From DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (US) : “Research Team Unlocks Secret Path to a Quantum Future”

From DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (US)

October 12, 2021
Rachel Berkowitz

Artist’s illustration of hydrodynamical behavior from an interacting ensemble of quantum spin defects in diamond. Credit: Norman Yao/Berkeley Lab.

In 1998, researchers including Mark Kubinec of The University of California-Berkeley (US) performed one of the first simple quantum computations using individual molecules. They used pulses of radio waves to flip the spins of two nuclei in a molecule, with each spin’s “up” or “down” orientation storing information in the way that a “0” or “1” state stores information in a classical data bit. In those early days of quantum computers, the combined orientation of the two nuclei – that is, the molecule’s quantum state – could only be preserved for brief periods in specially tuned environments. In other words, the system quickly lost its coherence. Control over quantum coherence is the missing step to building scalable quantum computers.

Now, researchers are developing new pathways to create and protect quantum coherence. Doing so will enable exquisitely sensitive measurement and information processing devices that function at ambient or even extreme conditions. In 2018, Joel Moore, a senior faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and professor at The University of California-Berkeley (US), secured funds from The Department of Energy (US) to create and lead the DOE Center for Nanoscale Control of Geologic CO2 (EFRC) – called the Center for Novel Pathways to Quantum Coherence in Materials (NPQC) – to further those efforts. “The EFRCs are an important tool for DOE to enable focused inter-institutional collaborations to make rapid progress on forefront science problems that are beyond the scope of individual investigators,” said Moore.

Through the NPQC, scientists from Berkeley Lab, The University of California-Berkeley, The University of California-Santa Barbara (US), DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory (US), and Columbia University (US) are leading the way to understand and manipulate coherence in a variety of solid-state systems. Their threefold approach focuses on developing novel platforms for quantum sensing; designing two-dimensional materials that host complex quantum states; and exploring ways to precisely control a material’s electronic and magnetic properties via quantum processes. The solution to these problems lies within the materials science community. Developing the ability to manipulate coherence in realistic environments requires in-depth understanding of materials that could provide alternate quantum bit (or “qubit”), sensing, or optical technologies.

Basic discoveries underlie further developments that will contribute to other DOE investments across The DOE Office of Science (US). As the program enters its fourth year, several breakthroughs are laying the scientific groundwork for innovations in quantum information science.

More defects, more opportunities

Many of NPQC’s achievements thus far focus on quantum platforms that are based on specific flaws in a material’s structure called spin defects. A spin defect in the right crystal background can approach perfect quantum coherence while possessing greatly improved robustness and functionality.

These imperfections can be used to make high-precision sensing platforms. Each spin defect responds to extremely subtle fluctuations in the environment; and coherent collections of defects can achieve unprecedented accuracy and precision. But understanding how coherence evolves in a system of many spins, where all the spins interact with one another, is daunting. To meet this challenge, NPQC researchers are turning to a common material that turns out to be ideal for quantum sensing: diamond.

During diamond’s formation, replacement of a carbon atom (green) with a nitrogen atom (yellow, N) and omitting another to leave a vacancy (purple, V) creates a common defect that has well-defined spin properties. (Credit: The National Institute of Standards and Technology (US))

In nature, each carbon atom in a diamond’s crystal structure connects to four other carbon atoms. When one carbon atom is replaced by a different atom or omitted altogether, which commonly occurs as the diamond’s crystal structure forms, the resulting defect can sometimes behave like an atomic system that has a well-defined spin – an intrinsic form of angular momentum carried by electrons or other subatomic particles. Much like these particles, certain defects in diamond can have an orientation, or polarization, that is either “spin-up” or “spin-down.”

By engineering multiple different spin defects into a diamond lattice, Norman Yao, a faculty scientist at Berkeley Lab and an assistant professor of physics at The University of California-Berkeley , and his colleagues created a 3D system with spins dispersed throughout the volume. Within that system, the researchers developed a way to probe the “motion” of spin polarization at tiny length scales.

Schematic depicting a central pocket of excess spin (turquoise shading) in a diamond cube, which then spread out much like dye in a liquid. Credit: Berkeley Lab.

Using a combination of measurement techniques, the researchers found that spin moves around in the quantum mechanical system in almost the same way that dye moves in a liquid. Learning from dyes has turned out to be a successful path toward understanding quantum coherence, as recently published in the journal Nature. Not only does the emergent behavior of spin provide a powerful classical framework for understanding quantum dynamics, but the multi-defect system provides an experimental platform for exploring how coherence works as well. Moore, the NPQC director and a member of the team who has previously studied other kinds of quantum dynamics, described the NPQC platform as “a uniquely controllable example of the interplay between disorder, long-ranged dipolar interactions between spins, and quantum coherence.”

Those spin defects’ coherence times depend heavily on their immediate surroundings. Many NPQC breakthroughs have centered on creating and mapping the strain sensitivity in the structure surrounding individual defects in diamond and other materials. Doing so can reveal how best to engineer defects that have the longest possible coherence times in 3D and 2D materials. But exactly how might the changes imposed by forces on the material itself correlate to changes in the defect’s coherence?

To find out, NPQC researchers are developing a technique for creating deformed areas in a host crystal and measuring the strain. “If you think about atoms in a lattice in terms of a box spring, you get different results depending on how you push on them,” said Martin Holt, group leader in electron and X-ray microscopy at Argonne National Laboratory and a principal investigator with NPQC. Using the Advanced Photon Source and Center for Nanoscale Materials, both user facilities at Argonne National Laboratory, he and his colleagues offer a direct image of the deformed areas in a host crystal. Until now, a defect’s orientation in a sample has been mostly random. The images reveal which orientations are the most sensitive, providing a promising avenue for high-pressure quantum sensing.

Scientists at Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley unexpectedly discovered superconductivity in a triple layer of carbon sheets. Credit: Feng Wang and Guorui Chen/Berkeley Lab.

“It’s really beautiful that you can take something like diamond and bring utility to it. Having something simple enough to understand the basic physics but that also can be manipulated enough to do complex physics is great,” said Holt.

Another goal for this research is the ability to transfer a quantum state, like that of a defect in diamond, coherently from one point to another using electrons. Work by NPQC scientists at Berkeley Lab and Argonne Lab studies special quantum wires that appear in atomically thin layers of some materials. Superconductivity was unexpectedly discovered in one such system, a triple layer of carbon sheets, by the group led by Feng Wang, a Berkeley Lab faculty senior scientist and UC Berkeley professor, and leader of NPQC’s effort in atomically thin materials. Of this work, published in Nature in 2019, Wang said, “The fact that the same materials can offer both protected one-dimensional conduction and superconductivity opens up some new possibilities for protecting and transferring quantum coherence.”

Toward useful devices

Multi-defect systems are not only important as fundamental science knowledge. They also have the potential to become transformative technologies. In novel two-dimensional materials that are paving the way for ultra-fast electronics and ultra-stable sensors, NPQC researchers investigate how spin defects may be used to control the material’s electronic and magnetic properties. Recent findings have offered some surprises.

“A fundamental understanding of nanoscale magnetic materials and their applications in spintronics has already led to an enormous transformation in magnetic storage and sensor devices. Exploiting quantum coherence in magnetic materials could be the next leap towards low-power electronics,” said Peter Fischer, senior scientist and division deputy in the Materials Sciences Division at Berkeley Lab.

A material’s magnetic properties depend entirely on the alignment of spins in adjacent atoms. Unlike the neatly aligned spins in a typical refrigerator magnet or the magnets used in classical data storage, antiferromagnets have adjacent spins that point in opposite directions and effectively cancel each other out. As a result, antiferromagnets don’t “act” magnetic and are extremely robust to external disturbances. Researchers have long sought ways to use them in spin-based electronics, where information is transported by spin instead of charge. Key to doing so is finding a way to manipulate spin orientation and maintain coherence.

An exotic magnetic device could further miniaturize computing devices and personal electronics without loss of performance. Scale bar shown above is 10 micrometers. Credit: James Analytis/Berkeley Lab.

In 2019 NPQC researchers led by James Analytis, a faculty scientist at Berkeley Lab and associate professor of physics at UC Berkeley, with postdoc Eran Maniv, observed that applying a small, single pulse of electrical current to tiny flakes of an antiferromagnet caused the spins to rotate and “switch” their orientation. As a result, the material’s properties could be tuned extremely quickly and precisely. “Understanding the physics behind this will require more experimental observations and some theoretical modeling,” said Maniv. “New materials could help reveal how it works. This is the beginning of a new research field.”

Now, the researchers are working to pinpoint the exact mechanism that drives that switching in materials fabricated and characterized at the Molecular Foundry, a user facility at Berkeley Lab. Recent findings, published in Science Advances and Nature Physics, suggest that fine-tuning the defects in a layered material could provide a reliable means of controlling the spin pattern in new device platforms. “This is a remarkable example of how having many defects lets us stabilize a switchable magnetic structure,” said Moore, the NPQC leader.

Spinning new threads

In its next year of operation, NPQC will build on this year’s progress. Goals include exploring how multiple defects interact in two-dimensional materials and investigating new kinds of one-dimensional structures that could arise. These lower-dimensional structures could prove themselves as sensors for detecting other materials’ smallest-scale properties. Additionally, focusing on how electric currents can manipulate spin-derived magnetic properties will directly link fundamental science to applied technologies.

Rapid progress in these tasks requires the combination of techniques and expertise that can only be created within a large collaborative framework. “You don’t develop capabilities in isolation,” said Holt. “The NPQC provides the dynamic research environment that drives the science and harnesses what each lab or facility is doing.” The research center meanwhile provides a unique education at the frontiers of science including opportunities for developing the scientific workforce that will lead the future quantum industry.

The NPQC brings a new set of questions and goals to the study of the basic physics of quantum materials. Moore said, “Quantum mechanics governs the behavior of electrons in solids, and this behavior is the basis for much of the modern technology we take for granted. But we are now at the beginning of the second quantum revolution, where properties like coherence take center stage, and understanding how to enhance these properties opens a new set of questions about materials for us to answer.”

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LBNL campus

LBNL Molecular Foundry

Bringing Science Solutions to the World

In the world of science, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) (US) is synonymous with “excellence.” Thirteen Nobel prizes are associated with Berkeley Lab. Seventy Lab scientists are members of the The National Academy of Sciences (US), 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 (US), 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 U.S. Department of Energy through its Office of Science. It is managed by the University of California (US) 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 (US) 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.

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 DOE’s Los Alamos Laboratory (US), and Robert Wilson founded Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory(US).

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 Department of Energy (US). 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 Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (US)) 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 (US), with management from the University of California (US). 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 (US):

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.

LBNL/ALS

DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (US) 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.

The DOE Joint Genome Institute (US) 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 (US), DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (US)(ORNL), DOE’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (US) (PNNL), and the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology (US). 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.

The LBNL Molecular Foundry (US) [above] 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 (US) 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(US) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Cray Cori II supercomputer at National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center(US) at DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory(US), 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 (US) 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 (US) (JBEI), located in Emeryville, California. Other partners are the DOE’s Sandia National Laboratory (US), the University of California (UC) campuses of Berkeley and Davis, the Carnegie Institution for Science (US), and DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (US) (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 (US) 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 (US) leads JCESR and Berkeley Lab is a major partner.

From Carnegie Mellon University – College of Engineering (US) : “Refuting a 70-year approach to predicting material microstructure”

From Carnegie Mellon University – College of Engineering (US)

10.11.21

Kaitlyn Landram
Jocelyn Duffy

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have developed a new microscopy technique that maps material microstructure in three dimensions; results demonstrate that the conventional method for predicting materials’ properties under high temperature is ineffective.

