission of the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis (JCAP) is to find a cost-effective method to produce fuels using only sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide. The lead institution for JCAP is the California Institute of Technology and Berkeley Lab is the second institutional center. The mission of the Joint Center for Energy Storage Research (JCESR) is to create next-generation battery technologies that will transform transportation and the electricity grid. DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory leads JCESR and Berkeley Lab is a major partner.

From The College of Engineering At Cornell University Via “The Chronicle”: “Qubit control – Cornell engineers push to make quantum practical”

From The College of Engineering

At

Cornell University

Via

“The Chronicle”

May 15, 2023
David Levin | Cornell Engineering

Reality, at least as we know it, only goes so deep. Look closely enough at any object, down to the level of molecules and atoms, and the world starts to play by its own rules. This is the realm of quantum physics: where waves of energy and particles are the same, and strange phenomena like “teleportation” are the norm.

These enigmatic traits could be the key to revolutionary new computers and electronic components. Instead of using silicon transistors, like a traditional computer or integrated circuit, quantum devices rely on subatomic particles as a means to route and process information, making them faster and more powerful than any other electronic hardware we can currently imagine.

From left: Assistant professor Mohamed Ibrahim, assistant professor Karan Mehta and associate professor Mark Wilde – all of the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering – are working to make quantum devices both practical and scalable.
Eric Laine/Provided.

Three new faculty from Cornell’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering are working to make quantum devices both practical and scalable. Assistant professor Karan Mehta, together with assistant professor Mohamed Ibrahim and associate professor Mark Wilde, are each going far beyond applied physics in their work, incorporating elements of circuit design, photonics, systems architecture, information theory and other fields to make quantum computers a reality.

Trapping ions

Mehta, for instance, studies a basic building block of quantum computers – a specialized component called a “trapped ion qubit.” It’s essentially a single atom suspended in a vacuum by electric fields and controlled with lasers. By using those lasers to manipulate the atoms’ spin and charge, it’s possible to “program” them to run simple algorithms.

As with any electronic component, however, these qubits have pros and cons, Mehta notes. One advantage is that each ion is suspended in space and isolated from other atoms, meaning it’s exposed to very little interference or “noise”. But controlling these qubits is complicated, and as systems get larger and larger, other sources of noise can creep into the system, preventing it from working smoothly. Getting rid of that noise is a critical part of building a useful quantum computer, which would require thousands or even millions of qubits.

“When you have large numbers of ion qubits in a system, controlling them with millions of laser beams moving around in free space becomes very hard,” Mehta says. “Whenever you add more qubits into the system, the complexity of the control apparatus will introduce more potential errors and noise.”

In quantum computing, that noise can scramble the output of a machine. When minute vibrations, heat or anything else that randomly perturbs a trapped ion appears, the qubits lose a critical trait called “superposition” – a phenomenon where electrons exist in multiple states at once, letting programmers run different iterations of a problem at the same time. If there’s any noise present, however, that superposition will collapse before any useful data is realized.

Mehta is trying to get around this limitation by using solid-state devices to manipulate and sense the state of each qubit. He thinks using pulses of light delivered to qubits and collected into chip-based control devices based on fiber optics may be the key to clean, low-noise quantum systems. Such systems could allow large scale systems, and also significantly reduce excess noise, making qubits more stable.

“From an engineering perspective, that can address the elephant in the room, which is the challenge of controlling these otherwise pristine quantum systems,” he says. “The idea is to leverage the fundamental advantages of extremely clean, low noise quantum systems, together with scalable hardware.”

“Quantum systems on chip”

Ibrahim is on board with that assessment. He’s working on scalable chip-scale quantum systems in his lab utilizing today’s advanced and miniscule integrated circuits (ICs).

Ibrahim is developing integrated quantum sensors using a specialized form of diamond crystals. Instead of pure carbon, these diamonds are seeded with atoms of nitrogen. When paired with a vacant site, each nitrogen atom introduces a nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center with unique new properties.

By exposing these crystals to a rising sweep of microwave energy and green light pulses, he says, they begin to glow fluorescent red with intensity depending on the spin states of the NV centers’ electrons – and by recording the exact frequencies at which a dip in the fluorescence intensity occurs, Ibrahim can track the temperature and measure the intensity of magnetic and electric fields that are surrounding the sensor.

Although this is a well-known property, Ibrahim is working to combine all the elements involved into a single chip-scale miniaturized device, including on-chip microwave radio source and red-light detection circuits. These are co-packaged with a diamond crystal lattice and a green laser emitter.

Integrated circuits like these, he says, could have all sorts of different applications, from global navigation to sensing bioelectric signals in the heart and brain – but Ibrahim says he’s also interested in building integrated controllers for quantum computers, where they might help to solve an age-old problem.

“Qubits need to be kept in a cryogenic fridge. In order to send signals between those ultra-cold environments and the classical computers that control the qubits, we currently use cables, which limit the scalability to thousands of qubits,” he says. By using cryogenic ICs as an intermediary, operating at few Kelvins, it may be possible to build multi-qubit controllers that can scale to a larger number of qubits much more efficiently.

“However, we still need to communicate with intermediate cold temperature, which is currently done using conductive coaxial cables. Since these cables are also thermally conductive, we can actually lose energy along them on the order of a few milliwatts,” he says.

Ibrahim is working on efficient transceivers that can solve this problem using either wireless communication or cables with very low heat conductivity, such as optical fibers. The utilization of ICs to develop new architectures to interface or directly control qubits would make it possible to increase their number, enabling the era of large-scale quantum computers.

Programming qubits

No matter how robust or efficient we can make a quantum computer, however, we won’t get very far unless we figure out the most effective ways to use it – an area Wilde is actively studying. While his colleagues in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering are developing new hardware and software to make these devices a reality, Wilde is turning his attention to “quantum information theory” – the complex algorithms used to process information within a device.

Not surprisingly, he says, quantum computers are far less straightforward than classical silicon devices. A classical computer with two bits, each taking values zero and one, can generate four different combinations of those numbers (00, 01, 10 and 11), but can only calculate one at a time. A quantum computer, on the other hand, can explore all four possible answers at once – and as a result, requires entirely new methods of programming.

“The cleverness involved in devising a quantum algorithm is to make the bad possibilities for an answer go away; to eliminate them from the computation like pruning a tree, and then amplify the paths that will lead to a correct solution when you ultimately measure it,” Wilde says.

Since noise in the quantum system will introduce errors during that pruning process, Wilde is working on ways to correct for those instances and ensure that noisy glitches don’t skew the computer’s output. One technique, he notes, is to make quantum algorithms as efficient as possible, reducing the amount of time they take to run and limiting the qubits’ chances of being corrupted by noise as the computation occurs.

Although he’s working on new ways of constructing robust quantum algorithms, Wilde’s work isn’t entirely focused on practical solutions. He’s also trying to answer puzzles with a more philosophical bent.

“I want to understand the ultimate limits of communication,” he says. “In every communication task, you’re going to need to do some kind of computation on either end, and in every computation task, you’re going to have to communicate between qubits inside the computer – so computation and communication are inevitably intertwined, and you can never separate them.” With that in mind, he asks, what are the physical limits of those processes? And how far can we push them?

These questions aren’t just abstract thought experiments; they’re the bread and butter of the work that Wilde and his colleagues are currently doing. In time, the interdisciplinary research coming out of their labs may revolutionize computing and electrical engineering as a whole, opening an endless array of new possibilities based on quantum physics.

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”.

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The Cornell University 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 Institutein 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 a member of the Association of American Universities and 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 The DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory: “Harnessing Machine Learning to Make Complex Systems More Energy Efficient” Stephen Whitelam

From The DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

5.12.23
William Schulz

Stephen Whitelam at the Molecular Foundry. (Credit: Thor Swift/Berkeley Lab)

Pac Man and a refrigerator and Maxwell’s Demon help Berkeley Lab researcher explore improved efficiency in nanosystems.

Getting something for nothing doesn’t work in physics. But it turns out that, by thinking like a strategic gamer, and with some help from a demon, improved energy efficiency for complex systems like data centers might be possible.

In computer simulations, Stephen Whitelam of the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laborator used neural networks (a type of machine learning model that mimics human brain processes) to train nanosystems, which are tiny machines about the size of molecules, to work with greater energy efficiency.

What’s more, the simulations showed that learned protocols could draw heat from the systems by virtue of constantly measuring them to find the most energy efficient operations.

“We can get energy out of the system, or we can store work in the system,” Whitelam said.

It’s an insight that could prove valuable, for example, in operating very large systems like computer data centers. Banks of computers produce enormous amounts of heat that must be extracted – using still more energy – to prevent damage to the sensitive electronics.

Whitelam conducted the research at the Molecular Foundry [below], a DOE Office of Science user facility at Berkeley Lab. His work is described in a paper published in Physical Review X [below].

Inspiration from Pac Man and “Maxwell’s Demon”

Asked about the origin of his ideas, Whitelam said, “People had used techniques in the machine learning literature to play Atari video games that seemed naturally suited to materials science.”

In a video game like Pac Man, he explained, the aim with machine learning would be to choose a particular time for an action – up, down, left, right, and so on – to be performed. Over time, the machine learning algorithms will “learn” the best moves to make, and when, to achieve high scores. The same algorithms can work for nanoscale systems.

Whitelam’s simulations are also something of an answer to an old thought experiment in physics called “Maxwell’s Demon”. Briefly, in 1867, physicist James Clerk Maxwell proposed a box filled with a gas, and in the middle of the box there would be a massless “demon” controlling a trap door. The demon would open the door to allow faster molecules of the gas to move to one side of the box and slower molecules to the opposite side.

Eventually, with all molecules so segregated, the “slow” side of the box would be cold and the “fast side” would be hot, matching the energy of the molecules.

Checking the refrigerator

The system would constitute a heat engine, Whitelam said. Importantly, however, “Maxwell’s Demon” doesn’t violate the laws of thermodynamics – getting something for nothing – because information is equivalent to energy. Measuring the position and speed of molecules in the box costs more energy than that derived from the resulting heat engine.

