From The National Institute of Standards and Technology: “Out of the Shadows:: New Imaging Method Reveals Concealed Objects”

From The National Institute of Standards and Technology

July 19, 2022

Media Contact
Ben P. Stein
benjamin.stein@nist.gov
(301) 975-2763

Technical Contact
Erich N. Grossman
erich.grossman@nist.gov
(303) 497-5102

Even though the figure in red lies hidden, out of the direct line of sight of the figure in green, radiation naturally emitted by the concealed figure at submillimeter wavelengths betrays its presence. At these long wavelengths, many types of walls act as partial mirrors, reflecting the light into view of the green figure. Credit: NIST.

A new way of imaging concealed objects, devised by a researcher at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and his colleagues, might take all the fun out of hide-and-seek, but could also help save lives.

Imaging scenes that lie outside an observer’s direct line of sight could greatly enhance search and rescue missions, such as finding a lost child in an abandoned factory, as well as military and police surveillance operations, such as exposing a hidden terrorist or enemy stronghold. The ability to see around corners and reconstruct a full image of a hidden object or obstacle in real time also could someday improve robotic vision and the safety and accuracy of self-driving cars. (At present, the prototype method cannot create an image instantaneously.)

Most conventional methods used to image objects behind an obstruction use an external source of light — ultra-short pulses of visible or infrared laser light, for example. The light source initially illuminates a wall that scatters the light into the concealed region. When the light strikes a hidden object, the object re-scatters some of the light back to the wall where it can be detected.

However, imaging hidden objects using only visible and infrared light is challenging. At those relatively short wavelengths, a typical wall — no matter how smooth to the human touch — presents itself as a rough surface and scatters incoming light in all directions. It therefore reveals less information about objects than light reflected from a smooth or mirrored surface and requires sophisticated algorithms and significant computing time to create even a semi-sharp image. In addition, the illumination could tip off adversaries that they are under surveillance.

Other methods, which don’t require a light source, analyze shadows cast by a hidden object on a wall, or detect the heat (infrared radiation) naturally emitted by the concealed body and scattered diffusely into view. But these approaches also require extensive computing time and analysis. “A good algorithm and lots of computer power might extract an image, but not a very good one,” said NIST physicist Erich Grossman.

Grossman and his colleagues based their new approach on detecting the tiny amounts of much longer wavelength radiation — the “submillimeter” range of the spectrum of light that lies just beyond microwave radiation and which people and objects also naturally emit. At these long, invisible wavelengths, ranging from 300 micrometers up to 1 millimeter, walls made of a variety of materials appear relatively smooth and act as partial mirrors, reflecting rather than diffusely scattering into view radiation from a concealed object.

To create an image, the reflected radiation has to be directed and focused. Unlike visible light, submillimeter radiation can’t be steered by glass lenses. Instead, Grossman and his colleagues relied on curved mirrors to focus the invisible light.

Experimenting with their prototype, Grossman and his collaborators at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities in Minneapolis demonstrated that they could construct images of objects hidden behind walls in about 20 minutes.

The prototype technique employs state-of-the-art indium phosphide transistors, which amplify submillimeter radiation with little noise over a wide range of wavelengths. The method does not require complex algorithms or intensive computer analysis. “What’s cool about this method is its simplicity,” Grossman said. “There’s no quantum mechanics, no relativity, there’s nothing cryogenic or anything fancy — just transistors and a basic computer and mirrors,” he added. The entire apparatus is small enough to fit in a backpack.

The setup for the experiment at Erich Grossman’s home, where the hidden object (Grossman himself) sat just behind an occluding, or concealing, wall, out of direct view of detectors. “Wall under test” connotes the various types of walls, including ceramic tile and plywood, that the team examined to determine which were best at reflecting submillimeter radiation. Credit: E. Grossman/NIST.

With NIST facilities closed during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, Grossman used his own home — converting the bedroom of his daughter, who had left for college, into a makeshift laboratory. Grossman himself was the body hidden behind a wall.

He tested walls made of a range of common indoor building materials to determine which ones reflected enough submillimeter radiation to form an image, including wet and dry wallboard, plywood, wood paneling, unpainted cinderblock and stone kitchen tiles. Walls that reflected at least 5% of the submillimeter radiation were best at producing images of concealed bodies. These included dry wallboard, wood paneling, vinyl floor planking, plywood, stone kitchen tiles and medium-density fiberboard.

With a larger array of detectors and transistors, Grossman said that the method should be able to image hidden objects in real time.

The work was supported by NIST and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

A colleague, James Leger of University of Minnesota Twin Cities, reported the team’s findings on July 12 at the annual Imaging and Applied Optics Congress in Vancouver, BC, Canada.

Science paper:
Optica

See the full article here.

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Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

NIST Campus, Gaitherberg, MD.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology‘s Mission, Vision, Core Competencies, and Core Values

Mission

To promote U.S. innovation and industrial competitiveness by advancing measurement science, standards, and technology in ways that enhance economic security and improve our quality of life.

NIST’s vision

NIST will be the world’s leader in creating critical measurement solutions and promoting equitable standards. Our efforts stimulate innovation, foster industrial competitiveness, and improve the quality of life.

NIST’s core competencies

Measurement science
Rigorous traceability
Development and use of standards

NIST’s core values

NIST is an organization with strong values, reflected both in our history and our current work. NIST leadership and staff will uphold these values to ensure a high performing environment that is safe and respectful of all.

Perseverance: We take the long view, planning the future with scientific knowledge and imagination to ensure continued impact and relevance for our stakeholders.
Integrity: We are ethical, honest, independent, and provide an objective perspective.
Inclusivity: We work collaboratively to harness the diversity of people and ideas, both inside and outside of NIST, to attain the best solutions to multidisciplinary challenges.
Excellence: We apply rigor and critical thinking to achieve world-class results and continuous improvement in everything we do.

Background

The Articles of Confederation, ratified by the colonies in 1781, contained the clause, “The United States in Congress assembled shall also have the sole and exclusive right and power of regulating the alloy and value of coin struck by their own authority, or by that of the respective states—fixing the standards of weights and measures throughout the United States”. Article 1, section 8, of the Constitution of the United States (1789), transferred this power to Congress; “The Congress shall have power…To coin money, regulate the value thereof, and of foreign coin, and fix the standard of weights and measures”.

In January 1790, President George Washington, in his first annual message to Congress stated that, “Uniformity in the currency, weights, and measures of the United States is an object of great importance, and will, I am persuaded, be duly attended to”, and ordered Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson to prepare a plan for Establishing Uniformity in the Coinage, Weights, and Measures of the United States, afterwards referred to as the Jefferson report. On October 25, 1791, Washington appealed a third time to Congress, “A uniformity of the weights and measures of the country is among the important objects submitted to you by the Constitution and if it can be derived from a standard at once invariable and universal, must be no less honorable to the public council than conducive to the public convenience”, but it was not until 1838, that a uniform set of standards was worked out. In 1821, John Quincy Adams had declared “Weights and measures may be ranked among the necessities of life to every individual of human society”.

From 1830 until 1901, the role of overseeing weights and measures was carried out by the Office of Standard Weights and Measures, which was part of the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey in the Department of the Treasury.

Bureau of Standards

In 1901 in response to a bill proposed by Congressman James H. Southard (R- Ohio) the National Bureau of Standards was founded with the mandate to provide standard weights and measures and to serve as the national physical laboratory for the United States. (Southard had previously sponsored a bill for metric conversion of the United States.)

President Theodore Roosevelt appointed Samuel W. Stratton as the first director. The budget for the first year of operation was $40,000. The Bureau took custody of the copies of the kilogram and meter bars that were the standards for US measures, and set up a program to provide metrology services for United States scientific and commercial users. A laboratory site was constructed in Washington DC (US) and instruments were acquired from the national physical laboratories of Europe. In addition to weights and measures the Bureau developed instruments for electrical units and for measurement of light. In 1905 a meeting was called that would be the first National Conference on Weights and Measures.

Initially conceived as purely a metrology agency the Bureau of Standards was directed by Herbert Hoover to set up divisions to develop commercial standards for materials and products. Some of these standards were for products intended for government use; but product standards also affected private-sector consumption. Quality standards were developed for products including some types of clothing; automobile brake systems and headlamps; antifreeze; and electrical safety. During World War I, the Bureau worked on multiple problems related to war production even operating its own facility to produce optical glass when European supplies were cut off. Between the wars Harry Diamond of the Bureau developed a blind approach radio aircraft landing system. During World War II military research and development was carried out including development of radio propagation forecast methods; the proximity fuze and the standardized airframe used originally for Project Pigeon; and shortly afterwards the autonomously radar-guided Bat anti-ship guided bomb and the Kingfisher family of torpedo-carrying missiles.

In 1948, financed by the United States Air Force the Bureau began design and construction of SEAC: the Standards Eastern Automatic Computer. The computer went into operation in May 1950 using a combination of vacuum tubes and solid-state diode logic. About the same time the Standards Western Automatic Computer, was built at the Los Angeles office of the NBS by Harry Huskey and used for research there. A mobile version- DYSEAC- was built for the Signal Corps in 1954.

Due to a changing mission, the “National Bureau of Standards” became the “ The National Institute of Standards and Technology” in 1988.

Following September 11, 2001, NIST conducted the official investigation into the collapse of the World Trade Center buildings.

Organization

NIST is headquartered in Gaithersburg, Maryland, and operates a facility in Boulder, Colorado, which was dedicated by President Eisenhower in 1954. NIST’s activities are organized into laboratory programs and extramural programs. Effective October 1, 2010, NIST was realigned by reducing the number of NIST laboratory units from ten to six. NIST Laboratories include:

Communications Technology Laboratory (CTL)
Engineering Laboratory (EL)
Information Technology Laboratory (ITL)
Center for Neutron Research (NCNR)
Material Measurement Laboratory (MML)
Physical Measurement Laboratory (PML)

Extramural programs include:

Hollings Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP), a nationwide network of centers to assist small and mid-sized manufacturers to create and retain jobs, improve efficiencies, and minimize waste through process improvements and to increase market penetration with innovation and growth strategies;
Technology Innovation Program (TIP), a grant program where NIST and industry partners cost share the early-stage development of innovative but high-risk technologies;
Baldrige Performance Excellence Program, which administers the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, the nation’s highest award for performance and business excellence.

NIST’s Boulder laboratories are best known for NIST‑F1 which houses an atomic clock. NIST‑F1 serves as the source of the nation’s official time. From its measurement of the natural resonance frequency of cesium—which defines the second—NIST broadcasts time signals via longwave radio station WWVB near Fort Collins in Colorado, and shortwave radio stations WWV and WWVH, located near Fort Collins and Kekaha in Hawai’i, respectively.