A 70-year-old model used to predict the microstructure of materials doesn’t work for today’s materials, say Carnegie Mellon University researchers in Science. A microscopy technique developed by Carnegie Mellon and DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory (US) yields evidence that contradicts the conventional model and points the way toward the use of new types of characterizations to predict properties—and therefore the safety and long-term durability—of new materials.

If a metallurgist discovered an alloy that could drastically improve an aircraft’s performance, it could take as long as 20 years before a passenger would be able to board a plane made of that alloy. With no way to predict how a material will change when it is subjected to the stressors of processing or everyday use, researchers use trial and error to establish a material’s safety and durability. This lengthy process is a significant bottleneck to materials innovation.

Greg Rohrer: Polycrystalline Materials.

Gregory Rohrer and Robert Suter of Carnegie Mellon University have uncovered new information that will help materials scientists to predict how the properties of materials change in response to stressors such as elevated temperatures. Using near-field high energy diffraction microscopy (HEDM), they found that the established model for predicting a material’s microstructure and properties does not apply to polycrystalline materials, and a new model is needed.

To the eye, most commonly used metals, alloys, and ceramics used in industrial and consumer equipment and products appear to be uniformly solid. But at the microscopic level, they are polycrystalline, made up of aggregates of grains that have different size, shapes, and crystal orientations. The grains are tied together by a network of grain boundaries that shift when exposed to stressors, changing the material’s properties.

The dark blue shading represents a boundary separating two grains; as the boundary moves some elements that belong to grain m become part of grain n. Credit: College of Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University.

High energy diffraction microscopy images of grain boundary velocities and curvatures and computed mobilities. Velocities do not correlate with the other properties. Credit: College of Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University.

When they make a new material, scientists need to control its microstructure, which includes its grain boundaries. Materials scientists manipulate the density of grain boundaries in order to meet different needs. For example, the structure surrounding the passenger cabin in a car is made of an ultrahigh strength steel that contains more grain boundaries than the aesthetic body panels in the car’s front-end crumple zone.

For the last 70 years, researchers have predicted materials’ behavior using a theory that says that the speed at which grain boundaries move throughout a heated material is correlated to the boundary’s shape. Rohrer and Suter have shown that this theory, formulated to describe the most ideal case, does not apply in real polycrystals.

Polycrystals are more complicated than the ideal cases studied in the past. Rohrer, a professor of materials science and engineering, Opens in new window explained, “If one considers a single grain boundary in a crystal, it can move without interruption, like a car driving down an empty roadway. In polycrystals, each grain boundary is connected to, on average, 10 others, so it’s like that car hit traffic—it can’t move so freely anymore. Therefore, this model no longer holds.” On top of that, Rohrer and Suter found that often polycrystal grain boundaries weren’t even moving in the direction that the model would have predicted.

HEDM, a technique that was pioneered by Suter and colleagues using the Argonne National Laboratory’s Advanced Photon Source (APS), was key to these discoveries. HEDM and its associated techniques allow researchers to non-destructively image thousands of crystals and measure their orientations within opaque metals and ceramics. The technique requires high energy X-rays available only at one of a few synchrotron sources around the world.

“It’s like having 3D X-ray vision,” said Suter, a professor of physics. “Before, you couldn’t look at a material’s grains without cutting it apart. HEDM allows us to noninvasively view the grain orientations and boundaries as they evolve over time.”

The development of HEDM began around 20 years ago and continues to this day. Suter’s group worked with scientists at APS to develop procedures for the synchronized collection of thousands of images of X-ray diffraction patterns from a material sample as it undergoes precision rotation in an intense incident beam.

ANL DOE Argonne National Laboratory (US) Advanced Photo Source

High performance computer codes developed by Suter’s research group convert the sets of images into three-dimensional maps of the crystalline grains that make up the material microstructure.

Ten years ago, Suter’s group (including physics graduate students Chris Hefferan, Shiu-Fai Li, and Jon Lind) repeatedly measured a nickel sample after successive high temperature treatments resulting in the first observations of individual grain boundary motions. These motions failed to show the systematic behavior predicted by the 70-year-old theory. The point of view developed by the Carnegie Mellon researchers in the Science paper correlates grain boundary structure with systematic behaviors observed in the HEDM experimental data.

While the current analysis is based on a single material, nickel, X-ray diffraction microscopy is being used on many materials, and Rohrer and Suter believe that many of those materials will demonstrate similar behavior to that seen in nickel. Similar applications to other material processing conditions also are being studied.

This research was funded by the National Science Foundation’s Designing Materials to Revolutionize and Engineer the Future program (DRMEF). The team’s four-year grant was renewed for $1.8 million dollars effective October 1, 2021. Carnegie Mellon’s Kaushik Dayal, professor of civil and environmental engineering ; Elizabeth Holm, professor of materials science and engineering; and David Kinderlehrer, professor of mathematical sciences, will also be involved in the next steps of research studying how and why polycrystals behave this way in different materials. Professors Carl Krill (Ulm University [Universität Ulm](DE)) and Amanda Krause (The University of Florida (US)) are also part of the collaboration.

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The College of Engineering is well-known for working on problems of both scientific and practical importance. Our acclaimed faculty focus on transformative results that will drive the intellectual and economic vitality of our community, nation and world. Our “maker” culture is ingrained in all that we do, leading to novel approaches and unprecedented results.

Carnegie Mellon University (US) is a global research university with more than 12,000 students, 95,000 alumni, and 5,000 faculty and staff.
CMU has been a birthplace of innovation since its founding in 1900.
Today, we are a global leader bringing groundbreaking ideas to market and creating successful startup businesses.
Our award-winning faculty members are renowned for working closely with students to solve major scientific, technological and societal challenges. We put a strong emphasis on creating things—from art to robots. Our students are recruited by some of the world’s most innovative companies.
We have campuses in Pittsburgh, Qatar and Silicon Valley, and degree-granting programs around the world, including Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe and Latin America.

The university was established by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools, the university became the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1912 and began granting four-year degrees. In 1967, the Carnegie Institute of Technology merged with the Mellon Institute of Industrial Research, formerly a part of the University of Pittsburgh. Since then, the university has operated as a single institution.

The university has seven colleges and independent schools, including the College of Engineering, College of Fine Arts, Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences, Mellon College of Science, Tepper School of Business, Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy, and the School of Computer Science. The university has its main campus located 3 miles (5 km) from Downtown Pittsburgh, and the university also has over a dozen degree-granting locations in six continents, including degree-granting campuses in Qatar and Silicon Valley.

Past and present faculty and alumni include 20 Nobel Prize laureates, 13 Turing Award winners, 23 Members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (US), 22 Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (US), 79 Members of the National Academies, 124 Emmy Award winners, 47 Tony Award laureates, and 10 Academy Award winners. Carnegie Mellon enrolls 14,799 students from 117 countries and employs 1,400 faculty members.
Research

Carnegie Mellon University is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very High Research Activity”. For the 2006 fiscal year, the university spent $315 million on research. The primary recipients of this funding were the School of Computer Science ($100.3 million), the Software Engineering Institute ($71.7 million), the College of Engineering ($48.5 million), and the Mellon College of Science ($47.7 million). The research money comes largely from federal sources, with a federal investment of $277.6 million. The federal agencies that invest the most money are the National Science Foundation (US) and the Department of Defense (US), which contribute 26% and 23.4% of the total university research budget respectively.

The recognition of Carnegie Mellon as one of the best research facilities in the nation has a long history—as early as the 1987 Federal budget Carnegie Mellon University was ranked as third in the amount of research dollars with $41.5 million, with only Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US) and Johns Hopkins University (US) receiving more research funds from the Department of Defense.

The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) (US) is a joint effort between Carnegie Mellon, University of Pittsburgh (US), and Westinghouse Electric Company. Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center was founded in 1986 by its two scientific directors, Dr. Ralph Roskies of the University of Pittsburgh and Dr. Michael Levine of Carnegie Mellon. Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center is a leading partner in the TeraGrid, the National Science Foundation’s cyberinfrastructure program.
Scarab lunar rover is being developed by the RI.

The Robotics Institute (RI) is a division of the School of Computer Science and considered to be one of the leading centers of robotics research in the world. The Field Robotics Center (FRC) has developed a number of significant robots, including Sandstorm and H1ghlander, which finished second and third in the DARPA Grand Challenge, and Boss, which won the DARPA Urban Challenge. The Robotics Institute has partnered with a spinoff company, Astrobotic Technology Inc., to land a CMU robot on the moon by 2016 in pursuit of the Google Lunar XPrize. The robot, known as Andy, is designed to explore lunar pits, which might include entrances to caves. The RI is primarily sited at Carnegie Mellon’s main campus in Newell-Simon hall.

The Software Engineering Institute (SEI) is a federally funded research and development center sponsored by the U.S. Department of Defense and operated by Carnegie Mellon, with offices in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA; Arlington, Virginia, and Frankfurt, Germany. The SEI publishes books on software engineering for industry, government and military applications and practices. The organization is known for its Capability Maturity Model (CMM) and Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI), which identify essential elements of effective system and software engineering processes and can be used to rate the level of an organization’s capability for producing quality systems. The SEI is also the home of CERT/CC, the federally funded computer security organization. The CERT Program’s primary goals are to ensure that appropriate technology and systems management practices are used to resist attacks on networked systems and to limit damage and ensure continuity of critical services subsequent to attacks, accidents, or failures.

The Human–Computer Interaction Institute (HCII) is a division of the School of Computer Science and is considered one of the leading centers of human–computer interaction research, integrating computer science, design, social science, and learning science. Such interdisciplinary collaboration is the hallmark of research done throughout the university.

The Language Technologies Institute (LTI) is another unit of the School of Computer Science and is famous for being one of the leading research centers in the area of language technologies. The primary research focus of the institute is on machine translation, speech recognition, speech synthesis, information retrieval, parsing and information extraction. Until 1996, the institute existed as the Center for Machine Translation that was established in 1986. From 1996 onwards, it started awarding graduate degrees and the name was changed to Language Technologies Institute.

Carnegie Mellon is also home to the Carnegie School of management and economics. This intellectual school grew out of the Tepper School of Business in the 1950s and 1960s and focused on the intersection of behavioralism and management. Several management theories, most notably bounded rationality and the behavioral theory of the firm, were established by Carnegie School management scientists and economists.

Carnegie Mellon also develops cross-disciplinary and university-wide institutes and initiatives to take advantage of strengths in various colleges and departments and develop solutions in critical social and technical problems. To date, these have included the Cylab Security and Privacy Institute, the Wilton E. Scott Institute for Energy Innovation, the Neuroscience Institute (formerly known as BrainHub), the Simon Initiative, and the Disruptive Healthcare Technology Institute.

Carnegie Mellon has made a concerted effort to attract corporate research labs, offices, and partnerships to the Pittsburgh campus. Apple Inc., Intel, Google, Microsoft, Disney, Facebook, IBM, General Motors, Bombardier Inc., Yahoo!, Uber, Tata Consultancy Services, Ansys, Boeing, Robert Bosch GmbH, and the Rand Corporation have established a presence on or near campus. In collaboration with Intel, Carnegie Mellon has pioneered research into claytronics.

From Lehigh University (US) : “A Novel Neural Network to Understand Symmetry and Speed Materials Research”

From Lehigh University (US)

Using a large, unstructured dataset gleaned from 25,000 images, scientists demonstrate a novel machine learning technique to identify structural similarities and trends in materials for the first time.

iStock-Piranka.

Understanding structure-property relations is a key goal of materials research, according to Joshua Agar, a faculty member in Lehigh University’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering. And yet currently no metric exists to understand the structure of materials because of the complexity and multidimensional nature of structure.

