From The DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory: “Boron Nitride with a Twist Could Lead to New Way to Make Qubits”

From The DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

10.6.22
Rachel Berkowitz

Easy control over bright emissions from the crystalline material offer a route toward scalable quantum computing and sensing.

Shaul Aloni, Cong Su, Alex Zettl, and Steven Louie at the Molecular Foundry. The researchers synthesized a device made from twisted layers of hexagonal boron nitride with color centers that can be switched on and off with a simple switch. (Credit: Marilyn Sargent/Berkeley Lab)

Achieving scalability in quantum processors, sensors, and networks requires novel devices that are easily manipulated between two quantum states. A team led by researchers from the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has now developed a method, using a solid-state “twisted” crystalline layered material, which gives rise to tiny light-emitting points called color centers. These color centers can be switched on and off with the simple application of an external voltage.

“This is a first step toward a color center device that engineers could build or adapt into real quantum systems,” said Shaul Aloni, a staff scientist at Berkeley Lab’s Molecular Foundry [below], who co-led the study. The work is detailed in the journal Nature Materials [below].

For example, the research could lead to a new way to make quantum bits, or qubits, which encode information in quantum computers.

Color centers are microscopic defects in a crystal, such as diamond, that usually emit bright and stable light of specific color when struck with laser or other energy source such as an electron beam. Their integration with waveguides, devices that guide light, can connect operations across a quantum processor. Several years ago researchers discovered that color centers in a synthesized material called hexagonal boron nitride (hBN), which is commonly used as a lubricant or additive for paints and cosmetics, emitted even brighter colors than color centers in diamond. But engineers have struggled to use the material in applications because producing the defects at a determined location is difficult, and they lacked a reliable way to switch the color centers on and off.

The Berkeley Lab team now solves these problems. Cong Su, a postdoc from the research group led by Alex Zettl, a faculty senior scientist at Berkeley Lab and professor of physics at UC Berkeley, examined how color centers behaved in different sophisticated forms of hBN. The researchers found that two stacked and twisted layers of the material resulted in the activation and enhancement of ultraviolet (UV) emission from a color center, which can be shut off when a voltage is applied across the structure. “It’s like a sandwich with two pieces of bread, but one rotated relative to the other,” said Zettl. The rotation between the two layers activates the color centers at the interface to become extremely bright. The applied voltage then easily and reversibly tunes the intensity from bright to completely dark, without “unrotating” the halves.

An electron beam placed at a series of locations on a sheet of twisted hBN intensifies the light emission from each location. The brightness depends on how long the beam sits at a given point, or the electron flux delivered to that point. The result is an illuminated pattern. (Credit: Su et al. 2022)

Aloni’s development of a modified electron microscope that not only probed the material’s structure but also collected the emitted light for analysis turned out to be key for this study. The setup uses an electron beam to excite the color centers; the researchers also found that they could use the electron beam to activate color centers and draw patterns, such as a smiley face, onto hBN. “People typically zap the material with lasers or ions, but we’ve instead zapped it with a beam of electrons,” said Zettl.

The study achieves three steps toward realization of a scalable quantum device. First, the UV color centers in hBN can be reliably activated to exceptional maximum brightness, by twisting the crystal interface. Second, these color centers can then be gradually and reversibly dimmed by a simple applied voltage. Finally, electron beam treatment allows further precise spatial positioning of these color centers.

Theoretical calculations led by Steven Louie, a faculty senior scientist at Berkeley Lab and distinguished professor of physics at UC Berkeley, provided candidates for the UV color center atomic configuration to help explain why their brightness depended on the twist angle. The light emission process involves an excited electron wandering around and recombining with a hole at the color center. But a typical hBN structure has many traps that could capture the electrons, preventing light emission. “Twisting the crystal layers removes many of these traps, or ‘quantum parking lots,’ near the interface,” said Louie.

The team next intends to prepare samples that allow atomic characterization to pinpoint the specific atomic structures behind this mechanism and add additional levels of control. “The work is pointing us in the direction of new types of mechanisms that we can use to control the emission even better, and this is very important for many applications in quantum information sciences,” said Aloni.

Science paper:
Nature Materials

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LBNL campus

Bringing Science Solutions to the World

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

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

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

History

1931–1941

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

E.O. Lawrence’ first cyclotron.

LBNL 88 inch cyclotron.

LBNL 88 inch cyclotron.

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

1942–1950

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

1951–2018

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

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

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

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

Science mission

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

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

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

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

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

Berkeley Lab Laser Accelerator (BELLA) Center

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

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

LBNL Molecular Foundry

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

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

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

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

NERSC Hopper Cray XE6 supercomputer.

NERSC Cray XC30 Edison supercomputer.

NERSC GPFS for Life Sciences.

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

NERSC PDSF computer cluster in 2003.

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

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

NERSC is a DOE Office of Science User Facility.

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

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

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

From The Kiel University [Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel] (DE) And The University of Hamburg [Universität Hamburg] (DE): “Magnetic nano mosaics”

From The Kiel University [Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel] (DE)

And

The University of Hamburg [Universität Hamburg] (DE)

10.5.22

PD Dr. Kirsten von Bergmann
Institute for Nanostructure and Solid State Physics
University of Hamburg
040 / 42838-6295
kirsten.von.bergmann@physik.uni-hamburg.de

Professor Dr. Stefan Heinze
Institute of Theoretical Physics and Astrophysics
Kiel University
0431 / 880-4127
heinze@theo-physik.uni-kiel.de

Press Contact:
Julia Siekmann
Science Communication Officer
Research area Kiel Nano Surface and Interface Sciences
jsiekmann@uv.uni-kiel.de
+49 (0)431/880-4855

Physics team from the universities of Kiel and Hamburg discovers new class of magnetic lattices.

The image shows the different orientation of atomic “bar magnets” of an iron film: In a magnetic mosaic lattice (above), they are oriented in groups either upwards (purple) or downwards (white). In the skyrmion lattice (below), on the other hand, they point in all directions. © André Kubetzka.

A measurement using spin-polarised scanning tunnelling microscopy (SP-STM) makes the hexagonal arrangement in the magnetic mosaic lattice visible on the nanometre scale. Due to a twist of the mosaic lattice on the atomic lattice, two rotational domains appear which deviate from each other by about 13° (see markings and graphs on the right). © André Kubetzka.

For about ten years, magnetic skyrmions – particle-like, stable magnetic whirls that can form in certain materials and possess fascinating properties – have been a focus of research: electrically easily controlled and only a few nanometers in size, they are suitable for future applications in spin electronics, quantum computers or neuromorphic chips. These magnetic whirls were first found in regular lattices, so-called “skyrmion lattices”, and later individual skyrmions were also observed at the University of Hamburg. Researchers from Kiel University and the University of Hamburg have now discovered a new class of spontaneously occurring magnetic lattices. They are related to skyrmion lattices, but their “atomic bar magnets” on the nanometer scale are oriented differently. A fundamental understanding of how such complex spin structures form, how they are arranged and remain stable is also needed for future applications. The results are published in the current issue of Nature Communications [below].

Quantum mechanical interactions

Attaching magnets to a refrigerator or reading data from a hard drive is only possible because of a quantum mechanical exchange interaction between the atomic bar magnets on the microscopic scale. This interaction, discovered by Werner Heisenberg in 1926, explains not only the parallel alignment of atomic bar magnets in ferromagnets, but also the occurrence of other magnetic configurations, such as antiferromagnets. Today many other magnetic interactions are known, which has led to a variety of possible magnetic states and new research questions. This is also important for skyrmion lattices. Here the atomic bar magnets show in all spatial directions, which is only possible due to the competition of different interactions.

“In our measurements, we found a hexagonal arrangement of magnetic contrasts, and at first we thought that was also a skyrmion lattice. Only later did it become clear that it could be a nanoscale magnetic mosaic,” says PD Dr. Kirsten von Bergmann. With her team from the University of Hamburg, she experimentally studied thin metallic films of iron and rhodium using spin-polarized scanning tunneling microscopy. This allows magnetic structures to be imaged down to the atomic scale. The observed magnetic lattices occurred spontaneously as in a ferromagnet, i.e., without an applied magnetic field. “With a magnetic field, we can invert the mosaic lattices, because the opposing spins only partially compensate for each other,” explains Dr. André Kubetzka, also from the University of Hamburg.

Surprising: Magnetically different alignment

Based on these measurements, the group of Prof. Dr. Stefan Heinze (Kiel University) performed quantum mechanical calculations on the supercomputers of the North German High Performance Computing Network (HLRN). They show that in the investigated iron films the tilting of the atomic bar magnets in a lattice of magnetic vortices, i.e. in all spatial directions, is very unfavorable. Instead, a nearly parallel or antiparallel alignment of neighboring atomic bar magnets is favored.

“This result completely surprised us. A lattice of skyrmions was thus no longer an option to explain the experimental observations,” says Mara Gutzeit, doctoral researcher and first author of the study. The development of an atomistic spin model made clear that it must be a novel class of magnetic lattices, which the researchers called “mosaic lattices”. “We found out that these mosaic-like magnetic structures are caused by higher-order exchange terms, predicted only a few years ago,” says Dr. Soumyajyoti Haldar from the group of Kiel.

“The study impressively shows how diverse spin structures can be and that a close collaboration between experimentally and theoretically working research groups can be really helpful for their understanding. In this field a few more surprises can be expected in the future,” states Professor Stefan Heinze.

Science paper:
Nature Communications
See the science paper for instructive images.
_________________________________________________
About spin electronics:

In addition to the charge of the electrons, spin electronics also uses their so-called spin. This electron spin is a quantum mechanical property and can be understood in simplified terms as the rotation of the electrons around their own axis. This is linked to a magnetic moment that leads to the formation of “atomic bar magnets” (atomic spins) in magnetic materials. They are suitable for processing and storing information. Through targeted electrical manipulation, it would be possible to create faster, more energy-saving and more powerful components for information technology.

See the full article here .

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The University of Hamburg [Universität Hamburg] (DE) is the largest institution for research and education in northern Germany. As one of the country’s largest universities, we offer a diverse range of degree programs and excellent research opportunities. The University boasts numerous interdisciplinary projects in a broad range of fields and an extensive partner network of leading regional, national, and international higher education and research institutions.
Sustainable science and scholarship

Universität Hamburg is committed to sustainability. All our faculties have taken great strides towards sustainability in both research and teaching.
Excellent research

As part of the Excellence Strategy of the Federal and State Governments, Universität Hamburg has been granted clusters of excellence for 4 core research areas: Advanced Imaging of Matter (photon and nanosciences), Climate, Climatic Change, and Society (CliCCS) (climate research), Understanding Written Artefacts (manuscript research) and Quantum Universe (mathematics, particle physics, astrophysics, and cosmology).

An equally important core research area is Infection Research, in which researchers investigate the structure, dynamics, and mechanisms of infection processes to promote the development of new treatment methods and therapies.
Outstanding variety: over 170 degree programs

Universität Hamburg offers approximately 170 degree programs within its eight faculties:

Faculty of Law
Faculty of Business, Economics and Social Sciences
Faculty of Medicine
Faculty of Education
Faculty of Mathematics, Informatics and Natural Sciences
Faculty of Psychology and Human Movement Science
Faculty of Business Administration (Hamburg Business School).

Universität Hamburg is also home to several museums and collections, such as the Zoological Museum, the Herbarium Hamburgense, the Geological-Paleontological Museum, the Loki Schmidt Garden, and the Hamburg Observatory.
History

Universität Hamburg was founded in 1919 by local citizens. Important founding figures include Senator Werner von Melle and the merchant Edmund Siemers. Nobel Prize winners such as the physicists Otto Stern, Wolfgang Pauli, and Isidor Rabi taught and researched at the University. Many other distinguished scholars, such as Ernst Cassirer, Erwin Panofsky, Aby Warburg, William Stern, Agathe Lasch, Magdalene Schoch, Emil Artin, Ralf Dahrendorf, and Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, also worked here.