NIST also operates a neutron science user facility: the NIST Center for Neutron Research (NCNR). The NCNR provides scientists access to a variety of neutron scattering instruments which they use in many research fields (materials science; fuel cells; biotechnology etc.).

The SURF III Synchrotron Ultraviolet Radiation Facility is a source of synchrotron radiation in continuous operation since 1961. SURF III now serves as the US national standard for source-based radiometry throughout the generalized optical spectrum. All NASA-borne extreme-ultraviolet observation instruments have been calibrated at SURF since the 1970s, and SURF is used for measurement and characterization of systems for extreme ultraviolet lithography.

The Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology (CNST) performs research in nanotechnology, both through internal research efforts and by running a user-accessible cleanroom nanomanufacturing facility. This “NanoFab” is equipped with tools for lithographic patterning and imaging (e.g., electron microscopes and atomic force microscopes).

Committees

NIST has seven standing committees:

Technical Guidelines Development Committee (TGDC)
Advisory Committee on Earthquake Hazards Reduction (ACEHR)
National Construction Safety Team Advisory Committee (NCST Advisory Committee)
Information Security and Privacy Advisory Board (ISPAB)
Visiting Committee on Advanced Technology (VCAT)
Board of Overseers for the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award (MBNQA Board of Overseers)
Manufacturing Extension Partnership National Advisory Board (MEPNAB)

Measurements and standards

As part of its mission, NIST supplies industry, academia, government, and other users with over 1,300 Standard Reference Materials (SRMs). These artifacts are certified as having specific characteristics or component content, used as calibration standards for measuring equipment and procedures, quality control benchmarks for industrial processes, and experimental control samples.

Handbook 44

NIST publishes the Handbook 44 each year after the annual meeting of the National Conference on Weights and Measures (NCWM). Each edition is developed through cooperation of the Committee on Specifications and Tolerances of the NCWM and the Weights and Measures Division (WMD) of the NIST. The purpose of the book is a partial fulfillment of the statutory responsibility for “cooperation with the states in securing uniformity of weights and measures laws and methods of inspection”.

NIST has been publishing various forms of what is now the Handbook 44 since 1918 and began publication under the current name in 1949. The 2010 edition conforms to the concept of the primary use of the SI (metric) measurements recommended by the Omnibus Foreign Trade and Competitiveness Act of 1988.

From Berkeley Engineering: “New single-mode semiconductor laser delivers power with scalability”

From Berkeley Engineering

At

The University of California-Berkeley

June 29, 2022
Sarah Yang

Schematic of the Berkeley Surface Emitting Laser (BerkSEL) illustrating the pump beam (blue) and the lasing beam (red). The unconventional design of the semiconductor membrane synchronizes all unit-cells (or resonators) in phase so that they are all participating in the lasing mode. (Image courtesy of the Kanté group)

Berkeley engineers have created a new type of semiconductor laser that accomplishes an elusive goal in the field of optics: the ability to emit a single mode of light while maintaining the ability to scale up in size and power. It is an achievement that means size does not have to come at the expense of coherence, enabling lasers to be more powerful and to cover longer distances for many applications.

A research team led by Boubacar Kanté, Chenming Hu Associate Professor in UC Berkeley’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (EECS) and faculty scientist at the Materials Sciences Division of the DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, showed that a semiconductor membrane perforated with evenly spaced and same-sized holes functioned as a perfect scalable laser cavity. They demonstrated that the laser emits a consistent single wavelength regardless of the size of the cavity.

Top view of a scanning electron micrograph of the Berkeley Surface Emitting Laser (BerkSEL). The hexagonal lattice photonic crystal (PhC) forms an electromagnetic cavity. (Image courtesy of the Kanté group)

The researchers described their invention, dubbed Berkeley Surface Emitting Lasers (BerkSELs), in a study published June 29, 2022 in the journal Nature.

“Increasing both size and power of a single-mode laser has been a challenge in optics since the first laser was built in 1960,” said Kanté. “Six decades later, we show that it is possible to achieve both these qualities in a laser. I consider this the most important paper my group has published to date.”

Despite the vast array of applications ushered in by the invention of the laser — from surgical tools to barcode scanners to precision etching — there has been a persistent limit that researchers in optics have had to contend with. The coherent, single-wavelength directional light that is a defining characteristic of a laser starts to break down as the size of the laser cavity increases. The standard workaround is to use external mechanisms, such as a waveguide, to amplify the beam.

“Using another medium to amplify laser light takes up a lot of space,” said Kanté. “By eliminating the need for external amplification, we can shrink the size and increase the efficiency of computer chips and other components that rely upon lasers.”

The study’s results are particularly relevant to vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers, or VCSELs, in which laser light is emitted vertically out of the chip. Such lasers are used in a wide range of applications, including fiber optic communications, computer mice, laser printers and biometric identification systems.

VCSELs are typically tiny, measuring a few microns wide. The current strategy used to boost their power is to cluster hundreds of individual VCSELs together. Because the lasers are independent, their phase and wavelength differ, so their power does not combine coherently.

“This can be tolerated for applications like facial recognition, but it’s not acceptable when precision is critical, like in communications or for surgery,” said study co-lead author Rushin Contractor, an EECS Ph.D. student.

Kanté compares the extra efficiency and power enabled by BerkSEL’s single-mode lasing to a crowd of people getting a stalled bus to move. Multi-mode lasing is akin to people pushing in different directions, he said. It would not only be less effective, but it could also be counterproductive if people are pushing in opposite directions. Single-mode lasing in BerkSELs is comparable to each person in the crowd pushing the bus in the same direction. This is far more efficient than what is done in existing lasers where, using the same analogy, only part of the crowd contributes to pushing the bus.

Schematic showing the “Dirac cones.” Light is emitted synchronously from the entire semiconductor cavity as a result of the Dirac point singularity. (Image courtesy of the Kanté group)

The study found that the BerkSEL design enabled the single-mode light emission because of the physics of the light passing through the holes in the membrane, a 200-nanometer-thick layer of indium gallium arsenide phosphide, a semiconductor commonly used in fiber optics and telecommunications technology. The holes, which were etched using lithography, had to be a fixed size, shape and distance apart.

The researchers explained that the periodic holes in the membrane became Dirac points, a topological feature of two-dimensional materials based on the linear dispersion of energy. They are named after English physicist and Nobel laureate Paul Dirac, known for his early contributions to quantum mechanics and quantum electrodynamics.

The researchers point out that the phase of light that propagates from one point to the other is equal to the refractive index multiplied by the distance traveled. Because the refractive index is zero at the Dirac point, light emitted from different parts of the semiconductor are exactly in phase and thus optically the same.

“The membrane in our study had about 3000 holes but theoretically it could have been 1 million or 1 billon holes, and the result would have been the same,” said study co-lead author, Walid Redjem, an EECS postdoctoral researcher.

The researchers used a high-energy pulsed laser to optically pump and provide energy to the BerkSEL devices. They measured the emission from each aperture using a confocal microscope optimized for near-infrared spectroscopy.

The semiconductor material and the dimensions of the structure used in this study were selected to enable lasing at telecommunications wavelength. Authors noted that BerkSELs can emit different target wavelengths by adapting the design specifications, such as hole size and semiconductor material.

Other study authors are Wanwoo Noh, co-lead author who earned his Ph.D. degree in EECS in May 2022; Wayesh Qarony, Scott Dhuey and Adam Schwartzberg from Berkeley Lab; and Emma Martin, a Ph.D. student in EECS.

The Office of Naval Research provided the primary support for this study. Additional funding came from the National Science Foundation, the Berkeley Lab, the Moore Inventor Fellows program and UC Berkeley’s Bakar Fellowship.

See the full article here .

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Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

The College of Engineering, also known informally as Berkeley Engineering or CoE, is one of the fourteen schools and colleges at the University of California, Berkeley. Established in 1931, the college is considered among the most prestigious engineering schools in the world, ranked third by U.S. News & World Report and with an acceptance rate of 8%. Berkeley Engineering is particularly well known for producing many successful entrepreneurs; among its alumni are co-founders and CEOs of some of the largest companies in the world, including Apple, Boeing, Google, Intel, and Tesla.

The college is currently situated in 14 buildings on the northeast side of the central campus, and also operates at the 150 acre (61 ha) Richmond Field Station. With the Haas School of Business, the college confers joint degrees and advises the university’s resident startup incubator, Berkeley SkyDeck.

Departments

Aerospace Engineering
Bioengineering (BioE)
Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE)
Development Engineering (DevEng)
Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (EECS)
Engineering Science
Energy Engineering
Engineering Mathematics and Statistics (EMS)
Engineering Physics
Environmental Engineering Science (EES)
Industrial Engineering and Operations Research (IEOR)
Materials Science and Engineering (MSE)
Mechanical Engineering (ME)
Nuclear Engineering (NE)

The College of Letters and Science also offers a Bachelor of Arts in computer science, which requires many of the same courses as the College of Engineering’s Bachelor of Science in EECS, but has different admissions and graduation criteria. Berkeley’s chemical engineering department is under the College of Chemistry.

Research units

All research facilities are managed by one of five Organized Research Units (ORUs):

Earthquake Engineering Research Center – research and public safety programs against the destructive effects of earthquakes
Electronics Research Laboratory – the largest ORU; advanced research in novel areas within seven different university departments, organized into five main divisions:
Berkeley Sensor & Actuator Center
Berkeley Wireless Research Center
Berkeley Northside Research Group
Micro Systems Group
Engineering Systems Research Center – focuses on manufacturing, mechatronics, and microelectro mechanical systems (MEMS)
Institute for Environmental Science and Engineering – focuses on applying basic research to current and future environmental problems
Institute of Transportation Studies – sponsors research in transportation planning, policy analysis, environmental concerns and transportation system performance

Major research centers and programs

Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation
Berkeley Institute of Design
Berkeley Multimedia Research Center
Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS)
Center for Intelligent Systems – developing a unified theoretical foundation for intelligent systems.
Consortium on Green Design and Manufacturing
Digital Library Project
UCSF/Berkeley Ergonomics Program
International Computer Science Institute – basic research institute focusing on Internet architecture, speech and language processing, artificial intelligence, and cognitive and theoretical computer science
Intel Research Laboratory @ Berkeley
Integrated Materials Laboratory – facilities for research in nano-structure growth, processing, and characterization
Microfabrication Laboratory
The Millennium Project – developing a hierarchical campus-wide “cluster of clusters” to support advanced computational applications
Nokia Research Center @ Berkeley
Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center
Partners for Advanced Transit & Highways – researching ways to improve the operation of California’s state highway system
Power Systems Engineering Research Center

The The University of California-Berkeley is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the state’s first land-grant university, it was the first campus of the University of California system and a founding member of the Association of American Universities . Its 14 colleges and schools offer over 350 degree programs and enroll some 31,000 undergraduate and 12,000 graduate students. Berkeley is ranked among the world’s top universities by major educational publications.