Artificial neural networks, a type of machine learning, can be trained to identify similarities―and even correlate parameters such as structure and properties―but there are two major challenges, says Agar. One is that the majority of the vast amounts of data generated by materials experiments are never analyzed. This is largely because such images, produced by scientists in laboratories all over the world, are rarely stored in a usable manner and not usually shared with other research teams. The second challenge is that neural networks are not very effective at learning symmetry and periodicity (how periodic a material’s structure is), two features of utmost importance to materials researchers.

Now, a team led by Lehigh University has developed a novel machine learning approach that can create similarity projections via machine learning, enabling researchers to search an unstructured image database for the first time and identify trends. Agar and his collaborators developed and trained a neural network model to include symmetry-aware features and then applied their method to a set of 25,133 piezoresponse force microscopy images collected on diverse materials systems over five years at The University of California- Berkeley (US). The results: they were able to group similar classes of material together and observe trends, forming a basis by which to start to understand structure-property relationships.

“One of the novelties of our work is that we built a special neural network to understand symmetry and we use that as a feature extractor to make it much better at understanding images,” says Agar, a lead author of the paper where the work is described in Nature Computational Materials Science. In addition to Agar, authors include, from Lehigh University: Tri N. M. Nguyen, Yichen Guo, Shuyu Qin and Kylie S. Frew and, from Stanford University (US): Ruijuan Xu. Nguyen, a lead author, was an undergraduate at Lehigh University and is now pursuing a Ph.D. at Stanford.

The team was able to arrive at projections by employing Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection (UMAP), a non-linear dimensionality reduction technique. This approach, says Agar, allows researchers to learn “…in a fuzzy way, the topology and the higher-level structure of the data and compress it down into 2D.”

“If you train a neural network, the result is a vector, or a set of numbers that is a compact descriptor of the features. Those features help classify things so that some similarity is learned,” says Agar. “What’s produced is still rather large in space, though, because you might have 512 or more different features. So, then you want to compress it into a space that a human can comprehend such as 2D, or 3D―or, maybe, 4D.”

By doing this, Agar and his team were able to take the 25,000-plus images and group very similar classes of material together.

“Similar types of structures in material are semantically close together and also certain trends can be observed particularly if you apply some metadata filters,” says Agar. “If you start filtering by who did the deposition, who made the material, what were they trying to do, what is the material system…you can really start to refine and get more and more similarity. That similarity can then be linked to other parameters like properties.”

This work demonstrates how improved data storage and management could rapidly accelerate materials discoveries. According to Agar, of particular value are images and data generated by failed experiments.

“No one publishes failed results and that’s a big loss because then a few years later someone repeats the same line of experiments,” says Agar. “So, you waste really good resources on an experiment that likely won’t work.”

Instead of losing all of that information, the data that has already been collected could be used to generate new trends that have not been seen before and speed discovery exponentially, says Agar.

This study is the first “use case” of an innovative new data-storage enterprise housed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory called DataFed. DataFed, according to its website is “…a federated, big-data storage, collaboration, and full-life-cycle management system for computational science and/or data analytics within distributed high-performance computing (HPC) and/or cloud-computing environments.”

“My team at Lehigh has been part of the design and development of DataFed in terms of making it relevant for scientific use cases,” says Agar. “Lehigh is the first live implementation of this fully-scalable system. It’s a federated database so anyone can pop up their own server and be tied to the central facility.”

Agar is the machine learning expert on Lehigh University’s Presidential Nano-Human Interface Initiative team. The interdisciplinary initiative, integrating the social sciences and engineering, seeks to transform the ways that humans interact with instruments of scientific discovery to accelerate innovations.

“One of the key goals of Lehigh’s Nano/Human Interface Initiative is to put relevant information at the fingertips of experimentalists to provide actionable information that allows more informed decision-making and accelerates scientific discovery,” says Agar. “Humans have limited capacity for memory and recollection. DataFed is a modern-day Memex; it provides a memory of scientific information that can easily be found and recalled.”

DataFed provides an especially powerful and invaluable tool for researchers engaged in interdisciplinary team science, allowing researchers who are collaborating on team projects located in different/remote locations to access each other’s raw data. This is one of the key components of our Lehigh Presidential Nano/Human Interface (NHI) Initiative for accelerating scientific discovery,” says Martin P. Harmer, Alcoa Foundation Professor in Lehigh’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering and Director of the Nano/Human Interface Initiative.

The work described was supported by the Lehigh University Nano/Human Interface Presidential Initiative and a National Science Foundation grant under TRIPODS + X.

See the full article here .

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Lehigh University (US) is an American private research university in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. It was established in 1865 by businessman Asa Packer. Its undergraduate programs have been coeducational since the 1971–72 academic year. As of 2014, the university had 4,904 undergraduate students and 2,165 graduate students. Lehigh is considered one of the twenty-four Hidden Ivies in the Northeastern United States.

Lehigh has four colleges: the P.C. Rossin College of Engineering and Applied Science, the College of Arts and Sciences, the College of Business and Economics, and the College of Education. The College of Arts and Sciences is the largest, which roughly consists of 40% of the university’s students.The university offers a variety of degrees, including Bachelor of Arts, Bachelor of Science, Master of Arts, Master of Science, Master of Business Administration, Master of Engineering, Master of Education, and Doctor of Philosophy.

Lehigh has produced Pulitzer Prize winners, Fulbright Fellows, members of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and of the National Academy of Sciences, and National Medal of Science winners.

From DOE’s Sandia National Laboratories (US) : “High-speed alloy creation might revolutionize hydrogen’s future”

From DOE’s Sandia National Laboratories (US)

September 20, 2021
Michael Langley
mlangle@sandia.gov
925-294-1482

Researchers from Sandia National Laboratories and international collaborators used computational approaches, including explainable machine learning models, to elucidate new high-entropy alloys with attractive hydrogen storage properties and direct laboratory synthesis and validation. (Illustration by Matthew Witman.)

A Sandia National Laboratories team of materials scientists and computer scientists, with some international collaborators, have spent more than a year creating 12 new alloys — and modeling hundreds more — that demonstrate how machine learning can help accelerate the future of hydrogen energy by making it easier to create hydrogen infrastructure for consumers.

Vitalie Stavila, Mark Allendorf, Matthew Witman and Sapan Agarwal are part of the Sandia team that published a paper [Chemistry of Materials] detailing its approach in conjunction with researchers from Ångström Laboratory-Uppsala University (SE) and The University of Nottingham (UK) .

“There is a rich history in hydrogen storage research and a database of thermodynamic values describing hydrogen interactions with different materials,” Witman said. “With that existing database, an assortment of machine-learning and other computational tools, and state-of-the art experimental capabilities, we assembled an international collaboration group to join forces on this effort. We demonstrated that machine learning techniques could indeed model the physics and chemistry of complex phenomena which occur when hydrogen interacts with metals.”

Having a data-driven modeling capability to predict thermodynamic properties can rapidly increase the speed of research. In fact, once constructed and trained, such machine learning models only take seconds to execute and can therefore rapidly screen new chemical spaces: in this case 600 materials that show promise for hydrogen storage and transmission.

“This was accomplished in only 18 months,” Allendorf said. “Without the machine learning it could have taken several years. That’s big when you consider that historically it takes something like 20 years to take a material from lab discovery to commercialization.”

Potential to change hydrogen energy storage

The team also found something else in their work — results that have dramatic implications for small-scale hydrogen generation at hydrogen fuel-cell filling stations.

“These high-entropy alloy hydrides could enable a natural cascade compression of hydrogen as it moves through the different materials,” Stavila said, adding that compressing hydrogen is traditionally done through a mechanical process.

He describes building a storage tank with multiple layers of these different alloys. As hydrogen is pumped into the tank, the first layer compresses the gas as it moves through the material. The second layer compresses it even further and so on through all of the layers of differing alloys, naturally making the hydrogen usable in motors that generate electricity.

Hydrogen produced under atmospheric conditions at sea level has a pressure of about 1 bar — the metric unit of pressure. For hydrogen to power a vehicle or some other engine from a fuel cell, it must be pressurized — compressed — to a much higher pressure. For example, hydrogen at a fuel-cell charging station must have a pressure of 800 bars or higher so that it can be dispensed as 700-bar hydrogen into fuel-cell hydrogen vehicles.

“As hydrogen moves through those layers, it gets more and more pressurized with no mechanical effort,” Stavila explained. “You could theoretically pump in 1 bar of hydrogen and get 800 bar out — the pressure needed for hydrogen charging stations.”

The team is still refining the model but, since the database is already public through the Department of Energy, once the method is better understood, using machine learning could lead to breakthroughs in a myriad of fields, including materials science, Agarwal said.

This research was sponsored by the Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Technologies Office within The Department of Energy (US), DOE Office of Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy (US) and through Sandia’s Laboratory Directed Research and Development program.

See the full article here .

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Sandia Campus.

DOE’s Sandia National Laboratories (US) managed and operated by the National Technology and Engineering Solutions of Sandia (a wholly owned subsidiary of Honeywell International), is one of three National Nuclear Security Administration(US) research and development laboratories in the United States. Their primary mission is to develop, engineer, and test the non-nuclear components of nuclear weapons and high technology. Headquartered in Central New Mexico near the Sandia Mountains, on Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, Sandia also has a campus in Livermore, California, next to DOE’sLawrence Livermore National Laboratory(US), and a test facility in Waimea, Kauai, Hawaii.

It is Sandia’s mission to maintain the reliability and surety of nuclear weapon systems, conduct research and development in arms control and nonproliferation technologies, and investigate methods for the disposal of the United States’ nuclear weapons program’s hazardous waste.

Other missions include research and development in energy and environmental programs, as well as the surety of critical national infrastructures. In addition, Sandia is home to a wide variety of research including computational biology; mathematics (through its Computer Science Research Institute); materials science; alternative energy; psychology; MEMS; and cognitive science initiatives.

Sandia formerly hosted ASCI Red, one of the world’s fastest supercomputers until its recent decommission, and now hosts ASCI Red Storm supercomputer, originally known as Thor’s Hammer.

ASCI Red Storm Cray supercomputer at DOE’s Sandia National Laboratory

Sandia is also home to the Z Machine.

Sandia Z machine.

The Z Machine is the largest X-ray generator in the world and is designed to test materials in conditions of extreme temperature and pressure. It is operated by Sandia National Laboratories to gather data to aid in computer modeling of nuclear guns. In December 2016, it was announced that National Technology and Engineering Solutions of Sandia, under the direction of Honeywell International, would take over the management of Sandia National Laboratories starting on May 1, 2017.

From University of Gronigen [Rijksuniversiteit Groningen] (NL) : “Finding new alloys just became simpler”

From University of Gronigen [Rijksuniversiteit Groningen] (NL)

16 September 2021

In metal alloys, behaviour at the atomic scale affects the material’s properties. However, the number of possible alloys is astronomical. Together with an international team of colleagues, Francesco Maresca, an engineer at the University of Groningen, developed a theoretical model that allows him to rapidly determine the strength of millions of different alloys at high temperatures. Experiments confirmed the model predictions. The findings were published in Nature Communications on 16 September.

The discovery that iron became much stronger with the addition of a little bit of carbon was one of the discoveries that heralded the Industrial Revolution. ‘Tweaking the composition of a base metal by adding different elements thus creating an alloy has been important in human history,’ says Francesco Maresca, assistant professor at the Engineering and Technology institute Groningen (ENTEG), at the University of Groningen. As a civil engineer, he likes large structures such as bridges. But he is now studying metals at an atomic scale to find the best alloys for specific applications.

Maresca is particularly interested in high-entropy alloys (HEAs) which were first proposed some twenty years ago. These are complex alloys with five or more elements that can have all kinds of useful properties. But how to find the best one? ‘There are around forty metallic elements that are not radioactive or toxic and are therefore suitable for use in alloys. This gives us roughly 1078 different compositions,’ he explains. It is impossible to test a large fraction of these by simply making them.