The Kiel University [ Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel ] (DE) was founded back in 1665. It is Schleswig-Holstein’s oldest, largest and best-known university, with over 26,000 students and around 3,000 members of staff. It is also the only fully-fledged university in the state. Seven Nobel prize winners have worked here. The CAU has been successfully taking part in the Excellence Initiative since 2006. The Cluster of Excellence The Future Ocean, which was established in cooperation with the GEOMAR [Helmholtz-Zentrum für Ozeanforschung Kiel](DE) in 2006, is internationally recognized. The second Cluster of Excellence “Inflammation at Interfaces” deals with chronic inflammatory diseases. The Kiel Institute for the World Economy is also affiliated with Kiel University. The university has a great reputation for its focus on public international law. The oldest public international law institution in Germany and Europe – the Walther Schuecking Institute for International Law – is based in Kiel.

History

The University of Kiel was founded under the name Christiana Albertina on 5 October 1665 by Christian Albert, Duke of Holstein-Gottorp. The citizens of the city of Kiel were initially quite sceptical about the upcoming influx of students, thinking that these could be “quite a pest with their gluttony, heavy drinking and their questionable character” (German: mit Fressen, Sauffen und allerley leichtfertigem Wesen sehr ärgerlich seyn). But those in the city who envisioned economic advantages of a university in the city won, and Kiel thus became the northernmost university in the German Holy Roman Empire.

After 1773, when Kiel had come under Danish rule, the university began to thrive, and when Kiel became part of Prussia in the year 1867, the university grew rapidly in size. The university opened one of the first botanical gardens in Germany (now the Alter Botanischer Garten Kiel), and Martin Gropius designed many of the new buildings needed to teach the growing number of students.

The Christiana Albertina was one of the first German universities to obey the Gleichschaltung in 1933 and agreed to remove many professors and students from the school, for instance Ferdinand Tönnies or Felix Jacoby. During World War II, the University of Kiel suffered heavy damage, therefore it was later rebuilt at a different location with only a few of the older buildings housing the medical school.

In 2019, it was announced it has banned full-face coverings in classrooms, citing the need for open communication that includes facial expressions and gestures.

Faculties

Faculty of Theology
Faculty of Law
Faculty of Business, Economics and Social Sciences
Faculty of Medicine
Faculty of Arts and Humanities
Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences
Faculty of Agricultural Science and Nutrition
Faculty of Engineering

From “The New York Times” : “Nobel Prize in Physics Is Awarded to 3 Scientists for Work in Quantum Technology”

From “The New York Times”

10.4.22
Isabella Kwai
Cora Engelbrecht
Dennis Overbye

Awarding the prize on Tuesday, the committee said that the scientists’ work had “opened doors to another world.” Credit: Jonas Ekstromer/TT News Agency, via Associated Press

The Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Alain Aspect, John F. Clauser and Anton Zeilinger on Tuesday for work that has “laid the foundation for a new era of quantum technology,” the Nobel Committee for Physics said.

Alain Aspect.

John F. Clauser

Anton Zeilinger

The scientists have each conducted “groundbreaking experiments using entangled quantum states, where two particles behave like a single unit even when they are separated,” the committee said in a briefing. Their results, it said, cleared the way for “new technology based upon quantum information.”

The laureates’ research builds on the work of John Stewart Bell, a physicist who strove in the 1960s to understand whether particles, having flown too far apart for there to be normal communication between them, can still function in concert, also known as quantum entanglement.

According to quantum mechanics, particles can exist simultaneously in two or more places. They do not take on formal properties until they are measured or observed in some way. By taking measurements of one particle, like its position or “spin,” a change is observed in its partner, no matter how far away it has traveled from its pair.

Working independently, the three laureates did experiments that helped clarify a fundamental claim about quantum entanglement, which concerns the behavior of tiny particles, like electrons, that interacted in the past and then moved apart.

Dr. Clauser, an American, was the first in 1972. Using duct tape and spare parts at The DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif., he endeavored to measure quantum entanglement by firing thousands of photons in opposite directions to investigate a property known as polarization. When he measured the polarizations of photon pairs, they showed a correlation, proving that a principle called Bell’s inequality had been violated and that the photon pairs were entangled, or acting in concert.

The research was taken up 10 years later by Dr. Aspect, a French scientist, and his team at the University of Paris. And in 1998, Dr. Zeilinger, an Austrian physicist, led another experiment that considered entanglement among three or more particles.

Eva Olsson, a member of the Nobel Committee for Physics, noted that quantum information science had broad implications in areas like secure information transfer and quantum computing.

Quantum information science is a “vibrant and rapidly developing field,” she said. “Its predictions have opened doors to another world, and it has also shaken the very foundation of how we interpret measurements.”

The Nobel committee said the three scientists were being honored for their experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science.

“Being able to manipulate and manage quantum states and all their layers of properties gives us access to tools with unexpected potential,” the committee said in a statement on Twitter.

Dr. Zeilinger described the award as “an encouragement to young people.”

“The prize would not be possible without more than 100 young people who worked with me over the years and made all this possible,” he said.

Though he acknowledged that the award was recognizing the future applications of his work, he said, “My advice would be: Do what you find interesting, and don’t care too much about possible applications.”

It was the second of several such prizes to be awarded over the coming week. The Nobels, among the highest honors in science, recognize groundbreaking contributions in a variety of fields.

“I’m still kind of shocked, but it’s a very positive shock,” Dr. Zeilinger said of receiving the phone call informing him of the news.

See the full article here .

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From The Technical University of Delft [Technische Universiteit Delft] (NL) Via “Science Alert (AU)” : “There is a New Quantum Computing Record:: Control of a 6-Qubit Processor in Silicon”

From The Technical University of Delft [Technische Universiteit Delft] (NL)

Via

“Science Alert (AU)”

10.3.22
David Nield

The six-qubit quantum processor. The qubits are created by tuning the voltage on the red, blue, and green wires on the chip.SD1 and SD2 are extremely sensitive electric field sensors that can detect the charge of a single electron. These sensors together with advanced control schemes allowed the researchers to place individual electrons at the locations labeled 1-6, which were then operated as qubits. (Philips et al., Nature, 2022)

Another record has been broken on the way to fully operational and capable quantum computers: the complete control of a 6-qubit quantum processor in silicon.

Researchers are calling it “a major stepping stone” for the technology.
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Qubits (or quantum bits) are the quantum equivalents of classical computing bits, only they can potentially process much more information. Thanks to quantum physics, they can be in two states at once, rather than just a single 1 or 0.

The difficulty is in getting a lot of qubits to behave as we need them to, which is why this jump to six is important. Being able to operate them in silicon – the same material used in today’s electronic devices – makes the technology potentially more viable.

“The quantum computing challenge today consists of two parts,” says quantum computing researcher Stephan Philips from the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. “Developing qubits that are of good enough quality, and developing an architecture that allows one to build large systems of qubits.”

“Our work fits into both categories. And since the overall goal of building a quantum computer is an enormous effort, I think it is fair to say we have made a contribution in the right direction.”

The qubits are made from individual electrons fixed in a row, 90 nanometers apart (a human hair is around 75,000 nanometers in diameter). This line of ‘quantum dots’ is placed in silicon, using a structure similar to the transistors used in standard processors.

By making careful improvements to the way the electrons were prepared, managed, and monitored, the team was able to successfully control their spin – the quantum mechanical property that enables the qubit state.

The researchers were also able to create logic gates and entangle systems of two or three electrons, on demand, with low error rates.

Researchers used microwave radiation, magnetic fields, and electric potentials to control and read electron spin, operating them as qubits, and getting them to interact with each other as required.

“In this research, we push the envelope of the number of qubits in silicon, and achieve high initialization fidelities, high readout fidelities, high single-qubit gate fidelities, and high two-qubit state fidelities,” says electrical engineer Lieven Vandersypen, also from the Delft University of Technology.

“What really stands out though is that we demonstrate all these characteristics together in one single experiment on a record number of qubits.”

Up until this point, only 3-qubit processors have been successfully built in silicon and controlled up to the necessary level of quality – so we’re talking about a major step forward in terms of what’s possible in this type of qubit.

There are different ways of building qubits – including on superconductors, where many more qubits have been operated together – and scientists are still figuring out the method that might be the best way forward.

The advantage of silicon is that the manufacturing and supply chains are all already in place, meaning the transition from a scientific laboratory to an actual machine should be more straightforward. Work continues to keep pushing the qubit record even higher.

“With careful engineering, it is possible to increase the silicon spin qubit count while keeping the same precision as for single qubits,” says electrical engineer Mateusz Madzik from the Delft University of Technology.

“The key building block developed in this research could be used to add even more qubits in the next iterations of study.”

The research has been published in Nature.

See the full article here.

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Delft University of Technology [Technische Universiteit Delft] (NL) campus

The University of Technology [Technische Universiteit Delft] (NL), is the oldest and largest Dutch public technological university. Delft University of Technology [Technische Universiteit Delft] (NL) is consistently ranked as the best university in the Netherlands. As of 2020, it is ranked by QS World University Rankings among the top 15 engineering and technology universities in the world.

With eight faculties and numerous research institutes, it has more than 19,000 students (undergraduate and postgraduate), and employs more than 2,900 scientists and 2,100 support and management staff.

The university was established on 8 January 1842 by William II of the Netherlands as a Royal Academy, with the primary purpose of training civil servants for work in the Dutch East Indies. The school expanded its research and education curriculum over time, becoming a polytechnic school in 1864 and an institute of technology (making it a full-fledged university) in 1905. It changed its name to Delft University of Technology in 1986.

Dutch Nobel laureates Jacobus Henricus van ‘t Hoff, Heike Kamerlingh Onnes, and Simon van der Meer have been associated with TU Delft. TU Delft is a member of several university federations, including The IDEA League, CESAER, UNITECH International, and 4TU.

Research

TU Delft has three officially recognized research institutes: Research Institute for the Built Environment; International Research Centre for Telecommunications-transmission and Radar; and Reactor Institute Delft. In addition to those three institutes, TU Delft hosts numerous smaller research institutes, including the Delft Institute of Microelectronics and Submicron Technology; Kavli Institute of Nanoscience; Materials innovation institute; Astrodynamics and Space Missions; Delft University Wind Energy Research Institute; TU Delft Safety and Security Institute; and the Delft Space Institute. Delft Institute of Applied Mathematics is also an important research institute which connects all engineering departments with respect to research and academia.

From The University of New South Wales (AU) : “For the longest time:: quantum computing engineers set new standard in silicon chip performance”

From The University of New South Wales (AU)

9.30.22
Lachlan Gilbert

UNSW engineers have substantially extended the time that their quantum computing processors can hold information by more than 100 times compared to previous results.

Controlling qubit spins in silicon ensures the production of future quantum computer chips can use existing manufacturing technology. Image: Shutterstock.

Two milliseconds – or two thousandths of a second – is an extraordinarily long time in the world of quantum computing.

On these timescales the blink of an eye – at one 10th of a second – is like an eternity.

Now a team of researchers at UNSW Sydney has broken new ground in proving that ‘spin qubits’ – properties of electrons representing the basic units of information in quantum computers – can hold information for up to two milliseconds. Known as ‘coherence time’, the duration of time that qubits can be manipulated in increasingly complicated calculations, the achievement is 100 times longer than previous benchmarks in the same quantum processor.

“Longer coherence time means you have more time over which your quantum information is stored – which is exactly what you need when doing quantum operations,” says PhD student Ms Amanda Seedhouse, whose work in theoretical quantum computing contributed to the achievement.

“The coherence time is basically telling you how long you can do all of the operations in whatever algorithm or sequence you want to do before you’ve lost all the information in your qubits.”

