From Aalto University [Aalto-yliopisto] (FI): “Researchers take a step towards turning interactions that normally ruin quantum information into a way of protecting it”

From Aalto University [Aalto-yliopisto] (FI)

3.8.23
Jose Lado
Assistant Professor
T304 Dept. Applied Physics
jose.lado@aalto.fi
+358503133730

A new method for predicting the behavior of quantum devices provides a crucial tool for real-world applications of quantum technology.

Illustration of non-Hermitian topology and open quantum systems. Image: Jose Lado/Aalto University.

Researchers have found a way to predict the behavior of many-body quantum systems coupled to their environment. The work represents a way to protect quantum information in quantum devices, which is crucial for real-world applications of quantum technology.

In a study published in Physical Review Letters [below], researchers at Aalto University in Finland and IAS Tsinghua University in China report a new way to predict how quantum systems, such as groups of particles, behave when they are connected to the external environment. Usually, connecting a system such as a quantum computer to its environment creates decoherence and leaks, which ruin any information about what’s happening inside the system. Now, the researchers developed a technique which turns that problem into its a solution.

The research was carried out by Aalto doctoral researcher Guangze Chen under the supervision of Professor Jose Lado and in collaboration with Fei Song from IAS Tsinghua. Their approach combines techniques from two domains, quantum many-body physics and non-Hermitian quantum physics.

Protection from decoherence and leaks

One of the most intriguing and powerful phenomena in quantum systems is many-body quantum correlations. Understanding these and predicting their behavior is vital because they underpin the exotic properties of key components of quantum computers and quantum sensors. While a lot of progress has been made in predicting quantum correlations when matter is isolated from its environment, doing so when matter is coupled to its environment has so far eluded scientists.

In the new study, the team showed that connecting a quantum device to an external system can be a strength in the right circumstances. When a quantum device is host to so-called non-Hermitian topology, it leads to robustly protected quantum excitations whose resilience stems from the very fact that they are open to the environment. These kinds of open quantum systems can potentially lead to disruptive new strategies for quantum technologies that harness external coupling to protect information from decoherence and leaks.

From idealized conditions to the real world

The study establishes a new theoretical method to calculate the correlations between quantum particles when they are coupled to their environment. ‘The method we developed allows us to solve correlated quantum problems that present dissipation and quantum many-body interactions simultaneously. As a proof of concept, we demonstrated the methodology for systems with 24 interacting qubits featuring topological excitations,’ says Chen.

Professor Lado explains that their approach will help move quantum research from idealized conditions to real-world applications. ‘Predicting the behavior of correlated quantum matter is one of the critical problems for the theoretical design of quantum materials and devices. However, the difficulty of this problem becomes much greater when considering realistic situations in which quantum systems are coupled to an external environment. Our results represent a step forward in solving this problem, providing a methodology for understanding and predicting both quantum materials and devices in realistic conditions in quantum technologies,’ he says.

Physical Review Letters

See the full article here.

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

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

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

Aalto University [Aalto-yliopisto] (FI) is a university located in Espoo, Finland. It was established in 2010 as a merger of three major Finnish universities: the Helsinki University of Technology (established 1849), the Helsinki School of Economics (established 1904), and the University of Art and Design Helsinki (established 1871). The close collaboration between the scientific, business and arts communities is intended to foster multi-disciplinary education and research. The Finnish government, in 2010, set out to create a university that fosters innovation, merging the three institutions into one.

The university is composed of six schools with close to 17,500 students and 4,000 staff members, making it Finland’s second largest university. The main campus of Aalto University is located in Otaniemi, Espoo. Aalto University Executive Education operates in the district of Töölö, Helsinki. In addition to the Greater Helsinki area, the university also operates its Bachelor’s Programme in International Business in Mikkeli and the Metsähovi Radio Observatory Metsähovi Radio Observatory [Metsähovin radiotutkimusasema] Aalto University [Aalto-yliopisto](FI) in Kirkkonummi. in Kirkkonummi.

Aalto University’s operations showcase Finland’s experiment in higher education. The Aalto Design Factory, Aalto Ventures Program and Aalto Entrepreneurship Society (Aaltoes), among others, drive the university’s mission for a radical shift towards multidisciplinary learning and have contributed substantially to the emergence of Helsinki as a hotbed for startups. Aaltoes is Europe’s largest and most active student run entrepreneurship community that has founded major concepts such as the Startup Sauna accelerator program and the Slush startup event.

The university is named in honour of Alvar Aalto, a prominent Finnish architect, designer and alumnus of the former Helsinki University of Technology, who was also instrumental in designing a large part of the university’s main campus in Otaniemi.

From Purdue University: “Purdue researchers suggest novel way to generate a light source made from entangled photons”

From Purdue University

9.7.22

Cheryl Pierce,
Communications Specialist
pierce81@purdue.edu

In a recent publication in Physical Review Research, Purdue researchers propose an unconventional way to generate light made from entangled photons. In the graphic above, photons meet the electrons of a helium atom, which then emits two entangled photons. Graphic by: Cheryl Pierce with elements from Adobe Stock.

This research shows promise in establishing the measurement of entangled photons down to the attosecond and possibly even zeptosecond.

Entanglement is a strange phenomenon in quantum physics where two particles are inherently connected to each other no matter the distance between them. When one is measured, the other measurement is instantly a given. Researchers from Purdue University have proposed a novel, unconventional approach to generate a special light source made up of entangled photons. On Sept. 6, 2022, they published their findings in Physical Review Research [below].

The team proposed a method to generate entangled photons at extreme-ultraviolet (XUV) wavelengths where no such source currently exists. Their work provides a road map on how to generate these entangled photons and use them to track the dynamics of electrons in molecules and materials on the incredibly short timescales of attoseconds.

“The entangled photons in our work are guaranteed to arrive at a given location within a very short duration of attoseconds, as long as they travel the same distance,” says Dr. Niranjan Shivaram, assistant professor of Physics and Astronomy. “This correlation in their arrival time makes them very useful to measure ultrafast events. One important application is in attosecond metrology to push the limits of measurement of the shortest time scale phenomena. This source of entangled photons can also be used in quantum imaging and spectroscopy, where entangled photons have been shown to enhance the ability to gain information, but now at XUV and even X-ray wavelengths.”

The authors of the publication are all from the Purdue University Department of Physics and Astronomy and work with the Purdue Quantum Science and Engineering Institute (PQSEI). They are Dr. Yimeng Wang, recent graduate of Purdue University; Siddhant Pandey, PhD candidate in the field of experimental ultrafast spectroscopy; Dr. Chris H. Greene, Albert Overhauser Distinguished Professor of Physics and Astronomy; and Dr. Shivaram.

“The Department of Physics and Astronomy at Purdue has a strong atomic, molecular and optical (AMO) physics program, which brings together experts in various subfields of AMO,” says Shivaram. “Chris Greene’s expert knowledge of theoretical atomic physics combined with Niranjan’s background in the relatively young field of experimental attosecond science led to this collaborative project. While many universities have AMO programs, Purdue’s AMO program is uniquely diverse in that it has experts in multiple subfields of AMO science.”

Each researcher played a significant role in this ongoing research. Greene initially suggested the idea of using photons emitted by helium atoms as a source of entangled photons and Shivaram suggested applications to attosecond science and proposed experimental schemes. Wang and Greene then developed the theoretical framework to calculate entangled photon emission from helium atoms, while Pandey and Shivaram made estimates of entangled photon emission/absorption rates and worked out the details of the proposed attosecond experimental schemes.