Berkeley hosts many leading research institutes, including the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute and the Space Sciences Laboratory. It founded and maintains close relationships with three national laboratories at DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and DOE’s Los Alamos National Lab, and has played a prominent role in many scientific advances, from the Manhattan Project and the discovery of 16 chemical elements to breakthroughs in computer science and genomics. Berkeley is also known for student activism and the Free Speech Movement of the 1960s.

Berkeley alumni and faculty count among their ranks 110 Nobel laureates (34 alumni), 25 Turing Award winners (11 alumni), 14 Fields Medalists, 28 Wolf Prize winners, 103 MacArthur “Genius Grant” recipients, 30 Pulitzer Prize winners, and 19 Academy Award winners. The university has produced seven heads of state or government; five chief justices, including Chief Justice of the United States Earl Warren; 21 cabinet-level officials; 11 governors; and 25 living billionaires. It is also a leading producer of Fulbright Scholars, MacArthur Fellows, and Marshall Scholars. Berkeley alumni, widely recognized for their entrepreneurship, have founded many notable companies.

Berkeley’s athletic teams compete in Division I of the NCAA, primarily in the Pac-12 Conference, and are collectively known as the California Golden Bears. The university’s teams have won 107 national championships, and its students and alumni have won 207 Olympic medals.

Made possible by President Lincoln’s signing of the Morrill Act in 1862, the University of California was founded in 1868 as the state’s first land-grant university by inheriting certain assets and objectives of the private College of California and the public Agricultural, Mining, and Mechanical Arts College. Although this process is often incorrectly mistaken for a merger, the Organic Act created a “completely new institution” and did not actually merge the two precursor entities into the new university. The Organic Act states that the “University shall have for its design, to provide instruction and thorough and complete education in all departments of science, literature and art, industrial and professional pursuits, and general education, and also special courses of instruction in preparation for the professions”.

Ten faculty members and 40 students made up the fledgling university when it opened in Oakland in 1869. Frederick H. Billings, a trustee of the College of California, suggested that a new campus site north of Oakland be named in honor of Anglo-Irish philosopher George Berkeley. The university began admitting women the following year. In 1870, Henry Durant, founder of the College of California, became its first president. With the completion of North and South Halls in 1873, the university relocated to its Berkeley location with 167 male and 22 female students.

Beginning in 1891, Phoebe Apperson Hearst made several large gifts to Berkeley, funding a number of programs and new buildings and sponsoring, in 1898, an international competition in Antwerp, Belgium, where French architect Émile Bénard submitted the winning design for a campus master plan.

20th century

In 1905, the University Farm was established near Sacramento, ultimately becoming the University of California-Davis. In 1919, Los Angeles State Normal School became the southern branch of the University, which ultimately became the University of California-Los Angeles. By 1920s, the number of campus buildings had grown substantially and included twenty structures designed by architect John Galen Howard.

In 1917, one of the nation’s first ROTC programs was established at Berkeley and its School of Military Aeronautics began training pilots, including Gen. Jimmy Doolittle. Berkeley ROTC alumni include former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and Army Chief of Staff Frederick C. Weyand as well as 16 other generals. In 1926, future fleet admiral Chester W. Nimitz established the first Naval ROTC unit at Berkeley.

In the 1930s, Ernest Lawrence helped establish the Radiation Laboratory (now DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (US)) and invented the cyclotron, which won him the Nobel physics prize in 1939. Using the cyclotron, Berkeley professors and Berkeley Lab researchers went on to discover 16 chemical elements—more than any other university in the world. In particular, during World War II and following Glenn Seaborg’s then-secret discovery of plutonium, Ernest Orlando Lawrence’s Radiation Laboratory began to contract with the U.S. Army to develop the atomic bomb. Physics professor J. Robert Oppenheimer was named scientific head of the Manhattan Project in 1942. Along with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley founded and was then a partner in managing two other labs, Los Alamos National Laboratory (1943) and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (1952).

By 1942, the American Council on Education ranked Berkeley second only to Harvard University in the number of distinguished departments.

In 1952, the University of California reorganized itself into a system of semi-autonomous campuses, with each campus given its own chancellor, and Clark Kerr became Berkeley’s first Chancellor, while Sproul remained in place as the President of the University of California.

Berkeley gained a worldwide reputation for political activism in the 1960s. In 1964, the Free Speech Movement organized student resistance to the university’s restrictions on political activities on campus—most conspicuously, student activities related to the Civil Rights Movement. The arrest in Sproul Plaza of Jack Weinberg, a recent Berkeley alumnus and chair of Campus CORE, in October 1964, prompted a series of student-led acts of formal remonstrance and civil disobedience that ultimately gave rise to the Free Speech Movement, which movement would prevail and serve as precedent for student opposition to America’s involvement in the Vietnam War.

In 1982, the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI) was established on campus with support from the National Science Foundation and at the request of three Berkeley mathematicians — Shiing-Shen Chern, Calvin Moore and Isadore M. Singer. The institute is now widely regarded as a leading center for collaborative mathematical research, drawing thousands of visiting researchers from around the world each year.

21st century

In the current century, Berkeley has become less politically active and more focused on entrepreneurship and fundraising, especially for STEM disciplines.

Modern Berkeley students are less politically radical, with a greater percentage of moderates and conservatives than in the 1960s and 70s. Democrats outnumber Republicans on the faculty by a ratio of 9:1. On the whole, Democrats outnumber Republicans on American university campuses by a ratio of 10:1.

In 2007, the Energy Biosciences Institute was established with funding from BP and Stanley Hall, a research facility and headquarters for the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences, opened. The next few years saw the dedication of the Center for Biomedical and Health Sciences, funded by a lead gift from billionaire Li Ka-shing; the opening of Sutardja Dai Hall, home of the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society; and the unveiling of Blum Hall, housing the Blum Center for Developing Economies. Supported by a grant from alumnus James Simons, the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing was established in 2012. In 2014, Berkeley and its sister campus, University of California-San Fransisco, established the Innovative Genomics Institute, and, in 2020, an anonymous donor pledged $252 million to help fund a new center for computing and data science.

Since 2000, Berkeley alumni and faculty have received 40 Nobel Prizes, behind only Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology among US universities; five Turing Awards, behind only MIT and Stanford University; and five Fields Medals, second only to Princeton University (US). According to PitchBook, Berkeley ranks second, just behind Stanford University, in producing VC-backed entrepreneurs.

From The University of Texas-Dallas : “Physicists Shine Light on Solid Way To Extend Excitons’ Life”

From The University of Texas-Dallas

June 17, 2022
Stephen Fontenot,
UT Dallas,
972-883-4405
stephen.fontenot@utdallas.edu,

Dr. Anton Malko’s Optics and Ultrafast Spectroscopy Laboratory focuses on the science and engineering of excitonic processes in various novel nanomaterials and hybrid structures. Malko and fellow researchers tested ultrathin semiconductors made with a method called laser-assisted synthesis technique in a recent study.

Optics researchers at The University of Texas at Dallas have shown for the first time that a new method for manufacturing ultrathin semiconductors yields material in which excitons survive up to 100 times longer than in materials created with previous methods.

The findings show that excitons, quasiparticles that transport energy, last long enough for a broad range of potential applications, including as bits in quantum computing devices.

Dr. Anton Malko, professor of physics in the School of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, is corresponding author of a paper published online March 30 in Advanced Materials that describes tests on ultrathin semiconductors made with a recently developed method called laser-assisted synthesis technique (LAST). The findings show novel quantum physics at work.

Semiconductors are a class of crystalline solids whose electrical conductivity is between that of a conductor and an insulator. This conductivity can be externally controlled, either by doping or electrical gating, making them key elements for the diodes and transistors that underpin all modern electronic technology.

Two-dimensional transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) are a novel type of ultrathin semiconductor consisting of a transition metal and a chalcogen element arranged in one atomic layer. While TMDs have been explored for a decade or so, the 2D form that Malko examined has advantages in scalability and optoelectronic properties.

“LAST is a very pure method. You take pure molybdenum or tungsten, and pure selenium or sulfur, and evaporate them under intense laser light,” Malko said. “Those atoms are distributed onto a substrate and make the two-dimensional TMD layer less than 1 nanometer thick.”

A material’s optical properties are partially determined by the behavior of excitons, which are quasiparticles that can transport energy while remaining electrically neutral.

“When a semiconductor absorbs a photon, it creates in the semiconductor a negatively charged electron paired with a positive hole, to maintain neutral charge. This pair is the exciton. The two parts are not completely free from each other — they still have a Coulomb interaction between them,” Malko said.

Malko and his team were surprised to discover that excitons in LAST-produced TMDs lasted up to 100 times longer than those in other TMD materials.

“We quickly found that, optically speaking, these 2D samples behave totally differently from any we’ve seen in 10 years working with TMDs,” he said. “When we started to look deeper at it, we realized it’s not a fluke; it’s repeatable and dependent on growth conditions.”

These longer lifetimes, Malko believes, are caused by indirect excitons, which are optically inactive.

“These excitons are used as a kind of reservoir to slowly feed the optically active excitons,” he said.

Lead study author Dr. Navendu Mondal, a former UT Dallas postdoctoral researcher who is now a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellow at Imperial College London, said he believes the indirect excitons exist due to the abnormal amount of strain between the monolayer TMD material and the substrate on which it grows.

“Strain-controlling in atomically thin monolayer of TMDs is an important tool to tailor their optoelectronic properties,” Mondal said. “Their electronic band-structure is highly sensitive to structural deformations. Under enough strain, band-gap modifications cause formation of various indirect ‘dark’ excitons that are optically inactive. Through this finding, we reveal how the presence of these hidden dark excitons influences those excitons created directly by photons.”

Malko said the built-in strain in 2D TMDs is comparable to what would be induced by pressing on the material with externally placed micro- or nanosize pillars, although it is not a viable technological option for such thin layers.

“That strain is crucial for creating these optically inactive, indirect excitons,” he said. “If you remove the substrate, the strain is released, and this wonderful optical response is gone.”

Malko said the indirect excitons can be both electronically controlled and converted into photons opening a path to the development of new optoelectronic devices.

“This increased lifespan has very interesting potential applications,” he said. “When an exciton has a lifespan of only about 100 picoseconds or less, there is no time to use it. But in this material, we can create a reservoir of inactive excitons that live much longer — a few nanoseconds instead of hundreds of picoseconds. You can do a lot with this.”

Malko said the results of the research are an important proof-of-concept for future quantum-scale devices.

“It’s the first time we know of that anyone has made this fundamental observation of such long-living excitations in TMD materials — long enough to be usable as a quantum bit — just like an electron in a transistor or even just for light harvesting in a solar cell,” he said. “Nothing in the literature can explain these superlong exciton lifetimes, but we now understand why they have these characteristics.”