In quantum computing, the more you can keep spins in motion, the better the chance that the information can be maintained during calculations. When spin qubits stop spinning, the calculation collapses and the values represented by each qubit are lost. The concept of extending coherence was already confirmed experimentally by quantum engineers at UNSW in 2016.

Making the task even more challenging is the fact that working quantum computers of the future will need to keep track of the values of millions of qubits if they are to solve some of humanity’s biggest challenges, like the search for effective vaccines, modelling weather systems and predicting the impacts of climate change.

Late last year the same team at UNSW Sydney solved a technical problem that had stumped engineers for decades on how to manipulate millions of qubits without generating more heat and interference. Rather than adding thousands of tiny antennas to control millions of electrons with magnetic waves, the research team came up with a way to use just one antenna to control all the qubits in the chip by introducing a crystal called a dielectric resonator. These results were published in Science Advances [below].

This solved the problem of space, heat and noise that would inevitably increase as more and more qubits are brought online to carry out the mind-bending calculations that are possible when qubits not only represent 1 or 0 like conventional binary computers, but both at once, using a phenomenon known as quantum superposition.

Global vs individual control

However, this proof-of-concept achievement still left a few challenges to solve. Lead researcher Ms Ingvild Hansen joined Ms Seedhouse to address these issues in a series of papers published in the journals Physical Review B [below], Physical Review A [below] and Applied Physics Reviews [below] – the last paper published just this week.

Being able to control millions of qubits with just one antenna was a large step forward. But while control of millions of qubits at once is a great feat, working quantum computers will also need them to be manipulated individually. If all the spin qubits are rotating at nearly the same frequency, they will have the same values. How can we control them individually so they can represent different values in a calculation?

Ingvild Hansen and Amanda Seedhouse in the laboratory where quantum computing experiments are carried out. Photo: UNSW/Richard Freeman.

“First we showed theoretically that we can improve the coherence time by continuously rotating the qubits,” says Ms Hansen.

“If you imagine a circus performer spinning plates, while they’re still spinning, the performance can continue. In the same way, if we continuously drive qubits, they can hold information for longer. We showed that such ‘dressed’ qubits had coherence times of more than 230 microseconds [230 millionths of a second].”

After the team showed that coherence times could be extended with so-called ‘dressed’ qubits, the next challenge was to make the protocol more robust and to show that the globally controlled electrons can also be controlled individually so that they could hold different values needed for complex calculations.

This was achieved by creating what the team dubbed the ‘SMART’ qubit protocol – Sinusoidally Modulated, Always Rotating and Tailored.

Rather than have qubits spinning in circles, they manipulated them to rock back and forth like a metronome. Then, if an electric field is applied individually to any qubit – putting it out of resonance – it can be put into a different tempo to its neighbours, but still moving at the same rhythm.

“Think of it like two kids on a swing who are pretty much going forward and backwards in sync,” says Ms Seedhouse. “If we give one of them a push, we can get them reaching the end of their arc at opposite ends, so one can be a 0 when the other is now a 1.”

The result is that not only can a qubit be controlled individually (electronically) while under the influence of global control (magnetically) but the coherence time is, as stated earlier, substantially longer and suitable for quantum calculations.

“We have shown a simple and elegant way to control all qubits at once that also comes with a better performance,” says Dr Henry Yang, one of the senior researchers in the team.

“The SMART protocol will be a potential path for full-scale quantum computers.”

The research team is led by Professor Andrew Dzurak, CEO and founder of Diraq, a UNSW spin-out company that is developing quantum computer processors which can be made using standard silicon chip manufacturing.

Next steps

“Our next goal is to show this working with two-qubit calculations after showing our proof-of-concept in our experimental paper with one qubit,” Ms Hansen says.

“Following that, we want to show that we can do this for a handful of qubits as well, to show that the theory is proven in practice.”

Science papers:
Science Advances
Physical Review B
Physical Review A
Applied Physics Reviews

Being able to control millions of qubits with just one antenna was a large step forward. But while control of millions of qubits at once is a great feat, working quantum computers will also need them to be manipulated individually. If all the spin qubits are rotating at nearly the same frequency, they will have the same values. How can we control them individually so they can represent different values in a calculation?

See the full article here .

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The University of New South Wales is an Australian public university with its largest campus in the Sydney suburb of Kensington.

Established in 1949, UNSW is a research university, ranked 44th in the world in the 2021 QS World University Rankings and 67th in the world in the 2021 Times Higher Education World University Rankings. UNSW is one of the founding members of the Group of Eight, a coalition of Australian research-intensive universities, and of Universitas 21, a global network of research universities. It has international exchange and research partnerships with over 200 universities around the world.

According to the 2021 QS World University Rankings by Subject, UNSW is ranked top 20 in the world for Law, Accounting and Finance, and 1st in Australia for Mathematics, Engineering and Technology. UNSW also leads Australia in Medicine, where the median ATAR (Australian university entrance examination results) of its Medical School students is higher than any other Australian medical school. UNSW enrolls the highest number of Australia’s top 500 high school students academically, and produces more millionaire graduates than any other Australian university.

The university comprises seven faculties, through which it offers bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees. The main campus is in the Sydney suburb of Kensington, 7 kilometres (4.3 mi) from the Sydney CBD. The creative arts faculty, UNSW Art & Design, is located in Paddington, and subcampuses are located in the Sydney CBD as well as several other suburbs, including Randwick and Coogee. Research stations are located throughout the state of New South Wales.

The university’s second largest campus, known as UNSW Canberra at ADFA (formerly known as UNSW at ADFA), is situated in Canberra, in the Australian Capital Territory (ACT). ADFA is the military academy of the Australian Defense Force, and UNSW Canberra is the only national academic institution with a defense focus.

Research centres

The university has a number of purpose-built research facilities, including:

UNSW Lowy Cancer Research Centre is Australia’s first facility bringing together researchers in childhood and adult cancers, as well as one of the country’s largest cancer-research facilities, housing up to 400 researchers.
The Mark Wainwright Analytical Centre is a centre for the faculties of science, medicine, and engineering. It is used to study the structure and composition of biological, chemical, and physical materials.
UNSW Canberra Cyber is a cyber-security research and teaching centre.
The Sino-Australian Research Centre for Coastal Management (SARCCM) has a multidisciplinary focus, and works collaboratively with the Ocean University of China [中國海洋大學](CN) in coastal management research.

From The Technical University of Munich [Technische Universität München] (DE) And The Technical University of Dresden [Technische Universität Dresden] (DE) : “Quantum matter:: entanglement of many atoms detected for the first time”

From The Technical University of Munich [Technische Universität München] (DE)

And

The Technical University of Dresden [Technische Universität Dresden] (DE)

9.30.22

New insights into quantum phenomena at phase transitions

In the past, quantum phenomena could be investigated only in the realm of just a few atoms. A research team from the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and the Technical University of Dresden (TUD) has now discovered conditions for which quantum entanglement dominates on much larger scales. The results suggest new approaches to the exploration of quantum phenomena and their practical applications such as quantum computing.

Andreas Wendl preparing a superconducting magnet system. Credit: A. Heddergott /TUM.

To observe phase transitions in familiar temperature ranges, we can look at water. At 100°C it evaporates into a gas and at 0°C it freezes into ice. In all three states, the atoms display different forms of order that change abruptly across well-defined transitions. Such ordered states are also referred to as phases, separated accordingly by phase transitions. Material properties such as magnetism, superconductivity or ferroelectricity are also ordered phases, however, of the electrons in solids.

Near absolute zero, at -273.15°C, the behavior of materials can no longer be explained by classical theories. Here quantum mechanics plays a crucial role, in particular the phenomenon of entanglement, in which particles share a quantum mechanical state. If a phase transition occurs at absolute zero, for example by means of a magnetic force, the entanglement changes and specialists speak of a quantum phase transition. As for high temperatures, quantum phase transitions result in an abrupt change of the material properties.

New type of phase transition discovered

“Despite more than 30 years of extensive research dedicated to phase transitions in quantum materials, we previously assumed that the phenomenon of entanglement plays an important role at tiny distance and time scales only,” explains Matthias Vojta, Chair of Theoretical Solid State Physics at TUD. In their investigation of lithium holmium fluoride (LiHoF4), the team was able to demonstrate under which conditions quantum entanglement can be studied on much larger scales. “We discovered a new type of quantum transition in which magnetic domains play a decisive role.”

Spherical samples permit precise measurements

LiHoF4 is a ferromagnet at very low temperatures. However, if a strong magnetic field is applied exactly perpendicular to the preferred magnetic direction, the ferromagnetism vanishes entirely above a quantum phase transition. This phenomenon has been known for a long time. In their studies, the researchers now changed the direction of the magnetic field. Andreas Wendl, who conducted the experiments as part of his doctoral thesis work, explains: “We used spherical samples for our precision measurements. This allowed us to investigate the behavior in response to a small tilt of the magnetic field.”

In doing so, the researchers made a surprising observation. “We discovered that the quantum phase transition continues to exist, whereas it was previously believed that even the smallest tilt of the magnetic field would immediately suppress the transition,” says Christian Pfleiderer, professor of Experimental Physics for the Topology of Correlated Systems at TUM. Instead of the expected gradual variation in the material’s properties, the team observed an abrupt change – the defining feature of a phase transition.

The cause of these transitions according to the researchers is what is known as textures. These refer to the rough patterns in which the particles organize themselves in their microscopically ordered states. In ice these are mutually tilted crystallites and in magnets these are magnetic domains, also known as Weiss domains. Until now it was unclear whether textures can exhibit quantum phase transitions by themselves. The researchers have now discovered that this is possible and thus demonstrated that quantum entanglement also takes place at the level of textures – in other words for large numbers of atoms.

Significance for quantum technologies

On the basis of their data, the researchers have developed a new theoretical model. “For our analysis, we had to generalize existing microscopic models to take into account the tilt of the magnetic field,” says Heike Eisenlohr, who performed the calculations as part of her PhD thesis. “As an entirely new aspect, we then also calculated the feedback of the ferromagnetic domains on the microscopic properties.”

The discovery of the new quantum phase transitions and the underlying theoretical model promise to be important as a foundation and general frame of reference for research on quantum phenomena in materials, as well as for new applications: “Quantum entanglement could be controlled and applied in such technologies as quantum sensors and quantum computers,” says Vojta. Pfleiderer adds: “Our work relates to fundamental research. However, it could soon have a direct impact on real-world applications with targeted use of the newly discovered material properties.”

Science paper:
Nature

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The Technical University of Dresden [Technische Universität Dresden] (DE), internationally known as Dresden University of Technology) is a public research university, the largest institute of higher education in the city of Dresden, the largest university in Saxony and one of the 10 largest universities in Germany with 32,389 students as of 2018.

The name Technische Universität Dresden has only been used since 1961; the history of the university, however, goes back nearly 200 years to 1828. This makes it one of the oldest colleges of technology in Germany, and one of the country’s oldest universities, which in German today refers to institutes of higher education that cover the entire curriculum. The university is a member of TU9, a consortium of the nine leading German Institutes of Technology. The university is one of eleven German universities which succeeded in the Excellence Initiative in 2012, thus getting the title of a “University of Excellence”. The Technical University of Dresden succeeded in all three rounds of the German Universities Excellence Initiative (Future Concept, Graduate Schools, Clusters of Excellence).

In 1828, with emerging industrialization, the Saxon Technical School was founded to educate skilled workers in technological subjects such as mechanics, mechanical engineering and ship construction. In 1871, the year the German Empire was founded, the institute was renamed the Royal Saxon Polytechnic Institute (Königlich-Sächsisches Polytechnikum). At that time, subjects not connected with technology, such as history and languages, were introduced. By the end of the 19th century the institute had developed into a university covering all disciplines. In 1961 it was given its present name, The Technical University of Dresden [Technische Universität Dresden].