The publication marks the beginning of this research for Shivaram and Greene. In this publication, the authors propose the idea and work out the theoretical aspects of the experiment. Shivaram and Greene plan to continue to collaborate on experimental and further theoretical ideas. Shivaram’s lab, the Ultrafast Quantum Dynamics Group, is currently building an apparatus to experimentally demonstrate some of these ideas. According to Shivaram, the hope is that other researchers in attosecond science will begin working on these ideas. A concerted effort by many research groups could further increase the impact of this work. Eventually, they hope to get the timescale of entangled photons down to the zeptosecond, 10^-21 seconds.

“Typically, experiments on attosecond timescales are performed using attosecond laser pulses as ‘strobes’ to ‘image’ the electrons. Current limits on these pulses are around 40 attoseconds. Our proposed idea of using entangled photons could push this down to a few attoseconds or zeptoseconds,” says Shivaram.

In order to understand the timing, one must understand that electrons play a fundamental role in determining the behavior of atoms, molecules and solid materials. The timescale of motion of electrons is typically in the femtosecond (one millionth of a billionth of a second – 10^-15 seconds) and attosecond (one billionth of a billionth of a second, or 10^-18 seconds) scale. According to Shivaram, gaining insight into the dynamics of electrons and tracking their motion on these ultrashort timescales is essential.

“The goal of the field of ultrafast science is to make such ‘movies’ of electrons and then use light to control the behavior of these electrons to engineer chemical reactions, make materials with novel properties, make molecular-scale devices, etc.,” he says. “This is light-matter interaction at its most basic level, and the possibilities for discovery are many. A single zeptosecond is 10^-21 seconds. A thousand zeptoseconds is an attosecond. Researchers are only now beginning to explore zeptosecond phenomena, though it is experimentally out of reach due to lack of zeptosecond laser pulses. Our unique approach of using entangled photons instead of photons in laser pulses could allow us to reach the zeptosecond regime. This will require considerable experimental effort and is likely possible on the timescale of five years.”

Science paper:
Physical Review Research

See the full article here .

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

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

Purdue University is a public land-grant research university in West Lafayette, Indiana, and the flagship campus of the Purdue University system. The university was founded in 1869 after Lafayette businessman John Purdue donated land and money to establish a college of science, technology, and agriculture in his name. The first classes were held on September 16, 1874, with six instructors and 39 students.

The main campus in West Lafayette offers more than 200 majors for undergraduates, over 69 masters and doctoral programs, and professional degrees in pharmacy and veterinary medicine. In addition, Purdue has 18 intercollegiate sports teams and more than 900 student organizations. Purdue is a member of the Big Ten Conference and enrolls the second largest student body of any university in Indiana, as well as the fourth largest foreign student population of any university in the United States.

Purdue University is a member of the Association of American Universities and is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity”. Purdue has 25 American astronauts as alumni and as of April 2019, the university has been associated with 13 Nobel Prizes.

In 1865, the Indiana General Assembly voted to take advantage of the Morrill Land-Grant Colleges Act of 1862 and began plans to establish an institution with a focus on agriculture and engineering. Communities throughout the state offered facilities and funding in bids for the location of the new college. Popular proposals included the addition of an agriculture department at Indiana State University, at what is now Butler University. By 1869, Tippecanoe County’s offer included $150,000 (equivalent to $2.9 million in 2019) from Lafayette business leader and philanthropist John Purdue; $50,000 from the county; and 100 acres (0.4 km^2) of land from local residents.

On May 6, 1869, the General Assembly established the institution in Tippecanoe County as Purdue University, in the name of the principal benefactor. Classes began at Purdue on September 16, 1874, with six instructors and 39 students. Professor John S. Hougham was Purdue’s first faculty member and served as acting president between the administrations of presidents Shortridge and White. A campus of five buildings was completed by the end of 1874. In 1875, Sarah A. Oren, the State Librarian of Indiana, was appointed Professor of Botany.

Purdue issued its first degree, a Bachelor of Science in chemistry, in 1875, and admitted its first female students that autumn.

Emerson E. White, the university’s president, from 1876 to 1883, followed a strict interpretation of the Morrill Act. Rather than emulate the classical universities, White believed Purdue should be an “industrial college” and devote its resources toward providing a broad, liberal education with an emphasis on science, technology, and agriculture. He intended not only to prepare students for industrial work, but also to prepare them to be good citizens and family members.

Part of White’s plan to distinguish Purdue from classical universities included a controversial attempt to ban fraternities, which was ultimately overturned by the Indiana Supreme Court, leading to White’s resignation. The next president, James H. Smart, is remembered for his call in 1894 to rebuild the original Heavilon Hall “one brick higher” after it had been destroyed by a fire.

By the end of the nineteenth century, the university was organized into schools of agriculture, engineering (mechanical, civil, and electrical), and pharmacy; former U.S. President Benjamin Harrison served on the board of trustees. Purdue’s engineering laboratories included testing facilities for a locomotive, and for a Corliss steam engine—one of the most efficient engines of the time. The School of Agriculture shared its research with farmers throughout the state, with its cooperative extension services, and would undergo a period of growth over the following two decades. Programs in education and home economics were soon established, as well as a short-lived school of medicine. By 1925, Purdue had the largest undergraduate engineering enrollment in the country, a status it would keep for half a century.

President Edward C. Elliott oversaw a campus building program between the world wars. Inventor, alumnus, and trustee David E. Ross coordinated several fundraisers, donated lands to the university, and was instrumental in establishing the Purdue Research Foundation. Ross’s gifts and fundraisers supported such projects as Ross–Ade Stadium, the Memorial Union, a civil engineering surveying camp, and Purdue University Airport. Purdue Airport was the country’s first university-owned airport and the site of the country’s first college-credit flight training courses.

Amelia Earhart joined the Purdue faculty in 1935 as a consultant for these flight courses and as a counselor on women’s careers. In 1937, the Purdue Research Foundation provided the funds for the Lockheed Electra 10-E Earhart flew on her attempted round-the-world flight.

Every school and department at the university was involved in some type of military research or training during World War II. During a project on radar receivers, Purdue physicists discovered properties of germanium that led to the making of the first transistor. The Army and the Navy conducted training programs at Purdue and more than 17,500 students, staff, and alumni served in the armed forces. Purdue set up about a hundred centers throughout Indiana to train skilled workers for defense industries. As veterans returned to the university under the G.I. Bill, first-year classes were taught at some of these sites to alleviate the demand for campus space. Four of these sites are now degree-granting regional campuses of the Purdue University system. On-campus housing became racially desegregated in 1947, following pressure from Purdue President Frederick L. Hovde and Indiana Governor Ralph F. Gates.

After the war, Hovde worked to expand the academic opportunities at the university. A decade-long construction program emphasized science and research. In the late 1950s and early 1960s the university established programs in veterinary medicine, industrial management, and nursing, as well as the first computer science department in the United States. Undergraduate humanities courses were strengthened, although Hovde only reluctantly approved of graduate-level study in these areas. Purdue awarded its first Bachelor of Arts degrees in 1960. The programs in liberal arts and education, formerly administered by the School of Science, were soon split into an independent school.

The official seal of Purdue was officially inaugurated during the university’s centennial in 1969.

Consisting of elements from emblems that had been used unofficially for 73 years, the current seal depicts a griffin, symbolizing strength, and a three-part shield, representing education, research, and service.

In recent years, Purdue’s leaders have continued to support high-tech research and international programs. In 1987, U.S. President Ronald Reagan visited the West Lafayette campus to give a speech about the influence of technological progress on job creation.

In the 1990s, the university added more opportunities to study abroad and expanded its course offerings in world languages and cultures. The first buildings of the Discovery Park interdisciplinary research center were dedicated in 2004.

Purdue launched a Global Policy Research Institute in 2010 to explore the potential impact of technical knowledge on public policy decisions.