And heat engines can be useful things. Refrigerators provide a good analogy, Whitelam said. As the system runs, food inside stays cold – the desired outcome – even though the back of the fridge gets hot as a product of work done by the refrigerator’s motor.

In Whitelam’s simulations, the machine learning protocol can be thought of as the “demon”. In the process of optimization, it converts information drawn from the system modeled into energy as heat.

Unleashing the “demon” on a nanoscale system

In one simulation, Whitelam optimized the process of dragging a nanoscale bead through water. He modeled a so-called optical trap in which laser beams, acting like tweezers of light, can hold and move a bead around.

“The name of the game is: Go from here to there with as little work done on the system as possible,” Whitelam said. The bead jiggles under natural fluctuations called Brownian motion as water molecules are bombarding it. Whitelam showed that if these fluctuations can be measured, moving the bead can then be done at the most energy efficient moment.

“Here we’re showing that we can train a neural-network demon to do something similar to Maxwell’s thought experiment but with an optical trap,” he said.

Cooling computers

Whitelam extended the idea to microelectronics and computation. He used the machine learning protocol to simulate flipping the state of a nanomagnetic bit between 0 and 1, which is a basic information-erasure/information-copying operation in computing.

“Do this again, and again. Eventually, your demon will “learn” how to flip the bit so as to absorb heat from the surroundings,” he said. He comes back to the refrigerator analogy. “You could make a computer that cools down as it runs, with the heat being sent somewhere else in your data center.”

Whitelam said the simulations are like a testbed for understanding concepts and ideas. “And here the idea is just showing that you can perform these protocols, either with little energy expense, or energy sucked in at the cost of going somewhere else, using measurements that could apply in a real-life experiment,” he said.

This research was supported by the Department of Energy’s Office of Science.

Physical Review X

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”.

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Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

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LBNL campus

Berkeley Lab campus Aerial View

Bringing Science Solutions to the World

In the world of science, The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) is synonymous with “excellence.” Thirteen Nobel prizes are associated with Berkeley Lab. Seventy Lab scientists are members of the The National Academy of Sciences, one of the highest honors for a scientist in the United States. Thirteen of our scientists have won the National Medal of Science, our nation’s highest award for lifetime achievement in fields of scientific research. Eighteen of our engineers have been elected to the The National Academy of Engineering, and three of our scientists have been elected into The Institute of Medicine. In addition, Berkeley Lab has trained thousands of university science and engineering students who are advancing technological innovations across the nation and around the world.

Berkeley Lab is a member of the national laboratory system supported by The DOE through its Office of Science. It is managed by the University of California and is charged with conducting unclassified research across a wide range of scientific disciplines. Located on a 202-acre site in the hills above The University of California-Berkeley campus that offers spectacular views of the San Francisco Bay, Berkeley Lab employs approximately 3,232 scientists, engineers and support staff. The Lab’s total costs for FY 2014 were $785 million. A recent study estimates the Laboratory’s overall economic impact through direct, indirect and induced spending on the nine counties that make up the San Francisco Bay Area to be nearly $700 million annually. The Lab was also responsible for creating 5,600 jobs locally and 12,000 nationally. The overall economic impact on the national economy is estimated at $1.6 billion a year. Technologies developed at Berkeley Lab have generated billions of dollars in revenues, and thousands of jobs. Savings as a result of Berkeley Lab developments in lighting and windows, and other energy-efficient technologies, have also been in the billions of dollars.

Berkeley Lab was founded in 1931 by Ernest Orlando Lawrence, a University of California-Berkeley physicist who won the 1939 Nobel Prize in physics for his invention of the cyclotron, a circular particle accelerator that opened the door to high-energy physics. It was Lawrence’s belief that scientific research is best done through teams of individuals with different fields of expertise, working together. His teamwork concept is a Berkeley Lab legacy that continues today.

History

1931–1941

The laboratory was founded on August 26, 1931, by Ernest Lawrence, as the Radiation Laboratory of the University of California-Berkeley, associated with the Physics Department. It centered physics research around his new instrument, the cyclotron, a type of particle accelerator for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1939.

E.O. Lawrence’ first cyclotron.

LBNL 88 inch cyclotron.

LBNL 88 inch cyclotron.

Throughout the 1930s, Lawrence pushed to create larger and larger machines for physics research, courting private philanthropists for funding. He was the first to develop a large team to build big projects to make discoveries in basic research. Eventually these machines grew too large to be held on the university grounds, and in 1940 the lab moved to its current site atop the hill above campus. Part of the team put together during this period includes two other young scientists who went on to establish large laboratories; J. Robert Oppenheimer founded The DOE’s Los Alamos Laboratory, and Robert Wilson founded The DOE’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.

1942–1950

Leslie Groves visited Lawrence’s Radiation Laboratory in late 1942 as he was organizing the Manhattan Project, meeting J. Robert Oppenheimer for the first time. Oppenheimer was tasked with organizing the nuclear bomb development effort and founded today’s Los Alamos National Laboratory to help keep the work secret. At the RadLab, Lawrence and his colleagues developed the technique of electromagnetic enrichment of uranium using their experience with cyclotrons. The “calutrons” (named after the University) became the basic unit of the massive Y-12 facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Lawrence’s lab helped contribute to what have been judged to be the three most valuable technology developments of the war (the atomic bomb, proximity fuse, and radar). The cyclotron, whose construction was stalled during the war, was finished in November 1946. The Manhattan Project shut down two months later.

1951–2018

After the war, the Radiation Laboratory became one of the first laboratories to be incorporated into the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) (now The Department of Energy . The most highly classified work remained at Los Alamos, but the RadLab remained involved. Edward Teller suggested setting up a second lab similar to Los Alamos to compete with their designs. This led to the creation of an offshoot of the RadLab (now The DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) in 1952. Some of the RadLab’s work was transferred to the new lab, but some classified research continued at Berkeley Lab until the 1970s, when it became a laboratory dedicated only to unclassified scientific research.

Shortly after the death of Lawrence in August 1958, the UC Radiation Laboratory (both branches) was renamed the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory. The Berkeley location became the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in 1971, although many continued to call it the RadLab. Gradually, another shortened form came into common usage, LBNL. Its formal name was amended to Ernest Orlando Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in 1995, when “National” was added to the names of all DOE labs. “Ernest Orlando” was later dropped to shorten the name. Today, the lab is commonly referred to as “Berkeley Lab”.

The Alvarez Physics Memos are a set of informal working papers of the large group of physicists, engineers, computer programmers, and technicians led by Luis W. Alvarez from the early 1950s until his death in 1988. Over 1700 memos are available on-line, hosted by the Laboratory.

The lab remains owned by the Department of Energy , with management from the University of California. Companies such as Intel were funding the lab’s research into computing chips.

Science mission

From the 1950s through the present, Berkeley Lab has maintained its status as a major international center for physics research, and has also diversified its research program into almost every realm of scientific investigation. Its mission is to solve the most pressing and profound scientific problems facing humanity, conduct basic research for a secure energy future, understand living systems to improve the environment, health, and energy supply, understand matter and energy in the universe, build and safely operate leading scientific facilities for the nation, and train the next generation of scientists and engineers.

The Laboratory’s 20 scientific divisions are organized within six areas of research: Computing Sciences; Physical Sciences; Earth and Environmental Sciences; Biosciences; Energy Sciences; and Energy Technologies. Berkeley Lab has six main science thrusts: advancing integrated fundamental energy science; integrative biological and environmental system science; advanced computing for science impact; discovering the fundamental properties of matter and energy; accelerators for the future; and developing energy technology innovations for a sustainable future. It was Lawrence’s belief that scientific research is best done through teams of individuals with different fields of expertise, working together. His teamwork concept is a Berkeley Lab tradition that continues today.

Berkeley Lab operates five major National User Facilities for the DOE Office of Science:

The Advanced Light Source (ALS) is a synchrotron light source with 41 beam lines providing ultraviolet, soft x-ray, and hard x-ray light to scientific experiments.

The DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Advanced Light Source.
The ALS is one of the world’s brightest sources of soft x-rays, which are used to characterize the electronic structure of matter and to reveal microscopic structures with elemental and chemical specificity. About 2,500 scientist-users carry out research at ALS every year. Berkeley Lab is proposing an upgrade of ALS which would increase the coherent flux of soft x-rays by two-three orders of magnitude.

Berkeley Lab Laser Accelerator (BELLA) Center

A view of BELLA, the Berkeley Lab Laser Accelerator. Credit: Roy Kaltschmidt-Berkeley Lab.

The DOE Joint Genome Institute supports genomic research in support of the DOE missions in alternative energy, global carbon cycling, and environmental management. The JGI’s partner laboratories are Berkeley Lab, DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), DOE’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), and the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology . The JGI’s central role is the development of a diversity of large-scale experimental and computational capabilities to link sequence to biological insights relevant to energy and environmental research. Approximately 1,200 scientist-users take advantage of JGI’s capabilities for their research every year.

LBNL Molecular Foundry

The LBNL Molecular Foundry is a multidisciplinary nanoscience research facility. Its seven research facilities focus on Imaging and Manipulation of Nanostructures; Nanofabrication; Theory of Nanostructured Materials; Inorganic Nanostructures; Biological Nanostructures; Organic and Macromolecular Synthesis; and Electron Microscopy. Approximately 700 scientist-users make use of these facilities in their research every year.

The DOE’s NERSC National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center is the scientific computing facility that provides large-scale computing for the DOE’s unclassified research programs. Its current systems provide over 3 billion computational hours annually. NERSC supports 6,000 scientific users from universities, national laboratories, and industry.

DOE’s NERSC National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Cray Cori II supercomputer at National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center at DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, named after Gerty Cori, the first American woman to win a Nobel Prize in science.

NERSC Hopper Cray XE6 supercomputer.

NERSC Cray XC30 Edison supercomputer

NERSC GPFS for Life Sciences.

The Genepool system is a cluster dedicated to the DOE Joint Genome Institute’s computing needs. Denovo is a smaller test system for Genepool that is primarily used by NERSC staff to test new system configurations and software.

NERSC PDSF computer cluster in 2003.

PDSF is a networked distributed computing cluster designed primarily to meet the detector simulation and data analysis requirements of physics, astrophysics and nuclear science collaborations.