Upon German reunification in 1990, the university had already integrated the College of Forestry (Forstliche Hochschule), formerly the Royal Saxony Academy of Forestry, in the nearby small town of Tharandt. This was followed by the integration of the Dresden College of Engineering (Ingenieurshochschule Dresden), the Friedrich List College of Transport (Hochschule für Verkehrswesen) the faculty of transport science, and the “Carl-Gustav Carus” Medical Academy (Medizinische Akademie or MedAk for short), the medical faculty. Some faculties were newly founded: the faculties of Information Technology (1991), Law (1991), Education (1993) and Economics (1993).

In 2009 TU Dresden, all Dresden institutes of the Fraunhofer Society, the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Scientific Community and the Max Planck Society and Forschungszentrum Dresden-Rossendorf, soon incorporated into the Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres, published a joint letter of intent with the name DRESDEN-Konzept – Dresden Research and Education Synergies for the Development of Excellence and Novelty, which points out worldwide elite aspirations, which was recognized as the first time that all four big post-gradual elite institutions declared campus co-operation with a university.

Measured by the number of DAX board members, no top manager in the German economy was a graduate of the TU Dresden in 2019.

According to the QS Engineering and Technology Ranking the university ranked 113th worldwide and 5th in Germany. According to the Times Higher Education World University Rankings the university ranked 157th worldwide and in engineering & technology the university ranked 90th worldwide. Moreover, According to Reuters, the university was ranked 79th in the list of ‘Most Innovative Universities Ranking 2019’.

The Eduniversal Business Schools ranking ranks the university’s Faculty of Business and Economics with 3 out of 5 palmes of excellence. According to the university ranking 2016 of the German business magazine Wirtschaftswoche the university ranked 7th in Germany in computer science and mechanical engineering and 6th in Germany in business informatics and engineering management. The university did not take first place in any of the ranked subjects: Business Administration, Business informatics, Engineering management, Natural Sciences, Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering and Economics.

International cooperations

As one of the first universities in Germany it has opened a branch in Hanoi, Vietnam offering a Master’s course in mechatronics. It also maintains close partnerships with leading universities around the world, e.g. Boston University, Georgetown University, Harvard Medical School, Tongji University [同济大学](CN) and Pohang University of Science and Technology [포항공과대학교](KR).

The Technical University of Munich [Technische Universität München] (DE) is a public research university in Munich, with additional campuses in Garching, Freising, Heilbronn, Straubing, and Singapore. A technical university that specializes in engineering, technology, medicine, and the applied and natural sciences, it is organized into 11 schools and departments, and supported by numerous research centers.

A University of Excellence under the German Universities Excellence Initiative, TUM is consistently ranked among the leading universities in the European Union and its researchers and alumni include 17 Nobel laureates and 23 Leibniz Prize winners.

Research

TUM is ranked first in Germany in the fields of engineering and computer science, and within the top three in the natural sciences.

In the QS World Rankings, TUM is ranked 25th (worldwide) in engineering and technology, 28th in the natural sciences, 35th in computer science, and 50th place overall. It is the highest ranked German university in those subject areas.

In the Times Higher Education World University Rankings, TUM stands at 38th place worldwide and 2nd place nationwide. Worldwide, it ranks 14th in computer science, 22nd in engineering and technology, and 23rd in the physical sciences. It is the highest ranked German university in those subject areas.

In the Academic Ranking of World Universities, TUM is ranked at 52nd place in the world and 2nd place in Germany. In the subject areas of computer science and engineering, electrical engineering, aerospace engineering, food science, biotechnology, and chemistry, TUM is ranked first in Germany.

In the 2020 Global University Employability Ranking of the Times Higher Education World Rankings, TUM was ranked 12th in the world and 3rd in Europe. TUM is ranked 7th overall in Reuters’ 2019 European Most Innovative University ranking.

The TUM School of Management is triple accredited by the European Quality Improvement System (EQUIS), the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) and the Association of MBAs (AMBA).

Partnerships

TUM has over 160 international partnerships, ranging from joint research activities to international study programs. Partners include:

Europe: ETH Zurich, EPFL, ENSEA, École Centrale Paris, TU Eindhoven, Technical University of Denmark, Technical University of Vienna.
United States: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, Northwestern University, University of Illinois, Cornell University, University of Texas-Austin, The Georgia Institute of Technology .
Asia: National University of Singapore, Multimedia University, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, University of Tokyo, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, Amrita University, Sirindhorn International Institute of Technology.
Australia: Australian National University, University of Melbourne, RMIT University.

Through the Erasmus+ program and its international student exchange program TUMexchange, TUM students are provided by opportunities to study abroad.

From The DOE’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory: “New Superconducting Qubit Testbed Benefits Quantum Information Science Development”

From The DOE’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

9.29.22
Karyn Hede

If you’ve ever tried to carry on a conversation in a noisy room, you’ll be able to relate to the scientists and engineers trying to “hear” the signals from experimental quantum computing devices called qubits. These basic units of quantum computers are early in their development and remain temperamental, subject to all manner of interference. Stray “noise” can masquerade as a functioning qubit or even render it inoperable.

That’s why physicist Christian Boutan and his Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) colleagues were in celebration mode recently as they showed off PNNL’s first functional superconducting qubit. It’s not much to look at. Its case—the size of a pack of chewing gum–is connected to wires that transmit signals to a nearby panel of custom radiofrequency receivers. But most important, it’s nestled within a shiny gold cocoon called a dilution refrigerator and shielded from stray electrical signals. When the refrigerator is running, it is among the coldest places on Earth, so very close to absolute zero, less than 6 millikelvin (about −460 degrees F).

Physicists Christian Boutan (L) and Jihee Yang (R) make adjustments to a dilution refrigerator that controls the temperature of a superconducting qubit. (Photo by Andrea Starr | Pacific Northwest National Laboratory)

The extreme cold and isolation transform the sensitive superconducting device into a functional qubit and slow down the movement of atoms that would destroy the qubit state. Then, the researchers listen for a characteristic signal, a blip on their radiofrequency receivers. The blip is akin to radar signals that the military uses to detect the presence of aircraft. Just as traditional radar systems transmit radio waves and then listen for returning waves, the physicists at PNNL have used a low-temperature detection technique to “hear” the presence of a qubit by broadcasting carefully crafted signals and decoding the returning message.

“You are whispering to the qubit and listening to the resonator,” said Boutan, who assembled PNNL’s first qubit testbed. “If you hit the right frequency with a signal sent to the qubit, you will see the peak of the resonator shift. The state of the qubit changes the resonator frequency. That’s the signal shift we are listening for.”

This is not directly measuring the quantum signal, but rather looking for the trail it leaves behind. One of the many oddities of quantum computing is that scientists can’t measure the quantum state directly. Rather, they probe its impact on the strategically prepared environment around it. This is why PNNL’s expertise in radiofrequency transmission and signal detection has been essential, said Boutan. Any uncontrolled background noise can destroy the qubit coherence.

All of this special care is necessary because the quantum signals the research team is trying to detect and record can rather easily be swamped out by competing “noise” from a variety of sources, including the materials in the qubit itself.

Quantum focus

It’s early days in quantum computing. Existing prototypes such as the one operating in PNNL’s physics lab could be compared to the Macintosh personal computer when Apple founder Steve Jobs and his friends emerged from their garage. Except the investment and stakes are a lot higher at this stage in the quantum computing era.

Radiofrequency signals are collected from the experimental qubit. (Photo by Andrea Starr | Pacific Northwest National Laboratory)

Scientists are particularly focused on quantum computers’ potential to solve pressing problems of energy production, use, and sustainability. That’s why the U.S. government investment alone totals more than $1 billion through the National Quantum Initiative and the Department of Energy’s National Quantum Information Science (QIS) Research Centers, which are focused on pushing forward the science of quantum computing.

PNNL, which is contributing to three of the five QIS centers, is working on several aspects of quantum information sciences, including revealing and eliminating the sources of interference and noise that throw qubits out of the useful state called “coherence,” writing computer codes that take advantage of these quantum computers, and improving the material design and construction of the qubits themselves. Boutan’s research on microwave quantum sensing is supported through PNNL’s Laboratory Directed Research and Development program.

The care and feeding of qubits

Superconducting qubits are made of exotic metals that react with oxygen in the atmosphere, creating metal oxides. You’ve seen this happening when iron turns to rust.

“It’s a materials problem,” said Brent VanDevender, a PNNL physicist working on sources of interference in qubits. “We call them two-level systems. The term refers to all the defects in your material, such as the oxides, that can mimic the qubit behavior and steal energy.”

PNNL materials scientist Peter Sushko and his colleagues are working on the challenge of stopping qubit “rust” with collaborators at Princeton University through their affiliation with the C2QA QIS Center. There, a team of researchers has developed one of the most durable qubits yet reported. And yet, metal oxides quickly form on the exposed surface of these superconducting qubit devices.

Working with their Princeton collaborators, Sushko and his team have proposed a protective coating that can interfere with oxygen in the air interacting with the surface of qubits and causing them to oxidize.

“Our goal is to remove disorder and to be compatible with the underlying structure,” said Sushko. “We are looking at a protective layer that will sit on top in an orderly way and prevent oxidation, minimizing the effects of disorder.”

This research builds upon foundational research by PNNL materials scientist Marvin Warner and colleagues. They have been building a body of knowledge about how to shield sensitive superconducting metal-based devices by applying a micro-coating that effectively protects the surface from damage that can impact performance.

“Controlling surface chemistry to protect emergent quantum properties of a material is an important approach to developing more stable and robust devices,” Warner said. “It plays perfectly into the strengths of PNNL as a chemistry laboratory.”

Soon the team will construct the proposed solution in the Princeton University Quantum Device Nanofabrication Laboratory. Once built, it will undergo an array of tests. If successful, the qubit could be ready for rigorous tests of its longevity when faced with qubit-coherence-destroying bombardment by atmospheric radiation, also known as cosmic rays.

Going underground

You can count on one hand the number of places in the United States set up to study qubit fidelity in a well-shielded underground environment. Soon PNNL will be among them. Preparations are well underway to set up an underground qubit test facility within PNNL’s Shallow Underground Laboratory. Decades of research on the effects of ionizing radiation have prepared PNNL scientists to establish how well quantum devices can tolerate interference from bombardment by natural radiation sources. Here, researchers and technicians are busy setting up a dilution refrigerator similar to the one in PNNL’s physics lab.

Within an ultra-clean room with world-leading ultra-pure material synthesis and ultra-low background radiation detection, experimental qubits will be put through their paces in a custom lead shielded environment that reduces external gamma-rays by more than 99 percent.

About 40 feet below ground, shielded by a mound of concrete, rocks and soil, lies the Shallow Underground Laboratory, which is central to Pacific Northwest National Laboratory’s capabilities in national security and fundamental physics. (Photo by Andrea Starr | Pacific Northwest National Laboratory)

Within the year, PNNL will be prepared to complete the full cycle of qubit testing, from design and theory, to microfabrication, to environmental testing, to deployment with research partners.

“Fully functional quantum computers will only be useful when they become reliable,” said Warner. “With our research partners, we are preparing today to help usher in that era today.”

See the full article here .

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DOE’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) is one of the United States Department of Energy National Laboratories, managed by the Department of Energy’s Office of Science. The main campus of the laboratory is in Richland, Washington.

PNNL scientists conduct basic and applied research and development to strengthen U.S. scientific foundations for fundamental research and innovation; prevent and counter acts of terrorism through applied research in information analysis, cyber security, and the nonproliferation of weapons of mass destruction; increase the U.S. energy capacity and reduce dependence on imported oil; and reduce the effects of human activity on the environment. PNNL has been operated by Battelle Memorial Institute since 1965.

From The California Institute of Technology: “Conventional Computers Can Learn to Solve Tricky Quantum Problems”

From The California Institute of Technology

Machine Learning

9.22.22

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

Physicists prove that classical machine learning models can improve predictions about quantum materials.