On April 27, 2017, Purdue University announced plans to acquire for-profit college Kaplan University and convert it to a public university in the state of Indiana, subject to multiple levels of approval. That school now operates as Purdue University Global, and aims to serve adult learners.

Campuses

Purdue’s campus is situated in the small city of West Lafayette, near the western bank of the Wabash River, across which sits the larger city of Lafayette. State Street, which is concurrent with State Road 26, divides the northern and southern portions of campus. Academic buildings are mostly concentrated on the eastern and southern parts of campus, with residence halls and intramural fields to the west, and athletic facilities to the north. The Greater Lafayette Public Transportation Corporation (CityBus) operates eight campus loop bus routes on which students, faculty, and staff can ride free of charge with Purdue Identification.

Organization and administration

The university president, appointed by the board of trustees, is the chief administrative officer of the university. The office of the president oversees admission and registration, student conduct and counseling, the administration and scheduling of classes and space, the administration of student athletics and organized extracurricular activities, the libraries, the appointment of the faculty and conditions of their employment, the appointment of all non-faculty employees and the conditions of employment, the general organization of the university, and the planning and administration of the university budget.

The Board of Trustees directly appoints other major officers of the university including a provost who serves as the chief academic officer for the university, several vice presidents with oversight over specific university operations, and the regional campus chancellors.

Academic divisions

Purdue is organized into thirteen major academic divisions.

College of Agriculture

The university’s College of Agriculture supports the university’s agricultural, food, life, and natural resource science programs. The college also supports the university’s charge as a land-grant university to support agriculture throughout the state; its agricultural extension program plays a key role in this.

College of Education

The College of Education offers undergraduate degrees in elementary education, social studies education, and special education, and graduate degrees in these and many other specialty areas of education. It has two departments: (a) Curriculum and Instruction and (b) Educational Studies.

College of Engineering

The Purdue University College of Engineering was established in 1874 with programs in Civil and Mechanical Engineering. The college now offers B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in more than a dozen disciplines. Purdue’s engineering program has also educated 24 of America’s astronauts, including Neil Armstrong and Eugene Cernan who were the first and last astronauts to have walked on the Moon, respectively. Many of Purdue’s engineering disciplines are recognized as top-ten programs in the U.S. The college as a whole is currently ranked 7th in the U.S. of all doctorate-granting engineering schools by U.S. News & World Report.

Exploratory Studies

The university’s Exploratory Studies program supports undergraduate students who enter the university without having a declared major. It was founded as a pilot program in 1995 and made a permanent program in 1999.

College of Health and Human Sciences

The College of Health and Human Sciences was established in 2010 and is the newest college. It offers B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in all 10 of its academic units.

College of Liberal Arts

Purdue’s College of Liberal Arts contains the arts, social sciences and humanities programs at the university. Liberal arts courses have been taught at Purdue since its founding in 1874. The School of Science, Education, and Humanities was formed in 1953. In 1963, the School of Humanities, Social Sciences, and Education was established, although Bachelor of Arts degrees had begun to be conferred as early as 1959. In 1989, the School of Liberal Arts was created to encompass Purdue’s arts, humanities, and social sciences programs, while education programs were split off into the newly formed School of Education. The School of Liberal Arts was renamed the College of Liberal Arts in 2005.

Krannert School of Management

The Krannert School of Management offers management courses and programs at the undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral levels.

College of Pharmacy

The university’s College of Pharmacy was established in 1884 and is the 3rd oldest state-funded school of pharmacy in the United States. The school offers two undergraduate programs leading to the B.S. in Pharmaceutical Sciences (BSPS) and the Doctor of Pharmacy (Pharm.D.) professional degree. Graduate programs leading to M.S. and Ph.D. degrees are offered in three departments (Industrial and Physical Pharmacy, Medicinal Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology, and Pharmacy Practice). Additionally, the school offers several non-degree certificate programs and post-graduate continuing education activities.

Purdue Polytechnic Institute

The Purdue Polytechnic Institute offers bachelor’s, master’s and Ph.D. degrees in a wide range of technology-related disciplines. With over 30,000 living alumni, it is one of the largest technology schools in the United States.

College of Science

The university’s College of Science houses the university’s science departments: Biological Sciences; Chemistry; Computer Science; Earth, Atmospheric, & Planetary Sciences; Mathematics; Physics & Astronomy; and Statistics. The science courses offered by the college account for about one-fourth of Purdue’s one million student credit hours.

College of Veterinary Medicine

The College of Veterinary Medicine is accredited by the AVMA to offer the Doctor of Veterinary Medicine degree, associate’s and bachelor’s degrees in veterinary technology, master’s and Ph.D. degrees, and residency programs leading to specialty board certification. Within the state of Indiana, the Purdue University College of Veterinary Medicine is the only veterinary school, while the Indiana University School of Medicine is one of only two medical schools (the other being Marian University College of Osteopathic Medicine). The two schools frequently collaborate on medical research projects.

Honors College

Purdue’s Honors College supports an honors program for undergraduate students at the university.

The Graduate School

The university’s Graduate School supports graduate students at the university.

Research

The university expended $622.814 million in support of research system-wide in 2017, using funds received from the state and federal governments, industry, foundations, and individual donors. The faculty and more than 400 research laboratories put Purdue University among the leading research institutions. Purdue University is considered by the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education to have “very high research activity”. Purdue also was rated the nation’s fourth best place to work in academia, according to rankings released in November 2007 by The Scientist magazine. Purdue’s researchers provide insight, knowledge, assistance, and solutions in many crucial areas. These include, but are not limited to Agriculture; Business and Economy; Education; Engineering; Environment; Healthcare; Individuals, Society, Culture; Manufacturing; Science; Technology; Veterinary Medicine. The Global Trade Analysis Project (GTAP), a global research consortium focused on global economic governance challenges (trade, climate, resource use) is also coordinated by the University. Purdue University generated a record $438 million in sponsored research funding during the 2009–10 fiscal year with participation from National Science Foundation, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and the Department of Agriculture, Department of Defense, Department of Energy, and Department of Health and Human Services. Purdue University was ranked fourth in Engineering research expenditures amongst all the colleges in the United States in 2017, with a research expenditure budget of 244.8 million. Purdue University established the Discovery Park to bring innovation through multidisciplinary action. In all of the eleven centers of Discovery Park, ranging from entrepreneurship to energy and advanced manufacturing, research projects reflect a large economic impact and address global challenges. Purdue University’s nanotechnology research program, built around the new Birck Nanotechnology Center in Discovery Park, ranks among the best in the nation.

The Purdue Research Park which opened in 1961 was developed by Purdue Research Foundation which is a private, nonprofit foundation created to assist Purdue. The park is focused on companies operating in the arenas of life sciences, homeland security, engineering, advanced manufacturing and information technology. It provides an interactive environment for experienced Purdue researchers and for private business and high-tech industry. It currently employs more than 3,000 people in 155 companies, including 90 technology-based firms. The Purdue Research Park was ranked first by the Association of University Research Parks in 2004.

Purdue’s library system consists of fifteen locations throughout the campus, including an archives and special collections research center, an undergraduate library, and several subject-specific libraries. More than three million volumes, including one million electronic books, are held at these locations. The Library houses the Amelia Earhart Collection, a collection of notes and letters belonging to Earhart and her husband George Putnam along with records related to her disappearance and subsequent search efforts. An administrative unit of Purdue University Libraries, Purdue University Press has its roots in the 1960 founding of Purdue University Studies by President Frederick Hovde on a $12,000 grant from the Purdue Research Foundation. This was the result of a committee appointed by President Hovde after the Department of English lamented the lack of publishing venues in the humanities. Since the 1990s, the range of books published by the Press has grown to reflect the work from other colleges at Purdue University especially in the areas of agriculture, health, and engineering. Purdue University Press publishes print and ebook monograph series in a range of subject areas from literary and cultural studies to the study of the human-animal bond. In 1993 Purdue University Press was admitted to membership of the Association of American University Presses. Purdue University Press publishes around 25 books a year and 20 learned journals in print, in print & online, and online-only formats in collaboration with Purdue University Libraries.