Cray Shasta Perlmutter SC18 AMD Epyc Nvidia pre-exascale supercomputer.

NERSC is a DOE Office of Science User Facility.

The DOE’s Energy Science Network is a high-speed network infrastructure optimized for very large scientific data flows. ESNet provides connectivity for all major DOE sites and facilities, and the network transports roughly 35 petabytes of traffic each month.

Berkeley Lab is the lead partner in the DOE’s Joint Bioenergy Institute (JBEI), located in Emeryville, California. Other partners are the DOE’s Sandia National Laboratory, the University of California (UC) campuses of Berkeley and Davis, the Carnegie Institution for Science , and DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). JBEI’s primary scientific mission is to advance the development of the next generation of biofuels – liquid fuels derived from the solar energy stored in plant biomass. JBEI is one of three new U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Bioenergy Research Centers (BRCs).

Berkeley Lab has a major role in two DOE Energy Innovation Hubs. The mission of the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis (JCAP) is to find a cost-effective method to produce fuels using only sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide. The lead institution for JCAP is the California Institute of Technology and Berkeley Lab is the second institutional center. The mission of the Joint Center for Energy Storage Research (JCESR) is to create next-generation battery technologies that will transform transportation and the electricity grid. DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory leads JCESR and Berkeley Lab is a major partner.

From The University of Zürich (Universität Zürich) (CH): “Electron dynamics in real time”

From The University of Zürich (Universität Zürich) (CH)

5.9.23
Simone Ulmer

Making the dynamics of an excited molecule visible is only possible using computationally intensive simulations. Recently, a research team led by Sandra Luber from the University of Zurich has developed a method that speeds up these complex simulations.

Visual representation of filtering processes as performed by the researcher’s algorithm. (Image adobe stock.)

Theoretical chemist Sandra Luber wants to know exactly what is going on: How do electrons behave in a molecule when it is excited with a laser pulse and made to oscillate? In experimental setups, researchers measure the energy spectra of the excited electrons with a detector and thereby obtain an electronic adsorption spectrum of the molecule, for example. But what happens to the electrons in the time between the laser pulse and the resulting spectrogram remains hidden — only supercomputers like “Piz Daint” can make that visible.

Cray Piz Daint Cray XC50/XC40 supercomputer of the Swiss National Supercomputing Center (CSCS) to be replaced by HPE NVIDIA “ALPS” supercomputer.

Calculating such dynamic processes in spectroscopy is time-consuming and cost-intensive, which means that even world-class supercomputers can only simulate small systems. However, Luber, a professor of theoretical chemistry at the University of Zurich, together with her PhD student Ruocheng Han and postdoc Johann Mattiat, recently presented an algorithm in Nature Communications [below] that works ten times faster, and without sacrificing accuracy.

Supercomputer “Piz Daint”

Luber and her team employed “Piz Daint” to model the excited molecules’ dynamics, including the quantum mechanical states. To do this, they used software packages such as CP2K that contain methods for calculating the quantum mechanical states in the atom or molecule in real time. This enabled them to follow how the wave function of the electrons changed over time after the laser pulse. Most importantly, they could see how the higher energy levels induced by the laser are occupied by the electrons and could take “detailed pictures” of the molecule at any point in the experiment. “This helps us analyze the structure and dynamics of a molecule,” said Luber.

In order to avoid trial and error, the researchers ideally wanted to develop an automated method for speeding up these calculations. Specifically, the algorithm that the team created now optimizes the so-called basis sets of functions that then CP2K, for example, uses for the calculations. The team achieved this by identifying two indicators: one indicator that can be used to capture the importance of each basis function for calculating the spectrum; and another indicator that provides information about how important they are for correctly tracking the quantum mechanical states over time.

Using “Piz Daint”, the researchers tested their new algorithm on various molecules, ranging from molecular hydrogen and water to a silver cluster and zinc phthalocyanine among other important molecules for industry. With the new algorithm, the researchers reached their goal faster and with the same precision, as comparisons of the simulated absorption spectra with conventionally modelled spectra showed. All other quantum mechanical programmes besides CP2K that also use atom-centered basis sets could use the new procedure, Luber said.

What is going on in the excited molecules

Optimized basis sets already exist for calculations of molecules mainly in the ground state. “However, such special basis sets for the simulation of excited molecular states did not exist until now,” Luber emphasized. “What’s more, our newly generated basis sets are even system and environment specific.” The researchers made this surprising discovery during test simulations of silver atoms within silver clusters, which have different chemical properties depending on the symmetry and environment in the cluster. “We could observe that our algorithm even finds different basis sets for these different silver atoms,” said Luber.

This means that the algorithm distinguishes the environments in the molecule: If, for instance, the polarization of the electron density is important, the algorithm adds polarization functions; for larger distances from the atom it adds diffuse functions. “We can see which type of function is important in which area of the atom or molecule. This gives us a lot of additional information about the molecule’s chemistry.” Luber and her team have thus come a lot closer to their goal of knowing exactly what is going on in the excited molecules.

Nature Communications
See the science paper for instructive material with images.

Fig. 1: Schematic diagram of the basis set truncation process.

First, a real-time propagation run of 1% (e.g., 100 steps) of the total simulation time is performed. Then the information of AO density matrix PAO(t) and MO coefficient C(t) at every step, and overlap matrix S, is collected. Basis functions to be truncated are selected based on the low standard deviation (std. in the figure) of Oμ(t) and Cμj(t). Eventually, one can directly modify the basis set file for a complete RT-TDHF/TDDFT calculation or a LR-TDHF/TDDFT calculation.

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”.

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Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

The University of Zürich (Universität Zürich) (CH), located in the city of Zürich, is the largest university in Switzerland, with over 26,000 students. It was founded in 1833 from the existing colleges of theology, law, medicine and a new faculty of philosophy.

Currently, the university has seven faculties: Philosophy, Human Medicine, Economic Sciences, Law, Mathematics and Natural Sciences, Theology and Veterinary Medicine. The university offers the widest range of subjects and courses of any Swiss higher education institutions.

As a member of the League of European Research Universities (EU) (LERU) and Universitas 21 (U21) network, a global network of 27 research universities from around the world, promoting research collaboration and exchange of knowledge.

Numerous distinctions highlight the University’s international renown in the fields of medicine, immunology, genetics, neuroscience and structural biology as well as in economics. To date, the Nobel Prize has been conferred on twelve UZH scholars.

Sharing Knowledge

The academic excellence of the University of Zürich brings benefits to both the public and the private sectors not only in the Canton of Zürich, but throughout Switzerland. Knowledge is shared in a variety of ways: in addition to granting the general public access to its twelve museums and many of its libraries, the University makes findings from cutting-edge research available to the public in accessible and engaging lecture series and panel discussions.

1. Identity of the University of Zürich

Scholarship

The University of Zürich (UZH) is an institution with a strong commitment to the free and open pursuit of scholarship.

Scholarship is the acquisition, the advancement and the dissemination of knowledge in a methodological and critical manner.

Academic freedom and responsibility

To flourish, scholarship must be free from external influences, constraints and ideological pressures. The University of Zürich is committed to unrestricted freedom in research and teaching.

Academic freedom calls for a high degree of responsibility, including reflection on the ethical implications of research activities for humans, animals and the environment.

Universitas

Work in all disciplines at the University is based on a scholarly inquiry into the realities of our world

As Switzerland’s largest university, the University of Zürich promotes wide diversity in both scholarship and in the fields of study offered. The University fosters free dialogue, respects the individual characteristics of the disciplines, and advances interdisciplinary work.

2. The University of Zurich’s goals and responsibilities

Basic principles

UZH pursues scholarly research and teaching, and provides services for the benefit of the public.

UZH has successfully positioned itself among the world’s foremost universities. The University attracts the best researchers and students, and promotes junior scholars at all levels of their academic career.

UZH sets priorities in research and teaching by considering academic requirements and the needs of society. These priorities presuppose basic research and interdisciplinary methods.

UZH strives to uphold the highest quality in all its activities.
To secure and improve quality, the University regularly monitors and evaluates its performance.

Research

UZH contributes to the increase of knowledge through the pursuit of cutting-edge research.

UZH is primarily a research institution. As such, it enables and expects its members to conduct research, and supports them in doing so.

While basic research is the core focus at UZH, the University also pursues applied research.

From The Relative Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) At The DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory: “RHIC Gets Ready to Smash Gold Ions for Run 23”

From The Relative Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC)

At

The DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory

5.8.23
Karen McNulty Walsh
kmcnulty@bnl.gov

New sPHENIX detector and a range of upgraded components at STAR will see full-energy heavy-ion collisions for the first time.

The start of this year’s physics run at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) also marks the start of a new era. For the first time since RHIC began operating at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory in 2000, a brand new detector will track what happens when the nuclei of gold atoms smash into one another at nearly the speed of light. That new detector, sPHENIX, has been a decade in the making. It has a host of components for making precision measurements never possible before at RHIC.

RHIC’s STAR detector, which has been running and evolving since 2000, will also see some firsts in Run 23. Its most recently upgraded components allow the detector to “see” more particles streaming out of collisions closer to the collision point and at wider angles than ever before. This suite of components, which operated successfully in lower-energy collisions, will now collect data from full-energy collisions for the first time. In addition, STAR physicists look forward to flexing the detector’s capacity for capturing up to 5,000 collision events per second, more than double its rate in any previous year.

“There’s a very rich physics program to be run and great interest worldwide—and in the media—in this physics program,” said Jamie Dunlop, Brookhaven Lab Physics Department Associate Chair for Nuclear Physics, pointing out a recent article in Scientific American about this year’s plans for RHIC.

One reason for that interest? RHIC’s research delves into the matter that makes up everything visible in the universe today—stars, planets, and even you and me. RHIC scientists use particle collisions to study that matter by effectively turning back the hands of time.