There has been a lot of buzz about quantum computers and for good reason. The futuristic computers are designed to mimic what happens in nature at microscopic scales, which means they have the power to better understand the quantum realm and speed up the discovery of new materials, including pharmaceuticals, environmentally friendly chemicals, and more. However, experts say viable quantum computers are still a decade away or more. What are researchers to do in the meantime?

A new Caltech-led study in the journal Science [below] describes how machine learning tools, run on classical computers, can be used to make predictions about quantum systems and thus help researchers solve some of the trickiest physics and chemistry problems. While this notion has been proposed before, the new report is the first to mathematically prove that the method works in problems that no traditional algorithms could solve.

“Quantum computers are ideal for many types of physics and materials science problems,” says lead author Hsin-Yuan (Robert) Huang, a graduate student working with John Preskill, the Richard P. Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics and the Allen V. C. Davis and Lenabelle Davis Leadership Chair of the Institute for Quantum Science and Technology (IQIM). “But we aren’t quite there yet and have been surprised to learn that classical machine learning methods can be used in the meantime. Ultimately, this paper is about showing what humans can learn about the physical world.”

At microscopic levels, the physical world becomes an incredibly complex place ruled by the laws of quantum physics. In this realm, particles can exist in a superposition of states, or in two states at once. And a superposition of states can lead to entanglement, a phenomenon in which particles are linked, or correlated, without even being in contact with each other. These strange states and connections, which are widespread within natural and human-made materials, are very hard to describe mathematically.

“Predicting the low-energy state of a material is very hard,” says Huang. “There are huge numbers of atoms, and they are superimposed and entangled. You can’t write down an equation to describe it all.”

The new study is the first mathematical demonstration that classical machine learning can be used to bridge the gap between us and the quantum world. Machine learning is a type of computer application that mimics the human brain to learn from data.

“We are classical beings living in a quantum world,” says Preskill. “Our brains and our computers are classical, and this limits our ability to interact with and understand the quantum reality.”

While previous studies have shown that machine learning models have the ability to solve some quantum problems, these methods typically operate in ways that make it difficult for researchers to learn how the machines arrived at their solutions.

“Normally, when it comes to machine learning, you don’t know how the machine solved the problem. It’s a black box,” says Huang. “But now we’ve essentially figured out what’s happening in the box through our mathematical analysis and numerical simulations.” Huang and his colleagues did extensive numerical simulations in collaboration with the AWS Center for Quantum Computing at Caltech, which corroborated their theoretical results.

The new study will help scientists better understand and classify complex and exotic phases of quantum matter.

“The worry was that people creating new quantum states in the lab might not be able to understand them,” Preskill explains. “But now we can obtain reasonable classical data to explain what’s going on. The classical machines don’t just give us an answer like an oracle but guide us toward a deeper understanding.”

Co-author Victor V. Albert, a NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) physicist and former DuBridge Prize Postdoctoral Scholar at Caltech, agrees. “The part that excites me most about this work is that we are now closer to a tool that helps you understand the underlying phase of a quantum state without requiring you to know very much about that state in advance.”

Ultimately, of course, future quantum-based machine learning tools will outperform classical methods, the scientists say. In a related study appearing June 10, 2022, in Science [below], Huang, Preskill, and their collaborators report using Google’s Sycamore processor, a rudimentary quantum computer, to demonstrate that quantum machine learning is superior to classical approaches.

“We are still at the very beginning of this field,” says Huang. “But we do know that quantum machine learning will eventually be the most efficient.”

Science papers:
Science
See this science paper for instructive images.
Science
See the science paper for instructive images.

See the full article here .

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Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

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Caltech campus

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

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

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

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

Research

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

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

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

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

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

From The Vienna University of Technology [Technische Universität Wien](AT) And Rice University: “Designing New Quantum Materials on the Computer”

From The Vienna University of Technology [Technische Universität Wien](AT)

And

Rice University

9.19.22
Prof. Silke Bühler-Paschen
Institute for Solid State Physics
TU Wien
+43 1 58801 13716
silke.buehler-paschen@tuwien.ac.at

A new design principle can now predict the properties of quantum materials that have hardly been explored so far. For the first time a strongly correlated topological semimetal has been discovered using a computer.

The new material: Ce2Au3In5. Credit: TU Wien.

How do you find novel materials with very specific properties – for example, special electronic properties which are needed for quantum computers? This is usually a very complicated task: various compounds are created, in which potentially promising atoms are arranged in certain crystal structures and then the material is examined, for example in the low-temperature laboratory of TU Wien.

Now, a cooperation between Rice University, TU Wien and other international research institutions has succeeded in tracking down suitable materials on the computer. New theoretical methods are used to identify particularly promising candidates from the vast number of possible materials. Measurements at TU Wien then showed: the materials do indeed have the required properties, the method works. This is an important step forward for research on quantum materials. The results have now been published in the journal Nature Physics [below].

Topological semimetals

Rice University in Texas and TU Wien have already worked together very successfully in recent years in the search for novel quantum materials with very special properties: in 2017 the two research groups presented the first so-called “Weyl-Kondo semimetal” – a material that could potentially play an important role in research into quantum computer technologies.

“The electrons in such a material cannot be described individually,” explains Prof. Silke Bühler-Paschen from the Institute of Solid State Physics at TU Wien. “There are very strong interactions between these electrons, they interfere with each other as waves according to the laws of quantum physics, and at the same time they repel each other because of their electrical charge.”

It is precisely this strong interaction that leads to excitations of the electrons, which can only be described using very elaborate mathematical methods. In the materials now being studied, topology also plays an important role – it is a branch of mathematics that deals with geometric properties that are not changed by continuous deformation, such as the number of holes in a doughnut, which remains the same even if the doughnut is slightly squeezed.

In a similar way, electronic states in the material can remain stable even if the material is slightly disturbed. This is precisely why these states are so useful for practical applications such as quantum computers.

Using the computer to identify possible candidates

Calculating the behaviour of all the strongly interacting electrons in the material is impossible – no supercomputer in the world is capable of doing it. But based on previous findings, it has now been possible to develop a design principle that uses simplified model calculations combined with mathematical symmetry considerations and a database of known materials to provide suggestions as to which of these materials might have the theoretically expected topological properties.

“This method provided three such candidates, and we then produced one of these materials and measured it in our laboratory at low temperatures,” says Silke Bühler-Paschen. “And indeed, these first measurements indicate that it is a highly correlated topological semimetal – the first to be predicted on a theoretical basis using a computer.”

An important key to success was to exploit the symmetries of the system in a clever way: “What we postulated was that strongly correlated excitations are still subject to symmetry requirements. Because of that, I can say a lot about the topology of a system without resorting to ab initio calculations that are often required but are particularly challenging for studying strongly correlated materials,” says Qimiao Si of Rice University. “All indications are that we have found a robust way to identify materials that have the features we want.”

Science paper:
Nature Physics

See the full article here.

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Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

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Rice University [formally William Marsh Rice University] is a private research university in Houston, Texas. It is situated on a 300-acre campus near the Houston Museum District and is adjacent to the Texas Medical Center.
Opened in 1912 after the murder of its namesake William Marsh Rice, Rice is a research university with an undergraduate focus. Its emphasis on education is demonstrated by a small student body and 6:1 student-faculty ratio. The university has a very high level of research activity. Rice is noted for its applied science programs in the fields of artificial heart research, structural chemical analysis, signal processing, space science, and nanotechnology. Rice has been a member of the Association of American Universities since 1985 and is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity”.
The university is organized into eleven residential colleges and eight schools of academic study, including the Wiess School of Natural Sciences, the George R. Brown School of Engineering, the School of Social Sciences, School of Architecture, Shepherd School of Music and the School of Humanities. Rice’s undergraduate program offers more than fifty majors and two dozen minors, and allows a high level of flexibility in pursuing multiple degree programs. Additional graduate programs are offered through the Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Business and the Susanne M. Glasscock School of Continuing Studies. Rice students are bound by the strict Honor Code, which is enforced by a student-run Honor Council.
Rice competes in 14 NCAA Division I varsity sports and is a part of Conference USA, often competing with its cross-town rival the University of Houston. Intramural and club sports are offered in a wide variety of activities such as jiu jitsu, water polo, and crew.
The university’s alumni include more than two dozen Marshall Scholars and a dozen Rhodes Scholars. Given the university’s close links to National Aeronautics Space Agency, it has produced a significant number of astronauts and space scientists. In business, Rice graduates include CEOs and founders of Fortune 500 companies; in politics, alumni include congressmen, cabinet secretaries, judges, and mayors. Two alumni have won the Nobel Prize.

Background

Rice University’s history began with the demise of Massachusetts businessman William Marsh Rice, who had made his fortune in real estate, railroad development and cotton trading in the state of Texas. In 1891, Rice decided to charter a free-tuition educational institute in Houston, bearing his name, to be created upon his death, earmarking most of his estate towards funding the project. Rice’s will specified the institution was to be “a competitive institution of the highest grade” and that only white students would be permitted to attend. On the morning of September 23, 1900, Rice, age 84, was found dead by his valet, Charles F. Jones, and was presumed to have died in his sleep. Shortly thereafter, a large check made out to Rice’s New York City lawyer, signed by the late Rice, aroused the suspicion of a bank teller, due to the misspelling of the recipient’s name. The lawyer, Albert T. Patrick, then announced that Rice had changed his will to leave the bulk of his fortune to Patrick, rather than to the creation of Rice’s educational institute. A subsequent investigation led by the District Attorney of New York resulted in the arrests of Patrick and of Rice’s butler and valet Charles F. Jones, who had been persuaded to administer chloroform to Rice while he slept. Rice’s friend and personal lawyer in Houston, Captain James A. Baker, aided in the discovery of what turned out to be a fake will with a forged signature. Jones was not prosecuted since he cooperated with the district attorney, and testified against Patrick. Patrick was found guilty of conspiring to steal Rice’s fortune and he was convicted of murder in 1901 (he was pardoned in 1912 due to conflicting medical testimony). Baker helped Rice’s estate direct the fortune, worth $4.6 million in 1904 ($131 million today), towards the founding of what was to be called the Rice Institute, later to become Rice University. The board took control of the assets on April 29 of that year.

In 1907, the Board of Trustees selected the head of the Department of Mathematics and Astronomy at Princeton University, Edgar Odell Lovett, to head the Institute, which was still in the planning stages. He came recommended by Princeton University‘s president, Woodrow Wilson. In 1908, Lovett accepted the challenge, and was formally inaugurated as the Institute’s first president on October 12, 1912. Lovett undertook extensive research before formalizing plans for the new Institute, including visits to 78 institutions of higher learning across the world on a long tour between 1908 and 1909. Lovett was impressed by such things as the aesthetic beauty of the uniformity of the architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, a theme which was adopted by the Institute, as well as the residential college system at University of Cambridge (UK) in England, which was added to the Institute several decades later. Lovett called for the establishment of a university “of the highest grade,” “an institution of liberal and technical learning” devoted “quite as much to investigation as to instruction.” [We must] “keep the standards up and the numbers down,” declared Lovett. “The most distinguished teachers must take their part in undergraduate teaching, and their spirit should dominate it all.”
Establishment and growth

In 1911, the cornerstone was laid for the Institute’s first building, the Administration Building, now known as Lovett Hall in honor of the founding president. On September 23, 1912, the 12th anniversary of William Marsh Rice’s murder, the William Marsh Rice Institute for the Advancement of Letters, Science, and Art began course work with 59 enrolled students, who were known as the “59 immortals,” and about a dozen faculty. After 18 additional students joined later, Rice’s initial class numbered 77, 48 male and 29 female. Unusual for the time, Rice accepted coeducational admissions from its beginning, but on-campus housing would not become co-ed until 1957.

Three weeks after opening, a spectacular international academic festival was held, bringing Rice to the attention of the entire academic world.