This is why Maresca wanted a good theory to describe important properties of HEAs. One of those properties is high-temperature strength, essential in various applications ranging from turbine engines to nuclear power plants. The strength of an alloy depends largely on defects in the crystal structure. “Perfect crystals are the strongest but these do not exist in real life materials.” A major determinant of strength at high temperatures in body-centred cubic alloys is thought to be a screw dislocation, a dislocation in the lattice structure of a crystal in which the atoms are rearranged into a helical pattern. ‘These dislocations are very hard to model at the atomic scale,’ explains Maresca.

Composition

Another type of defect is edge dislocation where an extra atomic plane is inserted into part of the crystal structure. Maresca: ‘It was believed that these dislocations have no effect on strength at high temperatures, because that was shown experimentally in pure metals. However, we found that they can determine strength in complex alloys.’ Edge dislocations are much easier to model and Maresca created an atomic-scale model for this dislocation in HEAs, which he then translated into a MATLAB script that could predict the engineering-scale strength of millions of different alloys at high temperatures in a matter of minutes.

Atomistic models shed light on the strengthening mechanisms of dislocations in alloys (panel a). Based on easily accessible input (composition, lattice parameters, elastic constants), an analytical model is formulated that enables the efficient screening over millions of alloys (panel b). The screening provides the prediction of the high-temperature yield strength of millions of high entropy alloys (panel c). Illustration credit: Francesco Maresca.

The result is a strength versus temperature relationship for these different alloys. ‘Using our results, you can find which compositions will give you a specific strength at, for example, 1300 Kelvin. This allows you to tweak the properties of such a high-temperature-resistant material.’ The theoretical results can be used to create alloys with new properties, or to find alternative compositions when one element in an alloy becomes scarce. The model was validated by creating two different alloys and testing their predicted ‘yield strength’, the amount of stress they can withstand at high temperatures without irreversible deformation. The importance of edge dislocation in this process was confirmed using different experimental techniques.

Surprise

‘We also made an atomic model for screw dislocations, which was too complicated for the high-throughput analysis used for the edge dislocation,’ says Maresca. This confirmed that screw dislocation was not the most important determinant of yield strength in these alloys. The finding that edge dislocation actually determines a large part of the yield strength of complex HEAs was a major surprise and one that has made a simple, theory-driven discovery of new complex alloys possible.

See the full article here.

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Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

The University of Gronigen [Rijksuniversiteit Groningen] (NL) is a public research university in the city of Groningen in the Netherlands. The university was founded in 1614 and is the second-oldest university in the Netherlands. In 2014, the university celebrated its 400th anniversary. Currently, RUG is placed in the top 100 universities worldwide according to three international ranking tables.

The university was ranked 65th in the world, according to Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) in 2019. In April 2013, according to the results of the International Student Barometer, the University of Groningen, for the third time in a row, was voted the best university of the Netherlands.

The University of Groningen has eleven faculties, nine graduate schools, 27 research centres and institutes, and more than 175-degree programmes. The university’s alumni and faculty include Johann Bernoulli, Aletta Jacobs, four Nobel Prize winners, nine Spinoza Prize winners, one Stevin Prize winner, royalty, multiple mayors, the first president of the European Central Bank, and a secretary general of NATO.

Research

Research schools, centres and institutes

Humanities and Social Sciences

Center for Language and Cognition Groningen (CLCG)
Globalisation Studies Groningen (GSG)
Centre for Religious Studies (CRS)
Groningen Institute of Archeology (GIA)
Groningen Institute for Educational research (GION)
Groningen Research Institute of Philosophy (GRIPH)
Groningen Research Institute for the Study of Culture (ICOG)
Heymans Institute
Interuniversity Center for Social Science Theory and Methodology (ICS)
Urban and Regional Studies Institute (URSI)

Law

Centre for Law, Administration and Society (CRBS)
Groningen Centre of Energy Law (GCEL)

Economics & Business

Economics, Econometrics and Finance (EEF)
Global Economics and Management (GEM)
Human Resource Management & Organisational Behaviour (HRM-OB)
Innovation & Organization (IO)
Marketing
Operations Management & Operations Research (OPERA)

Life Sciences

Research School of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences (BCN) / UMCG[51]
Research Institute BCN-BRAIN / UMCG[52]
Cancer Research Center Groningen (CRCG) / UMCG[53]
Groningen Institute for Evolutionary Life Sciences (GELIFES)[54]
Behavioural & Physiological Ecology[55]
Conservation Ecology Group[56]
Theoretical Research in Evolutionary Life Sciences[57]
Evolutionary Genetics, Development & Behaviour[58]
Genomics Research in Ecology & Evolution in Nature[59]
Neurobiology[60]
Groningen University Institute for Drug Exploration (GUIDE) / UMCG[61]
Groningen Biomolecular Sciences and Biotechnology (GBB)
Groningen Research Institute of Pharmacy (GRIP)
Science in Healthy Ageing and healthcaRE (SHARE), UMCG[62]
W.J. Kolff Institute for Biomedical Engineering and Materials Science / UMCG[63]

Science and Engineering[64]

Bernoulli Institute for Mathematics, Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence
ENTEG – Engineering and Technology Institute Groningen
ESRIG – Energy and Sustainability Research Institute Groningen
GBB – Groningen Biomolecular Sciences and Biotechnology Institute
GELIFES – Groningen Institute for Evolutionary Life Sciences
GRIP – Groningen Research Institute of Pharmacy
ISEC – Institute for Science Education and Communication
Kapteyn Astronomical Institute
Stratingh Institute for Chemistry
Van Swinderen Institute for Particle Physics and Gravity
Zernike Institute for Advanced Materials (ZIAM)

From Harvard University John A Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (US) : “First glimpse of hydrodynamic electron flow in 3D materials”

From Harvard University John A Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (US)

at

Harvard University (US)

Credit: New Zealand Online News.

September 16, 2021
Leah Burrows

Electrons flow through most materials more like a gas than a fluid meaning they don’t interact much with one another. It was long hypothesized that electrons could flow like a fluid, but only recent advances in materials and measurement techniques allowed these effects to be observed in 2D materials. In 2020, the labs of Amir Yacoby, Professor of Physics and of Applied Physics at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), Philip Kim, Professor of Physics and Professor Applied Physics at Harvard and Ronald Walsworth, formerly of the Department of Physics at Harvard, were among the first to image electrons [Nature] flowing in graphene like water flows through a pipe.

The findings provided a new sandbox in which to explore electron interactions and offered a new way to control electrons — but only in two-dimensional materials. Electron hydrodynamics in three-dimensional materials remained much more elusive because of a fundamental behavior of electrons in conductors known as screening. When there is a high density of electrons in a material, as in conducting metals, electrons are less inclined to interact with one another.

Recent research suggested that hydrodynamic electron flow in 3D conductors was possible, but exactly how it happened or how to observe it remained unknown. Until now.

A team of researchers from Harvard and The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US) developed a theory to explain how hydrodynamic electron flow could occur in 3D materials and observed it for the first time using a new imaging technique.

The research is published in Nature Physics.

“This research provides a promising avenue for the search for hydrodynamic flow and prominent electron interactions in high-carrier-density materials,” said Prineha Narang, Assistant Professor of Computational Materials Science at SEAS and a senior author of the study.

Hydrodynamic electron flow relies on strong interactions between electrons just as water and other fluids rely on strong interactions between their particles. In order to flow efficiently, electrons in high density materials arrange themselves in such a way that limits interactions. It’s the same reason that group dances like the electric slide don’t involve a lot of interaction between dancers — with that many people, it’s easier for everyone to do their own moves.

“To date, hydrodynamic effects have mostly been deduced from transport measurements, which effectively jumbles up the spatial signatures,” said Yacoby. “Our work has charted a different path in observing this dance and understanding hydrodynamics in systems beyond graphene with new quantum probes of electron correlations.”

The researchers proposed that rather than direct interactions, electrons in high density materials could interact with one another through the quantum vibrations of the atomic lattice, known as phonons.

“We can think of the phonon-mediated interactions between electrons by imagining two people jumping on a trampoline, who don’t propel each other directly but rather via the elastic force of the springs,” said Yaxian Wang, a postdoctoral scholar in the NarangLab at SEAS and co-author of the study.

In order to observe this mechanism, the researchers developed a new cryogenic scanning probe based on the nitrogen-vacancy defect in diamond, which imaged the local magnetic field of a current flow in a material called layered semimetal tungsten ditelluride.

“Our tiny quantum sensor is sensitive to small changes in the local magnetic field, allowing us to explore the magnetic structure in a material directly,” said Uri Vool, John Harvard distinguished science fellow and co-lead author of the study.

Not only did the researchers find evidence of hydrodynamic flow within three-dimensional tungsten ditelluride but they also found that the hydrodynamic character of the current strongly depends on the temperature.

“Hydrodynamic flow occurs in a narrow regime where temperature is not too high and not too low, and so the unique ability to scan across a wide temperature range was crucial to see the effect,” said Assaf Hamo, a postdoctoral scholar at the Yacoby lab and co-lead author of the study.

“The ability to image and engineer these hydrodynamic flows in three-dimensional conductors as a function of temperature, opens up the possibility to achieve near dissipation-less electronics in nanoscale devices, as well as provides new insights into understanding electron-electron interactions,” said Georgios Varnavides, a Ph.D student in the NarangLab at SEAS and one of the lead authors of the study. ”The research also paves the way for exploring non-classical fluid behavior in hydrodynamic electron flow, such as steady-state vortices.”

“This is an exciting and interdisciplinary field synthesizing concepts from condensed matter and materials science to computational hydrodynamics and statistical physics,” said Narang. In previous research, Varnavides and Narang classified different types of hydrodynamic behaviors which could arise in quantum materials where electrons flow collectively.

This research was co-authored by Tony X. Zhou, Nitesh Kumar, Yuliya Dovzhenko, Ziwei Qiu, Christina A. C. Garcia, Andrew T. Pierce, Johannes Gooth, Polina Anikeeva, and Claudia Felser. It was supported in part by the US Department of Energy (DOE), Basic Energy Sciences Office, Division of Materials Sciences and Engineering, under award DE-SC0019300, Army Research Office grant no. W911NF-17-1-0023 and Army Research Office MURI (Ab-Initio Solid-State Quantum Materials) grant no. W911NF-18-1-0431 as well as the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation through an EPiQS Initiative grant no. GBMF4531 and Moore Inventor Fellowship grant no.GBMF8048.

See the full article here .

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Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

Through research and scholarship, the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (US) will create collaborative bridges across Harvard and educate the next generation of global leaders. By harnessing the power of engineering and applied sciences we will address the greatest challenges facing our society.

Specifically, that means that SEAS will provide to all Harvard College students an introduction to and familiarity with engineering and technology as this is essential knowledge in the 21st century.

Moreover, our concentrators will be immersed in the liberal arts environment and be able to understand the societal context for their problem solving, capable of working seamlessly with others, including those in the arts, the sciences, and the professional schools. They will focus on the fundamental engineering and applied science disciplines for the 21st century; as we will not teach legacy 20th century engineering disciplines.

Instead, our curriculum will be rigorous but inviting to students, and be infused with active learning, interdisciplinary research, entrepreneurship and engineering design experiences. For our concentrators and graduate students, we will educate “T-shaped” individuals – with depth in one discipline but capable of working seamlessly with others, including arts, humanities, natural science and social science.

To address current and future societal challenges, knowledge from fundamental science, art, and the humanities must all be linked through the application of engineering principles with the professions of law, medicine, public policy, design and business practice.

In other words, solving important issues requires a multidisciplinary approach.

With the combined strengths of SEAS, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and the professional schools, Harvard is ideally positioned to both broadly educate the next generation of leaders who understand the complexities of technology and society and to use its intellectual resources and innovative thinking to meet the challenges of the 21st century.