Colliding atomic nuclei at very high energies melts the boundaries of individual protons and neutrons, setting free those particles’ innermost building blocks: quarks and gluons. Such a system of “free” quarks and gluons—known as a quark-gluon plasma (QGP)—existed in nature some 14 billion years ago, a millionth of a second after the birth of the universe, before protons and neutrons formed. Studying this substance using detectors like STAR and sPHENIX offers clues to why matter behaves the way it does.

sPHENIX co-spokesperson David Morrison (front, orange hard hat) with part of the team installing the final sector of the sPHENIX electromagnetic calorimeter: (front row, left to right) Jim Mills, C-AD engineer; Jeff Hoogsteden, Aaron Allen, and Shana Prifte — all Physics Department technicians; (standing rear, upper level) Chris Cordovano, Physics Department technician; Damon Miraglia, C-AD technician; Sean Stoll, physicist; Mike Lenz, Physics Department technician; (standing rear, lower level) James Sadloski, Facilities & Operations heavy machine operator.

Why a new detector?

“The initial thought behind RHIC was does the QGP exist?” said Brookhaven Lab physicist and sPHENIX co-spokesperson Dave Morrison. “Then a big part of what RHIC and the heavy-ion program at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have done has been exploring how the QGP behaves, what are its properties?”

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) physicist Gunther Roland, the other sPHENIX co-spokesperson, noted, “We have answers to those questions over the last 15 years or so. Now we want to move to a new set of questions—to understand how these properties arise from the underlying interactions of quarks and gluons. Nobody knows the answer to that. We realized we needed a new experiment to provide those answers.”

The science goals of the sPHENIX detector were highlighted in the 2015 Long Range Plan for Nuclear Science, a roadmap that guides U.S. research in the field. The detector has precision components to collect the data needed to answer very specific questions about jets (collimated collections of particles produced in collisions) and a family of quark-antiquark particles known as upsilons.

Studying the way different upsilons interact with the matter created in RHIC collisions, Morrison said, “is like putting a tape measure inside the QGP and measuring something about the distance over which the forces that are affecting quarks and gluons operate.” And tracking the angles at which the particles that make up jets traverse the plasma, and the energy or momentum they have, “gives us different handles on the ways QGP affects how quarks and gluons interact.”

But before the scientists can make those precision measurements, they will ensure the detector they’ve built over the past seven and a half years operates correctly.

Commissioning sPHENIX

“sPHENIX is a very complex detector with many distinct systems, and the extensive process of commissioning everything will be the top priority of the 2023 run,” Morrison said.

“Many hundreds of people have been working on sPHENIX for many years and there’s a lot of excitement,” Roland added. “But one needs to proceed with great care and in a very systematic fashion.”

For one thing, while RHIC will operate at its highest energy for heavy ion collisions (200 billion electron volts, or GeV, per colliding pair of nuclei), its luminosity—the rate of collisions—will be kept deliberately low for at least the first several weeks of the run.

“We will systematically verify the operation of each of the detector systems—starting with the simplest ones that provide the trigger (telling us if there is a collision or not) to some of the most complex detectors that have ever been employed in high energy nuclear physics,” Roland said.

The sPHENIX crew is planning a period of systematic troubleshooting.

“There are always little mysteries that pop up and then need to be solved as you commission this sort of one-of-a-kind detector—or collection of one-of-a-kind devices—for the first time,” Roland noted.

They’ll do some measurements for which they already know the answer and make whatever adjustments are needed to be sure all the detector components are working together to capture details of each collision. Thinking about what happens at full luminosity makes it clear why this process is much easier with fewer collisions happening.

“At full luminosity you can have a collision every 100 nanoseconds. So quite a few collisions can happen, each of them putting tracks into the ‘time projection chamber’ (TPC) of the detector,” Morrison said. All the electrons that make up those tracks drift along, potentially overlapping and interfering with one another.

An end-view of the Time Project Chamber of the sPHENIX detector, which will be seeing its first collisions during Run 23 at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). The top priority of the run will be commissioning all the complex components of sPHENIX.

There’s also a complex system of lasers inside the TPC, which will produce known electron tracks scientists use to compare with those generated by particles emitted from collisions.

“It’s going to be like a discothèque inside with lasers going every which way,” Morrison said. “We need to make sure we understand how the lasers work, how the TPC works, and all the other components when there aren’t very many collisions per second before we ramp up to full luminosity.”

“Soft” explorations at STAR

Meanwhile, even with low collision rates at the beginning of the run, STAR will be making use of the high collision energy.

“The last 200 GeV gold-gold run at RHIC was in 2016,” said STAR co-spokesperson Lijuan Ruan, a physicist at Brookhaven. Since then, she explained, one detector component that was great for measurements needed at the time but that reduced the resolution of other measurements has been removed—thus promising increased resolution for this run. In addition, a slew of STAR component upgrades has increased the detector’s ability to track particles closest to the collision point and also at the widest angles ever in the “forward” direction at one end of the detector.

“Run 23 is the first time all those detector upgrades will see particles emerging from interactions at RHIC’s top collision energy,” Ruan said.

During this run and the planned run for 2025, which will also collide gold ions at 200 GeV, the STAR team will use those components and the rest of STAR’s capabilities to collect high-statistics data on particles with very low energy or transverse momentum. Extending measurements of these so-called “soft observables” into the forward region, for example, can help reveal global properties of the QGP. Examples include how particles flow collectively through the plasma, the temperature dependence of variables such as viscosity, and the degree to which variations in the interactions among quarks and gluons influence the spin alignment of particles streaming out.

The silicon tracker detector modules installed around the beampipe at one end of the STAR detector at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) are just one of the recently upgraded STAR components that will see full-energy gold-gold collisions for the first time during Run 23.

“Previously, we were looking at one observable or another at a time and comparing those measurements with predictions from models to get conclusions,” Ruan said. “But now, with the new detector capabilities and high statistics, we are entering a precision era using multiple observables—a multi-messenger approach—to look at them globally. That will inform our understanding of the evolution of heavy ion collisions and the properties of the QGP.”

To get those high statistics, STAR will also make use of a recent upgrade that more than doubles the readout speed of its TPC. Previously able to record a maximum of 2000 events per second, the STAR TPC can now capture up to 5000 collisions in less than the blink of an eye.

With the run starting at relatively low luminosity, STAR physicists may not be able to push their detector to that max level until later this summer. But they understand the need to provide sPHENIX with the conditions needed to come up to speed.

“Commissioning their detector is the most important thing for this run. We will collect data, but sPHENIX is going to be driving the run,” said Yale University physicist Helen Caines, who recently concluded her six-year term as a STAR co-spokesperson.

When the collision rates ramp up, STAR will be ready.

“We have the best particle acceptance, highest-rate detector that we’ve had at STAR at this point, so we’re going to collect data with the best and most comprehensive suite of detectors we’ve had to date,” Caines said. “This will be a data set that we can analyze for a long time into the future.”

Bring on the luminosity

The sPHENIX collaboration is also eager to get to full luminosity to begin addressing the physics questions it was designed to answer.

“Our plan is for several weeks of data taking for physics, which would happen after commissioning the detector,” sPHENIX collaboration co-spokesperson Morrison said. “There’s a ton of physics that sPHENIX can do with that data.”

The new detector’s mission will focus on hard probes—energetic particle jets and particles made from heavy quarks, which require a lot of energy to generate.

“We’ll get RHIC’s first look at jets that come from the fragmentation of the very heavy bottom quark with fantastic statistical precision. These measurements can explore what happens to pairs of jets in a collision, for example those produced at different orientations relative to the rest of the particles coming out,” Morrison said. “That can help tell us how the truly microscopic interactions of quarks and gluons produce QGP properties like its perfect fluidity.”

“We’ll start seeing what happens to the three different members of the upsilon family of mesons,” each made of a bottom quark bound to an antibottom quark but with different binding energies, he noted. Those measurements will give the scientists information about the length scale of the strong-force interactions among quarks and gluons, and potentially the temperature of the QGP.

The point of sPHENIX, MIT’s Roland said, “is to get a complete picture of the collisions in terms of these hard probes and in terms of their correlations with the soft particles that represent the bulk of the QGP once it turns back into hadrons [composite particles made of quarks and/or antiquarks].”

Some of those measurements will rely on additional gold-gold collision data collected in the 2025 run, and proton-proton collisions in 2024, which will provide essential comparison data.

“The full physics program requires as much data as can possibly be collected in RHIC’s remaining runs to give us the statistical reach to complete the sPHENIX program,” Roland said.

Generating the collisions

RHIC’s experiments rely on accelerator physicists’ ability to deliver particle beams at specified energies and rates within each detector. Under the guidance of Run 23 Coordinator Travis Shrey, the Collider-Accelerator Department (C-AD) staff at this DOE Office of Science user facility will demonstrate their strengths and the machine’s versatility.

As noted, the run will start with beams of gold ions (the nuclei of gold atoms stripped of their electrons) entering RHIC’s two counter-circulating rings at low intensity—meaning fewer bunches of particles and fewer particles per bunch—to keep the number of collisions low. But each beam will be accelerated to collide at full energy inside the sPHENIX and STAR detectors located at interaction regions where the two rings cross.

RHIC has traditionally operated with the two beams traveling in opposite directions passing straight through one another inside the detectors. This allows collisions to occur between particles in the opposing beams across the entire length of each pair of colliding bunches. But for this run, the particles will travel a different path to cross one another at an angle.

“This crossing angle creates a narrower collision zone, which will improve the performance particularly of the sPHENIX detector,” said Wolfram Fischer, chair of C-AD.

During sPHENIX commissioning, accelerator physicists will use a range of tools to monitor the size and positions of the beams—and techniques to control those beam properties—to maintain a slow but constant collision rate at STAR.

Monitoring and optimizing beams will continue as the collision rate ramps up, taking advantage of a newly recommissioned “stochastic cooling” system and a refurbished superconducting radiofrequency (RF) cavity.

“Sensors in the stochastic cooling system measure small random fluctuations in the positions of the particles within each bunch of particles and send signals to ‘kicker’ cavities that nudge the particles back together. These nudges result in more dense bunches,” explained Michiko Minty, head of the Accelerator Division of C-AD. “Similarly, the 56-megahertz RF cavity, together with the other RF cavities, will prevent bunches from lengthening due to intrabeam scattering.”

All this squeezing and shortening of ion bunches increases the chance that the ions will collide. It also helps maintain the shorter beam-crossover region inside the sPHENIX detector.