The researchers next will try to manipulate excitons with an electric field, which is a key step toward creating quantum-level logic elements.

“Classical semiconductors have already been miniaturized down to the doorstep before quantum effects change the game entirely,” Malko said. “If you can apply gate voltage and show that 2D TMD materials will work for future electronic devices, it’s a huge step. The atomic monolayer in 2D TMD material is 10 times smaller than the size limit with silicon. But can you create logic elements at that size? That’s what we need to find out.”

Other key contributors to this research are Dr. Yuri Gartstein, associate professor of physics at UT Dallas who did computational modeling that explained the reservoir behavior and coupling between different exciton species; and Dr. Masoud Mahjouri-Samani and graduate student Nurul Azam from Auburn University, who developed and used the LAST method to create the semiconductor material.

Funding for the research came from the U.S. Department of Energy, Basic Energy Sciences program (BES award #DE-SC0010697).

See the full article here .

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The University of Texas at Dallas is a Carnegie R1 classification (Doctoral Universities – Highest research activity) institution, located in a suburban setting 20 miles north of downtown Dallas. The University enrolls more than 27,600 students — 18,380 undergraduate and 9,250 graduate —and offers a broad array of bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degree programs.

Established by Eugene McDermott, J. Erik Jonsson and Cecil Green, the founders of Texas Instruments, UT Dallas is a young institution driven by the entrepreneurial spirit of its founders and their commitment to academic excellence. In 1969, the public research institution joined The University of Texas System and became The University of Texas at Dallas.

A high-energy, nimble, innovative institution, UT Dallas offers top-ranked science, engineering and business programs and has gained prominence for a breadth of educational paths from audiology to arts and technology. UT Dallas’ faculty includes a Nobel laureate, six members of the National Academies and more than 560 tenured and tenure-track professors.

From The University of Exeter (UK) : “Breakthrough in quest to control light to evolve next generation of quantum sensing and computing”

From The University of Exeter (UK)

6.20.22

This is a pivotal breakthrough in the quest to control light to evolve the next generation of quantum sensing and computing.

Scientists have made a pivotal new breakthrough in the quest to control light to evolve the next generation of quantum sensing and computing.

The team of researchers, including Dr Oleksandr Kyriienko from the University of Exeter, has shown that controlling light can be achieved by inducing and measuring a nonlinear phase shift down to a single polariton level.

Polaritons are hybrid particles that combine properties of light and matter. They arise in optical structures at strong light-matter coupling, where photons hybridize with underlying particles in the materials – quantum well excitons (bound electron-hole pairs).

The new research, led by experimental group of Prof D Krizhanovskii from the University of Sheffield, has observed that an interaction between polaritons in micropillars leads to a cross-phase-modulation between modes of different polarization.

The change of phase is significant even in the presence of (on average) a single polariton, and can be further increased in structures with stronger confinement of light. This brings an opportunity for quantum polaritonic effects that can be used for quantum sensing and computing.

Theoretical analysis, led by Dr Oleksandr Kyriienko, shows the observed single polariton phase shift can be further increased, and by cascading micropillars offers a path towards polaritonic quantum gates.

Quantum effects with weak light beams can in turn help detecting chemicals, gas leakage, and perform computation at largely increased speed.

The research is published by Nature Photonics.

Dr Kyriienko said: “The experimental results reveal that quantum effects at single polariton level can be measured in a single micropillar. From the theory point of view, it is important to increase phase shifts and develop the system into an optical controlled phase gate. We will definitely see more efforts to build quantum polaritonic lattices as a quantum technology platform.”

Polaritons have proven to be an excellent platform for nonlinear optics, where particles enjoy increased coherence due to cavity field and strong nonlinear from exciton-exciton scattering.

Previously, polaritonic experiments led to observation of polaritonic Bose-Einstein condensation and various macroscopic nonlinear effects, including formation of solitons and vortices. However, the observation of quantum polaritonic effects in the low occupation limit remains an uncharted field.

The study shows that polaritons can sustain nonlinearity and coherence at extremely small occupations. This triggers a search for polaritonic systems that can further enhance quantum effects and operate as quantum devices.

Dr Paul Walker, the corresponding author of the study, explains: “We have used high quality micropillars from gallium arsenide provided by collaborators from University of Paris Saclay, France. These pillars confine modes of different polarization that are close in energy. By pumping light into one of the modes (fundamental), we probe a signal sent into another (higher energy) mode, and observe that the presence of weak (single photon) pulse leads to polarization rotation. This can be seen as a controlled phase rotation.”

The senior author for the study Prof Krizhanovskii concludes: “In the presented experiment we have made a first step to see single-polariton effects. There is certainly a room for improvement. In fact, using cavities of smaller size and optimizing the structure we expect to increase phase shift orders of magnitude. This will establish the state-of-the-art for future polaritonic chips.”

See the full article here.

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The The University of Exeter (UK) is a public research university in Exeter, Devon, South West England, United Kingdom. It was founded and received its royal charter in 1955, although its predecessor institutions, St Luke’s College, Exeter School of Science, Exeter School of Art, and the Camborne School of Mines were established in 1838, 1855, 1863, and 1888 respectively. In post-nominals, the University of Exeter is abbreviated as Exon. (from the Latin Exoniensis), and is the suffix given to honorary and academic degrees from the university.

The university has four campuses: Streatham and St Luke’s (both of which are in Exeter); and Truro and Penryn (both of which are in Cornwall). The university is primarily located in the city of Exeter, Devon, where it is the principal higher education institution. Streatham is the largest campus containing many of the university’s administrative buildings. The Penryn campus is maintained in conjunction with Falmouth University (UK) under the Combined Universities in Cornwall (CUC) initiative. The Exeter Streatham Campus Library holds more than 1.2 million physical library resources, including historical journals and special collections. The annual income of the institution for 2017–18 was £415.5 million of which £76.1 million was from research grants and contracts, with an expenditure of £414.2 million.

Exeter is a member of the Russell Group of research-intensive UK universities and is also a member of Association of Commonwealth Universities, the European University Association (EU), and and an accredited institution of the Association of MBAs (AMBA).

From Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich [Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München] (DE) : “Controlling the Waveform of Ultrashort Infrared Pulses”

From Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich [Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München] (DE)

3 Jun 2022

An international team of laser physicists of the attoworld team at LMU and the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics has achieved unprecedented control over light pulses in the mid-infrared wavelength range.

Generation of ultrashort laser pulses: image from the laboratory of co-author Alexander Weigel. | © Thorsten Naeser / LMU.

Ultrashort infrared light pulses are the key to a wide range of technological applications. The oscillating infrared light field can excite molecules in a sample to vibrate at specific frequencies, or drive ultrafast electric currents in semiconductors. Anyone intending to exploit the oscillating waveform of ultrashort light pulses, to drive cutting-edge electro-optical processes for example, faces the same question — how to best control the waveform themselves. The generation of ultrashort pulses with adjustable waveforms has been demonstrated in different wavelength ranges like the UV-visible and the near-infrared.

Physicists from the attoworld team at the LMU, the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics (MPQ) and the Hungarian Center for Molecular Fingerprinting (CMF) have now succeeded in generating ultrashort mid-infrared pulses and precisely controlling their electric-field waveforms.

Science paper:
Nature Photonics

With this infrared waveform manipulator at hand, new possibilities of optical control for biomedical applications and quantum electronics come into reach.

Stabilized Laser

The basis for the new mid-infrared source is a stabilized laser system that generates light pulses with a precisely defined waveform at near-infrared wavelengths. The pulses consist of only one oscillation of the light wave and are thus only a few femtoseconds long. When these pulses are sent into a suitable nonlinear crystal, the generation of long-wavelength infrared pulses can be induced by taking advantage of complex frequency-mixing processes. In this way, the team succeeded in producing light pulses with an exceptionally large spectral coverage of more than three optical octaves, from 1 to 12 micrometres. The researchers were not only able to understand and simulate the underlying physics of the mixing processes, but also developed a new approach to precisely control the oscillations of the generated mid-infrared light via the tuning of the laser input parameters.

Speeding up electronics

Ultrashort laser pulses are sent into a nonlinear crystal and undergo complex frequency-mixing processes. | © Dennis Luck, Alexander Gelin.

The resulting adjustable waveforms can, for example, selectively trigger certain electronic processes in solids, which could allow to achieve much higher electronic signal processing speeds in future. “On this basis, one could envision the development of light-controlled electronics,” explains Philipp Steinleitner, one of the three lead authors of the study. “If opto-electronic devices were to operate at frequencies of the generated light, you could speed up today’s electronics by at least a factor of 1000.”

The attoworld physicists are paying particular attention to the use of the new light technology for the spectroscopy of molecules. When mid-infrared light passes through a sample liquid, for example human blood, molecules in the sample begin to oscillate and in turn emit characteristic light waves. Detecting the molecular response provides a unique fingerprint that depends on the exact composition of the sample. “With our laser technology, we have significantly expanded the controllable wavelength range in the infrared,” says Nathalie Nagl, also first author of the study. “The additional wavelengths give us the opportunity to analyze even more precisely how a mixture of molecules is composed,” she continues.

Increasing the reliability of medical diagnostics

In the attoworld group, colleagues from the Broadband Infrared Diagnostics (BIRD) team led by Mihaela Zigman and the CMF Research team led by Alexander Weigel are particularly interested in measuring the precise infrared molecular fingerprints of human blood samples. The vision is to identify characteristic signatures that allow to diagnose diseases like cancer. A developing tumor, for example, leads to small and highly complex changes in the molecular composition of the blood. The goal is to detect these changes, and to enable the early diagnosis of diseases by measuring the infrared fingerprint of a simple drop of human blood.

“In the future, our laser technology will allow our colleagues to detect previously undetectable changes in specific biomolecules such as proteins or lipids. It thus increases the reliability of future medical diagnostics using infrared laser technology,” says Maciej Kowalczyk, also first author of the study.

See the full article here.

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Welcome to Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich [Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München] (DE) – the University in the heart of Munich. LMU is recognized as one of Europe’s premier academic and research institutions. Since our founding in 1472, LMU has attracted inspired scholars and talented students from all over the world, keeping the University at the nexus of ideas that challenge and change our complex world.

Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich [Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München] (DE) is a public research university located in Munich, Germany.

The University of Munich is Germany’s sixth-oldest university in continuous operation. Originally established in Ingolstadt in 1472 by Duke Ludwig IX of Bavaria-Landshut, the university was moved in 1800 to Landshut by King Maximilian I of Bavaria when Ingolstadt was threatened by the French, before being relocated to its present-day location in Munich in 1826 by King Ludwig I of Bavaria. In 1802, the university was officially named Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität by King Maximilian I of Bavaria in his as well as the university’s original founder’s honour.