Sustainability

Purdue’s Sustainability Council, composed of University administrators and professors, meets monthly to discuss environmental issues and sustainability initiatives at Purdue. The University’s first LEED Certified building was an addition to the Mechanical Engineering Building, which was completed in Fall 2011. The school is also in the process of developing an arboretum on campus. In addition, a system has been set up to display live data detailing current energy production at the campus utility plant. The school holds an annual “Green Week” each fall, an effort to engage the Purdue community with issues relating to environmental sustainability.

Rankings

In its 2021 edition, U.S. News & World Report ranked Purdue University the 5th most innovative national university, tied for the 17th best public university in the United States, tied for 53rd overall, and 114th best globally. U.S. News & World Report also rated Purdue tied for 36th in “Best Undergraduate Teaching, 83rd in “Best Value Schools”, tied for 284th in “Top Performers on Social Mobility”, and the undergraduate engineering program tied for 9th at schools whose highest degree is a doctorate.

From The DOE’s Sandia National Laboratories: “Can an algorithm teach scientists to write better quantum computer programs?”

From The DOE’s Sandia National Laboratories

8.2.22
Troy Rummler
trummle@sandia.gov
505-249-3632

Timothy Proctor, who recently received a DOE Early Career Research Program Award, will be training an algorithm to improve quantum computer programs at Sandia National Laboratories. (Photo by Rebecca Caravan)

When it comes to programming it is not what you say. It is how you say it that prevents errors.

While quantum computers could someday revolutionize technology, a single slip of an atom can cause a malfunction. Scientists around the world are figuring out what causes these errors, and it turns out sometimes they stem from the way code in a program is arranged.

Timothy Proctor, a quantum physicist at Sandia, is leading a new research project to help quantum computer scientists write better programs that fail less often.

The Department of Energy Office of Science recently selected Proctor for an Early Career Research Program Award, which will support the project for the next five years.

The Early Career Research Program, now in its 13th year, is designed to provide support to researchers during their early career years, when many scientists do their formative work. This year, DOE awarded 83 scientists nationwide, including 27 from national laboratories.

Proctor was one of four Sandia researchers selected.

He said that in quantum circuits — the quantum equivalent of computer programs — how commands are arranged, or structured, can decide whether a computer can successfully run it.

“For example, repeating the same instructions again and again can cause certain kinds of errors to build up much more quickly than they would if you were doing some other pattern of instructions,” he said.

In his new project, Proctor will be training an algorithm to discover other patterns and structures that can cause errors.

“We know that structure impacts how well the program is going to run, but we don’t know exactly what structures are going to impact it, and it changes from device to device.”

Initially, he wants to create a tool that will tell developers how likely their program is to run on a given quantum computer. In time, he hopes his work will change how programs are written, to reduce errors and make quantum computers more useful.

Mentorship and a love of math fuels work in quantum computing

Proctor came to Sandia six years ago after earning a doctoral degree in quantum physics from the University of Leeds (UK). But in high school, he didn’t love science. To him, science involved too much memorizing of facts and not enough understanding why. Then he learned about particle physics, which caught his interest, and later in college quantum physics, which he pursued his degrees in.

“Quantum physics just seemed exciting and actually easier than other subjects,” Proctor said. Even though the field has a reputation for being difficult and unintuitive, he said the mathematical foundations are straight forward.

“It’s very mathematical, and I enjoy that,” he said.

Since joining Sandia, Proctor has worked in the Quantum Performance Lab, a research group that develops and deploys cutting-edge techniques for assessing quantum computers. Not only has the work been interesting, he said, but the mentorship has been extraordinary.

“Coming out of grad school, I was a competent scientist — I could tackle technical problems — but it’s a long way from that to coming up with compelling research ideas and leading projects. The mentorship I’ve had since I joined Sandia is the reason that I can do that,” Timothy said.

Now, the Early Career Research Award will allow him to expand his own team, and he’s excited to onboard and mentor other early career scientists.

See the full article here3 .

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

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

Sandia Campus.

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

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

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

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

ASCI Red Storm Cray superrcomputer at DOE’s Sandia National Laboratory.

Sandia is also home to the Z Machine.

Sandia Z machine

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

From “Science Magazine” : “A quantum sense for dark matter”

From “Science Magazine”

28 Apr 2022
Adrian Cho

Bullet Cluster NASA Chandra NASA ESA Hubble, evidence of shock.

A collision of galaxy clusters separated gas (pink) from dark matter (blue), mapped from subtle gravitational distortions in the images of background galaxies. Credits:(X-ray) NASA/CXC/CFA/M. Markevitch et al.; (Optical) D. Clowe et al. NASA/STSCI; Magellan/U. Arizona/; (Lensing Map) D. Clowe et al./NASA/STSCI; ESO WFI; Magellan/U. Arizona/

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration Chandra X-ray telescope.

National Aeronautics and Space Administration/The European Space Agency [La Agencia Espacial Europea] [Agence spatiale européenne][Europäische Weltraumorganisation](EU) Hubble Space Telescope.

Wide Field Imager on the 2.2 meter MPG/ESO telescope at Cerro LaSilla (CL)

MPG Institute for Astronomy [Max-Planck-Institut für Astronomie](DE)European Southern Observatory(EU)2.2 meter telescope at Cerro La Silla, Chile, 600 km north of Santiago de Chile at an altitude of 2400 metres.

Carnegie 6.5 meter Magellan Baade and Clay Telescopes located at Carnegie’s Las Campanas Observatory, Chile. over 2,500 m (8,200 ft) high.

Carnegie Institution for Science’s Las Campanas Observatory on Cerro Pachón in the southern Atacama Desert of Chile in the Atacama Region approximately 100 kilometres (62 mi) northeast of the city of La Serena,near the southern end and over 2,500 m (8,200 ft) high.

Kent Irwin has a vision: He aims to build a glorified radio that will reveal the nature of Dark Matter, the invisible stuff that makes up 85% of all matter. For decades, physicists have struggled to figure out what the stuff is, stalking one hypothetical particle after another, only to come up empty. However, if Dark Matter consists of certain nearly massless particles, then in the right setting it might generate faint, unquenchable radio waves. Irwin, a quantum physicist at Stanford University, plans to tune in to that signal in an experiment called Dark Matter Radio (DM Radio).

No ordinary radio will do. To make the experiment practical, Irwin’s team plans to transform it into a quantum sensor—one that exploits the strange rules of quantum mechanics. Quantum sensors are a hot topic, having received $1.275 billion in funding in the 2018 U.S. National Quantum Initiative. Some scientists are employing them as microscopes and gravimeters. But because of the devices’ unparalleled sensitivity, Irwin says, “dark matter is a killer app for quantum sensing.”

DM Radio is just one of many new efforts to use quantum sensors to hunt the stuff. Some approaches detect the granularity of the subatomic realm, in which matter and energy come in tiny packets called quanta. Others exploit the trade-offs implicit in the famous Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Still others borrow technologies being developed for quantum computing. Physicists don’t agree on the definition of a quantum sensor, and none of the concepts is entirely new. “I would argue that quantum sensing has been happening in one form or another for a century,” says Peter Abbamonte, a condensed matter physicist and leader of the Center on Quantum Sensing and Quantum Materials at the University of Illinois – Urbana-Champaign (UIUC).