“Higher beam intensities will also be available thanks to a recent upgrade in the Electron-Beam Ion Source (EBIS),” Minty said. EBIS is the machine that generates RHIC’s heavy ion beams and injects them into the accelerator chain that feeds the beams into the collider. “This year we’ll be operating with up to 40 percent more gold beam than in any previous run,” she said.

The new Extended Electron Beam Ion Source (EBIS) at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) will have more intensity than its predecessor, delivering up to 40 percent more gold beam into the collider than in any previous run.

In addition to delivering gold to the experiments, the C-AD staff will be implementing new systems for protecting the detectors when RHIC’s beams are dumped periodically. They’ll also be conducting tests of additional beam-cooling systems and acceleration schemes that will play a role in post-RHIC C-AD operations at Brookhaven, when many of RHIC’s accelerator components are transformed into an Electron-Ion Collider (EIC).

“We plan to make use of every second of this run to help sPHENIX and STAR accomplish their goals and to explore all the ways we can get the most out of the world’s most versatile particle accelerator and collider complex—both now and in the future,” Fischer said.

RHIC operations and much of its research are funded by the DOE Office of Science (NP).

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”.

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Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

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DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory Relative Heavy Ion Collider.

The Physics of RHIC
Physicists from around the world are using the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider to explore some of Nature’s most basic — and intriguing — ingredients and phenomena. Here’s a look at the physics of RHIC in plain English.

Heavy Ion Collisions

RHIC is the first machine in the world capable of colliding heavy ions, which are atoms which have had their outer cloud of electrons removed. RHIC primarily uses ions of gold, one of the heaviest common elements, because its nucleus is densely packed with particles.

RHIC collides two beams of gold ions head-on when they’re traveling at nearly the speed of light (what physicists call relativistic speeds). The beams travel in opposite directions around RHIC’s 2.4-mile, two-lane “racetrack.” At six intersections, the lanes cross, leading to an intersection. When ions collide at such high speeds fascinating things happen.

If conditions are right, the collision “melts” the protons and neutrons and, for a brief instant, liberates their constituent quarks and gluons. Just after the collision, thousands more particles form as the area cools off. Each of these particles provides a clue as to what occurred inside the collision zone. Physicists sift through those clues for interesting information.

Brookhaven Campus

One of ten national laboratories overseen and primarily funded by the The DOE Office of Science, The DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory conducts research in the physical, biomedical, and environmental sciences, as well as in energy technologies and national security. Brookhaven Lab also builds and operates major scientific facilities available to university, industry and government researchers. The Laboratory’s almost 3,000 scientists, engineers, and support staff are joined each year by more than 5,000 visiting researchers from around the world. Brookhaven is operated and managed for DOE’s Office of Science by Brookhaven Science Associates, a limited-liability company founded by Stony Brook University-SUNY the largest academic user of Laboratory facilities, and Battelle, a nonprofit, applied science and technology organization.

Research at BNL specializes in nuclear and high energy physics, energy science and technology, environmental and bioscience, nanoscience and national security. The 5,300 acre campus contains several large research facilities, including the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider [below] and National Synchrotron Light Source II [below]. Seven Nobel prizes have been awarded for work conducted at Brookhaven lab.

BNL is staffed by approximately 2,750 scientists, engineers, technicians, and support personnel, and hosts 4,000 guest investigators every year. The laboratory has its own police station, fire department, and ZIP code (11973). In total, the lab spans a 5,265-acre (21 km^2) area that is mostly coterminous with the hamlet of Upton, New York. BNL is served by a rail spur operated as-needed by the New York and Atlantic Railway. Co-located with the laboratory is the Upton, New York, forecast office of the National Weather Service.

Major programs

Although originally conceived as a nuclear research facility, Brookhaven Lab’s mission has greatly expanded. Its foci are now:

Nuclear and high-energy physics
Physics and chemistry of materials
Environmental and climate research
Nanomaterials
Energy research
Nonproliferation
Structural biology
Accelerator physics

Operation

Brookhaven National Lab was originally owned by the Atomic Energy Commission and is now owned by that agency’s successor, the United States Department of Energy (DOE). DOE subcontracts the research and operation to universities and research organizations. It is currently operated by Brookhaven Science Associates LLC, which is an equal partnership of Stony Brook University and Battelle Memorial Institute. From 1947 to 1998, it was operated by Associated Universities, Inc., but AUI lost its contract in the wake of two incidents: a 1994 fire at the facility’s high-beam flux reactor that exposed several workers to radiation and reports in 1997 of a tritium leak into the groundwater of the Long Island Central Pine Barrens on which the facility sits.

Foundations

Following World War II, the US Atomic Energy Commission was created to support government-sponsored peacetime research on atomic energy. The effort to build a nuclear reactor in the American northeast was fostered largely by physicists Isidor Isaac Rabi and Norman Foster Ramsey Jr., who during the war witnessed many of their colleagues at Columbia University leave for new remote research sites following the departure of the Manhattan Project from its campus. Their effort to house this reactor near New York City was rivalled by a similar effort at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to have a facility near Boston, Massachusetts. Involvement was quickly solicited from representatives of northeastern universities to the south and west of New York City such that this city would be at their geographic center. In March 1946 a nonprofit corporation was established that consisted of representatives from nine major research universities — Columbia University, Cornell University, Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Princeton University, University of Pennsylvania, University of Rochester, and Yale University.

Out of 17 considered sites in the Boston-Washington corridor, Camp Upton on Long Island was eventually chosen as the most suitable in consideration of space, transportation, and availability. The camp had been a training center from the US Army during both World War I and World War II. After the latter war, Camp Upton was deemed no longer necessary and became available for reuse. A plan was conceived to convert the military camp into a research facility.

On March 21, 1947, the Camp Upton site was officially transferred from the U.S. War Department to the new U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), predecessor to the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).

Research and facilities

Reactor history

In 1947 construction began on the first nuclear reactor at Brookhaven, the Brookhaven Graphite Research Reactor. This reactor, which opened in 1950, was the first reactor to be constructed in the United States after World War II. The High Flux Beam Reactor operated from 1965 to 1999. In 1959 Brookhaven built the first US reactor specifically tailored to medical research, the Brookhaven Medical Research Reactor, which operated until 2000.

Accelerator history

In 1952 Brookhaven began using its first particle accelerator, the Cosmotron. At the time the Cosmotron was the world’s highest energy accelerator, being the first to impart more than 1 GeV of energy to a particle.

BNL Cosmotron 1952-1966.

The Cosmotron was retired in 1966, after it was superseded in 1960 by the new Alternating Gradient Synchrotron (AGS).

BNL Alternating Gradient Synchrotron (AGS).

The AGS was used in research that resulted in 3 Nobel prizes, including the discovery of the muon neutrino, the charm quark, and CP violation.

In 1970 in BNL started the ISABELLE project to develop and build two proton intersecting storage rings.

The groundbreaking for the project was in October 1978. In 1981, with the tunnel for the accelerator already excavated, problems with the superconducting magnets needed for the ISABELLE accelerator brought the project to a halt, and the project was eventually cancelled in 1983.

The National Synchrotron Light Source operated from 1982 to 2014 and was involved with two Nobel Prize-winning discoveries. It has since been replaced by the National Synchrotron Light Source II. [below].

BNL National Synchrotron Light Source.

After ISABELLE’S cancellation, physicist at BNL proposed that the excavated tunnel and parts of the magnet assembly be used in another accelerator. In 1984 the first proposal for the accelerator now known as the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC)[below] was put forward. The construction got funded in 1991 and RHIC has been operational since 2000. One of the world’s only two operating heavy-ion colliders, RHIC is as of 2010 the second-highest-energy collider after the Large Hadron Collider(CH). RHIC is housed in a tunnel 2.4 miles (3.9 km) long and is visible from space.

On January 9, 2020, It was announced by Paul Dabbar, undersecretary of the US Department of Energy Office of Science, that the BNL eRHIC design has been selected over the conceptual design put forward by DOE’s Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility) as the future Electron–ion collider (EIC)

Brookhaven Lab Electron-Ion Collider (EIC) to be built inside the tunnel that currently houses the RHIC.

In addition to the site selection, it was announced that the BNL EIC had acquired CD-0 from the Department of Energy. BNL’s eRHIC design proposes upgrading the existing Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, which collides beams light to heavy ions including polarized protons, with a polarized electron facility, to be housed in the same tunnel.

Other discoveries

In 1958, Brookhaven scientists created one of the world’s first video games, Tennis for Two. In 1968 Brookhaven scientists patented Maglev, a transportation technology that utilizes magnetic levitation.

Major facilities

Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), which was designed to research quark–gluon plasma and the sources of proton spin. Until 2009 it was the world’s most powerful heavy ion collider. It is the only collider of spin-polarized protons.

Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN), used for the study of nanoscale materials.

BNL National Synchrotron Light Source II, Brookhaven’s newest user facility, opened in 2015 to replace the National Synchrotron Light Source (NSLS), which had operated for 30 years. NSLS was involved in the work that won the 2003 and 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Alternating Gradient Synchrotron, a particle accelerator that was used in three of the lab’s Nobel prizes.
Accelerator Test Facility, generates, accelerates and monitors particle beams.
Tandem Van de Graaff, once the world’s largest electrostatic accelerator.

Computational Science resources, including access to a massively parallel Blue Gene series supercomputer that is among the fastest in the world for scientific research, run jointly by Brookhaven National Laboratory and Stony Brook University-SUNY.

Interdisciplinary Science Building, with unique laboratories for studying high-temperature superconductors and other materials important for addressing energy challenges.
NASA Space Radiation Laboratory, where scientists use beams of ions to simulate cosmic rays and assess the risks of space radiation to human space travelers and equipment.

Off-site contributions

It is a contributing partner to the ATLAS experiment, one of the four detectors located at 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] Large Hadron Collider(LHC).

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] map.

Iconic view of 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] ATLAS detector.

It is currently operating at 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] near Geneva, Switzerland.

Brookhaven was also responsible for the design of the Spallation Neutron Source at DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Tennessee.

DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory Spallation Neutron Source annotated.

Brookhaven plays a role in a range of neutrino research projects around the world, including the Daya Bay Neutrino Experiment (CN) nuclear power plant, approximately 52 kilometers northeast of Hong Kong and 45 kilometers east of Shenzhen, China.