The University of Munich is associated with 43 Nobel laureates (as of October 2020). Among these were Wilhelm Röntgen, Max Planck, Werner Heisenberg, Otto Hahn and Thomas Mann. Pope Benedict XVI was also a student and professor at the university. Among its notable alumni, faculty and researchers are inter alia Rudolf Peierls, Josef Mengele, Richard Strauss, Walter Benjamin, Joseph Campbell, Muhammad Iqbal, Marie Stopes, Wolfgang Pauli, Bertolt Brecht, Max Horkheimer, Karl Loewenstein, Carl Schmitt, Gustav Radbruch, Ernst Cassirer, Ernst Bloch, Konrad Adenauer. The LMU has recently been conferred the title of “University of Excellence” under the German Universities Excellence Initiative.

LMU is currently the second-largest university in Germany in terms of student population; in the winter semester of 2018/2019, the university had a total of 51,606 matriculated students. Of these, 9,424 were freshmen while international students totalled 8,875 or approximately 17% of the student population. As for operating budget, the university records in 2018 a total of 734,9 million euros in funding without the university hospital; with the university hospital, the university has a total funding amounting to approximately 1.94 billion euros.

Faculties

LMU’s Institute of Systematic Botany is located at Botanischer Garten München-Nymphenburg
Faculty of chemistry buildings at the Martinsried campus of LMU Munich

The university consists of 18 faculties which oversee various departments and institutes. The official numbering of the faculties and the missing numbers 06 and 14 are the result of breakups and mergers of faculties in the past. The Faculty of Forestry Operations with number 06 has been integrated into the Technical University of Munich [Technische Universität München] (DE) in 1999 and faculty number 14 has been merged with faculty number 13.

01 Faculty of Catholic Theology
02 Faculty of Protestant Theology
03 Faculty of Law
04 Faculty of Business Administration
05 Faculty of Economics
07 Faculty of Medicine
08 Faculty of Veterinary Medicine
09 Faculty for History and the Arts
10 Faculty of Philosophy, Philosophy of Science and Study of Religion
11 Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences
12 Faculty for the Study of Culture
13 Faculty for Languages and Literatures
15 Faculty of Social Sciences
16 Faculty of Mathematics, Computer Science and Statistics
17 Faculty of Physics
18 Faculty of Chemistry and Pharmacy
19 Faculty of Biology
20 Faculty of Geosciences and Environmental Sciences

Research centres

In addition to its 18 faculties, the University of Munich also maintains numerous research centres involved in numerous cross-faculty and transdisciplinary projects to complement its various academic programmes. Some of these research centres were a result of cooperation between the university and renowned external partners from academia and industry; the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, for example, was established through a joint initiative between LMU Munich and the Deutsches Museum, while the Parmenides Center for the Study of Thinking resulted from the collaboration between the Parmenides Foundation and LMU Munich’s Human Science Center.

Some of the research centres which have been established include:

Center for Integrated Protein Science Munich (CIPSM)
Graduate School of Systemic Neurosciences (GSN)
Helmholtz Zentrum München – German Research Center for Environmental Health
Nanosystems Initiative Munich (NIM)
Parmenides Center for the Study of Thinking
Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society

From The University of Rochester: “Quest for elusive monolayers just got a lot simpler”

From The University of Rochester

May 27, 2022

Bob Marcotte
bmarcotte@ur.rochester.edu

Researchers can process 100 images covering 1 centimeter x 1 centimeter-sized samples like this one in around nine minutes using a new system that greatly simplifies the often tedious search for monolayers in the lab. (University of Rochester photo / J. Adam Fenster)

Novel University of Rochester solution paves the way for cutting-edge photonics.

One of the most tedious, daunting tasks for undergraduate assistants in university research labs involves looking hours on end through a microscope at samples of material, trying to find monolayers.

These two-dimensional materials—less than 1/100,000th the width of a human hair—are highly sought for use in electronics, photonics, and optoelectronic devices because of their unique properties.

“Research labs hire armies of undergraduates to do nothing but look for monolayers,” says Jaime Cardenas, an assistant professor of optics at the University of Rochester. “It’s very tedious, and if you get tired, you might miss some of the monolayers or you might start making misidentifications.”

Even after all that work, the labs then must doublecheck the materials with expensive Raman spectroscopy or atomic force microscopy.

Jesús Sánchez Juárez, a PhD student in the Cardenas Lab, has made life a whole lot easier for those undergraduates, their research labs, and companies that encounter similar difficulties in detecting monolayers.

The breakthrough technology, an automated scanning device described in Optical Materials Express, can detect monolayers with 99.9 percent accuracy—surpassing any other method to date.

At a fraction of the cost. In far less time. With readily available materials.

“One of the main objectives was to develop a system with a very small budget so that students and labs can replicate these methodologies without having to invest thousands and thousands of dollars just to buy the necessary equipment,” says Sánchez Juárez, the lead author of the paper.

For example, the device he created can be replicated with an inexpensive microscope with a 5X objective lens and a low-cost OEM (original equipment manufacturer) camera.

Jesús Sánchez Juárez, a PhD student in the lab of Jaime Cardenas, has made it easier to detect monolayers—two-dimensional materials less than 1/100,000 the width of a human hair—which are highly sought for use in electronics, photonics, and optoelectronic devices because of their unique properties. Sánchez Juárez combined an inexpensive microscope with a 5X objective lens and a low-cost camera, shown at far right, with an artificial intelligence neural network, to detect, and then process images of monolayers, as shown in green on his computer screen. (Photo by J. Adam Fenster/University of Rochester)

A creative adaptation of an AI neural network

“We’re very excited,” Cardenas says. “Jesús did several things here that are new and different, applying artificial intelligence in a novel way to solve a major problem in the use of 2D materials.”

Many labs have tried to eliminate the need for human scanning costly backup characterization tests by training an artificial intelligence (AI) neural network to scan for the monolayers. Most labs that have tried this approach attempt to build a network from scratch, which takes significant time, Cardenas says.

Instead, Sánchez Juárez started with a publicly available neural network called AlexNet that is already trained to recognize objects.

He then developed a novel process that inverts images of materials so that whatever was bright on the original image instead appears black, and vice versa. The inverted images are run through additional processing steps. At that point, the images “don’t look good at all to the human eye,” Cardenas says, “but for a computer makes it easier to separate the monolayers from the substrates they are deposited on.”

Bottom line: Compared to those long, tedious hours of scanning by undergraduates, Sánchez Juárez’s system can process 100 images covering 1 centimeter x 1 centimeter-sized samples in nine minutes with near 100 percent accuracy.

“Our demonstration paves the way for automated production of monolayer materials for use in research and industrial settings by greatly reducing the processing time,” Sánchez Juárez writes in the paper. Applications include 2D materials suitable for photodetectors, excitonic light-emitting devices (LEDs), lasers, optical generation of spin–valley currents, single photon emission, and modulators.

Additional coauthors include Marissa Granados Baez, a PhD student in the Cardenas Lab, and Alberto A. Aguilar-Lasserre, a professor at the Instituto Tecnológico de Orizaba.

See the full article here .

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University of Rochester campus

The University of Rochester 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 enrolls approximately 6,800 undergraduates and 5,000 graduate students. Its 158 buildings house over 200 academic majors. According to the National Science Foundation , 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 supported national laboratory.

University of Rochester Laboratory for Laser Energetics.

The University of Rochester’s Eastman School of Music 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 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.

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 fraternitie’s 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 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 University of 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 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 endowment and the University of Texas 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 of Rochester 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 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 University of Washington Paul G. Allen College of Electrical and Computer of Engineering: “UW research team uses sound waves to move ‘excitons’ further than ever before leading toward faster and more energy efficient electronics and optical devices”

From The University of Washington Paul G. Allen College of Electrical and Computer of Engineering

May 12, 2022 [Just now in social media.]
Wayne Gillam

Most people have probably never heard of an ‘exciton’ before. But scientists and engineers have been working with excitons for some time now, seeking ways to unlock the potential these subatomic quasiparticles have to revolutionize modern electronic circuitry and optics in commonly used devices such as solar panels and light-emitting diodes (LEDs).

A research team led by UW ECE Professor Mo Li has developed a method of using soundwaves to move subatomic quasiparticles known as ‘excitons’ a much greater distance than ever before possible. The team’s innovations lead the way to development of a new type of computing circuit, one that is faster and much more energy efficient, using light and quantum phenomena to store, process and transmit information. Shown above: an illustration of the 2D material (tungsten diselenide) Li and his team used to capture and move the excitons. The material layers are each only one atom thick, which for practical purposes, makes them two-dimensional. The layers are flanked by devices that generate sound waves capable of moving excitons relatively long distances. Illustration provided by Ruoming Peng.

Excitons are considered quasiparticles because they are quantum phenomena resulting from the interaction between two particles within solid matter. An exciton is created when an electron absorbs light (in the form of a photon) and jumps to a higher energy state, leaving a ‘hole’ behind in its previous position — something akin to a tiny bubble floating in water. The negatively charged electron and the positively charged hole remain bound together by electrostatic forces, and together they form what is known as an exciton. Once the electron falls back into the hole, it emits a photon, and the exciton ceases to exist.

Excitons contain internal quantum properties that can be used to store information transmitted through light. And because excitons are charge-neutral — the negatively charged electron and the positively charged hole cancel each other out — they escape energy-scattering losses from electrically-charged disorder or lattice vibration, which makes today’s electronic circuitry unpleasantly hot and drains the battery fast. These qualities make excitons promising candidates for increasing the speed and energy efficiency of computing and a wide range of electronic and optical devices.

However, a big challenge for engineers is the fact that excitons are temporary, typically lasting only a few microseconds at most. So, finding ways to stabilize excitons and move them in a controlled direction beyond the short distance in which they naturally diffuse and disappear is a crucial step toward engineering energy-efficient exciton circuits capable of replacing standard circuits in modern electronics.

Over the last two years, a University of Washington research team led by Mo Li, a professor in the electrical and computer engineering department and the physics department, has developed an innovative way to use sound waves to transport excitons over the distances needed to create exciton transistors, switches and transducers — the building blocks of exciton circuitry. In a recent paper published in Nature Communications, Li and his team demonstrate how they were able to extend exciton life and use sound waves to move these quasiparticles distances over 10 times further than what other researchers have been able to achieve to date.

“In our innovation, we used two atomic layers of 2D materials (tungsten diselenide) stacked on top of each other. When light is applied and excitons form, the electrons separate out into one layer and the holes they leave behind go into the other,” Li explained. “The electrons and the holes are still close enough to each other to remain bonded together, and because they are on separate layers, it’s much harder for them to recombine. This makes the excitons live much, much longer — more than 10 times longer than they would on a single layer. From there, we used acoustic waves to move the excitons further than has ever been achieved before.”