Ultimately, we will provide to our graduates a rigorous quantitative liberal arts education that is an excellent launching point for any career and profession.

Harvard University (US) is the oldest institution of higher education in the United States, established in 1636 by vote of the Great and General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. It was named after the College’s first benefactor, the young minister John Harvard of Charlestown, who upon his death in 1638 left his library and half his estate to the institution. A statue of John Harvard stands today in front of University Hall in Harvard Yard, and is perhaps the University’s bestknown landmark.

Harvard University (US) has 12 degree-granting Schools in addition to the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. The University has grown from nine students with a single master to an enrollment of more than 20,000 degree candidates including undergraduate, graduate, and professional students. There are more than 360,000 living alumni in the U.S. and over 190 other countries.

The Massachusetts colonial legislature, the General Court, authorized Harvard University (US)’s founding. In its early years, Harvard College primarily trained Congregational and Unitarian clergy, although it has never been formally affiliated with any denomination. Its curriculum and student body were gradually secularized during the 18th century, and by the 19th century, Harvard University (US) had emerged as the central cultural establishment among the Boston elite. Following the American Civil War, President Charles William Eliot’s long tenure (1869–1909) transformed the college and affiliated professional schools into a modern research university; Harvard became a founding member of the Association of American Universities in 1900. James B. Conant led the university through the Great Depression and World War II; he liberalized admissions after the war.

The university is composed of ten academic faculties plus the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Arts and Sciences offers study in a wide range of academic disciplines for undergraduates and for graduates, while the other faculties offer only graduate degrees, mostly professional. Harvard has three main campuses: the 209-acre (85 ha) Cambridge campus centered on Harvard Yard; an adjoining campus immediately across the Charles River in the Allston neighborhood of Boston; and the medical campus in Boston’s Longwood Medical Area. Harvard University (US)’s endowment is valued at $41.9 billion, making it the largest of any academic institution. Endowment income helps enable the undergraduate college to admit students regardless of financial need and provide generous financial aid with no loans The Harvard Library is the world’s largest academic library system, comprising 79 individual libraries holding about 20.4 million items.

Harvard University (US) has more alumni, faculty, and researchers who have won Nobel Prizes (161) and Fields Medals (18) than any other university in the world and more alumni who have been members of the U.S. Congress, MacArthur Fellows, Rhodes Scholars (375), and Marshall Scholars (255) than any other university in the United States. Its alumni also include eight U.S. presidents and 188 living billionaires, the most of any university. Fourteen Turing Award laureates have been Harvard affiliates. Students and alumni have also won 10 Academy Awards, 48 Pulitzer Prizes, and 108 Olympic medals (46 gold), and they have founded many notable companies.

Colonial

Harvard University (US) was established in 1636 by vote of the Great and General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. In 1638, it acquired British North America’s first known printing press. In 1639, it was named Harvard College after deceased clergyman John Harvard, an alumnus of the University of Cambridge(UK) who had left the school £779 and his library of some 400 volumes. The charter creating the Harvard Corporation was granted in 1650.

A 1643 publication gave the school’s purpose as “to advance learning and perpetuate it to posterity, dreading to leave an illiterate ministry to the churches when our present ministers shall lie in the dust.” It trained many Puritan ministers in its early years and offered a classic curriculum based on the English university model—many leaders in the colony had attended the University of Cambridge—but conformed to the tenets of Puritanism. Harvard University (US) has never affiliated with any particular denomination, though many of its earliest graduates went on to become clergymen in Congregational and Unitarian churches.

Increase Mather served as president from 1681 to 1701. In 1708, John Leverett became the first president who was not also a clergyman, marking a turning of the college away from Puritanism and toward intellectual independence.

19th century

In the 19th century, Enlightenment ideas of reason and free will were widespread among Congregational ministers, putting those ministers and their congregations in tension with more traditionalist, Calvinist parties. When Hollis Professor of Divinity David Tappan died in 1803 and President Joseph Willard died a year later, a struggle broke out over their replacements. Henry Ware was elected to the Hollis chair in 1805, and the liberal Samuel Webber was appointed to the presidency two years later, signaling the shift from the dominance of traditional ideas at Harvard to the dominance of liberal, Arminian ideas.

Charles William Eliot, president 1869–1909, eliminated the favored position of Christianity from the curriculum while opening it to student self-direction. Though Eliot was the crucial figure in the secularization of American higher education, he was motivated not by a desire to secularize education but by Transcendentalist Unitarian convictions influenced by William Ellery Channing and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

20th century

In the 20th century, Harvard University (US)’s reputation grew as a burgeoning endowment and prominent professors expanded the university’s scope. Rapid enrollment growth continued as new graduate schools were begun and the undergraduate college expanded. Radcliffe College, established in 1879 as the female counterpart of Harvard College, became one of the most prominent schools for women in the United States. Harvard University (US) became a founding member of the Association of American Universities in 1900.

The student body in the early decades of the century was predominantly “old-stock, high-status Protestants, especially Episcopalians, Congregationalists, and Presbyterians.” A 1923 proposal by President A. Lawrence Lowell that Jews be limited to 15% of undergraduates was rejected, but Lowell did ban blacks from freshman dormitories.

President James B. Conant reinvigorated creative scholarship to guarantee Harvard University (US)’s preeminence among research institutions. He saw higher education as a vehicle of opportunity for the talented rather than an entitlement for the wealthy, so Conant devised programs to identify, recruit, and support talented youth. In 1943, he asked the faculty to make a definitive statement about what general education ought to be, at the secondary as well as at the college level. The resulting Report, published in 1945, was one of the most influential manifestos in 20th century American education.

Between 1945 and 1960, admissions were opened up to bring in a more diverse group of students. No longer drawing mostly from select New England prep schools, the undergraduate college became accessible to striving middle class students from public schools; many more Jews and Catholics were admitted, but few blacks, Hispanics, or Asians. Throughout the rest of the 20th century, Harvard became more diverse.

Harvard University (US)’s graduate schools began admitting women in small numbers in the late 19th century. During World War II, students at Radcliffe College (which since 1879 had been paying Harvard University (US) professors to repeat their lectures for women) began attending Harvard University (US) classes alongside men. Women were first admitted to the medical school in 1945. Since 1971, Harvard University (US) has controlled essentially all aspects of undergraduate admission, instruction, and housing for Radcliffe women. In 1999, Radcliffe was formally merged into Harvard University (US).

21st century

Drew Gilpin Faust, previously the dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, became Harvard University (US)’s first woman president on July 1, 2007. She was succeeded by Lawrence Bacow on July 1, 2018.

From University of Arizona (US) : “UArizona Engineer Awarded $5M to Build Quantum-Powered Navigation Tools”

From University of Arizona (US)

9.16.21
Emily Dieckman, College of Engineering

Funded by The National Science Foundation (US) Convergence Accelerator Program the Quantum Sensors project aims to make space and terrestrial navigation far more sensitive, accurate and affordable.

Zheshen Zhang. Credit: Emily Dieckman.

Zheshen Zhang, a University of Arizona assistant professor of materials science and engineering, is leading a $5 million quantum technology project to advance navigation for autonomous vehicles and spacecraft, as well as measurement of otherworldly materials such as Dark Matter and gravitational waves.

The National Science Foundation’s Convergence Accelerator Program, which fast-tracks multidisciplinary efforts to solve real-world problems, is funding the Quantum Sensors project.

In September 2020, 29 U.S. teams received phase I funding to develop solutions in either quantum technology or artificial intelligence-driven data sharing and modeling. Ten prototypes have advanced to phase II, each receiving $5 million, including two projects led by UArizona researchers – Zhang’s project and another by hydrology and atmospheric sciences assistant professor Laura Condon.

“Quantum technology and AI innovation are a priority for the National Science Foundation,” said Douglas Maughan, head of the NSF Convergence Accelerator program. “Today’s scientific priorities and national-scale societal challenges cannot be solved by a single discipline. Instead, the merging of new ideas, techniques and approaches, plus the Convergence Accelerator’s innovation curriculum, enables teams to speed their research into application. We are excited to welcome Quantum Sensors into phase II and to assist them in applying our program fundamentals to ensure their solution provides a positive impact on society at large.”

Upgrading Gyroscopes and Accelerometers

The objects we interact with in our daily lives adhere to classic laws of physics, like gravity and thermodynamics. Quantum physics, however, has different rules, and objects in quantum states can exhibit strange but useful properties. For example, when two particles are linked by quantum entanglement, anything that happens to one particle affects the other, no matter how far apart they are. This means probes in two locations can share information, allowing for more precise measurements. Or, while “classical” light emits photons at random intervals, scientists can induce a quantum state called “squeezed” light to make photon emission more regular and reduce uncertainty – or “noise” – in measurements.

The Quantum Sensors project will take advantage of quantum states to create ultrasensitive gyroscopes, accelerometers and other sensors. Gyroscopes are used in navigation of aircraft and other vehicles to maintain balance as orientation shifts. In tandem, accelerometers measure vibration or acceleration of motion. These navigation-grade gyroscopes and accelerometers are light-based and can be extremely precise, but they are bulky and expensive.

Many electronics including cellphones are equipped with tiny gyroscopes and accelerometers that enable features like automatic screen rotation and directional pointers for GPS apps. At this scale, gyroscopes are made up of micromechanical parts, rather than lasers or other light sources, rendering them far less precise. Zhang and his team aim to develop chip-scale light-based gyroscopes and accelerometers to outperform current mechanical methods. However, the detection of light at this scale is limited by the laws of quantum physics, presenting a fundamental performance limit for such optical gyroscopes and accelerometers.

Rather than combat these quantum limitations with classical resources, Zhang and his team are fighting fire with fire, so to speak, by using quantum resources. For example, the stability of squeezed light can counterbalance the uncertainty of quantum fluctuations, which are temporary changes in variables such as position and momentum.

“The fundamental quantum limit is induced by quantum fluctuations, but this limit can be broken using a quantum state of light, like entangled photons or squeezed light, for the laser itself,” said Zhang, director of The University of Arizona (US) Quantum Information and Materials Group. “With this method, we can arrive at much better measurements.”

Gaining an Edge on Earth and Beyond

The benefits of extremely precise measurements are numerous. If a self-driving car could determine its exact location and speed using only a compact, quantum-enhanced, onboard gyroscope and accelerometer, it wouldn’t need to rely on GPS to navigate. A self-contained navigation system would protect the car from hackers and provide more stability. The same goes for navigation of spacecraft and terrestrial vehicles sent to other planets.

“In both space-based and terrestrial technologies, there are a lot of fluctuations. In an urban environment, you might lose GPS signal driving through a tunnel,” Zhang said. “This method could capture information not provided by a GPS. GPS tells you where you are, but it doesn’t tell you your altitude, the direction your vehicle is driving or the angle of the road. With all of this information, the safety of the passengers would be ensured.”

Zhang is collaborating with partners at General Dynamics Mission Systems, Honeywell, NASA JPL-Caltech (US) The National Institute of Standards and Technology (US), Purdue University (US), The Texas A&M University (US), The University of California-Los Angeles (US) and Morgan State University (US).

“We are excited to work with the University of Arizona on this NSF Convergence Accelerator project,” said Jianfeng Wu, Honeywell representative and project co-principal investigator. “The integrated entangled light sources can reduce the noise floor and enable the navigation-grade performance from chip-scale gyroscopes. The success of this program will significantly disrupt the current gyroscope landscape from many perspectives.”

Because precise navigation would directly affect 700 million people worldwide, researchers estimate that quantum sensors could create a $2.5 billion market by 2035. They also expect that the precision and stability offered by the technology will give researchers a way to measure previously unmeasurable forces, such as gravitational waves and Dark Matter.