Still, Yonatan Kahn, a theoretical physicist at UIUC, says quantum sensors open the way to testing new ideas for what Dark Matter might be. “You shouldn’t just go blindly looking” for Dark Matter, Kahn says. “But even if your model is made of bubblegum and paperclips, if it satisfies all cosmological constraints, it’s fair game.” Quantum sensing is essential for testing many of those models, Irwin says. “It can make it possible to do an experiment in 3 years that would otherwise take thousands of years.”

Astrophysical evidence for Dark Matter has accreted for decades. For example, the stars in spiral galaxies appear to whirl so fast that their own gravity shouldn’t keep them from flying into space. The observation implies that the stars circulate within a vast cloud of Dark Matter that provides the additional gravity needed to rein them in. Physicists assume it consists of swarms of some as-yet-unknown fundamental particle.

In the 1980s theorists hypothesized what soon became the leading contender: weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs). Emerging in the hot soup of particles after the big bang, WIMPs would interact with ordinary matter only through gravity and the weak nuclear force, which produces a kind of radioactive decay. Like the particles that convey the weak force, the W and Z bosons, WIMPs would weigh roughly 100 times as much as a proton. And just enough WIMPs would naturally linger—a few thousand per cubic meter near Earth—to account for Dark Matter.

Occasionally a WIMP should crash into an atomic nucleus and blast it out of its atom. So, to spot WIMPs, experimenters need only look for recoiling nuclei in detectors built deep underground to protect them from extraneous radiation. But no signs of WIMPs have appeared, even as detectors have grown bigger and more sensitive. Fifteen years ago, WIMP detectors weighed kilograms; now, the biggest contain several tons of frigid liquid xenon.

The second most popular candidate—and one DM Radio targets—is the axion. Far lighter than WIMPs, axions are predicted by a theory that explains a certain symmetry of the strong nuclear force, which binds quarks into trios to make protons and neutrons. Axions would also emerge in the early universe, and theorists originally estimated they could account for Dark Matter if the axion has a mass between one-quadrillionth and 100-quadrillionths of a proton.

In a strong magnetic field an axion should sometimes turn into a radio photon whose frequency depends on the axion’s mass. To amplify the faint signal, physicists place in the field an ultracold cylindrical metal cavity designed to resonate with radio waves just as an organ pipe rings with sound. The Axion Dark Matter Experiment (ADMX) at the University of Washington, Seattle, scans the low end of the mass range, and an experiment called the Haloscope at Yale Sensitive to Axion CDM (HAYSTAC) at Yale University probes the high end. But no axions have shown up yet.

Inside the Axion Dark Matter eXperiment U Washington Credit : Mark Stone U. of Washington. Axion Dark Matter Experiment.

Yale HAYSTAC axion dark matter experiment at Yale’s Wright Lab.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Haystack Observatory EDGES telescope in a radio quiet zone at the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory in Western Australia, on the traditional lands of the Wajarri peoples.

In recent years physicists have begun to consider other possibilities. Maybe axions are either more or less massive than previously estimated. Instead of one type of particle Dark Matter might even consist of a hidden “dark sector” of multiple new particles that would interact through gravity but not the three other forces, electromagnetism and the weak and strong nuclear forces. Rather, they would have their own forces, says Kathryn Zurek, a theorist at the California Institute of Technology. So, just as photons convey the electromagnetic force dark photons might convey a dark electromagnetic force. Dark and ordinary electromagnetism might intertwine so that rarely, a dark photon could morph into an ordinary one.

To spot such quarry Dark Matter hunters have turned to quantum sensors—a shift partly inspired by another hot field: quantum computing. A quantum computer flips quantum bits, or qubits, that can be set to 0, 1, or, thanks to the odd rules of quantum mechanics, 0 and 1 at the same time. That may seem irrelevant to hunting dark matter, but such qubits must be carefully controlled and shielded from external interference, exactly what Dark Matter hunters already do with their detectors, says Aaron Chou, a physicist at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) who works on ADMX. “We have to keep these devices very, very well isolated from the environment so that when we see the very, very rare event, we’re more confident that it might be due to the Dark Matter.”

The interest in quantum sensors also reflects the tinkerer culture of Dark Matter hunters, says Reina Maruyama, a nuclear and particle physicist at Yale and co-leader of HAYSTAC. The field has long attracted people interested in developing new detectors and in quick, small-scale experiments, she says. “This kind of footloose approach has always been possible in the Dark Matter field.”

For some novel searches, the simplest definition of a quantum sensor may do: It’s any device capable of detecting a single quantum particle, such as a photon or an energetic electron. “I call a quantum sensor something that can detect single quanta in whatever form that takes,” Zurek says. That’s what is needed for hunting particles slightly lighter than WIMPs and plumbing the dark sector, she says.

Such runty particles wouldn’t produce detectable nuclear recoils. A wispy dark sector particle could interact with ordinary matter by emitting a dark photon that morphs into an ordinary photon. But that low-energy photon would barely nudge a nucleus.

In the right semiconductor, however, the same photon could excite an electron and enable it to flow through the material. Kahn and Abbamonte are working on an extremely sensitive photodiode, a device that produces an electrical signal when it absorbs light. Were such a device shielded from light and other forms of radiation and cooled to near absolute zero to reduce noise, a Dark Matter signal would stand out as a steady pitter-pat of tiny electrical pulses.

A chip that could sense dark photons (first image) and an axion detector, HAYSTAC, could fit on a tabletop despite their high sensitivity. (First image) Roger Romani/University of California, Berkeley; (Second image) Karl Van Bibber.

The trick is to find a semiconductor sensitive to very low-energy photons, Kahn says. The industrial standard, silicon, releases an electron when it absorbs a photon with an energy of at least 1.1 electron volts (eV). To detect dark sector particles with masses as low as 1/100,000th that of a proton, the material would need to unleash an electron when pinged by a photon of just 0.03 eV. So Kahn, Abbamonte, and colleagues at The DOE’s Los Alamos National Laboratory are exploring “narrow bandgap” semiconductors such as a compound of europium, indium, and antimony.

Even lighter dark-sector particles would create photons with too little energy to liberate an electron in the most sensitive semiconductor. To hunt for them, Zurek and Matt Pyle, a detector physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, are developing a detector that would sense the infinitesimal quantized vibrations set off when a dark photon creates an ordinary photon that pings a nucleus. It would “only rattle that nucleus and produce a bunch of vibrations,” Pyle says. “So the detectors must be fundamentally different.”

Their detector consists of a single crystal of material composed of two types of ions with opposite charges, such as gallium arsenide. The feeble photon spawned by a dark photon would nudge the different ions in opposite directions, setting off quantized vibrations called optical phonons. To detect these vibrations, Zurek and Pyle dot the crystal with small patches of tungsten and chill it to temperatures near absolute zero, where tungsten becomes a superconductor that carries electricity without resistance. Any phonons would slightly warm the tungsten, reducing its superconductivity and leading to a noticeable spike in its resistance.

Within 5 years, the researchers hope to improve their detector’s sensitivity by a factor of 10 so that they can sense a single phonon and hunt dark-sector particles weighing one-millionth as much as a proton. To provide the Dark Matter, such particles would have to be so numerous that a detector weighing just a few kilograms should be able to spot them or rule them out. And because so few experiments have probed this mass range, even little prototype detectors unshielded from background radiation can yield interesting data, Pyle says. “We run just in our lab above ground, and we can get world-leading results.”

Some physicists argue that true quantum sensors should do something more subtle. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle states that if you simultaneously measure the position and momentum of an electron, the product of the uncertainties in those measurements must exceed a “standard quantum limit.” That means no measurement can yield a perfectly precise result, no matter how it’s done. However, the principle also implies you can swap greater uncertainty in one measurement for greater precision in the other. To some physicists, a quantum sensor is one that exploits that trade-off.