Laying the groundwork for exciton circuits

n their experiments, the team was able to transport excitons far beyond the diffusion limit — the distance from its origin at which an exciton naturally recombines — moving them 20 microns in a controlled direction at 100 K (-280° F). They also demonstrated success transporting excitons well beyond the diffusion limit at room temperature. A distance of 20 microns may not seem very far, but it is over 10 times further than the exciton’s natural diffusion limit, which is far enough to demonstrate the viability of exciton circuitry. And until now, most research teams have only been able to move excitons a few microns in similar 2D materials.

“The reason we demonstrated moving the excitons 20 microns is because our material is 20 microns wide,” said Ruoming Peng, the paper’s lead author. “If the material were larger, say 100 microns (a typical size for sophisticated electronic circuitry), we could move them that far using stronger sound waves. We are only limited by the size of the device.”

Excitons are unresponsive to an electrical charge because they are charge-neutral, but when struck by sound waves, these quasiparticles will move in the direction the waves travel. A key innovation by the team was orienting sound waves perpendicular to the plane of the atomic layers that contained the excitons.

“Our main innovation here was to generate a primarily vertical acoustic field but not a horizontal field,” Peng explained. “We used that vertical field, which oscillates and moves, to push the excitons away, along the direction in which the sound wave propagates. You could say that the excitons were ‘surfing’ the sound wave! Prior to this innovation, excitons could not survive and would dissociate with the surface acoustic wave. Our group was able to suppress the detrimental effect of the acoustic wave but keep the beneficial effect.”

A bright future for excitons

This work shows that sound waves are an effective, contact-free means to shuttle excitons over relatively long distances in a controlled direction. And that means exciton circuits are a real possibility for the future, leading to faster and more energy efficient computing and optical devices such as LEDs, better sensing and detection devices, and improved speed and efficiency within electronics we use every day.

Next steps for Li’s research team include building on their findings by constructing a large-scale exciton circuit prototype, one that can store, manipulate and transmit data through light and the quantum information inherent to these quasiparticles.

“This advance is very exciting. It shows that we can build a much larger exciton circuit than before, and possibly at room temperature,” Li said. “We can move excitons from one end of a computer chip to another, and we have an idea for how to make them do 90-degree turns. We already know how to use excitons to store, transport and manipulate quantum information. And larger areas of the materials we use to hold the excitons are becoming available now. Altogether, this makes building a much larger-scale, integrated exciton circuit possible, a new and revolutionary system for all kinds of applications.”

Ruoming Peng, Adina Ripin, Yusen Ye, Jiayi Zhu, Changming Wu, Seokhyeong Lee, Huan Li, Takashi Taniguchi, Kenji Watanabe, Ting Cao, Xiaodong Xu and Mo Li are authors of the science paper.

See the full article here.

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About the The University of Washington Paul G. Allen College of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Mission, Facts, and Stats

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

Faculty:
275 faculty (25.2% women)
Achievements:

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

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

Engineering innovation

PEOPLE Innovation at UW ECE is exemplified by our outstanding faculty and by the exceptional group of students they advise and mentor. Students receive a robust education through a strong technical foundation, group project work and hands-on research opportunities. Our faculty work in dynamic research areas with diverse opportunities for projects and collaborations. Through their research, they address complex global challenges in health, energy, technology and the environment, and receive significant research and education grants. IMPACT We continue to expand our innovation ecosystem by promoting an entrepreneurial mindset in our teaching and through diverse partnerships. The field of electrical and computer engineering is at the forefront of solving emerging societal challenges, empowered by innovative ideas from our community. As our department evolves, we are dedicated to expanding our faculty and student body to meet the growing demand for engineers. We welcomed six new faculty hires in the 2018-2019 academic year. Our meaningful connections and collaborations place the department as a leader in the field.

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

Commitment to diversity and access

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

19th century relocation

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

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

20th century expansion

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

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

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

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

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

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

21st century

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From The Yale School of Engineering and Applied Science: “An Intelligent Quantum Sensor”

Yale SEAS

From The Yale School of Engineering and Applied Science

at

Yale University

05/16/2022

Artistic rendering of the intelligent sensing process: quantum geometric properties determine the photoresponses, which are then interpreted by a neural network. Copyright: Xia group.

A team of researchers has built an intelligent sensor – the size of about 1/1000 of the cross-section of a human hair – that can simultaneously detect the intensity, polarization and wavelength of light, tapping into the quantum properties of electrons. It’s a breakthrough that could help advance the fields of astronomy, health care, and remote sensing.

Led by Fengnian Xia, the Barton L. Weller Associate Professor in Engineering and Science at Yale and Fan Zhang, Associate Professor of Physics at University of Texas-Dallas, the results are published in Nature.

Researchers have learned in recent years that twisting certain materials at specific angles can form what are known as “moiré materials,” which elicit previously undiscovered properties. In this case, the research team used twisted double bilayer graphene (TDBG) – that is, two atomic layers of natural stacked carbon atoms given a slight rotational twist – to build their sensing device. This is critical because the twist reduces the crystal symmetry, and materials with atomic structures that are less symmetrical – in many cases – promise some intriguing physical properties that aren’t found in those with greater symmetry.

With this device, the researchers were able to detect a strong presence of what is known as bulk photovoltaic effect (BPVE), a process that converts light into electricity, giving a response strongly dependent on the light intensity, polarization and wavelength. The researchers found that the BPVE in TDBG can further be tuned by external electrical means, which allowed them to create “2D fingerprints” of the photovoltages for each different incident light.

Shaofan Yuan, a graduate student in Xia’s lab and co-lead author of the study, had the idea to apply a convolutional neural network (CNN), a type of artificial neural network previously used for image recognition, to decipher these fingerprints. From there, they were able to demonstrate an intelligent photodetector.

Its small size makes it potentially valuable for applications such as deep space exploration, in-situ medical tests and remote sensing on autonomous vehicles or aircraft. Moreover, their work reveals a new pathway for the investigation of nonlinear optics based on moiré materials.

“Ideally, one single intelligent device can replace several bulky, complex and expensive optical elements that are used to capture the information of light, dramatically saving space and cost,” said Chao Ma, a graduate student in Xia’s lab, and co-lead author of the study.

Patrick Cheung of University of Texas at Dallas performed theoretical calculations and analysis. Other contributing authors are Drs. Kenji Watanabe, Takashi Taniguchi of National Institute for Materials Science in Japan.

See the full article here .

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Yale School of Engineering and Applied Science Daniel L Malone Engineering Center
The Yale School of Engineering & Applied Science is the engineering school of Yale University. When the first professor of civil engineering was hired in 1852, a Yale School of Engineering was established within the Yale Scientific School, and in 1932 the engineering faculty organized as a separate, constituent school of the university. The school currently offers undergraduate and graduate classes and degrees in electrical engineering, chemical engineering, computer science, applied physics, environmental engineering, biomedical engineering, and mechanical engineering and materials science.

Yale University is a private Ivy League research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Founded in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the nine Colonial Colleges chartered before the American Revolution. The Collegiate School was renamed Yale College in 1718 to honor the school’s largest private benefactor for the first century of its existence, Elihu Yale. Yale University is consistently ranked as one of the top universities and is considered one of the most prestigious in the nation.

Chartered by Connecticut Colony, the Collegiate School was established in 1701 by clergy to educate Congregational ministers before moving to New Haven in 1716. Originally restricted to theology and sacred languages, the curriculum began to incorporate humanities and sciences by the time of the American Revolution. In the 19th century, the college expanded into graduate and professional instruction, awarding the first PhD in the United States in 1861 and organizing as a university in 1887. Yale’s faculty and student populations grew after 1890 with rapid expansion of the physical campus and scientific research.

Yale is organized into fourteen constituent schools: the original undergraduate college, the Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and twelve professional schools. While the university is governed by the Yale Corporation, each school’s faculty oversees its curriculum and degree programs. In addition to a central campus in downtown New Haven, the university owns athletic facilities in western New Haven, a campus in West Haven, Connecticut, and forests and nature preserves throughout New England. As of June 2020, the university’s endowment was valued at $31.1 billion, the second largest of any educational institution. The Yale University Library, serving all constituent schools, holds more than 15 million volumes and is the third-largest academic library in the United States. Students compete in intercollegiate sports as the Yale Bulldogs in the NCAA Division I – Ivy League.

As of October 2020, 65 Nobel laureates, five Fields Medalists, four Abel Prize laureates, and three Turing award winners have been affiliated with Yale University. In addition, Yale has graduated many notable alumni, including five U.S. Presidents, 19 U.S. Supreme Court Justices, 31 living billionaires, and many heads of state. Hundreds of members of Congress and many U.S. diplomats, 78 MacArthur Fellows, 252 Rhodes Scholars, 123 Marshall Scholars, and nine Mitchell Scholars have been affiliated with the university.

Research

Yale is a member of the Association of American Universities (AAU) and is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity”. According to the National Science Foundation, Yale spent $990 million on research and development in 2018, ranking it 15th in the nation.

Yale’s faculty include 61 members of the National Academy of Sciences , 7 members of the National Academy of Engineering and 49 members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The college is, after normalization for institution size, the tenth-largest baccalaureate source of doctoral degree recipients in the United States, and the largest such source within the Ivy League.

Yale’s English and Comparative Literature departments were part of the New Criticism movement. Of the New Critics, Robert Penn Warren, W.K. Wimsatt, and Cleanth Brooks were all Yale faculty. Later, the Yale Comparative literature department became a center of American deconstruction. Jacques Derrida, the father of deconstruction, taught at the Department of Comparative Literature from the late seventies to mid-1980s. Several other Yale faculty members were also associated with deconstruction, forming the so-called “Yale School”. These included Paul de Man who taught in the Departments of Comparative Literature and French, J. Hillis Miller, Geoffrey Hartman (both taught in the Departments of English and Comparative Literature), and Harold Bloom (English), whose theoretical position was always somewhat specific, and who ultimately took a very different path from the rest of this group. Yale’s history department has also originated important intellectual trends. Historians C. Vann Woodward and David Brion Davis are credited with beginning in the 1960s and 1970s an important stream of southern historians; likewise, David Montgomery, a labor historian, advised many of the current generation of labor historians in the country. Yale’s Music School and Department fostered the growth of Music Theory in the latter half of the 20th century. The Journal of Music Theory was founded there in 1957; Allen Forte and David Lewin were influential teachers and scholars.

In addition to eminent faculty members, Yale research relies heavily on the presence of roughly 1200 Postdocs from various national and international origin working in the multiple laboratories in the sciences, social sciences, humanities, and professional schools of the university. The university progressively recognized this working force with the recent creation of the Office for Postdoctoral Affairs and the Yale Postdoctoral Association.