“As a leading international research university bringing the Fourth Industrial Revolution to life, we are deeply committed to advance amazing new information technologies like quantum networking to benefit humankind,” said University of Arizona President Robert C. Robbins. “The University of Arizona is an internationally recognized leader in this area, and I look forward to seeing how Dr. Zhang’s Quantum Sensors project moves us forward in addressing real-world challenges with quantum technology.”

See the full article here .

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As of 2019, the University of Arizona (US) enrolled 45,918 students in 19 separate colleges/schools, including the UArizona College of Medicine in Tucson and Phoenix and the James E. Rogers College of Law, and is affiliated with two academic medical centers (Banner – University Medical Center Tucson and Banner – University Medical Center Phoenix). UArizona is one of three universities governed by the Arizona Board of Regents. The university is part of the Association of American Universities and is the only member from Arizona, and also part of the Universities Research Association(US). The university is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very High Research Activity”.

Known as the Arizona Wildcats (often shortened to “Cats”), the UArizona’s intercollegiate athletic teams are members of the Pac-12 Conference of the NCAA. UArizona athletes have won national titles in several sports, most notably men’s basketball, baseball, and softball. The official colors of the university and its athletic teams are cardinal red and navy blue.

After the passage of the Morrill Land-Grant Act of 1862, the push for a university in Arizona grew. The Arizona Territory’s “Thieving Thirteenth” Legislature approved the UArizona in 1885 and selected the city of Tucson to receive the appropriation to build the university. Tucson hoped to receive the appropriation for the territory’s mental hospital, which carried a $100,000 allocation instead of the $25,000 allotted to the territory’s only university (Arizona State University(US) was also chartered in 1885, but it was created as Arizona’s normal school, and not a university). Flooding on the Salt River delayed Tucson’s legislators, and by they time they reached Prescott, back-room deals allocating the most desirable territorial institutions had been made. Tucson was largely disappointed with receiving what was viewed as an inferior prize.

With no parties willing to provide land for the new institution, the citizens of Tucson prepared to return the money to the Territorial Legislature until two gamblers and a saloon keeper decided to donate the land to build the school. Construction of Old Main, the first building on campus, began on October 27, 1887, and classes met for the first time in 1891 with 32 students in Old Main, which is still in use today. Because there were no high schools in Arizona Territory, the university maintained separate preparatory classes for the first 23 years of operation.

Research

UArizona is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity”. UArizona is the fourth most awarded public university by National Aeronautics and Space Administration(US) for research. UArizona was awarded over $325 million for its Lunar and Planetary Laboratory (LPL) to lead NASA’s 2007–08 mission to Mars to explore the Martian Arctic, and $800 million for its OSIRIS-REx mission, the first in U.S. history to sample an asteroid.

The LPL’s work in the Cassini spacecraft orbit around Saturn is larger than any other university globally. The UArizona laboratory designed and operated the atmospheric radiation investigations and imaging on the probe. UArizona operates the HiRISE camera, a part of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. While using the HiRISE camera in 2011, UArizona alumnus Lujendra Ojha and his team discovered proof of liquid water on the surface of Mars—a discovery confirmed by NASA in 2015. UArizona receives more NASA grants annually than the next nine top NASA/JPL-Caltech(US)-funded universities combined. As of March 2016, the UArizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory is actively involved in ten spacecraft missions: Cassini VIMS; Grail; the HiRISE camera orbiting Mars; the Juno mission orbiting Jupiter; Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO); Maven, which will explore Mars’ upper atmosphere and interactions with the sun; Solar Probe Plus, a historic mission into the Sun’s atmosphere for the first time; Rosetta’s VIRTIS; WISE; and OSIRIS-REx, the first U.S. sample-return mission to a near-earth asteroid, which launched on September 8, 2016.

UArizona students have been selected as Truman, Rhodes, Goldwater, and Fulbright Scholars. According to The Chronicle of Higher Education, UArizona is among the top 25 producers of Fulbright awards in the U.S.

UArizona is a member of the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy(US), a consortium of institutions pursuing research in astronomy. The association operates observatories and telescopes, notably Kitt Peak National Observatory(US) just outside Tucson. Led by Roger Angel, researchers in the Steward Observatory Mirror Lab at UArizona are working in concert to build the world’s most advanced telescope. Known as the Giant Magellan Telescope(CL), it will produce images 10 times sharper than those from the Earth-orbiting Hubble Telescope.

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

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

The telescope is set to be completed in 2021. GMT will ultimately cost $1 billion. Researchers from at least nine institutions are working to secure the funding for the project. The telescope will include seven 18-ton mirrors capable of providing clear images of volcanoes and riverbeds on Mars and mountains on the moon at a rate 40 times faster than the world’s current large telescopes. The mirrors of the Giant Magellan Telescope will be built at UArizona and transported to a permanent mountaintop site in the Chilean Andes where the telescope will be constructed.

Reaching Mars in March 2006, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter contained the HiRISE camera, with Principal Investigator Alfred McEwen as the lead on the project. This National Aeronautics and Space Administration(US) mission to Mars carrying the UArizona-designed camera is capturing the highest-resolution images of the planet ever seen. The journey of the orbiter was 300 million miles. In August 2007, the UArizona, under the charge of Scientist Peter Smith, led the Phoenix Mars Mission, the first mission completely controlled by a university. Reaching the planet’s surface in May 2008, the mission’s purpose was to improve knowledge of the Martian Arctic. The Arizona Radio Observatory(US), a part of UArizona Department of Astronomy Steward Observatory(US), operates the Submillimeter Telescope on Mount Graham.

The National Science Foundation(US) funded the iPlant Collaborative in 2008 with a $50 million grant. In 2013, iPlant Collaborative received a $50 million renewal grant. Rebranded in late 2015 as “CyVerse”, the collaborative cloud-based data management platform is moving beyond life sciences to provide cloud-computing access across all scientific disciplines.
In June 2011, the university announced it would assume full ownership of the Biosphere 2 scientific research facility in Oracle, Arizona, north of Tucson, effective July 1. Biosphere 2 was constructed by private developers (funded mainly by Texas businessman and philanthropist Ed Bass) with its first closed system experiment commencing in 1991. The university had been the official management partner of the facility for research purposes since 2007.

U Arizona mirror lab-Where else in the world can you find an astronomical observatory mirror lab under a football stadium?

University of Arizona’s Biosphere 2, located in the Sonoran desert. An entire ecosystem under a glass dome? Visit our campus, just once, and you’ll quickly understand why the UA is a university unlike any other.

From University of Rochester (US): “Grant supports Rochester professor’s quest for superconductivity”

From University of Rochester (US)

September 15, 2021

Bob Marcotte
bmarcotte@ur.rochester.edu

University of Rochester assistant professor of mechanical engineering and physics and astronomy Ranga Dias holds an array containing diamond anvil cells used to compress and alter the properties of hydrogen rich materials. Dias’ goal is to create novel quantum materials such as superconductors with a critical temperature at or near room temperature. (University of Rochester photo / J. Adam Fenster)

The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation (US) award will also help Ranga Dias recruit other US scientists to the cause.

University of Rochester researcher Ranga Dias has been awarded a $1.6 million grant from the Gordan and Betty Moore Foundation to support his groundbreaking efforts to create viable superconducting materials.

The award will also help him prepare more researchers in the United States to join the quest.

“We want to take this to the broader scientific community,” says Dias, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering, whose research group has set new records by creating superconducting materials at or near room temperatures.

“There is very limited academic research being conducted in the US in superconducting materials at high pressures,” Dias says. “We need young scientists to focus on doing active research in the area of high-pressure superconductivity.”

Materials that are superconducting have zero electrical resistance and expelled magnetic fields. At room temperatures, superconducting materials could transform our power grids and transportation, reduce the costs of MRI machines, and make quantum superconductors more feasible.

Dias is among several Rochester scientists pursuing research involving superconductivity. For example, physics professor Andrew Jordan and his colleagues use the quantum property of superconductivity to facilitate and enhance the performance of quantum sensors or circuits for ultrafast quantum computers. Meanwhile, the University and its Laboratory for Laser Energetics [below] host one of the nation’s leading institutes dedicated to studying high-energy-density physics.

Building ‘stronger ties’ between materials scientists

In recent papers in Nature and in Physical Review Letters, Dias and collaborators at the University of Las Vegas-Nevada (US), reported creating hydrogen-rich, binary compounds exhibiting superconductivity at or near room temperatures, but only in diamond anvils at pressures too high for commercial application.

Earlier this year, Dias received a $794,000 National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award to fund his efforts to instead create ternary (three-component) and quaternary (four-component) compounds with the right chemical structure and chemical bonding of materials to remain superconducting at ambient pressures.

The Moore Foundation award will allow Dias to add two postdoctoral researchers to his lab. With this additional support, he hopes to not only achieve the goals of the CAREER award but also to push beyond them. Dias aims to reach a point where his lab can use the anvils to identify potential superconducting materials that could then be grown, “atom by atom,” on lattices that could be subjected to strain at ambient room temperatures and pressures.

As part of the Moore Foundation grant, Dias will also conduct workshops to train students, postdocs, and other researchers on how to use the high-pressure techniques needed to conduct research in this area. The goal is to also build stronger ties between the high-pressure and quantum materials science communities.

See the full article here .

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University of Rochester campus

The University of Rochester (US) is a private research university in Rochester, New York. The university grants undergraduate and graduate degrees, including doctoral and professional degrees.

The University of Rochester (US) enrolls approximately 6,800 undergraduates and 5,000 graduate students. Its 158 buildings house over 200 academic majors. According to the National Science Foundation (US), Rochester spent $370 million on research and development in 2018, ranking it 68th in the nation. The university is the 7th largest employer in the Finger lakes region of New York.

The College of Arts, Sciences, and Engineering is home to departments and divisions of note. The Institute of Optics was founded in 1929 through a grant from Eastman Kodak and Bausch and Lomb as the first educational program in the US devoted exclusively to optics and awards approximately half of all optics degrees nationwide and is widely regarded as the premier optics program in the nation and among the best in the world. The Departments of Political Science and Economics have made a significant and consistent impact on positivist social science since the 1960s and historically rank in the top 5 in their fields. The Department of Chemistry is noted for its contributions to synthetic organic chemistry, including the first lab based synthesis of morphine. The Rossell Hope Robbins Library serves as the university’s resource for Old and Middle English texts and expertise. The university is also home to Rochester’s Laboratory for Laser Energetics, a Department of Energy (US) supported national laboratory.

University of Rochester(US) Laboratory for Laser Energetics.

The University of Rochester’s Eastman School of Music (US) ranks first among undergraduate music schools in the U.S. The Sibley Music Library at Eastman is the largest academic music library in North America and holds the third largest collection in the United States.

In its history university alumni and faculty have earned 13 Nobel Prizes; 13 Pulitzer Prizes; 45 Grammy Awards; 20 Guggenheim Awards; 5 National Academy of Sciences; 4 National Academy of Engineering; 3 Rhodes Scholarships; 3 National Academy of Inventors; and 1 National Academy of Inventors Hall of Fame.

History

Early history

The University of Rochester traces its origins to The First Baptist Church of Hamilton (New York) which was founded in 1796. The church established the Baptist Education Society of the State of New York later renamed the Hamilton Literary and Theological Institution in 1817. This institution gave birth to both Colgate University(US) and the University of Rochester. Its function was to train clergy in the Baptist tradition. When it aspired to grant higher degrees it created a collegiate division separate from the theological division.

The collegiate division was granted a charter by the State of New York in 1846 after which its name was changed to Madison University. John Wilder and the Baptist Education Society urged that the new university be moved to Rochester, New York. However, legal action prevented the move. In response, dissenting faculty, students, and trustees defected and departed for Rochester, where they sought a new charter for a new university.