Physicists are using such schemes to enhance axion searches. To make up Dark Matter, those lightweight particles would be so numerous that en masse they’d act like a wave, just as sunlight acts more like a light wave than a hail of photons. So with their metal cavities, ADMX and HAYSTAC researchers are searching for the conversion of an invisible axion wave into a detectable radio wave.

Like any wave, the radio wave will have an amplitude that reveals how strong it is and a phase that marks its exact synchronization relative to whatever ultraprecise clock you might choose. Conventional radio circuits measure both and run into a limit set by the uncertainty principle. But axion hunters care only about the signal’s amplitude—is a wave there or not?—and quantum mechanics lets them measure it with greater precision in exchange for more uncertainty in the phase.

HAYSTAC experimenters exploit that trade-off to tamp down noise in their experiment. The vacuum—the backdrop for the measurement—can itself be considered a wave. Although that vacuum wave has on average zero amplitude, its amplitude is still uncertain and fluctuates to create noise. In HAYSTAC a special amplifier reduces the vacuum’s amplitude fluctuations while allowing those in the irrelevant phase to grow bigger, causing any axion signal to stand out more readily. Last year, HAYSTAC researchers reported in Nature that they had searched for and ruled out axions in a narrow range around 19-quadrillionths of a proton mass. By squeezing the noise, they increased the speed of the search by a factor of 2, Maruyama says, and validated the principle.

Such “squeezing” has been demonstrated for decades in laboratory experiments with lasers and optics. Now, Irwin says, “These techniques for beating the standard quantum limit [have] been used to actually do something better, as opposed to do something in a demonstration.” In the DM Radio experiment, he hopes to use a related technique to probe for even lighter axions as well as dark photons.

Instead of a resonating cavity, DM Radio consists of a radio circuit containing a charge-storing capacitor and a current-storing inductor—a carefully designed coil of wire—both placed in a magnetic field. Axions could convert to radio waves within the inductor coil to create a resonating signal in the circuit at a certain frequency. Researchers can also look for dark photons by reconfiguring the coil and turning off the magnetic field.

To read out the signal, Irwin’s scheme plays on another implication of quantum mechanics, that by measuring a system’s state you may change it. The researchers couple their resonating circuit to a second, higher frequency circuit, so that, much as in AM radio, any Dark Matter signal would make the amplitude of the higher frequency carrier wave warble. The stronger the coupling, the bigger the warbling, and the more prominent the signal. But stronger coupling also injects noise that could stymie efforts to measure Dark Matter with greater precision.

Again, a quantum trade-off comes to the rescue. The researchers modify their carrier wave by injecting a tiny warble at the frequency they hope to probe. Just by random chance, that input warble and any Dark Matter signal will likely be somewhat out of sync, or phase. But the Dark Matter wave can be thought of as the sum of two components: one that’s exactly in sync with the added signal and one that’s exactly out of sync with it—much as any direction on a map is a combination of north-south and east-west. The experiment is designed to measure the in-sync component with greater precision while injecting all the disturbance into the out-of-sync component, making the measurement more sensitive and accelerating the rate at which the experiment can scan different frequencies.

Irwin and colleagues have already run a small prototype of the experiment. They are now building a larger version, and ultimately they plan one with a coil that has a volume of 1 cubic meter. Implementing the quantum sensing is essential, Irwin says, as without it, scanning the entire frequency range would take thousands of years.

Some Dark Matter hunters are explicitly borrowing hardware from quantum computing. For example, Fermilab’s Chou and colleagues have used a superconducting qubit—the same kind Google and IBM use in their quantum computers—to perform a proof-of-principle search for dark photons in a very narrow energy range. Like a smaller version of ADMX or HAYSTAC, their experiment centers on a resonating cavity, this one drilled into the edge of an aluminum plate. There a dark photon could convert into radio waves, although at a higher frequency than in ADMX or HAYSTAC. Ordinarily, experimenters would bleed the radio waves out through a hole in the cavity and measure them with a low-noise amplifier. However, the tiny cavity would generate a signal so faint it would drown in noise from the amplifier itself.

The qubit sidesteps that problem. Like any other qubit, the tiny superconducting circuit can act like a clock, cycling between different combinations of 0 and 1 at a rate that depends on the difference in energy between the circuit’s 0 and 1 states. That difference in turn depends on whether there are any radio photons in the cavity. Even one is enough to speed up the clock, Chou says. “We’re going to stick this artificial atomic clock in the cavity and see if it still keeps good time.”

The measurement probes only the amplitude of the radio waves and not their phase, obtaining greater precision in the former in exchange for greater uncertainty in the latter, the team reported last year in Physical Review Letters. It might speed up dark photon searches by as much as a factor of 1300, Chou says, and it could be extended to search for axions, if researchers could apply a magnetic field to the cavity while shielding the sensitive qubit.

One group has invented a scheme to search for WIMPs using another candidate qubit: a so-called nitrogen vacancy (NV) center within a diamond crystal. In an NV, a nitrogen atom replaces a carbon atom in the crystal lattice and creates an adjacent, empty site that collects a pair of electrons that can serve as qubit. A WIMP passing through a diamond can bump carbon atoms out of the way, leaving a trail of NVs roughly 100 nanometers long, says Ronald Walsworth, an experimental physicist at the University of Maryland, College Park. The NVs will absorb and emit light of specific wavelengths, so the track can be spotted clearly with fluorescence microscopy.

That scheme has little to do with quantum computing, but it would address a looming problem for WIMP searches. If current liquid xenon detectors get much bigger, they should start to see well-known particles called neutrinos, which stream from the Sun. To tell a WIMP from a neutrino, physicists would need to know where a particle came from, as WIMPs should come from the plane of the Galaxy rather than the Sun. A liquid xenon detector can’t determine the direction of a particle that caused a signal. A detector made of diamonds could.

Walsworth envisions a detector formed of millions of millimeter-size synthetic diamonds. A diamond would flash when pierced by a neutrino or WIMP, and an automated system would remove it and scan it for an NV track, using the time of the flash to determine the track’s orientation relative to the Sun and the Galaxy, the team explained last year in Quantum Science and Technology. Walsworth hopes to build a prototype detector in a few years. “I absolutely do not want to claim that our idea would work or that it’s better than other approaches,” he says. “But I think it’s promising enough to go forward.”

Physicists have proposed many other ideas for using quantum sensors to search for Dark Matter, and the influx of money should help transform them into new technologies, Zurek says. “Things can move faster when you’re funded,” she says. As tool builders, Dark Matter hunters embrace that push. “They have a great hammer, so they started looking for nails,” Walsworth says. Perhaps they’ll bang out a discovery of cosmic proportions.

__________________________________
Dark Matter Background
Fritz Zwicky discovered Dark Matter in the 1930s when observing the movement of the Coma Cluster., Vera Rubin a Woman in STEM, denied the Nobel, some 30 years later, did most of the work on Dark Matter.

Fritz Zwicky.
Coma cluster via NASA/ESA Hubble, the original example of Dark Matter discovered during observations by Fritz Zwicky and confirmed 30 years later by Vera Rubin.
In modern times, it was astronomer Fritz Zwicky, in the 1930s, who made the first observations of what we now call dark matter. His 1933 observations of the Coma Cluster of galaxies seemed to indicated it has a mass 500 times more than that previously calculated by Edwin Hubble. Furthermore, this extra mass seemed to be completely invisible. Although Zwicky’s observations were initially met with much skepticism, they were later confirmed by other groups of astronomers.