Daya Bay Neutrino Experiment (CN) nuclear power plant, approximately 52 kilometers northeast of Hong Kong and 45 kilometers east of Shenzhen, China .

DOE’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory DUNE LBNF from FNAL to Sanford Underground Research Facility, Lead, South Dakota, USA.

BNL Center for Functional Nanomaterials.

BNL National Synchrotron Light Source II.

BNL NSLS II.

BNL Relative Heavy Ion Collider Campus.

BNL/RHIC Star Detector.

BNL RHIC’s newly enhanced STAR detector. The house-size STAR detector at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) acts like a giant 3D digital camera to track particles emerging from particle collisions at the center of the detector.

BNL/RHIC Phenix detector.

Brookhaven sPhenix Assembly

BNL RHIC Schematic view of the proposed sPHENIX detector.

BNL RHIC inner hadronic calorimeter being installed in the sPHENIX Detector.

Particles circulate along RHIC’s 2.4-mile ring at close to the speed of light before colliding inside detectors sPHENIX and STAR. Credit: Christopher Payne.

RHIC’s tunnels “stochastic cooling kickers” push the particles within the rings closer together to correct for their tendency to spread out as they travel. Credit: Christopher Payne.

From The College of Engineering At Cornell University Via “The Chronicle” With The MPG Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter [MPG Institut für Struktur und Dynamik der Materie] (DE) : “Ultrafast laser enhances material’s magnetism at effective temperature”

From The College of Engineering

At

Cornell University

Via

“The Chronicle”

With

The MPG Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter [MPG Institut für Struktur und Dynamik der Materie] (DE).

5.8.23
Syl Kacapyr | Cornell Engineering

In this conceptual image a laser illuminates ballerinas, representing the interactions between electron spins in a sample of yttrium titanate, the atomic structure of which can be changed to stabilize its magnetism at desired temperatures. Credit: Joerg Harms/MPG Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter (DE).

In this conceptual image a laser illuminates ballerinas, representing the interactions between electron spins in a sample of yttrium titanate, the atomic structure of which can be changed to stabilize its magnetism at desired temperatures.

Using a precisely tuned, ultrafast laser, a Cornell researcher showed that the atomic structure of yttrium titanate could be changed to stabilize its magnetism at temperatures three times higher than was previously possible – a promising finding for applications in quantum computing and other next-generation devices.

In the quest to develop faster and more efficient types of computers, scientists are searching for materials with quantum properties that work at ambient temperatures. Being able to control magnetism – which depends on the microscopic interactions between electron spins – using laser pulses holds promise for energy-efficient, high-frequency computers and digital memories.

Ankit Disa ’10, assistant professor in applied and engineering physics, is lead author of “Photo-Induced High-Temperature Ferromagnetism in YTiO3,” published May 3 in Nature [below].

Disa and collaborators at the MPG Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter in Hamburg (DE), found that by using different frequencies of the light pulses in a specially designed terahertz laser source, they could alter the atomic structure of yttrium titanate in different ways – sometimes getting significant enhancements of the magnetic properties with exponential improvements in the temperature scale.

At other frequencies, however, the magnetism was not as strong or showed no change.

“The results of our work are encouraging and exciting for several reasons,” Disa said. “We were able to demonstrate the ability to manipulate the structure of a material, which helps us understand the structure-property relationships within the material. Second, from a technological point of view, we found that using light pulses that are a few hundred femtoseconds long – or less than a millionth of a millionth of a second – we can change the magnetic state of an atom.”

This could enable new kinds of computing – based on electron spins, rather than charge – that could operate orders of magnitude faster and more efficiently than existing computing technologies. But controlling magnetism is challenging, Disa said.

“To control magnetism, you have to apply magnetic field,” he said. “This often requires bulky electromagnetic coils and is difficult to do on a microscopic scale. The fact that we showed how to do this with light, and could improve an existing magnet’s properties in this way, could help push this type of technology forward.”

Disa plans to further develop the experimental setup and collaborate with materials design experts – researchers who are creating new materials that can be built atomic layer by atomic layer – to explore new ways to optimize material properties with light, including magnets, electronic materials and superconductors.

The research project’s experimental work was performed at the MPG Institute. Other collaborators were from Harvard University, the Leibniz Institute for Solid State and Materials Research (DE), and Oxford University (UK).

Nature

Fig. 1: Fluctuating spin–orbital order in YTiO3.

a) Crystal structure along with the associated low-temperature ferromagnetic and orbital ordering pattern. The orthorhombic structure determines the crystal field splitting and orbital mixing of the Ti t2g levels on each Ti site. b) Magnetization as a function of magnetic field measured at T << Tc, which saturates at high fields to roughly 0.8 μB per Ti, well below the theoretical limit. Fluctuations of the lattice and orbitals weaken ferromagnetic order through competing antiferromagnetic interactions, manifesting as a diminished magnetic moment and reduced critical temperature. c) Magnetization as a function of temperature. Spin correlations extend well above Tc = 27 K. The inset schematically shows the fluctuating orbital and spin configurations within the shaded region above Tc.

See the full article here .

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New methods are enabling physicists and biologists at the The MPG Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter [MPG Institut für Struktur und Dynamik der Materie] (DE) to break new scientific ground. With the help of new radiation sources, especially the x-ray free-electron laser being built at the DESY in Hamburg, the researchers can show the properties and behavior of matter at a spatial resolution of a few nanometers and at time intervals of a few billionths of a billionth of a second. This provides them with completely new insights into the structure and function of biological materials and into the properties of solids and their electronic and structural dynamics. The coherent light of lasers enables the physicists to inspect the collective properties, for example superconductivity, of complex solids, including many types of ceramics.

MPG Society for the Advancement of Science [MPG Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften e. V.] is a formally independent non-governmental and non-profit association of German research institutes founded in 1911 as the Kaiser Wilhelm Society and renamed the Max Planck Society in 1948 in honor of its former president, theoretical physicist Max Planck. The society is funded by the federal and state governments of Germany as well as other sources.

According to its primary goal, the MPG Society supports fundamental research in the natural, life and social sciences, the arts and humanities in its 83 (as of January 2014) MPG Institutes.

The Cornell University 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 Institutein 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 a member of the Association of American Universities and 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 SPIE – The International Society for Optics and Photonics: “New high-speed two-photon microscope for precise biological imaging”

From SPIE – The International Society for Optics and Photonics

5.3.23

Innovative laser scanning design unlocks high-precision observations at up to 10000 frames per second making the microscope a powerful recording tool.

By combining two laser scanning modes, researchers have developed a versatile two-photon microscopy system that can be used to observe extremely fast biological processes at high frame rates and spatial resolution. Credit: Li et al.

Two-photon microscopy (TPM) has revolutionized the field of biology by enabling researchers to observe complex biological processes in living tissues at high resolution. In contrast to traditional fluorescence microscopy techniques, TPM makes use of low-energy photons to excite fluorescent molecules for observation. This, in turn, makes it possible to penetrate the tissue much more deeply, and ensures that the fluorescent molecules, or fluorophores, are not permanently damaged by the excitation laser.

However, some biological processes are simply too fast to be recorded, even with state-of-the-art TPMs. One of the design parameters that limits the performance of a TPM is the line scanning frequency, measured as frames per second (FPS). This refers to the rate at which the target sample can be swept across by the excitation laser along one direction (for instance, in a horizontal sweep). A slow scanning frequency also impacts the overall FPS of the system, since it determines how fast the laser can be swept across the other direction, i.e. in a vertical sweep. Together, these create a tradeoff between the microscope’s temporal resolution and the size of the observation frame.

Working around this problem, an international team of researchers from China and Germany recently developed a powerful TPM setup with an unprecedentedly high line scanning frequency. According to their report published in Neurophotonics [below], this microscopy system was designed for imaging fast biological processes at a high temporal as well as spatial resolution.

One of the key factors that distinguish the proposed TPM from the conventional ones is the use of acousto-optic deflectors (AODs) to control the scanning of the excitation laser. An AOD is a special type of crystal whose refractive index can be precisely controlled by acoustic waves. This, in turn, allows us to redirect a laser beam through it as desired. More importantly, AODs enable a faster laser-steering than that obtained with the galvanometers used in conventional TPMs.

Accordingly, the team designed a custom AOD with an exceptionally high acoustic velocity using a tellurium dioxide (TeO2) crystal, achieving a high line scanning frequency. With this AOD, the laser could scan a line in the frame within a mere 2.5 microseconds, corresponding to a maximum line scanning frequency of 400 kHz. Similarly, the team used an AOD to achieve a reasonable slow scanning frequency in the other direction.

To further improve the adaptability of their microscope, the team added the option of switching to a galvanometer-based laser scanning mechanism when necessary. This allowed the scanning of large regions of the sample at an acceptable resolution and speed, making it easier to locate small areas of interest before switching to AOD scanning.

The team conducted several proof-of-concept experiments with the newly designed TPM. They installed cranial windows on genetically engineered mice and used them to observe the morphology and activity of neurons as well as the movement of single red blood cells (RBCs). The system achieved a frame rate of up to 10,000 FPS using an appropriate AOD configuration and frame size. This was sufficient to precisely measure the velocity at which calcium propagates in neuronal dendrites as well as to visualize the trajectory of individual RBCs within blood vessels.

Impressed by these results, Dr. Na Ji, Associate Editor of Neurophotonics and Luis Alvarez Memorial Chair in Experimental Physics at UC Berkeley, remarks, “The new system for AOD-based scanning microscopy represents a substantial improvement in imaging speed and performance, as demonstrated in its application for calcium signal propagation and blood flow measurements in the brain in vivo.”

Going forward, the new proof-of-concept TPM design will make it possible to capture fast biological processes, and could significantly improve our understanding of them.

Neurophotonics

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”.