Madison University was eventually renamed as Colgate University (US).

Founding

Asahel C. Kendrick- professor of Greek- was among the faculty that departed Madison University for Rochester. Kendrick served as acting president while a national search was conducted. He reprised this role until 1853 when Martin Brewer Anderson of the Newton Theological Seminary in Massachusetts was selected to fill the inaugural posting.

The University of Rochester’s new charter was awarded by the Regents of the State of New York on January 31, 1850. The charter stipulated that the university have $100,000 in endowment within five years upon which the charter would be reaffirmed. An initial gift of $10,000 was pledged by John Wilder which helped catalyze significant gifts from individuals and institutions.

Classes began that November with approximately 60 students enrolled including 28 transfers from Madison. From 1850 to 1862 the university was housed in the old United States Hotel in downtown Rochester on Buffalo Street near Elizabeth Street- today West Main Street near the I-490 overpass. On a February 1851 visit Ralph Waldo Emerson said of the university:

“They had bought a hotel, once a railroad terminus depot, for $8,500, turned the dining room into a chapel by putting up a pulpit on one side, made the barroom into a Pythologian Society’s Hall, & the chambers into Recitation rooms, Libraries, & professors’ apartments, all for $700 a year. They had brought an omnibus load of professors down from Madison bag and baggage… called in a painter and sent him up the ladder to paint the title “University of Rochester” on the wall, and they had runners on the road to catch students. And they are confident of graduating a class of ten by the time green peas are ripe.

For the next 10 years the college expanded its scope and secured its future through an expanding endowment; student body; and faculty. In parallel a gift of 8 acres of farmland from local businessman and Congressman Azariah Boody secured the first campus of the university upon which Anderson Hall was constructed and dedicated in 1862. Over the next sixty years this Prince Street Campus grew by a further 17 acres and was developed to include fraternities houses; dormitories; and academic buildings including Anderson Hall; Sibley Library; Eastman and Carnegie Laboratories the Memorial Art Gallery and Cutler Union.

Twentieth century

Coeducation

The first female students were admitted in 1900- the result of an effort led by Susan B. Anthony and Helen Barrett Montgomery. During the 1890s a number of women took classes and labs at the university as “visitors” but were not officially enrolled nor were their records included in the college register. President David Jayne Hill allowed the first woman- Helen E. Wilkinson- to enroll as a normal student although she was not allowed to matriculate or to pursue a degree. Thirty-three women enrolled among the first class in 1900 and Ella S. Wilcoxen was the first to receive a degree in 1901. The first female member of the faculty was Elizabeth Denio who retired as Professor Emeritus in 1917. Male students moved to River Campus upon its completion in 1930 while the female students remained on the Prince Street campus until 1955.

Expansion

Major growth occurred under the leadership of Benjamin Rush Rhees over his 1900-1935 tenure. During this period George Eastman became a major donor giving more than $50 million to the university during his life. Under the patronage of Eastman the Eastman School of Music (US) was created in 1921. In 1925 at the behest of the General Education Board and with significant support for John D. Rockefeller George Eastman and Henry A. Strong’s family medical and dental schools were created. The university award its first Ph.D that same year.

During World War II Rochester was one of 131 colleges and universities nationally that took part in the V-12 Navy College Training Program which offered students a path to a Navy commission. In 1942, the university was invited to join the Association of American Universities(US) as an affiliate member and it was made a full member by 1944. Between 1946 and 1947 in infamous uranium experiments researchers at the university injected uranium-234 and uranium-235 into six people to study how much uranium their kidneys could tolerate before becoming damaged.

In 1955 the separate colleges for men and women were merged into The College on the River Campus. In 1958 three new schools were created in engineering; business administration and education. The Graduate School of Management was named after William E. Simon- former Secretary of the Treasury in 1986. He committed significant funds to the school because of his belief in the school’s free market philosophy and grounding in economic analysis.

Financial decline and name change controversy

Following the princely gifts given throughout his life George Eastman left the entirety of his estate to the university after his death by suicide. The total of these gifts surpassed $100 million before inflation and as such Rochester enjoyed a privileged position amongst the most well endowed universities. During the expansion years between 1936 and 1976 the University of Rochester’s financial position ranked third, near Harvard University’s(US) endowment and the University of Texas (US) System’s Permanent University Fund. Due to a decline in the value of large investments and a lack of portfolio diversity the university’s place dropped to the top 25 by the end of the 1980s. At the same time the preeminence of the city of Rochester’s major employers began to decline.

In response the University commissioned a study to determine if the name of the institution should be changed to “Eastman University” or “Eastman Rochester University”. The study concluded a name change could be beneficial because the use of a place name in the title led respondents to incorrectly believe it was a public university, and because the name “Rochester” connoted a “cold and distant outpost.” Reports of the latter conclusion led to controversy and criticism in the Rochester community. Ultimately, the name “University of Rochester” was retained.

Renaissance Plan

In 1995 university president Thomas H. Jackson announced the launch of a “Renaissance Plan” for The College that reduced enrollment from 4,500 to 3,600 creating a more selective admissions process. The plan also revised the undergraduate curriculum significantly creating the current system with only one required course and only a few distribution requirements known as clusters. Part of this plan called for the end of graduate doctoral studies in chemical engineering; comparative literature; linguistics; and mathematics the last of which was met by national outcry. The plan was largely scrapped and mathematics exists as a graduate course of study to this day.

Twenty-first century

Meliora Challenge

Shortly after taking office university president Joel Seligman commenced the private phase of the “Meliora Challenge”- a $1.2 billion capital campaign- in 2005. The campaign reached its goal in 2015- a year before the campaign was slated to conclude. In 2016, the university announced the Meliora Challenge had exceeded its goal and surpassed $1.36 billion. These funds were allocated to support over 100 new endowed faculty positions and nearly 400 new scholarships.

The Mangelsdorf Years

On December 17, 2018 the University of Rochester announced that Sarah C. Mangelsdorf would succeed Richard Feldman as President of the University. Her term started in July 2019 with a formal inauguration following in October during Meliora Weekend. Mangelsdorf is the first woman to serve as President of the University and the first person with a degree in psychology to be appointed to Rochester’s highest office.

In 2019 students from China mobilized by the Chinese Students and Scholars Association (CSSA) defaced murals in the University’s access tunnels which had expressed support for the 2019 Hong Kong Protests, condemned the oppression of the Uighurs, and advocated for Taiwanese independence. The act was widely seen as a continuation of overseas censorship of Chinese issues. In response a large group of students recreated the original murals. There have also been calls for Chinese government run CSSA to be banned from campus.

Research

Rochester is a member of the Association of American Universities (US) and is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very High Research Activity”. Rochester had a research expenditure of $370 million in 2018. In 2008 Rochester ranked 44th nationally in research spending but this ranking has declined gradually to 68 in 2018. Some of the major research centers include the Laboratory for Laser Energetics, a laser-based nuclear fusion facility, and the extensive research facilities at the University of Rochester Medical Center. Recently the university has also engaged in a series of new initiatives to expand its programs in biomedical engineering and optics including the construction of the new $37 million Robert B. Goergen Hall for Biomedical Engineering and Optics on the River Campus. Other new research initiatives include a cancer stem cell program and a Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute. UR also has the ninth highest technology revenue among U.S. higher education institutions with $46 million being paid for commercial rights to university technology and research in 2009. Notable patents include Zoloft and Gardasil. WeBWorK, a web-based system for checking homework and providing immediate feedback for students was developed by University of Rochester professors Gage and Pizer. The system is now in use at over 800 universities and colleges as well as several secondary and primary schools. Rochester scientists work in diverse areas. For example, physicists developed a technique for etching metal surfaces such as platinum; titanium; and brass with powerful lasers enabling self-cleaning surfaces that repel water droplets and will not rust if tilted at a 4 degree angle; and medical researchers are exploring how brains rid themselves of toxic waste during sleep.

From The Technical University of Denmark [Danmarks Tekniske Universitet](DK): “Quantum materials cut closer than ever”

From The Technical University of Denmark [Danmarks Tekniske Universitet](DK)

13 Sep 2021

Peter Bøggild
Professor
DTU Physics
+45 21 36 27 98
pbog@dtu.dk

Lene Gammelgaard
Postdoc
DTU Physics
+45 45 25 66 26
lenga@dtu.dk

A new method designs nanomaterials with less than 10-nanometer precision. It could pave the way for faster, more energy-efficient electronics.

DTU and Graphene Flagship (EU) researchers have taken the art of patterning nanomaterials to the next level. Precise patterning of 2D materials is a route to computation and storage using 2D materials, which can deliver better performance and much lower power consumption than today’s technology.

One of the most significant recent discoveries within physics and material technology is two-dimensional materials such as graphene. Graphene is stronger, smoother, lighter, and better at conducting heat and electricity than any other known material.

Their most unique feature is perhaps their programmability. By creating delicate patterns in these materials, we can change their properties dramatically and possibly make precisely what we need.

At DTU, scientists have worked on improving state of the art for more than a decade in patterning 2D materials, using sophisticated lithography machines in the 1500 m2 cleanroom facility. Their work is based in DTU’s Center for Nanostructured Graphene, supported by the Danish National Research Foundation and a part of The Graphene Flagship.

The electron beam lithography system in DTU Nanolab can write details down to 10 nanometers. Computer calculations can predict exactly the shape and size of patterns in the graphene to create new types of electronics. They can exploit the charge of the electron and quantum properties such as spin or valley degrees of freedom, leading to high-speed calculations with far less power consumption. These calculations, however, ask for higher resolution than even the best lithography systems can deliver: atomic resolution.

“If we really want to unlock the treasure chest for future quantum electronics scientists need to go below 10 nanometers and approach the atomic scale,” says professor and group leader at DTU Physics, Peter Bøggild.

And that is exactly what the researchers have succeeded in doing.

“We showed in 2019 that circular holes placed with just 12-nanometer spacing turn the semimetallic graphene into a semiconductor. Now we know how to create circular holes and other shapes such as triangles, with nanometer sharp corners. Such patterns can sort electrons based on their spin and create essential components for spintronics or valleytronics. The technique also works on other 2D materials. With these supersmall structures, we may create very compact and electrically tunable metalenses to be used in high-speed communication and biotechnology,” explains Peter Bøggild.

Razor-sharp triangle

The research was led by postdoc Lene Gammelgaard, an engineering graduate of DTU in 2013 who has since played a vital role in the experimental exploration of 2D materials at DTU:

“The trick is to place the nanomaterial hexagonal boron-nitride on top of the material you want to pattern. Then you drill holes with a particular etching recipe,” says Lene Gammelgaard, and continues:

“The etching process we developed over the past years down-size patterns below our electron beam lithography systems’ otherwise unbreakable limit of approximately 10 nanometers. Suppose we make a circular hole with a diameter of 20 nanometers; the hole in the graphene can then be downsized to 10 nanometers. While if we make a triangular hole, with the round holes coming from the lithography system, the downsizing will make a smaller triangle with self-sharpened corners. Usually, patterns get more imperfect when you make them smaller. This is the opposite, and this allows us to recreate the structures the theoretical predictions tell us are optimal.”

One can e.g. produce flat electronic meta-lenses – a kind of super-compact optical lens that can be controlled electrically at very high frequencies, and which according to Lene Gammelgaard can become essential components for the communication technology and biotechnology of the future.

Crystals of the material hexagonal boron nitride can be etched so that the pattern you draw at the top transforms into a smaller and razor-sharp version at the bottom. These perforations can be used as a shadow mask to draw components and circuits in graphene. This process enables a precision that is impossible with even the best lithographic techniques today. To the right are images of triangular and square holes taken with an electron microscope. Illustration: Peter Bøggild, Lene Gammelgaard og Dorte Danielsen.