Thirty years later, astronomer Vera Rubin provided a huge piece of evidence for the existence of dark matter. She discovered that the centers of galaxies rotate at the same speed as their extremities, whereas, of course, they should rotate faster. Think of a vinyl LP on a record deck: its center rotates faster than its edge. That’s what logic dictates we should see in galaxies too. But we do not. The only way to explain this is if the whole galaxy is only the center of some much larger structure, as if it is only the label on the LP so to speak, causing the galaxy to have a consistent rotation speed from center to edge.

Vera Rubin, following Zwicky, postulated that the missing structure in galaxies is dark matter. Her ideas were met with much resistance from the astronomical community, but her observations have been confirmed and are seen today as pivotal proof of the existence of dark matter.
Astronomer Vera Rubin at the Lowell Observatory in 1965, worked on Dark Matter (The Carnegie Institution for Science).

Vera Rubin, with Department of Terrestrial Magnetism (DTM) image tube spectrograph attached to the Kitt Peak 84-inch telescope, 1970.

Vera Rubin measuring spectra, worked on Dark Matter(Emilio Segre Visual Archives AIP SPL).
Dark Matter Research

Super Cryogenic Dark Matter Search from DOE’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory at Stanford University at SNOLAB (Vale Inco Mine, Sudbury, Canada).

LBNL LZ Dark Matter Experiment xenon detector at Sanford Underground Research Facility Credit: Matt Kapust.

Lamda Cold Dark Matter Accerated Expansion of The universe http scinotions.com the-cosmic-inflation-suggests-the-existence-of-parallel-universes. Credit: Alex Mittelmann.

DAMA at Gran Sasso uses sodium iodide housed in copper to hunt for dark matter LNGS-INFN.

Yale HAYSTAC axion dark matter experiment at Yale’s Wright Lab.

DEAP Dark Matter detector, The DEAP-3600, suspended in the SNOLAB (CA) deep in Sudbury’s Creighton Mine.

The LBNL LZ Dark Matter Experiment Dark Matter project at SURF, Lead, SD.

DAMA-LIBRA Dark Matter experiment at the Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics’ (INFN’s) Gran Sasso National Laboratories (LNGS) located in the Abruzzo region of central Italy.

DARWIN Dark Matter experiment. A design study for a next-generation, multi-ton dark matter detector in Europe at The University of Zurich [Universität Zürich](CH).

PandaX II Dark Matter experiment at Jin-ping Underground Laboratory (CJPL) in Sichuan, China.

Inside the Axion Dark Matter eXperiment U Washington (US) Credit : Mark Stone U. of Washington. Axion Dark Matter Experiment.
__________________________________

See the full article here .

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

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

From The University of Nebraska -Lincoln: “New device gets scientists closer to quantum materials breakthrough”

From The University of Nebraska -Lincoln

6.16.22
Dan Moser | IANR News

Wei Bao, Nebraska assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering.

Researchers from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and the University of California-Berkeley, have developed a new photonic device that could get scientists closer to the “holy grail” of finding the global minimum of mathematical formulations at room temperature. Finding that illusive mathematical value would be a major advancement in opening new options for simulations involving quantum materials.

Many scientific questions depend heavily on being able to find that mathematical value, said Wei Bao, Nebraska assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering. The search can be challenging even for modern computers, especially when the dimensions of the parameters — commonly used in quantum physics — are extremely large.

Until now, researchers could only do this with polariton optimization devices at extremely low temperatures, close to about minus 270 degrees Celsius. Bao said the Nebraska-UC Berkeley team “has found a way to combine the advantages of light and matter at room temperature suitable for this great optimization challenge.”

The devices use quantum half-light and half-matter quasi-particles known as exciton-polaritons which recently emerged as a solid-state analog photonic simulation platform for quantum physics such as Bose-Einstein condensation and complex XY spin models.

“Our breakthrough is enabled by adopting solution-grown halide perovskite-a famous material for solar cell communities and growing it under nanoconfinement,” Bao said. “This will produce exceptional smooth single-crystalline large crystals with great optical homogeneity, previously never reported at room temperature for a polariton system.”

Bao is the corresponding author of a paper reporting this research, published in Nature Materials.

“This is exciting,” said Xiang Zhang, Bao’s collaborator, now president of Hong Kong University but who completed this research as a mechanical engineering faculty member at UC Berkeley. “We show that XY spin lattice with a large number of coherently coupled condensates that can be constructed as a lattice with a size up to 10×10.”

Its material properties also could enable future studies at room temperature rather than ultracold temperatures. Bao said, “We are just starting to explore the potential of a room temperature system for solving complex problems. Our work is a concrete step towards the long-sought room-temperature solid-state quantum simulation platform.

“The solution synthesis method we reported with excellent thickness control for large ultra-homogenous halide perovskite can enable many interesting studies at room temperature, without the need” for complicated and expensive equipment and materials, Bao added. It also opens the door for simulating large calculational approaches and many other device applications, previously inaccessible at room temperature.

This process is essential in the highly competitive era of quantum technologies, which are expected to transform the fields of information processing, sensing, communication, imaging and more.

Nebraska has prioritized quantum science and engineering as one of its Grand Challenges. It was named a research priority because of the university’s expertise in this area and the impact Husker research can make on the exciting and promising field.

Bao’s co-authors are Kai Peng, a postdoctoral researcher at Nebraska; Renjie Tao, Quanwei Li, Graham Fleming and Xiang Zhang of UC Berkeley; Dafei Jin of The DOE’s Argonne National Lab; and Louis Haeberlé and Stéphane Kéna-Cohen of Polytechnique Montréal.

This work is primarily supported by the Office of Naval Research, NSF and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.

See the full article here .

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings
Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

The University of Nebraska–Lincoln is a public research university in the city of Lincoln, in the state of Nebraska in the Midwestern United States. It is the state’s oldest university, and the largest in the University of Nebraska system.

The state legislature chartered the university in 1869 as a land-grant university under the 1862 Morrill Act, two years after Nebraska’s statehood into the United States. Around the turn of the 20th century, the university began to expand significantly, hiring professors from eastern schools to teach in the newly organized professional colleges while also producing groundbreaking research in agricultural sciences. The “Nebraska method” of ecological study developed here during this time pioneered grassland ecology and laid the foundation for research in theoretical ecology for the rest of the 20th century. The university is organized into eight colleges on two campuses in Lincoln with over 100 classroom buildings and research facilities.

Its athletic program, called the Cornhuskers, is a member of the Big Ten Conference. The Nebraska football team has won 46 conference championships, and since 1970, five national championships. The women’s volleyball team has won four national championships along with eight other appearances in the Final Four. The Husker football team plays its home games at Memorial Stadium, selling out every game since 1962. The stadium’s capacity is about 92,000 people, larger than the population of Nebraska’s third-largest city.

From The University of Waterloo (CA): “Physicists wonder what comes after quantum?”

From The University of Waterloo (CA)

May 18, 2022 [Just today in social media.]

Quantum theory, the physics of the very small, helps us to understand nature and our world by explaining and predicting the behaviour of atoms and molecules. Researchers at the Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC) are interested in what comes after quantum theory, specifically the possibility of a broader theory that replaces quantum theory as a more complete description of nature.

In 1900, while studying radiation, Max Planck observed that energy could behave in a way not consistent with classical physics. Twenty-years later a more fulsome understanding of matter emerged. Based on the research of physicists like Bohr, Schrödinger, and Heisenberg this new theory, quantum theory, accounted for the unpredictable nature Planck observed two decades before. In the same way that quantum physics built on our understanding of classical physics, a novel, post-quantum theory may build off our current understanding of quantum physics.

As a master’s student with the Department of Physics and Astronomy and IQC, Michael Grabowecky was interested in exploring any potential deviations from quantum theory and identifying restrictions on any new potential theories.