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Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

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SPIE (formerly the Society of Photographic Instrumentation Engineers, later the Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers) is an international not-for-profit professional society for optics and photonics technology, founded in 1955. It organizes technical conferences, trade exhibitions, and continuing education programs for researchers and developers in the light-based fields of physics, including: optics, photonics, and imaging engineering. The society publishes peer-reviewed scientific journals, conference proceedings, monographs, tutorial texts, field guides, and reference volumes in print and online. SPIE is especially well-known for Photonics West, one of the laser and photonics industry’s largest combined conferences and tradeshows which is held annually in San Francisco. SPIE also participates as partners in leading educational initiatives, and in 2020, for example, provided more than $5.8 million in support of optics education and outreach programs around the world.

Publications

The society’s first publication, SPIE Newsletter, was launched in 1957. In 1959, the society published its first book, SPIE Photographic Instrumentation Catalog. The newsletter morphed into the society’s first journal, now known as Optical Engineering, SPIE’s flagship monthly journal. Throughout the years, SPIE has created many publications including journals, magazines, newspapers, websites, and books.

Scientific journals

All SPIE journals are peer-reviewed.

Advanced Photonics Co-published by SPIE and Chinese Laser Press, Advanced Photonics is a highly selective, open access, international journal publishing innovative research in all areas of optics and photonics, including fundamental and applied research.
Journal of Applied Remote Sensing (JARS) is an online-only, quarterly published journal on remote sensing.
Journal of Astronomical Telescopes, Instruments, and Systems (JATIS) is published quarterly and covers development, testing, and application of telescopes, instrumentation, techniques, and systems for ground- and space-based astronomy.
Journal of Biomedical Optics (JBO) is published monthly with the latest on optical technology in health care and research.
Journal of Electronic Imaging (JEI), co-published bi-monthly with the Society for Imaging Science and Technology, publishes papers on electronic imaging science and technology.
Journal of Medical Imaging (JMI) is published quarterly and covers fundamental and translational research and applications focused on photonics in medical imaging, which continue to yield physical and biomedical advancements in early detection, diagnostics, and therapy of disease as well as in the understanding of normal.
Journal of Micro/Nanopatterning, Materials, and Metrology Advanced Photonics Co-published by SPIE and Chinese Laser Press, Advanced Photonics is a highly selective, open access, international journal publishing innovative research in all areas of optics and photonics, including fundamental and applied research.
Journal of Nanophotonics (JNP) is an online-only, quarterly published journal on fabrication and application of nanostructures that generate or manipulate light from the infrared to the ultraviolet regimes.
Journal of Optical Microsystems (JOM) is published quarterly and contains papers on cutting-edge research of optical and photonic microsystems, from materials and fabrication of micro-optical and photonic components, through assembly and packaging, to systems and applications.
Journal of Photonics for Energy (JPE) is an e-journal published quarterly that covers fundamental and applied research applications of photonics for renewable energy harvesting, conversion, storage, distribution, monitoring, consumption, and efficient usage.
Neurophotonics, published quarterly, is at the interface of optics and neuroscience covering advances in optical technology applicable to study of the brain and their impact on the basic and clinical neuroscience applications.
Optical Engineering (OE) is the flagship monthly journal of the society, with papers on research and development in all areas of optics, photonics, and imaging science and engineering.

From The California Institute of Technology: “At the Edge of Physics” Lee McCuller

From The California Institute of Technology

4.21.23
Whitney Clavin
(626) 395‑1944
wclavin@caltech.edu

Lee McCuller. Caltech.

New professor Lee McCuller is making quantum measurements even more precise.

When new assistant professor of physics Lee McCuller was young, he liked to build things. His uncle made him a power supply, which he integrated with electronic hobby kits from RadioShack to do simple things like use analog circuits to switch lights and motors on and off. Today, McCuller tinkers with what some would call the most advanced measurement device in the world: LIGO, or the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory.

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Caltech /MIT Advanced aLigo

Caltech/MIT Advanced aLigo Hanford, WA. installation. Credit: Caltech.

Caltech/MIT Advanced aLigo detector installation Livingston, LA. Credit: Caltech.

SXS – Simulating eXtreme Spacetimes

Gravitational waves. Credit: MPG Institute for Gravitational Physics [Max-Planck-Institut für Gravitationsphysik] (Albert Einstein Institute) (DE)/W.Benger-Zib

Gravity is talking. Lisa will listen. Dialogos of Eide.

European Space Agency(EU)/National Aeronautics and Space Administration eLISA space based, the future of gravitational wave research.

This graphic shows the masses of all of LIGO’s announced gravitational wave detections, as well as black holes and neutron stars previously obtained through electromagnetic observations.
LIGO-Virgo-Kagra/Aaron Geller/Northwestern.
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McCuller is an expert on “quantum squeezing”, a method used at LIGO to make incredibly precise measurements of gravitational waves that travel millions and billions of light-years across space to reach us. When black holes and collapsed stars, called neutron stars, collide, they generate ripples in space-time, or gravitational waves. LIGO’s detectors—located in Washington and Louisiana—specialize in picking up these waves but are limited by quantum noise, an inherent property of quantum mechanics that results in photons popping in and out of existence in empty space. Quantum squeezing is a complex method for reducing this unwanted noise.

Research into quantum squeezing and related measurements ramped up as far back as the 1980s, with key theoretical studies by Caltech’s Kip Thorne (BS ’62), Richard P. Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics, Emeritus, along with physicist Carl Caves (PhD ’79) and others worldwide. Those theories inspired the first experimental demonstration of squeezing in 1986 by Jeff Kimble, the William L. Valentine Professor of Physics, Emeritus. The next decades saw many other advances in squeezing research, and now McCuller is at the leading edge of this innovative field. For example, he has been busy developing “frequency-dependent” squeezing that will greatly enhance LIGO’s sensitivity when it turns back on in May of this year.

After earning his bachelor’s degree from the University of Texas-Austin in 2010, McCuller attended the University of Chicago, where he earned his PhD in physics in 2015. There he began work on an experiment called the Fermilab Holometer, which looked for a speculative type of noise that would link gravity with quantum mechanics.

DOE’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory Holometer

It was during this project that McCuller met LIGO scientists, including MIT’s Rai Weiss—who together with Thorne and Barry Barish, the Ronald and Maxine Linde Professor of Physics, Emeritus, won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2017 for their groundbreaking work on LIGO. McCuller was inspired by Weiss and the LIGO project and decided to join MIT in 2016. He became an assistant professor at Caltech in 2022.

In the future, McCuller hopes to take the quantum measurement tools he has developed for LIGO and apply them to other problems. “If LIGO is the most precise ruler in the world, then we want to make those rulers available to everyone,” he says.

We met with McCuller over Zoom to learn more about quantum squeezing and its future applications to other fields as well as what inspired McCuller to join Caltech.

When did you first start working on LIGO?

After I graduated from University of Chicago in 2015, I went to work on LIGO at MIT. When I walked in the door, they were having a meeting about the first detection of gravitational waves! The public didn’t know yet, but there had been rumors. It was exciting to learn the rumors were true, and it was nice to see everyone overjoyed that things were working.

There was a local experiment taking place at that time on using squeezed light in the frequency-dependent manner that will start up at LIGO later this year. My job was to help build the first full-scale demonstration of this. The group, before me, had previously demonstrated the concept but not at the full scale. I was there was to show exactly what would be needed to employ it in the LIGO observatories. This required a particularly challenging experimental setup.

Can you attempt to explain what quantum squeezing is?

At each of the observatory locations, LIGO uses laser beams to measure disturbances in space-time—the gravitational waves. The laser beams are shot out at 90-degrees from each other and travel down two 4-kilometer-long arms. They reflect off mirrors and travel back down the arms to meet back up. If a gravitational wave passes through space, it will stretch and squeeze LIGO arms such that the lasers will be pushed out of sync; when they meet back up, the combined laser will create an interference pattern.

At the quantum level, there are photons in the laser light that hit the mirrors at different times. We call this shot noise, or quantum noise. Imagine dumping out a can full of BBs. They all hit the ground and click and clack independently. The BBs are randomly hitting the ground, and that creates a noise. The photons are like the BBs and hit LIGO’s mirrors at irregular times. Quantum squeezing, in essence, makes the photons arrive more regularly as if the photons are holding hands rather than traveling independently. And this means that you can more precisely measure the phase or frequency of the light inside LIGO—and ultimately detect even fainter gravitational waves.

To squeeze light, we are basically pushing the uncertainty inherent in light waves from one feature to another. We are making the light more certain in its phase, or frequency, and less certain in its amplitude, or power [the uncertainty principle says that both the exact frequency and amplitude of a light wave cannot be known at the same time]. To really explain the details of how squeezing actually works is very hard! I primarily know how to use math to describe it.

Can you explain more about how the quantum squeezing technology works at LIGO?

An interesting thing about squeezed light is that we aren’t doing anything to the actual laser. We don’t even touch it. When we operate LIGO, we offset the arms so that its wave interference is not perfectly dark—a small amount of light gets through. The little bit of light that remains has an electrical field that interferes with quantum fluctuations in the vacuum, or empty space, and this leads to the shot noise or the photons acting like BBs as we talked about earlier. When we squeeze light, we are actually squeezing the vacuum so that the photons have lower uncertainty in their frequency.

What does the new “frequency-dependent” technique you are working on entail?

Up until now, we have been squeezing light in LIGO to reduce uncertainty in the frequency. This allows us to be more sensitive to the high-frequency gravitational waves within LIGO’s range. But if we want to detect lower frequencies—which occur earlier in, say, a black hole merger, before the bodies collide—we need to do the opposite: we want to make the light’s amplitude, or power, more certain and the frequency less certain. At the lower frequencies, the shot noise, our BB-like photons, push the mirrors around in different ways. We want to reduce that. Our new frequency-dependent cavity at the LIGO detectors is designed to reduce the frequency uncertainty in the high frequencies and the amplitude uncertainties in the low frequencies. The goal is to win everywhere and reduce the unwanted mirror motions.

Part of the reason this technology is more important in the next run is because we are turning up the power on our lasers. With more power, you get more pressure on the mirrors. Our new squeezing technology will allow us to turn the power up without creating the unwanted mirror motions.

What this means is that we will be even more sensitive to the early phases of black hole and neutron star mergers, and that we can see even fainter mergers.

What other projects are you working on?