Per William Marsh Rice’s will and Rice Institute’s initial charter, the students paid no tuition. Classes were difficult, however, and about half of Rice’s students had failed after the first 1912 term. At its first commencement ceremony, held on June 12, 1916, Rice awarded 35 bachelor’s degrees and one master’s degree. That year, the student body also voted to adopt the Honor System, which still exists today. Rice’s first doctorate was conferred in 1918 on mathematician Hubert Evelyn Bray.

The Founder’s Memorial Statue, a bronze statue of a seated William Marsh Rice, holding the original plans for the campus, was dedicated in 1930, and installed in the central academic quad, facing Lovett Hall. The statue was crafted by John Angel. In 2020, Rice students petitioned the university to take down the statue due to the founder’s history as slave owner.

During World War II, Rice Institute 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.

The residential college system proposed by President Lovett was adopted in 1958, with the East Hall residence becoming Baker College, South Hall residence becoming Will Rice College, West Hall becoming Hanszen College, and the temporary Wiess Hall becoming Wiess College.

In 1959, the Rice Institute Computer went online. 1960 saw Rice Institute formally renamed William Marsh Rice University. Rice acted as a temporary intermediary in the transfer of land between Humble Oil and Refining Company and NASA, for the creation of NASA’s Manned Spacecraft Center (now called Johnson Space Center) in 1962. President John F. Kennedy then made a speech at Rice Stadium reiterating that the United States intended to reach the moon before the end of the decade of the 1960s, and “to become the world’s leading space-faring nation”. The relationship of NASA with Rice University and the city of Houston has remained strong to the present day.

The original charter of Rice Institute dictated that the university admit and educate, tuition-free, “the white inhabitants of Houston, and the state of Texas”. In 1963, the governing board of Rice University filed a lawsuit to allow the university to modify its charter to admit students of all races and to charge tuition. Ph.D. student Raymond Johnson became the first black Rice student when he was admitted that year. In 1964, Rice officially amended the university charter to desegregate its graduate and undergraduate divisions. The Trustees of Rice University prevailed in a lawsuit to void the racial language in the trust in 1966. Rice began charging tuition for the first time in 1965. In the same year, Rice launched a $33 million ($268 million) development campaign. $43 million ($283 million) was raised by its conclusion in 1970. In 1974, two new schools were founded at Rice, the Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Management and the Shepherd School of Music. The Brown Foundation Challenge, a fund-raising program designed to encourage annual gifts, was launched in 1976 and ended in 1996 having raised $185 million. The Rice School of Social Sciences was founded in 1979.

On-campus housing was exclusively for men for the first forty years, until 1957. Jones College was the first women’s residence on the Rice campus, followed by Brown College. According to legend, the women’s colleges were purposefully situated at the opposite end of campus from the existing men’s colleges as a way of preserving campus propriety, which was greatly valued by Edgar Odell Lovett, who did not even allow benches to be installed on campus, fearing that they “might lead to co-fraternization of the sexes”. The path linking the north colleges to the center of campus was given the tongue-in-cheek name of “Virgin’s Walk”. Individual colleges became coeducational between 1973 and 1987, with the single-sex floors of colleges that had them becoming co-ed by 2006. By then, several new residential colleges had been built on campus to handle the university’s growth, including Lovett College, Sid Richardson College, and Martel College.

Late twentieth and early twenty-first century

The Economic Summit of Industrialized Nations was held at Rice in 1990. Three years later, in 1993, the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy was created. In 1997, the Edythe Bates Old Grand Organ and Recital Hall and the Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology, renamed in 2005 for the late Nobel Prize winner and Rice professor Richard E. Smalley, were dedicated at Rice. In 1999, the Center for Biological and Environmental Nanotechnology was created. The Rice Owls baseball team was ranked #1 in the nation for the first time in that year (1999), holding the top spot for eight weeks.

In 2003, the Owls won their first national championship in baseball, which was the first for the university in any team sport, beating Southwest Missouri State in the opening game and then the University of Texas and Stanford University twice each en route to the title. In 2008, President David Leebron issued a ten-point plan titled “Vision for the Second Century” outlining plans to increase research funding, strengthen existing programs, and increase collaboration. The plan has brought about another wave of campus constructions, including the erection the newly renamed BioScience Research Collaborative building (intended to foster collaboration with the adjacent Texas Medical Center), a new recreational center and the renovated Autry Court basketball stadium, and the addition of two new residential colleges, Duncan College and McMurtry College.

Beginning in late 2008, the university considered a merger with Baylor College of Medicine, though the merger was ultimately rejected in 2010. Rice undergraduates are currently guaranteed admission to Baylor College of Medicine upon graduation as part of the Rice/Baylor Medical Scholars program. According to History Professor John Boles’ recent book University Builder: Edgar Odell Lovett and the Founding of the Rice Institute, the first president’s original vision for the university included hopes for future medical and law schools.

In 2018, the university added an online MBA program, MBA@Rice.

In June 2019, the university’s president announced plans for a task force on Rice’s “past in relation to slave history and racial injustice”, stating that “Rice has some historical connections to that terrible part of American history and the segregation and racial disparities that resulted directly from it”.

Campus

Rice’s campus is a heavily wooded 285-acre (115-hectare) tract of land in the museum district of Houston, located close to the city of West University Place.

Five streets demarcate the campus: Greenbriar Street, Rice Boulevard, Sunset Boulevard, Main Street, and University Boulevard. For most of its history, all of Rice’s buildings have been contained within this “outer loop”. In recent years, new facilities have been built close to campus, but the bulk of administrative, academic, and residential buildings are still located within the original pentagonal plot of land. The new Collaborative Research Center, all graduate student housing, the Greenbriar building, and the Wiess President’s House are located off-campus.

Rice prides itself on the amount of green space available on campus; there are only about 50 buildings spread between the main entrance at its easternmost corner, and the parking lots and Rice Stadium at the West end. The Lynn R. Lowrey Arboretum, consisting of more than 4000 trees and shrubs (giving birth to the legend that Rice has a tree for every student), is spread throughout the campus.
The university’s first president, Edgar Odell Lovett, intended for the campus to have a uniform architecture style to improve its aesthetic appeal. To that end, nearly every building on campus is noticeably Byzantine in style, with sand and pink-colored bricks, large archways and columns being a common theme among many campus buildings. Noteworthy exceptions include the glass-walled Brochstein Pavilion, Lovett College with its Brutalist-style concrete gratings, Moody Center for the Arts with its contemporary design, and the eclectic-Mediterranean Duncan Hall. In September 2011, Travel+Leisure listed Rice’s campus as one of the most beautiful in the United States.

The university and Houston Independent School District jointly established The Rice School-a kindergarten through 8th grade public magnet school in Houston. The school opened in August 1994. Through Cy-Fair ISD Rice University offers a credit course based summer school for grades 8 through 12. They also have skills based classes during the summer in the Rice Summer School.

Innovation District

In early 2019 Rice announced the site where the abandoned Sears building in Midtown Houston stood along with its surrounding area would be transformed into the “The Ion” the hub of the 16-acre South Main Innovation District. President of Rice David Leebron stated “We chose the name Ion because it’s from the Greek ienai, which means ‘go’. We see it as embodying the ever-forward motion of discovery, the spark at the center of a truly original idea.”

Students of Rice and other Houston-area colleges and universities making up the Student Coalition for a Just and Equitable Innovation Corridor are advocating for a Community Benefits Agreement (CBA)-a contractual agreement between a developer and a community coalition. Residents of neighboring Third Ward and other members of the Houston Coalition for Equitable Development Without Displacement (HCEDD) have faced consistent opposition from the City of Houston and Rice Management Company to a CBA as traditionally defined in favor of an agreement between the latter two entities without a community coalition signatory.

Organization

Rice University is chartered as a non-profit organization and is governed by a privately appointed board of trustees. The board consists of a maximum of 25 voting members who serve four-year terms. The trustees serve without compensation and a simple majority of trustees must reside in Texas including at least four within the greater Houston area. The board of trustees delegates its power by appointing a president to serve as the chief executive of the university. David W. Leebron was appointed president in 2004 and succeeded Malcolm Gillis who served since 1993. The provost six vice presidents and other university officials report to the president. The president is advised by a University Council composed of the provost, eight members of the Faculty Council, two staff members, one graduate student, and two undergraduate students. The president presides over a Faculty Council which has the authority to alter curricular requirements, establish new degree programs, and approve candidates for degrees.

The university’s academics are organized into several schools. Schools that have undergraduate and graduate programs include:

The Rice University School of Architecture
The George R. Brown School of Engineering
The School of Humanities
The Shepherd School of Music
The Wiess School of Natural Sciences
The Rice University School of Social Sciences

Two schools have only graduate programs:

The Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Management
The Susanne M. Glasscock School of Continuing Studies

Rice’s undergraduate students benefit from a centralized admissions process which admits new students to the university as a whole, rather than a specific school (the schools of Music and Architecture are decentralized). Students are encouraged to select the major path that best suits their desires; a student can later decide that they would rather pursue study in another field or continue their current coursework and add a second or third major. These transitions are designed to be simple at Rice with students not required to decide on a specific major until their sophomore year of study.

Rice’s academics are organized into six schools which offer courses of study at the graduate and undergraduate level, with two more being primarily focused on graduate education, while offering select opportunities for undergraduate students. Rice offers 360 degrees in over 60 departments. There are 40 undergraduate degree programs, 51 masters programs, and 29 doctoral programs.

Faculty members of each of the departments elect chairs to represent the department to each School’s dean and the deans report to the Provost who serves as the chief officer for academic affairs.

Rice Management Company

The Rice Management Company manages the $6.5 billion Rice University endowment (June 2019) and $957 million debt. The endowment provides 40% of Rice’s operating revenues. Allison Thacker is the President and Chief Investment Officer of the Rice Management Company, having joined the university in 2011.

Academics

Rice is a medium-sized highly residential research university. The majority of enrollments are in the full-time four-year undergraduate program emphasizing arts & sciences and professions. There is a high graduate coexistence with the comprehensive graduate program and a very high level of research activity. It is accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges as well as the professional accreditation agencies for engineering, management, and architecture.

Each of Rice’s departments is organized into one of three distribution groups, and students whose major lies within the scope of one group must take at least 3 courses of at least 3 credit hours each of approved distribution classes in each of the other two groups, as well as completing one physical education course as part of the LPAP (Lifetime Physical Activity Program) requirement. All new students must take a Freshman Writing Intensive Seminar (FWIS) class, and for students who do not pass the university’s writing composition examination (administered during the summer before matriculation), FWIS 100, a writing class, becomes an additional requirement.

The majority of Rice’s undergraduate degree programs grant B.S. or B.A. degrees. Rice has recently begun to offer minors in areas such as business, energy and water sustainability, and global health.

Student body

As of fall 2014, men make up 52% of the undergraduate body and 64% of the professional and post-graduate student body. The student body consists of students from all 50 states, including the District of Columbia, two U.S. Territories, and 83 foreign countries. Forty percent of degree-seeking students are from Texas.

Research centers and resources

Rice is noted for its applied science programs in the fields of nanotechnology, artificial heart research, structural chemical analysis, signal processing and space science.