Pushing the limits

The other key person is a young student, Dorte Danielsen. She got interested in nanophysics after a 9th-grade internship in 2012, won a spot in the final of a national science competition for high school students in 2014, and pursued studies in Physics and Nanotechnology under DTU’s honors program for elite students.

She explains that the mechanism behind the “super-resolution” structures is still not well understood:

“We have several possible explanations for this unexpected etching behavior, but there is still much we don’t understand. Still, it is an exciting and highly useful technique for us. At the same time, it is good news for the thousands of researchers around the world pushing the limits for 2D nanoelectronics and nanophotonics.”

Supported by the Independent Research Fund Denmark, within the METATUNE project, Dorte Danielsen will continue her work on extremely sharp nanostructures. Here, the technology she helped develop, will be used to create and explore optical metalenses that can be tuned electrically.

Science paper:
ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces

See the full article here.

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Stem Education Coalition

The Technical University of Denmark [Danmarks Tekniske Universitet](DK) is a university in the town Kongens Lyngby, 12 kilometres (7.5 mi) north of central Copenhagen, Denmark. It was founded in 1829 at the initiative of Hans Christian Ørsted as Denmark’s first polytechnic, and it is today ranked among Europe’s leading engineering institutions.

Along with École Polytechnique in Paris, EPFL (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne) [École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne](CH), Eindhoven University of Technology [Technische Universiteit Eindhoven](NL), Technical University of Munich [Technische Universität München] (DE) and Technion – Israel Institute of Technology [ הטכניון – מכון טכנולוגי לישראל] (IL), DTU is a member of EuroTech Universities Alliance.

The Technical University of Denmark was founded in 1829 as the College of Advanced Technology[Den Polytekniske Læreanstalt](NL). The Physicist Hans Christian Ørsted, at that time a professor at the University of Copenhagen [Københavns Universitet](DK), was one of the driving forces behind this initiative. He was inspired by the École Polytechnique in Paris, France which Ørsted had visited as a young scientist. The new institution was inaugurated on 5 November 1829 with Ørsted becoming its Principal, a position he held until his death in 1851.

The first home of the new college consisted of two buildings located in Studiestræde and St- Pederstræde in the center of Copenhagen. Although these buildings were expanded several times, they eventually became inadequate for the requirements of the college. In 1890 a new building complex was completed and inaugurated located in Sølvgade. The new buildings were designed by the architect Johan Daniel Herholdt.

In 1903, the College of Advanced Technology commenced the education of electrical engineers in addition to that of the construction engineers, the production engineers, and the mechanical engineers who already at that time were being educated at the college.

In the 1920s, space again became insufficient and in 1929 the foundation stone was laid for a new school at Østervold. Completion of this building was delayed by World War II and it was not completed before 1954.

From 1933, the institution was officially known as Danmarks tekniske Højskole (DtH), which commonly was translated into English, as the ‘Technical University of Denmark’. On 1 April 1994, in connection with the joining of Danmarks Ingeniørakademi (DIA) and DTH, the Danish name was changed to Danmarks Tekniske Universitet, this done to include the word ‘University’ thus giving rise to the initials DTU by which the university is commonly known today. The formal name, Den Polytekniske Læreanstalt, Danmarks Tekniske Universitet, however, still includes the original name.

In 1960 a decision was made to move the College of Advanced Technology to new and larger facilities in Lyngby north of Copenhagen. They were inaugurated on 17 May 1974.

On 23 and 24 November 1967, the University Computing Center hosted the NATO Science Committee’s Study Group first meeting discussing the newly coined term “Software Engineering”.

On 1 January 2007, the university was merged with the following Danish research centers: Forskningscenter Risø, Danmarks Fødevareforskning, Danmarks Fiskeriundersøgelser (from 1 January 2008: National Institute for Aquatic Resources; DTU Aqua), Danmarks Rumcenter, and Danmarks Transport-Forskning.

Departments:

DTU Aqua, National Institute for Aquatic Resources
DTU Business, DTU Executive School of Business
DTU Cen, Center for Electron Nanoscopy
DTU Centre for Technology Entrepreneurship
DTU Chemical Engineering, Department of Chemical and Biochemical Engineering
DTU Chemistry, Department of Chemistry
DTU Civil Engineering, Department of Civil Engineering
DTU Compute, Institut for Matematik og Computer Science
DTU Danchip, National Center for Micro and Nanofabrication
DTU Diplom, Department of Bachelor Engineering
DTU Electrical Engineering, Department of Electrical Engineering
DTU Environment, Department of Environmental Engineering
DTU Executive School of Business
DTU Food, National Food Institute

Research centers

Arctic Technology Centre
Center for Facilities Management
Center for Biological Sequence Analysis – chair Søren Brunak
Center for Information and Communication Technologies
Center for Microbial Biotechnology
Center for Phase Equilibria and Separation Processes
Center for Technology, Economics and Management
Center for Traffic and Transport
Centre for Applied Hearing Research
Centre for Electric Power and Energy
Combustion and Harmful Emission Control
The Danish Polymer Centre
IMM Statistical Consulting Center
International Centre for Indoor Environment and Energy
Centre for Advanced Food Studies
Nano-DTU
Fluid-DTU
Food-DTU
EnergiDTU

From California Institute of Technology (US) : “Finding a Metal-Oxide Needle in a Periodic Table Haystack”

From California Institute of Technology (US)

September 11, 2021

Robert Perkins
(626) 395‑1862
rperkins@caltech.edu

Materials Scientists and Data Scientists Team Up to Create New Way to Discover Potentially Useful Materials.

Coupling computer automation with an ink-jet printer originally used to print T-shirt designs, researchers at Caltech and Google have developed a high-throughput method of identifying novel materials with interesting properties. In a trial run of the process, they screened hundreds of thousands of possible new materials and discovered one made from cobalt, tantalum, and tin that has tunable transparency and acts as a good catalyst for chemical reactions while remaining stable in strong acid electrolytes.

The effort, described in a scientific article published in PNAS, was led by John Gregoire and Joel Haber of Caltech, and Lusann Yang of Google. It builds on research conducted at the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis (JCAP), a Department of Energy (US) Energy Innovation Hub at Caltech, and continues with JCAP’s successor, the Liquid Sunlight Alliance (LiSA), a DOE-funded effort that aims to streamline the complicated steps needed to convert sunlight into fuels, to make that process more efficient.

Creating new materials is not as simple as dropping a few different elements into a test tube and shaking it up to see what happens. You need the elements that you combine to bond with each other at the atomic level to create something new and different rather than just a heterogeneous mixture of ingredients. With a nearly infinite number of possible combinations of the various squares on the periodic table, the challenge is knowing which combinations will yield such a material.

“Materials discovery can be a bleak process. If you can’t predict where to find the desired properties, you could spend your entire career mixing random elements and never find anything interesting,” says Gregoire, research professor of applied physics and materials science, researcher at JCAP, and LiSA team lead.

When combining a small number of individual elements, materials scientists can often make predictions about what properties a new material might have based on its constituent parts. However, that process quickly becomes untenable when more complicated mixtures are made.

“Anything more than two elements is considered ‘high dimensional’ in materials science,” Gregoire says. “Most or all of the one- and two-metal oxides are already known,” he says. “The unknown frontier is three or more together.” (Metal oxides are solid materials that contain positively charged metal ions, or cations, and negatively charged oxygen ions, or anions; rust, for example, is iron oxide.)

Most of the materials in Earth’s crust are metal oxides, because the oxygen in the atmosphere reacts with various metals in the crust of the planet. The environmental stability of metal oxides makes them practically useful, provided that specific compositions of such oxides can be identified that will provide the mechanical, optical, electronic, and chemical properties needed for a given technology.

Although materials scientists have shown how all of these properties can be tuned through the use of various metal oxides, achieving the necessary properties for a particular application can require specific combinations of multiple elements, and finding the right ones is a daunting challenge.

To broach the three-or-more-metal-oxide frontier, Gregoire’s group drew on a decade’s worth of work by JCAP. There, researchers have developed methods to create 100,000 materials per day. One such material—discovered in this study—was produced by using repurposed ink-jet printers to “print” new materials onto glass sheets. Each combination of elements was printed as a line with a gradation of the ratio between its constituents and then oxidized at high temperature.

Each of those materials was then scanned and imaged at Caltech using a hyperspectral imaging technique co-developed with Google that can quickly capture information about the material by recording how much light it absorbs at nine different wavelengths. “It’s not a comprehensive analysis of the material, but it’s rapid and offers clues to the compositions with interesting properties,” says Haber, research chemist and material engineer at JCAP and LiSA.

In all, the Caltech team created 376752 three-metal-oxide combinations based on 10 metal elements and produced samples of each individual combination 10 different times to detect and weed out any flaws in the synthesis process. “The printing can have artifacts, which is the sacrifice you make for speed. Analyses by Google taught us to make everything 10 times to build trust in the results,” Gregoire says.

Though imperfect, the process creates three-metal materials about 1,000 times faster than traditional techniques such as vapor deposition, in which the new material is coated onto a substrate by condensing it from a vapor.

Google computer engineers then created algorithms to process the hyperspectral images and searched for specific compositions whose optical properties can only be explained by chemical interactions among the three metal elements.

“If the three elements chemically interact to provide exceptional optical properties, their interactions may also give rise to other exceptional properties,” Gregoire explains. Because the technique can identify the small fraction of compositions that show evidence of these chemical interactions, it also narrows down the haystack for materials scientists searching for needles, so to speak.

“John’s lab had the sort of problem we dream about at Google Applied Science; he can print hundreds of thousands of samples in a day, resulting in terabytes of image data,” says Google researcher Lusann Yang. “We were delighted to work closely with him at every step of this six-year collaboration, finding places to apply Google’s unique toolkit for iterative experiments on large quantities of noisy data: designing experiments, debugging hardware, processing large amounts of image data, and creating physics-inspired algorithms. The result is an experimental data set of unique breadth across many chemical spaces that I’m proud to open source.”

To validate their findings, Gregoire’s team at Caltech recreated the materials flagged as “interesting” using physical vapor deposition and analyzed them using X-ray diffraction, a slower but more thorough process than hyperspectral imaging. This type of validation revealed that the automated high-throughput process was more adept at spotting new materials than a thorough analysis of the hyperspectral data by a human scientist.

See the full article here .

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Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

Caltech campus

The California Institute of Technology (US) 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.

Caltech 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, Caltech was elected to the Association of American Universities, and the antecedents of National Aeronautics and Space Administration (US)’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which Caltech continues to manage and operate, were established between 1936 and 1943 under Theodore von Kármán.

Caltech 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 Caltech. Although Caltech 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 Caltech 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 Caltech, 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 Caltech. 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(US) as well as National Aeronautics and Space Administration(US). According to a 2015 Pomona College(US) study, Caltech ranked number one in the U.S. for the percentage of its graduates who go on to earn a PhD.

Research

Caltech 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(US); National Science Foundation(US); Department of Health and Human Services(US); Department of Defense(US), and Department of Energy(US).

In 2005, Caltech 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 JPL, Caltech also operates the Caltech Palomar Observatory(US); the Owens Valley Radio Observatory(US);the Caltech Submillimeter Observatory(US); the W. M. Keck Observatory at the Mauna Kea Observatory(US); the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory at Livingston, Louisiana and Richland, Washington; and Kerckhoff Marine Laboratory(US) in Corona del Mar, California. The Institute launched the Kavli Nanoscience Institute at Caltech 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(US), part of the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center(US) located on the Caltech campus, is the data analysis and community support center for NASA’s Spitzer Infrared Space Telescope [no longer in service].

Caltech partnered with University of California at Los Angeles(US) 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.

Caltech operates several Total Carbon Column Observing Network(US) stations as part of an international collaborative effort of measuring greenhouse gases globally. One station is on campus.