One project I’m working on involves Kathryn Zurek and Rana Adhikari. We are building a tabletop-size detector that will attempt to pick up signatures of quantum gravity, or pixels in space and time as some people say. The idea there is to make interferometers more like high-energy-physics detectors. The detectors would click when something passes through it, largely circumventing the impacts of shot noise. I love the motivation of the project—quantum gravity, which is the quest to merge theories of gravity with quantum physics. It is a very lofty goal.

In general, what I hope to do is grow from the LIGO work and apply quantum measurement techniques to not only enhance the gravitational wave detectors but also to see where other fundamental physics experiments or technologies can be improved. I want to use quantum optics not necessarily for computation or for information but for measurement. Squeezing light is one of the first demonstrations of these concepts in a real experiment. The hope is that we can keep using these quantum techniques in more and more experiments. We want to take the advantages of LIGO and find all the places where we can apply them.

What made you chose Caltech?

Caltech has a lot of mission-oriented scientists. It’s not just about learning or demonstrating or exploring—it’s the mix of all these things. I like a place where the goal is to integrate technologies and do new experiments. Take LIGO for instance. Few people know how the whole thing works and many of them are here. Caltech is a place where people understand that what we are doing is hard. Good projects require both narrow and broad expertise, and a combination of the right people. The students are similarly motivated by both the science goals and the process. We are not just trying to build something that reliably works, we are also trying to build something that’s at the edge of what is possible.

See the full article here .

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Caltech campus

The California Institute of Technology is a private research university in Pasadena, California. The university is known for its strength in science and engineering, and is one among a small group of institutes of technology in the United States which is primarily devoted to the instruction of pure and applied sciences.

The California Institute of Technology was founded as a preparatory and vocational school by Amos G. Throop in 1891 and began attracting influential scientists such as George Ellery Hale, Arthur Amos Noyes, and Robert Andrews Millikan in the early 20th century. The vocational and preparatory schools were disbanded and spun off in 1910 and the college assumed its present name in 1920. In 1934, The California Institute of Technology was elected to the Association of American Universities, and the antecedents of National Aeronautics and Space Administration ‘s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which The California Institute of Technology continues to manage and operate, were established between 1936 and 1943 under Theodore von Kármán.

The California Institute of Technology has six academic divisions with strong emphasis on science and engineering. Its 124-acre (50 ha) primary campus is located approximately 11 mi (18 km) northeast of downtown Los Angeles. First-year students are required to live on campus, and 95% of undergraduates remain in the on-campus House System at The California Institute of Technology. Although The California Institute of Technology has a strong tradition of practical jokes and pranks, student life is governed by an honor code which allows faculty to assign take-home examinations. The The California Institute of Technology Beavers compete in 13 intercollegiate sports in the NCAA Division III’s Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference (SCIAC).

As of October 2020, there are 76 Nobel laureates who have been affiliated with The California Institute of Technology, including 40 alumni and faculty members (41 prizes, with chemist Linus Pauling being the only individual in history to win two unshared prizes). In addition, 4 Fields Medalists and 6 Turing Award winners have been affiliated with The California Institute of Technology. There are 8 Crafoord Laureates and 56 non-emeritus faculty members (as well as many emeritus faculty members) who have been elected to one of the United States National Academies. Four Chief Scientists of the U.S. Air Force and 71 have won the United States National Medal of Science or Technology. Numerous faculty members are associated with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute as well as National Aeronautics and Space Administration. According to a 2015 Pomona College study, The California Institute of Technology ranked number one in the U.S. for the percentage of its graduates who go on to earn a PhD.

Research

The California Institute of Technology is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very High Research Activity”. Caltech was elected to The Association of American Universities in 1934 and remains a research university with “very high” research activity, primarily in STEM fields. The largest federal agencies contributing to research are National Aeronautics and Space Administration; National Science Foundation; Department of Health and Human Services; Department of Defense, and Department of Energy.

In 2005, The California Institute of Technology had 739,000 square feet (68,700 m^2) dedicated to research: 330,000 square feet (30,700 m^2) to physical sciences, 163,000 square feet (15,100 m^2) to engineering, and 160,000 square feet (14,900 m^2) to biological sciences.

In addition to managing NASA-JPL/Caltech , The California Institute of Technology also operates the Caltech Palomar Observatory; The Owens Valley Radio Observatory;the Caltech Submillimeter Observatory; the W. M. Keck Observatory at the Mauna Kea Observatory; the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory at Livingston, Louisiana and Hanford, Washington; and Kerckhoff Marine Laboratory in Corona del Mar, California. The Institute launched the Kavli Nanoscience Institute at The California Institute of Technology in 2006; the Keck Institute for Space Studies in 2008; and is also the current home for the Einstein Papers Project. The Spitzer Science Center, part of the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center located on The California Institute of Technology campus, is the data analysis and community support center for NASA’s Spitzer Infrared Space Telescope [no longer in service].

Caltech Palomar Observatory. Credit: The California Institute of Technology, Altitude 1,713 m (5,620 ft), located in San Diego County, California.

California Institute of Technology The Owens Valley Radio Observatory, Owens Valley, California, Altitude 1,222 m (4,009 ft). Credit: Caltech.

W.M. Keck Observatory two ten meter telescopes operated by California Institute of Technology and The University of California, at Mauna Kea Observatory, Hawai’i, altitude 4,207 m (13,802 ft). Credit: Caltech.

Caltech /MIT Advanced aLigo. Credit: Caltech.

Caltech/MIT Advanced aLigo Hanford, WA installation. Credit: Caltech.

Caltech/MIT Advanced aLigo detector installation Livingston, LA. Credit: Caltech.

The California Institute of Technology partnered with University of California-Los Angeles to establish a Joint Center for Translational Medicine (UCLA-Caltech JCTM), which conducts experimental research into clinical applications, including the diagnosis and treatment of diseases such as cancer.

The California Institute of Technology operates several Total Carbon Column Observing Network stations as part of an international collaborative effort of measuring greenhouse gases globally. One station is on campus.

From UKRI – UK Research and Innovation (UK) Via “phys.org” : “New insights into quantum materials”

From UKRI – UK Research and Innovation (UK)

Via

“phys.org”

4.14.23

(a) Pictorial view of the starlike lattice reconstruction in the CDW phase of 1T−TaSe2. (b) Surface-projected Brillouin zone (BZ) of the undistorted “normal” state. The red dashed lines mimic the Fermi surface and the blue solid line indicates the experimental path through the BZ as measured by TR-ARPES. (c) Sketch of the TR-ARPES experiment with laser photon energies. Credit: Physical Review Letters (2023).

The Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) Central Laser Facility (CLF) is celebrating the publication of the first paper from its newly upgraded Artemis lab space.

The study used short light pulses at Artemis’ 1 kHz beamline to study the quantum material, tantalum diselenide (1T-TaSe2) to visualize the motion of electrons and ions inside materials in real-time, providing valuable insights into its complex behaviors.

The finding highlights the role of the crystal lattices in driving and stabilizing phase transitions in quantum materials. This understanding could lead to the design of materials with unique electronic properties and was made possible by the advanced capabilities of the Artemis lab space.

Artemis, which forms part of the Research Complex at Harwell (RCaH) at the STFC Harwell Campus in Oxfordshire, is a state-of-the-art facility dedicated to studying the ultrafast motion of electrons in molecules and novel materials.

STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory at Harwell in Oxfordshire, UK.

Opened in late 2021, it has yielded crucial insights into the behavior of charge-density-wave (CDW) transitions in quantum materials.

Quantum materials, which exhibit unique properties, have been a subject of intense research in condensed matter physics.

To understand the fundamental interactions that occur within these materials, the STFC Artemis lab space provides cutting-edge capabilities, including ultrafast laser sources, XUV beamlines, and end-stations for molecular dynamics, condensed matter physics, and imaging. The facility is one of few in the world capable of recording and capturing processes that happen at femtosecond timescales.

The results that Artemis can produce not only promote the development of innovative technologies, but also expand our fundamental understanding of the complicated physics found in the interactions between light and matter.

This latest research was led by Dr. Enrico Da Como from the University of Bath, in collaboration with Dr. Charles James Sayers from the Polytechnic University of Milan, and Dr. Ettore Carpene from the Institute of Photonics and Nanotechnologies of the Italian National Research Council (CNR).

The paper has been published in Physical Review Letters [below].

Dr. Charles James Sayers, Research Fellow in the ultrafast spectroscopy group at Polytechnic University of Milan, says, “Using ultrashort pulses of light on the order of femtoseconds, such as those available at the Artemis facility, allows us to directly visualize the motion of electrons and ions inside materials in real time, providing a great insight into the important interactions occurring inside these exotic materials.”

Dr. Ettore Carpene, Researcher at the Institute of Photonics and Nanotechnologies of the CNR, says, “One of the most important scientific questions surrounding quantum materials it the origin of phase transitions to ordered states of matter.”

Dr. Carlotte Sanders, Senior Experimental Scientist at STFC Central Laser Facility, says, “We are incredibly happy to have the new Artemis lab up and running and producing papers. Not only are we enjoying the benefits of our new lab space, but with our new HiLUX upgrades of the next four years, our users can expect even more new capabilities in the near future. It is an extremely exciting time.

“It was great to work with colleagues at the University of Bath, Politecnico di Milano, and CNR-IFN on this interesting project. We look forward to a lot more top-notch science with them and the rest of our user community in the future.”

Physical Review Letters

See the full article here.

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UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) is a non-departmental public body of the Government of the United Kingdom that directs research and innovation funding, funded through the science budget of the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy.

UKRI convenes, catalyzes and invests in close collaboration with others to build a thriving, inclusive research and innovation system.

Established on 1 April 2018 by the Higher Education and Research Act 2017, UKRI brought nine organizations into one unified body. UKRI was created following a report by Sir Paul Nurse, the President of the Royal Society, who recommended the merger in order to increase integrative cross-disciplinary research.

Working in partnership with universities, research organizations, businesses, charities and government, its mission is to foster research and development within the United Kingdom and create a positive “impact” – “push the frontiers of human knowledge and understanding”, “deliver economic impact” and “create social and cultural impact”.

Arts and Humanities Research Council

Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council

Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council

Economic and Social Research Council

Medical Research Council

Natural Environment Research Council

Science and Technology Facilities Council

Innovate UK

Research England