Rice Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurship – supports entrepreneurs and early-stage technology ventures in Houston and Texas through education, collaboration, and research, ranked No. 1 among university business incubators.
Baker Institute for Public Policy – a leading nonpartisan public policy think-tank
BioScience Research Collaborative (BRC) – interdisciplinary, cross-campus, and inter-institutional resource between Rice University and Texas Medical Center
Boniuk Institute – dedicated to religious tolerance and advancing religious literacy, respect and mutual understanding
Center for African and African American Studies – fosters conversations on topics such as critical approaches to race and racism, the nature of diasporic histories and identities, and the complexity of Africa’s past, present and future
Chao Center for Asian Studies – research hub for faculty, students and post-doctoral scholars working in Asian studies
Center for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality (CSWGS) – interdisciplinary academic programs and research opportunities, including the journal Feminist Economics
Data to Knowledge Lab (D2K) – campus hub for experiential learning in data science
Digital Signal Processing (DSP) – center for education and research in the field of digital signal processing
Ethernest Hackerspace – student-run hackerspace for undergraduate engineering students sponsored by the ECE department and the IEEE student chapter
Humanities Research Center (HRC) – identifies, encourages, and funds innovative research projects by faculty, visiting scholars, graduate, and undergraduate students in the School of Humanities and beyond
Institute of Biosciences and Bioengineering (IBB) – facilitates the translation of interdisciplinary research and education in biosciences and bioengineering
Ken Kennedy Institute for Information Technology – advances applied interdisciplinary research in the areas of computation and information technology
Kinder Institute for Urban Research – conducts the Houston Area Survey, “the nation’s longest running study of any metropolitan region’s economy, population, life experiences, beliefs and attitudes”
Laboratory for Nanophotonics (LANP) – a resource for education and research breakthroughs and advances in the broad, multidisciplinary field of nanophotonics
Moody Center for the Arts – experimental arts space featuring studio classrooms, maker space, audiovisual editing booths, and a gallery and office space for visiting national and international artists
OpenStax CNX (formerly Connexions) and OpenStax – an open source platform and open access publisher, respectively, of open educational resources
Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen (OEDK) – space for undergraduate students to design, prototype and deploy solutions to real-world engineering challenges
Rice Cinema – an independent theater run by the Visual and Dramatic Arts department at Rice which screens documentaries, foreign films, and experimental cinema and hosts film festivals and lectures since 1970
Rice Center for Engineering Leadership (RCEL) – inspires, educates, and develops ethical leaders in technology who will excel in research, industry, non-engineering career paths, or entrepreneurship
Religion and Public Life Program (RPLP) – a research, training and outreach program working to advance understandings of the role of religion in public life
Rice Design Alliance (RDA) – outreach and public programs of the Rice School of Architecture
Rice Center for Quantum Materials (RCQM) – organization dedicated to research and higher education in areas relating to quantum phenomena
Rice Neuroengineering Initiative (NEI) – fosters research collaborations in neural engineering topics
Rice Space Institute (RSI) – fosters programs in all areas of space research
Smalley-Curl Institute for Nanoscale Science and Technology (SCI) – the nation’s first nanotechnology center
Welch Institute for Advanced Materials – collaborative research institute to support the foundational research for discoveries in materials science, similar to the model of Salk Institute and Broad Institute
Woodson Research Center Special Collections & Archives – publisher of print and web-based materials highlighting the department’s primary source collections such as the Houston African American, Asian American, and Jewish History Archives, University Archives, rare books, and hip hop/rap music-related materials from the Swishahouse record label and Houston Folk Music Archive, etc.

Residential colleges

In 1957, Rice University implemented a residential college system, which was proposed by the university’s first president, Edgar Odell Lovett. The system was inspired by existing systems in place at University of Oxford (UK) and University of Cambridge (UK) and at several other universities in the United States, most notably Yale University. The existing residences known as East, South, West, and Wiess Halls became Baker, Will Rice, Hanszen, and Wiess Colleges, respectively.

Student-run media

Rice has a weekly student newspaper (The Rice Thresher), a yearbook (The Campanile), college radio station (KTRU Rice Radio), and now defunct, campus-wide student television station (RTV5). They are based out of the RMC student center. In addition, Rice hosts several student magazines dedicated to a range of different topics; in fact, the spring semester of 2008 saw the birth of two such magazines, a literary sex journal called Open and an undergraduate science research magazine entitled Catalyst.

The Rice Thresher is published every Wednesday and is ranked by Princeton Review as one of the top campus newspapers nationally for student readership. It is distributed around campus, and at a few other local businesses and has a website. The Thresher has a small, dedicated staff and is known for its coverage of campus news, open submission opinion page, and the satirical Backpage, which has often been the center of controversy. The newspaper has won several awards from the College Media Association, Associated Collegiate Press and Texas Intercollegiate Press Association.

The Rice Campanile was first published in 1916 celebrating Rice’s first graduating class. It has published continuously since then, publishing two volumes in 1944 since the university had two graduating classes due to World War II. The website was created sometime in the early to mid 2000’s. The 2015 won the first place Pinnacle for best yearbook from College Media Association.

KTRU Rice Radio is the student-run radio station. Though most DJs are Rice students, anyone is allowed to apply. It is known for playing genres and artists of music and sound unavailable on other radio stations in Houston, and often, the US. The station takes requests over the phone or online. In 2000 and 2006, KTRU won Houston Press’ Best Radio Station in Houston. In 2003, Rice alum and active KTRU DJ DL’s hip-hip show won Houston Press‘ Best Hip-hop Radio Show. On August 17, 2010, it was announced that Rice University had been in negotiations to sell the station’s broadcast tower, FM frequency and license to the University of Houston System to become a full-time classical music and fine arts programming station. The new station, KUHA, would be operated as a not-for-profit outlet with listener supporters. The FCC approved the sale and granted the transfer of license to the University of Houston System on April 15, 2011, however, KUHA proved to be an even larger failure and so after four and a half years of operation, The University of Houston System announced that KUHA’s broadcast tower, FM frequency and license were once again up for sale in August 2015. KTRU continued to operate much as it did previously, streaming live on the Internet, via apps, and on HD2 radio using the 90.1 signal. Under student leadership, KTRU explored the possibility of returning to FM radio for a number of years. In spring 2015, KTRU was granted permission by the FCC to begin development of a new broadcast signal via LPFM radio. On October 1, 2015, KTRU made its official return to FM radio on the 96.1 signal. While broadcasting on HD2 radio has been discontinued, KTRU continues to broadcast via internet in addition to its LPFM signal.

RTV5 is a student-run television network available as channel 5 on campus. RTV5 was created initially as Rice Broadcast Television in 1997; RBT began to broadcast the following year in 1998, and aired its first live show across campus in 1999. It experienced much growth and exposure over the years with successful programs like Drinking with Phil, The Meg & Maggie Show, which was a variety and call-in show, a weekly news show, and extensive live coverage in December 2000 of the shut down of KTRU by the administration. In spring 2001, the Rice undergraduate community voted in the general elections to support RBT as a blanket tax organization, effectively providing a yearly income of $10,000 to purchase new equipment and provide the campus with a variety of new programming. In the spring of 2005, RBT members decided the station needed a new image and a new name: Rice Television 5. One of RTV5’s most popular shows was the 24-hour show, where a camera and couch placed in the RMC stayed on air for 24 hours. One such show is held in fall and another in spring, usually during a weekend allocated for visits by prospective students. RTV5 has a video on demand site at rtv5.rice.edu. The station went off the air in 2014 and changed its name to Rice Video Productions. In 2015 the group’s funding was threatened, but ultimately maintained. In 2016 the small student staff requested to no longer be a blanket-tax organization. In the fall of 2017, the club did not register as a club.

The Rice Review, also known as R2, is a yearly student-run literary journal at Rice University that publishes prose, poetry, and creative nonfiction written by undergraduate students, as well as interviews. The journal was founded in 2004 by creative writing professor and author Justin Cronin.

The Rice Standard was an independent, student-run variety magazine modeled after such publications as The New Yorker and Harper’s. Prior to fall 2009, it was regularly published three times a semester with a wide array of content, running from analyses of current events and philosophical pieces to personal essays, short fiction and poetry. In August 2009, The Standard transitioned to a completely online format with the launch of their redesigned website, http://www.ricestandard.org. The first website of its kind on Rice’s campus, The Standard featured blog-style content written by and for Rice students. The Rice Standard had around 20 regular contributors, and the site features new content every day (including holidays). In 2017 no one registered The Rice Standard as a club within the university.

Open, a magazine dedicated to “literary sex content,” predictably caused a stir on campus with its initial publication in spring 2008. A mixture of essays, editorials, stories and artistic photography brought Open attention both on campus and in the Houston Chronicle. The third and last annual edition of Open was released in spring of 2010.

Athletics

Rice plays in NCAA Division I athletics and is part of Conference USA. Rice was a member of the Western Athletic Conference before joining Conference USA in 2005. Rice is the second-smallest school, measured by undergraduate enrollment, competing in NCAA Division I FBS football, only ahead of Tulsa.

The Rice baseball team won the 2003 College World Series, defeating Stanford, giving Rice its only national championship in a team sport. The victory made Rice University the smallest school in 51 years to win a national championship at the highest collegiate level of the sport. The Rice baseball team has played on campus at Reckling Park since the 2000 season. As of 2010, the baseball team has won 14 consecutive conference championships in three different conferences: the final championship of the defunct Southwest Conference, all nine championships while a member of the Western Athletic Conference, and five more championships in its first five years as a member of Conference USA. Additionally, Rice’s baseball team has finished third in both the 2006 and 2007 College World Series tournaments. Rice now has made six trips to Omaha for the CWS. In 2004, Rice became the first school ever to have three players selected in the first eight picks of the MLB draft when Philip Humber, Jeff Niemann, and Wade Townsend were selected third, fourth, and eighth, respectively. In 2007, Joe Savery was selected as the 19th overall pick.

Rice has been very successful in women’s sports in recent years. In 2004–05, Rice sent its women’s volleyball, soccer, and basketball teams to their respective NCAA tournaments. The women’s swim team has consistently brought at least one member of their team to the NCAA championships since 2013. In 2005–06, the women’s soccer, basketball, and tennis teams advanced, with five individuals competing in track and field. In 2006–07, the Rice women’s basketball team made the NCAA tournament, while again five Rice track and field athletes received individual NCAA berths. In 2008, the women’s volleyball team again made the NCAA tournament. In 2011 the Women’s Swim team won their first conference championship in the history of the university. This was an impressive feat considering they won without having a diving team. The team repeated their C-USA success in 2013 and 2014. In 2017, the women’s basketball team, led by second-year head coach Tina Langley, won the Women’s Basketball Invitational, defeating UNC-Greensboro 74–62 in the championship game at Tudor Fieldhouse. Though not a varsity sport, Rice’s ultimate frisbee women’s team, named Torque, won consecutive Division III national championships in 2014 and 2015.

In 2006, the football team qualified for its first bowl game since 1961, ending the second-longest bowl drought in the country at the time. On December 22, 2006, Rice played in the New Orleans Bowl in New Orleans, Louisiana against the Sun Belt Conference champion, Troy. The Owls lost 41–17. The bowl appearance came after Rice had a 14-game losing streak from 2004–05 and went 1–10 in 2005. The streak followed an internally authorized 2003 McKinsey report that stated football alone was responsible for a $4 million deficit in 2002. Tensions remained high between the athletic department and faculty, as a few professors who chose to voice their opinion were in favor of abandoning the football program. The program success in 2006, the Rice Renaissance, proved to be a revival of the Owl football program, quelling those tensions. David Bailiff took over the program in 2007 and has remained head coach. Jarett Dillard set an NCAA record in 2006 by catching a touchdown pass in 13 consecutive games and took a 15-game overall streak into the 2007 season.

In 2008, the football team posted a 9-3 regular season, capping off the year with a 38–14 victory over Western Michigan University in the Texas Bowl. The win over Western Michigan marked the Owls’ first bowl win in 45 years.

Rice Stadium also serves as the performance venue for the university’s Marching Owl Band, or “MOB.” Despite its name, the MOB is a scatter band that focuses on performing humorous skits and routines rather than traditional formation marching.

Rice Owls men’s basketball won 10 conference titles in the former Southwest Conference (1918, 1935*, 1940, 1942*, 1943*, 1944*, 1945, 1949*, 1954*, 1970; * denotes shared title). Most recently, guard Morris Almond was drafted in the first round of the 2007 NBA Draft by the Utah Jazz. Rice named former Cal Bears head coach Ben Braun as head basketball coach to succeed Willis Wilson, fired after Rice finished the 2007–2008 season with a winless (0-16) conference record and overall record of 3-27.