Notable alumni

Over its history, Yale has produced many distinguished alumni in a variety of fields, ranging from the public to private sector. According to 2020 data, around 71% of undergraduates join the workforce, while the next largest majority of 16.6% go on to attend graduate or professional schools. Yale graduates have been recipients of 252 Rhodes Scholarships, 123 Marshall Scholarships, 67 Truman Scholarships, 21 Churchill Scholarships, and 9 Mitchell Scholarships. The university is also the second largest producer of Fulbright Scholars, with a total of 1,199 in its history and has produced 89 MacArthur Fellows. The U.S. Department of State Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs ranked Yale fifth among research institutions producing the most 2020–2021 Fulbright Scholars. Additionally, 31 living billionaires are Yale alumni.

At Yale, one of the most popular undergraduate majors among Juniors and Seniors is political science, with many students going on to serve careers in government and politics. Former presidents who attended Yale for undergrad include William Howard Taft, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush while former presidents Gerald Ford and Bill Clinton attended Yale Law School. Former vice-president and influential antebellum era politician John C. Calhoun also graduated from Yale. Former world leaders include Italian prime minister Mario Monti, Turkish prime minister Tansu Çiller, Mexican president Ernesto Zedillo, German president Karl Carstens, Philippine president José Paciano Laurel, Latvian president Valdis Zatlers, Taiwanese premier Jiang Yi-huah, and Malawian president Peter Mutharika, among others. Prominent royals who graduated are Crown Princess Victoria of Sweden, and Olympia Bonaparte, Princess Napoléon.

Yale alumni have had considerable presence in U.S. government in all three branches. On the U.S. Supreme Court, 19 justices have been Yale alumni, including current Associate Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Brett Kavanaugh. Numerous Yale alumni have been U.S. Senators, including current Senators Michael Bennet, Richard Blumenthal, Cory Booker, Sherrod Brown, Chris Coons, Amy Klobuchar, Ben Sasse, and Sheldon Whitehouse. Current and former cabinet members include Secretaries of State John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, Cyrus Vance, and Dean Acheson; U.S. Secretaries of the Treasury Oliver Wolcott, Robert Rubin, Nicholas F. Brady, Steven Mnuchin, and Janet Yellen; U.S. Attorneys General Nicholas Katzenbach, John Ashcroft, and Edward H. Levi; and many others. Peace Corps founder and American diplomat Sargent Shriver and public official and urban planner Robert Moses are Yale alumni.

Yale has produced numerous award-winning authors and influential writers, like Nobel Prize in Literature laureate Sinclair Lewis and Pulitzer Prize winners Stephen Vincent Benét, Thornton Wilder, Doug Wright, and David McCullough. Academy Award winning actors, actresses, and directors include Jodie Foster, Paul Newman, Meryl Streep, Elia Kazan, George Roy Hill, Lupita Nyong’o, Oliver Stone, and Frances McDormand. Alumni from Yale have also made notable contributions to both music and the arts. Leading American composer from the 20th century Charles Ives, Broadway composer Cole Porter, Grammy award winner David Lang, and award-winning jazz pianist and composer Vijay Iyer all hail from Yale. Hugo Boss Prize winner Matthew Barney, famed American sculptor Richard Serra, President Barack Obama presidential portrait painter Kehinde Wiley, MacArthur Fellow and contemporary artist Sarah Sze, Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist Garry Trudeau, and National Medal of Arts photorealist painter Chuck Close all graduated from Yale. Additional alumni include architect and Presidential Medal of Freedom winner Maya Lin, Pritzker Prize winner Norman Foster, and Gateway Arch designer Eero Saarinen. Journalists and pundits include Dick Cavett, Chris Cuomo, Anderson Cooper, William F. Buckley, Jr., and Fareed Zakaria.

In business, Yale has had numerous alumni and former students go on to become founders of influential business, like William Boeing (Boeing, United Airlines), Briton Hadden and Henry Luce (Time Magazine), Stephen A. Schwarzman (Blackstone Group), Frederick W. Smith (FedEx), Juan Trippe (Pan Am), Harold Stanley (Morgan Stanley), Bing Gordon (Electronic Arts), and Ben Silbermann (Pinterest). Other business people from Yale include former chairman and CEO of Sears Holdings Edward Lampert, former Time Warner president Jeffrey Bewkes, former PepsiCo chairperson and CEO Indra Nooyi, sports agent Donald Dell, and investor/philanthropist Sir John Templeton,

Yale alumni distinguished in academia include literary critic and historian Henry Louis Gates, economists Irving Fischer, Mahbub ul Haq, and Nobel Prize laureate Paul Krugman; Nobel Prize in Physics laureates Ernest Lawrence and Murray Gell-Mann; Fields Medalist John G. Thompson; Human Genome Project leader and National Institutes of Health director Francis S. Collins; brain surgery pioneer Harvey Cushing; pioneering computer scientist Grace Hopper; influential mathematician and chemist Josiah Willard Gibbs; National Women’s Hall of Fame inductee and biochemist Florence B. Seibert; Turing Award recipient Ron Rivest; inventors Samuel F.B. Morse and Eli Whitney; Nobel Prize in Chemistry laureate John B. Goodenough; lexicographer Noah Webster; and theologians Jonathan Edwards and Reinhold Niebuhr.

In the sporting arena, Yale alumni include baseball players Ron Darling and Craig Breslow and baseball executives Theo Epstein and George Weiss; football players Calvin Hill, Gary Fenick, Amos Alonzo Stagg, and “the Father of American Football” Walter Camp; ice hockey players Chris Higgins and Olympian Helen Resor; Olympic figure skaters Sarah Hughes and Nathan Chen; nine-time U.S. Squash men’s champion Julian Illingworth; Olympic swimmer Don Schollander; Olympic rowers Josh West and Rusty Wailes; Olympic sailor Stuart McNay; Olympic runner Frank Shorter; and others.

From The National Institute of Standards and Technology: “Inspired by Prehistoric Creatures NIST Researchers Make Record-Setting Lenses”

From The National Institute of Standards and Technology

April 19, 2022

Media Contact
Ben P. Stein
benjamin.stein@nist.gov
(301) 975-2763

Technical Contact

Amit Agrawal
amit.agrawal@nist.gov
(301) 975-4633

Inspired by the compound eyes of a species of trilobite researchers at NIST developed a metalens that can simultaneously image objects both near and far. This illustration shows the structure of the lens of an extinct trilobite. Credit: NIST.

Five hundred million years ago, the oceans teemed with trillions of trilobites — creatures that were distant cousins of horseshoe crabs. All trilobites had a wide range of vision, thanks to compound eyes — single eyes composed of tens to thousands of tiny independent units, each with their own cornea, lens and light-sensitive cells. But one group, Dalmanitina socialis, was exceptionally farsighted. Their bifocal eyes, each mounted on stalks and composed of two lenses that bent light at different angles, enabled these sea creatures to simultaneously view prey floating nearby as well as distant enemies approaching from more than a kilometer away.

Inspired by the eyes of D. socialis, researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have developed a miniature camera featuring a bifocal lens with a record-setting depth of field — the distance over which the camera can produce sharp images in a single photo. The camera can simultaneously image objects as close as 3 centimeters and as far away as 1.7 kilometers. They devised a computer algorithm to correct for aberrations, sharpen objects at intermediate distances between these near and far focal lengths and generate a final all-in-focus image covering this enormous depth of field.

Such lightweight, large-depth-of-field cameras, which integrate photonic technology at the nanometer scale with software-driven photography, promise to revolutionize future high-resolution imaging systems. In particular, the cameras would greatly boost the capacity to produce highly detailed images of cityscapes, groups of organisms that occupy a large field of view and other photographic applications in which both near and far objects must be brought into sharp focus.

NIST researchers Amit Agrawal and Henri Lezec, along with their colleagues from the University of Maryland in College Park and Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications [南京邮电大学] (CN), describe their work online in the April 19 issue of Nature Communications.

Scanning electron microscope image of the titanium oxide nanopillars that make up the metalens. The scale is 500 nanometers (nm). Credit: NIST.

The researchers fabricated an array of tiny lenses known as metalenses. These are ultrathin films etched or imprinted with groupings of nanoscale pillars tailored to manipulate light in specific ways. To design their metalenses, Agrawal and his colleagues studded a flat surface of glass with millions of tiny, rectangular nanometer-scale pillars. The shape and orientation of the constituent nanopillars focused light in such a way that the metasurface simultaneously acted as a macro lens (for close-up objects) and a telephoto lens (for distant ones).

Specifically, the nanopillars captured light from a scene of interest, which can be divided into two equal parts — light that is left circularly polarized and right circularly polarized. (Polarization refers to the direction of the electric field of a light wave; left circularly polarized light has an electric field that rotates counterclockwise, while right circularly polarized light has an electric field that rotates clockwise.)

The nanopillars bent the left and right circularly polarized light by different amounts, depending on the orientation of the nanopillars. The team arranged the nanopillars, which were rectangular, so that some of the incoming light had to travel through the longer part of the rectangle and some through the shorter part. In the longer path, light had to pass through more material and therefore experienced more bending. For the shorter path, the light had less material to travel though and therefore less bending.

Illustration of how the metalens modeled on the compound lens of a trilobite simultaneously focuses object both near (rabbit) and far (tree). Credit: S. Kelley/NIST.

Light that is bent by different amounts is brought to a different focus. The greater the bending, the closer the light is focused. In this way, depending on whether light traveled through the longer or shorter part of the rectangular nanopillars, the metalens produces images of both distant objects (1.7 kilometers away) and nearby ones (a few centimeters).

Without further processing, however, that would leave objects at intermediate distances (several meters from the camera) unfocused. Agrawal and his colleagues used a neural network — a computer algorithm that mimics the human nervous system — to teach software to recognize and correct for defects such as blurriness and color aberration in the objects that resided midway between the near and far focus of the metalens. The team tested its camera by placing objects of various colors, shapes and sizes at different distances in a scene of interest and applying software correction to generate a final image that was focused and free of aberrations over the entire kilometer range of depth of field.

The metalenses developed by the team boost light-gathering ability without sacrificing image resolution. In addition, because the system automatically corrects for aberrations, it has a high tolerance for error, enabling researchers to use simple, easy to fabricate designs for the miniature lenses, Agrawal said.

See the full article here.

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Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

NIST Campus, Gaitherberg, MD, USA

The National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Mission, Vision, Core Competencies, and Core Values

Mission

To promote U.S. innovation and industrial competitiveness by advancing measurement science, standards, and technology in ways that enhance economic security and improve our quality of life.

NIST’s vision

NIST will be the world’s leader in creating critical measurement solutions and promoting equitable standards. Our efforts stimulate innovation, foster industrial competitiveness, and improve the quality of life.

NIST’s core competencies

Measurement science
Rigorous traceability
Development and use of standards

NIST’s core values

NIST is an organization with strong values, reflected both in our history and our current work. NIST leadership and staff will uphold these values to ensure a high performing environment that is safe and respectful of all.