At At The Vienna University of Technology [Technische Universität Wien](AT), we have been conducting research, teaching and learning under the motto ‘Technology for people’ for over 200 years. TU Wien has evolved into an open academic institution where discussions can happen, opinions can be voiced and arguments will be heard. Although everyone may have different individual philosophies and approaches to life, the staff, management personnel and students at TU Wien all promote open-mindedness and tolerance.

From The University of California-Santa Barbara: “The Magneto-Optic Modulator”

From The University of California-Santa Barbara

9.16.22
Harrison Tasoff
(805) 893-7220
harrisontasoff@ucsb.edu

Researchers create a device to streamline interactions between ultra-cold and room-temperature computers.

a, Perspective view of the device (not to scale). The top gold coil is used to apply a radial magnetic field to Ce:YIG underneath, making it non-reciprocal. The silicon microring and silicon waveguide, in the all-pass filter configuration, are visible through the transparent top cladding. b, Cross-section of the microring and electromagnet (not to scale) where the direction of the electrical current and magnetic field are highlighted. c, Optical micrograph of the fabricated sample (top view).

Electricity flowing through a metal coil generates electric (purple) and magnetic (faint green) fields. This changes the properties of the substrate, which tunes the resonance ring (red) to different frequencies. The whole setup enables the scientists to convert a continuous beam of light (red on left) into pulses that can carry data through a fiber-optic cable. Photo Credit: Brian Long.

Many state-of-the-art technologies work at incredibly low temperatures. Superconducting microprocessors and quantum computers promise to revolutionize computation, but scientists need to keep them just above absolute zero (-459.67° Fahrenheit) to protect their delicate states. Still, ultra-cold components have to interface with room temperature systems, providing both a challenge and an opportunity for engineers.

An international team of scientists, led by UC Santa Barbara’s Paolo Pintus, has designed a device to help cryogenic computers talk with their fair-weather counterparts. The mechanism uses a magnetic field to convert data from electrical current to pulses of light. The light can then travel via fiber-optic cables, which can transmit more information than regular electrical cables while minimizing the heat that leaks into the cryogenic system. The team’s results appear in the journal Nature Electronics [below].

“A device like this could enable seamless integration with cutting-edge technologies based on superconductors, for example,” said Pintus, a project scientist in UC Santa Barbara’s Optoelectronics Research Group. Superconductors can carry electrical current without any energy loss, but typically require temperatures below -450° Fahrenheit to work properly.

Right now, cryogenic systems use standard metal wires to connect with room-temperature electronics. Unfortunately, these wires transfer heat into the cold circuits and can only transmit a small amount of data at a time.

Pintus and his collaborators wanted to address both these issues at once. “The solution is using light in an optical fiber to transfer information instead of using electrons in a metal cable,” he said.

Fiber optics are standard in modern telecommunications. These thin glass cables carry information as pulses of light far faster than metal wires can carry electrical charges. As a result, fiberoptic cables can relay 1000 times more data than conventional wires over the same time span. And glass is a good insulator, meaning it will transfer far less heat to the cryogenic components than a metal wire.

However, using fiber optics requires an extra step: converting data from electrical signals into optical signals using a modulator. This is a routine process at ambient conditions, but becomes a bit tricky at cryogenic temperatures.

Pintus and his collaborators built a device that translates electrical input into pulses of light. An electric current creates a magnetic field that changes the optical properties of a synthetic garnet. Scientists refer to this as the “magneto-optic effect.”

The magnetic field changes the garnet’s refractive index, essentially its “density” to light. By changing this property, Pintus can tune the amplitude of the light that circulates in a micro-ring resonator and interacts with the garnet. This creates bright and dark pulses that carry information through the fiberoptic cable like Morse code in a telegraph wire.

“This is the first high-speed modulator ever fabricated using the magneto-optic effect,” Pintus remarked.

Other researchers have created modulators using capacitor-like devices and electric fields. However, these modulators usually have high electrical impedance — they resist the flow of alternating current — making them a poor match for superconductors, which have essentially zero electrical impedance. Since the magneto-optic modulator has low impedance, the scientists hope it will be able to better interface with superconductor circuits.

The team also took steps to make their modulator as practical as possible. It operates at wavelengths of 1,550 nanometers, the same wavelength of light used in internet telecommunications. It was produced using standard methods, which simplifies its manufacturing.

The project, funded by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, was a collaborative effort. Pintus and group director John Bowers(link is external) at UC Santa Barbara led the project, from conception, modelling and design through fabrication and testing. The synthetic garnet was grown and characterized by a group of researchers from the Tokyo Institute of Technology who have collaborated with the team at UCSB’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering on several research projects in the past.

Another partner, the Quantum Computing and Engineering group of BBN Raytheon, develops the kinds of superconducting circuits that could benefit from the new technology. Their collaboration with UCSB is a longstanding one. Scientists at BBN performed the low-temperature testing of the device to verify its performance in a realistic superconducting computing environment.

The device’s bandwidth is around 2 gigabits per second. It’s not a lot compared to data links at room temperature, but Pintus said it’s promising for a first demonstration. The team also needs to make the device more efficient for it to become useful in practical applications. However, they believe they can achieve this by replacing the garnet with a better material. “We would like to investigate other materials,” he added, “and we think we can achieve a higher bitrate. For instance, europium-based materials show a magneto-optic effect 300 times larger than the garnet.”

There are plenty of materials to choose from, but not a lot of information to help Pintus and his colleagues make that choice. Scientists have studied the magneto-optic properties of only a few materials at low temperatures.

“The promising results demonstrated in this work could pave the way for a new class of energy efficient cryogenic devices,” Pintus said, “leading the research toward high-performing (unexplored) magneto-optic materials that can operate at low temperatures.”

Science paper:
Nature Electronics

See the full article here .

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Stem Education Coalition

The University of California-Santa Barbara is a public land-grant research university in Santa Barbara, California, and one of the ten campuses of the University of California system. Tracing its roots back to 1891 as an independent teachers’ college, The University of California-Santa Barbara joined the University of California system in 1944, and is the third-oldest undergraduate campus in the system.

The university is a comprehensive doctoral university and is organized into five colleges and schools offering 87 undergraduate degrees and 55 graduate degrees. It is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity”. According to the National Science Foundation, The University of California-Santa Barbara spent $235 million on research and development in fiscal year 2018, ranking it 100th in the nation. In his 2001 book The Public Ivies: America’s Flagship Public Universities, author Howard Greene labeled The University of California-Santa Barbara a “Public Ivy”.

The University of California-Santa Barbara is a research university with 10 national research centers, including the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics and the Center for Control, Dynamical-Systems and Computation. Current University of California-Santa Barbara faculty includes six Nobel Prize laureates; one Fields Medalist; 39 members of the National Academy of Sciences; 27 members of the National Academy of Engineering; and 34 members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The University of California-Santa Barbara was the No. 3 host on the ARPANET and was elected to The Association of American Universities in 1995. The faculty also includes two Academy and Emmy Award winners and recipients of a Millennium Technology Prize; an IEEE Medal of Honor; a National Medal of Technology and Innovation; and a Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics.
The University of California-Santa Barbara Gauchos compete in the Big West Conference of the NCAA Division I. The Gauchos have won NCAA national championships in men’s soccer and men’s water polo.

History

The University of California-Santa Barbara traces its origins back to the Anna Blake School, which was founded in 1891, and offered training in home economics and industrial arts. The Anna Blake School was taken over by the state in 1909 and became the Santa Barbara State Normal School which then became the Santa Barbara State College in 1921.

In 1944, intense lobbying by an interest group in the City of Santa Barbara led by Thomas Storke and Pearl Chase persuaded the State Legislature, Gov. Earl Warren, and the Regents of the University of California to move the State College over to the more research-oriented University of California system. The State College system sued to stop the takeover but the governor did not support the suit. A state constitutional amendment was passed in 1946 to stop subsequent conversions of State Colleges to University of California campuses.

From 1944 to 1958, the school was known as Santa Barbara College of the University of California, before taking on its current name. When the vacated Marine Corps training station in Goleta was purchased for the rapidly growing college Santa Barbara City College moved into the vacated State College buildings.

Originally the regents envisioned a small several thousand–student liberal arts college a so-called “Williams College of the West”, at Santa Barbara. Chronologically, The University of California-Santa Barbara is the third general-education campus of the University of California, after The University of California-Berzerkeley and The University of California-Los Angeles (the only other state campus to have been acquired by the University of California system). The original campus the regents acquired in Santa Barbara was located on only 100 acres (40 ha) of largely unusable land on a seaside mesa. The availability of a 400-acre (160 ha) portion of the land used as Marine Corps Air Station Santa Barbara until 1946 on another seaside mesa in Goleta, which the regents could acquire for free from the federal government, led to that site becoming the Santa Barbara campus in 1949.

Originally only 3000–3500 students were anticipated but the post-WWII baby boom led to the designation of general campus in 1958 along with a name change from “Santa Barbara College” to “University of California-Santa Barbara,” and the discontinuation of the industrial arts program for which the state college was famous. A chancellor- Samuel B. Gould- was appointed in 1959.

In 1959 The University of California-Santa Barbara professor Douwe Stuurman hosted the English writer Aldous Huxley as the university’s first visiting professor. Huxley delivered a lectures series called The Human Situation.

In the late ’60s and early ’70s The University of California-Santa Barbara became nationally known as a hotbed of anti–Vietnam War activity. A bombing at the school’s faculty club in 1969 killed the caretaker Dover Sharp. In the spring of 1970 multiple occasions of arson occurred including a burning of the Bank of America branch building in the student community of Isla Vista during which time one male student Kevin Moran was shot and killed by police. The University of California-Santa Barbara ‘s anti-Vietnam activity impelled then-Gov. Ronald Reagan to impose a curfew and order the National Guard to enforce it. Armed guardsmen were a common sight on campus and in Isla Vista during this time.

In 1995 The University of California-Santa Barbara was elected to The Association of American Universities– an organization of leading research universities with a membership consisting of 59 universities in the United States (both public and private) and two universities in Canada.

On May 23, 2014 a killing spree occurred in Isla Vista, California, a community in close proximity to the campus. All six people killed during the rampage were students at The University of California-Santa Barbara. The murderer was a former Santa Barbara City College student who lived in Isla Vista.

Research activity

According to the National Science Foundation, The University of California-Santa Barbara spent $236.5 million on research and development in fiscal 2013, ranking it 87th in the nation.

From 2005 to 2009 UCSB was ranked fourth in terms of relative citation impact in the U.S. (behind Massachusetts Institute of Technology, California Institute of Technology, and Princeton University) according to Thomson Reuters.

The University of California-Santa Barbara hosts 12 National Research Centers, including The Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, the Southern California Earthquake Center, the UCSB Center for Spatial Studies, an affiliate of the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis, and the California Nanosystems Institute. Eight of these centers are supported by The National Science Foundation. UCSB is also home to Microsoft Station Q, a research group working on topological quantum computing where American mathematician and Fields Medalist Michael Freedman is the director.

Research impact rankings

The Times Higher Education World University Rankings ranked The University of California-Santa Barbara 48th worldwide for 2016–17, while the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) in 2016 ranked https://www.nsf.gov/ 42nd in the world; 28th in the nation; and in 2015 tied for 17th worldwide in engineering.

In the United States National Research Council rankings of graduate programs, 10 University of California-Santa Barbara departments were ranked in the top ten in the country: Materials; Chemical Engineering; Computer Science; Electrical and Computer Engineering; Mechanical Engineering; Physics; Marine Science Institute; Geography; History; and Theater and Dance. Among U.S. university Materials Science and Engineering programs, The University of California-Santa Barbara was ranked first in each measure of a study by the National Research Council of the NAS.

The Centre for Science and Technologies Studies at