Perseverance: We take the long view, planning the future with scientific knowledge and imagination to ensure continued impact and relevance for our stakeholders.
Integrity: We are ethical, honest, independent, and provide an objective perspective.
Inclusivity: We work collaboratively to harness the diversity of people and ideas, both inside and outside of NIST, to attain the best solutions to multidisciplinary challenges.
Excellence: We apply rigor and critical thinking to achieve world-class results and continuous improvement in everything we do.

Background

The Articles of Confederation, ratified by the colonies in 1781, contained the clause, “The United States in Congress assembled shall also have the sole and exclusive right and power of regulating the alloy and value of coin struck by their own authority, or by that of the respective states—fixing the standards of weights and measures throughout the United States”. Article 1, section 8, of the Constitution of the United States (1789), transferred this power to Congress; “The Congress shall have power…To coin money, regulate the value thereof, and of foreign coin, and fix the standard of weights and measures”.

In January 1790, President George Washington, in his first annual message to Congress stated that, “Uniformity in the currency, weights, and measures of the United States is an object of great importance, and will, I am persuaded, be duly attended to”, and ordered Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson to prepare a plan for Establishing Uniformity in the Coinage, Weights, and Measures of the United States, afterwards referred to as the Jefferson report. On October 25, 1791, Washington appealed a third time to Congress, “A uniformity of the weights and measures of the country is among the important objects submitted to you by the Constitution and if it can be derived from a standard at once invariable and universal, must be no less honorable to the public council than conducive to the public convenience”, but it was not until 1838, that a uniform set of standards was worked out. In 1821, John Quincy Adams had declared “Weights and measures may be ranked among the necessities of life to every individual of human society”.

From 1830 until 1901, the role of overseeing weights and measures was carried out by the Office of Standard Weights and Measures, which was part of the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey in the Department of the Treasury.

Bureau of Standards

In 1901 in response to a bill proposed by Congressman James H. Southard (R- Ohio) the National Bureau of Standards was founded with the mandate to provide standard weights and measures and to serve as the national physical laboratory for the United States. (Southard had previously sponsored a bill for metric conversion of the United States.)

President Theodore Roosevelt appointed Samuel W. Stratton as the first director. The budget for the first year of operation was $40,000. The Bureau took custody of the copies of the kilogram and meter bars that were the standards for US measures, and set up a program to provide metrology services for United States scientific and commercial users. A laboratory site was constructed in Washington DC and instruments were acquired from the national physical laboratories of Europe. In addition to weights and measures the Bureau developed instruments for electrical units and for measurement of light. In 1905 a meeting was called that would be the first National Conference on Weights and Measures.

Initially conceived as purely a metrology agency the Bureau of Standards was directed by Herbert Hoover to set up divisions to develop commercial standards for materials and products. Some of these standards were for products intended for government use; but product standards also affected private-sector consumption. Quality standards were developed for products including some types of clothing; automobile brake systems and headlamps; antifreeze; and electrical safety. During World War I, the Bureau worked on multiple problems related to war production even operating its own facility to produce optical glass when European supplies were cut off. Between the wars Harry Diamond of the Bureau developed a blind approach radio aircraft landing system. During World War II military research and development was carried out including development of radio propagation forecast methods; the proximity fuze and the standardized airframe used originally for Project Pigeon; and shortly afterwards the autonomously radar-guided Bat anti-ship guided bomb and the Kingfisher family of torpedo-carrying missiles.

In 1948, financed by the United States Air Force the Bureau began design and construction of SEAC: the Standards Eastern Automatic Computer. The computer went into operation in May 1950 using a combination of vacuum tubes and solid-state diode logic. About the same time the Standards Western Automatic Computer, was built at the Los Angeles office of the NBS by Harry Huskey and used for research there. A mobile version- DYSEAC- was built for the Signal Corps in 1954.

Due to a changing mission, the “National Bureau of Standards” became the “National Institute of Standards and Technology” in 1988.

Following September 11, 2001, NIST conducted the official investigation into the collapse of the World Trade Center buildings.

Organization

NIST is headquartered in Gaithersburg, Maryland, and operates a facility in Boulder, Colorado, which was dedicated by President Eisenhower in 1954. NIST’s activities are organized into laboratory programs and extramural programs. Effective October 1, 2010, NIST was realigned by reducing the number of NIST laboratory units from ten to six. NIST Laboratories include:

Communications Technology Laboratory (CTL)
Engineering Laboratory (EL)
Information Technology Laboratory (ITL)
Center for Neutron Research (NCNR)
Material Measurement Laboratory (MML)
Physical Measurement Laboratory (PML)

Extramural programs include:

Hollings Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP), a nationwide network of centers to assist small and mid-sized manufacturers to create and retain jobs, improve efficiencies, and minimize waste through process improvements and to increase market penetration with innovation and growth strategies;
Technology Innovation Program (TIP), a grant program where NIST and industry partners cost share the early-stage development of innovative but high-risk technologies;
Baldrige Performance Excellence Program, which administers the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, the nation’s highest award for performance and business excellence.

NIST’s Boulder laboratories are best known for NIST‑F1 which houses an atomic clock. NIST‑F1 serves as the source of the nation’s official time. From its measurement of the natural resonance frequency of cesium—which defines the second—NIST broadcasts time signals via longwave radio station WWVB near Fort Collins in Colorado, and shortwave radio stations WWV and WWVH, located near Fort Collins and Kekaha in Hawai’i, respectively.

NIST also operates a neutron science user facility: the NIST Center for Neutron Research (NCNR). The NCNR provides scientists access to a variety of neutron scattering instruments which they use in many research fields (materials science; fuel cells; biotechnology etc.).

The SURF III Synchrotron Ultraviolet Radiation Facility is a source of synchrotron radiation in continuous operation since 1961. SURF III now serves as the US national standard for source-based radiometry throughout the generalized optical spectrum. All NASA-borne extreme-ultraviolet observation instruments have been calibrated at SURF since the 1970s, and SURF is used for measurement and characterization of systems for extreme ultraviolet lithography.

The Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology (CNST) performs research in nanotechnology, both through internal research efforts and by running a user-accessible cleanroom nanomanufacturing facility. This “NanoFab” is equipped with tools for lithographic patterning and imaging (e.g., electron microscopes and atomic force microscopes).

Committees

NIST has seven standing committees:

Technical Guidelines Development Committee (TGDC)
Advisory Committee on Earthquake Hazards Reduction (ACEHR)
National Construction Safety Team Advisory Committee (NCST Advisory Committee)
Information Security and Privacy Advisory Board (ISPAB)
Visiting Committee on Advanced Technology (VCAT)
Board of Overseers for the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award (MBNQA Board of Overseers)
Manufacturing Extension Partnership National Advisory Board (MEPNAB)

Measurements and standards

As part of its mission, NIST supplies industry, academia, government, and other users with over 1,300 Standard Reference Materials (SRMs). These artifacts are certified as having specific characteristics or component content, used as calibration standards for measuring equipment and procedures, quality control benchmarks for industrial processes, and experimental control samples.

Handbook 44

NIST publishes the Handbook 44 each year after the annual meeting of the National Conference on Weights and Measures (NCWM). Each edition is developed through cooperation of the Committee on Specifications and Tolerances of the NCWM and the Weights and Measures Division (WMD) of the NIST. The purpose of the book is a partial fulfillment of the statutory responsibility for “cooperation with the states in securing uniformity of weights and measures laws and methods of inspection”.

NIST has been publishing various forms of what is now the Handbook 44 since 1918 and began publication under the current name in 1949. The 2010 edition conforms to the concept of the primary use of the SI (metric) measurements recommended by the Omnibus Foreign Trade and Competitiveness Act of 1988.

From The Harvard University John A Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences: “Turning any camera into a polarization camera”

From The Harvard University John A Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences

at

Harvard University

March 17, 2022 [Just now in social media.]
Leah Burrows

Metasurface attachment can be used with almost any optical system from machine vision cameras to telescopes.

The grating is mounted just in front of the front face of a chosen objective lens in a tube that also houses a bandpass filter and a field stop. This is shown implemented (top), as a schematic (bottom). Credit: Capasso Lab/Harvard SEAS.

Polarization, the direction in which light vibrates, provides a lot of information about the objects with which it interacts, from aerosols in the atmosphere to the magnetic field of stars. However, because this quality of light is invisible to human eyes, researchers and engineers have relied on specialized, expensive, and bulky cameras to capture it. Until now.

Researchers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have developed a metasurface attachment that can turn just about any camera or imaging system, even off-the-shelf systems, into polarization cameras. The attachment uses a metasurface of subwavelength nanopillars to direct light based on its polarization and compiles an image that captures polarization at every pixel.

The research is published in Optics Express.

“The addition of polarization sensitivity to practically any camera will reveal details and features that ordinary cameras can’t see, benefiting a wide range of applications from face recognition and self-driving cars to remote sensing and machine vision, “said Federico Capasso, the Robert L. Wallace Professor of Applied Physics and Vinton Hayes Senior Research Fellow in Electrical Engineering at SEAS and senior author of the study.

In 2019, Capasso and his team developed a compact, portable camera that used a metasurface to image polarization in a single shot. In this research, the team explored how to generalize the concept of a polarization camera.

“After building the specialized polarization camera, we wanted to go more in depth and investigate the design rules and trade-offs that govern pairing a special polarization component with a conventional camera system,” said Noah Rubin, a graduate student at SEAS and co-first author of the study.

To demonstrate those design rules, the researchers attached the polarization metasurface to an off-the-shelf machine vision camera, simply screwing it on in front of the objective lens, in a small tube that also housed a color filter and field stop. From there, all they needed to do was point and click to get polarization information.

The nanopillars direct light based on polarization, which forms four images, each showing a different aspect of the polarization. The images are then put together, giving a full snapshot of polarization at every pixel.

The attachment could be used to improve machine vision in vehicles or in biometric sensors for security applications.

“This metasurface attachment is incredibly versatile,” said Paul Chevalier, a postdoctoral research fellow at SEAS and co-first author of the study. “It is a component that could live in a variety of optical systems, from room-size telescopes to tiny spy cameras, expanding the application space for polarization cameras.”

The research was co-authored by Michael Juhl, Michele Tamagnone and Russell Chipman. It was supported by the Earth Science Technology Office (ESTO) of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and by the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research under grant no. FA9550-18-P-0024. It was performed in part at the Center for Nanoscale Systems (CNS), a member of the National Nanotechnology Coordinated Infrastructure (NNCI), which is supported by the National Science Foundation under NSF award no. 1541959.

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 The Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences 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 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 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’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 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’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 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 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 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’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 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’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’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 classes alongside men. Women were first admitted to the medical school in 1945. Since 1971, Harvard University has controlled essentially all aspects of undergraduate admission, instruction, and housing for Radcliffe women. In 1999, Radcliffe was formally merged into Harvard University.

21st century

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