To test quantum theory against possible alternates, a neutral or theory agnostic approach was needed. This approach allows data to inform an interpretation theory. The team designed an experiment to collect a large amount of data from a three-level system, then work out a theory directly from the obtained data.

“We do not assume any particular theory to be true before conducting the experiment. We want to make as little assumptions as possible, and we definitely don’t want to assume that quantum mechanics is true,” said Grabowecky. “The whole purpose of these kind of experiments is to let the statistics and the photons speak for themselves.”

To minimize the experimental assumptions and take a theory-agnostic approach, the team used the framework of generalized probabilistic theories (GPTs). GPTs are operational theories in which classical and quantum physics are special cases. The team used GPTs because they require minimal assumptions and can be used to avoid any inherent quantum biases when conducting an experiment.

A digital computer stores and processes information using bits, which can either be 0 or 1. A quantum bit or qubit can be both 0 and 1 and is a two-level system. In this experiment the team investigated a three-level system where the bits have three degrees of freedom rather than two. The quantum analog of a three-level system is called a qutrit.

“We prepared a three-level system in a wide variety of ways and on each of those preparations, we performed a large number of measurements. The statistics associated with these random preparations and measurements were used to construct a physical theory describing our system,” said Grabowecky.

The experiment found that quantum theory works well in describing the obtained data, but a broader theory beyond quantum may be possible. Furthermore, this research identified quantitative boundaries on the scope of possible deviations from quantum theory for three-level systems.

Grabowecky, now the Quantum Technology Lab Coordinator at IQC, is excited by the potential of this research.

The experimental data sets from this research can be used to test future theories that may supersede quantum theory and advance fundamental research.

The science paper was published in Physical Review A on March 10, 2022.

Accepted 17 February 2022.

See the full article here .

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

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

In just half a century, the The University of Waterloo (CA) located at the heart of Canada’s technology hub, has become a leading comprehensive university with nearly 36,000 full- and part-time students in undergraduate and graduate programs.

Consistently ranked Canada’s most innovative university, Waterloo is home to advanced research and teaching in science and engineering, mathematics and computer science, health, environment, arts and social sciences. From quantum computing and nanotechnology to clinical psychology and health sciences research, Waterloo brings ideas and brilliant minds together, inspiring innovations with real impact today and in the future.

As home to the world’s largest post-secondary co-operative education program, Waterloo embraces its connections to the world and encourages enterprising partnerships in learning, research, and commercialization. With campuses and education centres on four continents, and academic partnerships spanning the globe, Waterloo is shaping the future of the planet.

From MPG Institute for Quantum Optics [MPG Institut für Quantenoptik] (DE) via phys.org : “Quantum magnets in motion”

Max Planck Institut für Quantenoptik (DE)

From MPG Institute for Quantum Optics [MPG Institut für Quantenoptik] (DE)

via

phys.org

May 16, 2022

The Kardar-Parisi-Zhang universality combines classical everyday phenomena such as coffee stains with quantum mechanical spin chains in a surprising way. Credit: MPG Institute of Quantum Optics.

The behavior of microscopic quantum magnets has long been a subject taught in lectures in theoretical physics. However, investigating the dynamics of systems that are far out of equilibrium and watching them “live” has been difficult so far. Now, researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching have accomplished precisely this, using a quantum gas microscope. With this tool, quantum systems can be manipulated and then imaged with such high resolution that even individual atoms are visible. The results of the experiments on linear chains of spins show that the way their orientation propagates corresponds to the so-called Kardar-Parisi-Zhang superdiffusion. This confirms a conjecture that recently emerged from theoretical considerations.

A team of physicists around Dr. Johannes Zeiher and Prof Immanuel Bloch has eyes on objects that others hardly ever get to see. The researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics (MPQ) in Garching use a so-called quantum gas microscope to track down processes on the tiny scale of quantum physics. Such an instrument allows—with the help of atoms and lasers—to specifically create quantum systems with desired properties and to investigate them with high resolution. In these experiments, the researchers also focus on transport phenomena—how quantum objects move under certain external conditions.

The team has now made a surprising experimental discovery. The researchers were able to show that the one-dimensional transport of spins—the term “spin” stands for a specific, magnetic quantum property of atoms and other particles—resembles macroscopic phenomena in certain areas. For the most part, processes in the quantum realm and in the everyday world differ significantly. “But our work reveals an interesting connection between quantum mechanical spin systems in cold atoms and classical systems such as growing bacterial colonies or spreading wildfires,” says Johannes Zeiher, group leader in the Quantum Many-Body Systems division at MPQ. “This discovery is completely unexpected and points to a deep connection in the field of non-equilibrium physics that is still poorly understood.”

Physicists refer to such a theoretical analogy between random motion in quantum and classical systems as “universality.” In this specific case, it is the Kardar-Parisi-Zhang universality (KPZ)—a phenomenon previously known only from classical physics.

The telling exponent

In order to observe the phenomenon microscopically, the Garching team first cooled down a cloud of atoms to temperatures close to absolute zero. That way, movements due to heat could be ruled out. Then they locked the ultracold atoms in a specially formed “box-shaped” potential, formed by an arrangement of tiny mirrors. “We used this to study the relaxation of a single magnetic domain wall in a chain of 50 linearly arranged spins,” explains David Wei, a researcher in Johannes Zeiher’s group. The domain wall separates areas with identical orientation of neighboring spins from each other. The researchers first created the domain wall for the experiment using a new trick, whereby an “effective magnetic field” was generated by projecting light. In doing so, the researchers can strongly suppress the couplings between spins, effectively “locking” them into place.

The relaxation within the spin chain occurred after the couplings between spins were switched on in a controlled manner and, as it turned out, followed a characteristic pattern. “This can be described mathematically by a power law with the exponent 3/2,” says Wei—a hint at the connection with KPZ universality. Further evidence for this relationship was provided when the researchers detected the motion of individual spins, which was revealed through the quantum gas microscope.

“This high precision was the basis for a detailed statistical evaluation,” says Zeiher. “The striking course of spin diffusion that our experiment showed corresponds in its mathematical form approximately to the spread of a coffee stain on a tablecloth, for example,” explains the Max Planck physicist. That such an astonishing connection could exist had been suspected by a team of theorists about two years ago on the basis of theoretical considerations. However, experimental confirmation of this hypothesis was still lacking.

An old model amazes physicists

For the description of quantum mechanical spin phenomena, physicists have been using the so-called Heisenberg model very successfully for a long time (but it was only recently that spin transport phenomena could be described theoretically within this model). “Our results show that surprising new insights are still possible even within an established theoretical framework,” Johannes Zeiher emphasizes. “And they are proof of how theory and experiment cross-fertilize in physics.”

The results that have now been achieved by the team in Garching are not only of academic value. They could also be useful for tangible technical applications. For example, spins also constitute the basis of certain forms of quantum computers. Knowledge of the transport properties of the information carriers could be of critical importance for the practical realization of such novel computer architectures.

The study appears in Science.

See the full article here .

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

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

Research at the MPG Institute for Quantum Optics [Max Planck Institut für Quantenoptik ] (DE)
Light can behave as an electromagnetic wave or a shower of particles that have no mass, called photons, depending on the conditions under which it is studied or used. Matter, on the other hand, is composed of particles, but it can actually exhibit wave-like properties, giving rise to many astonishing phenomena in the microcosm.

At our institute we explore the interaction of light and quantum systems, exploiting the two extreme regimes of the wave-particle duality of light and matter. On the one hand we handle light at the single photon level where wave-interference phenomena differ from those of intense light beams. On the other hand, when cooling ensembles of massive particles down to extremely low temperatures we suddenly observe phenomena that go back to their wave-like nature. Furthermore, when dealing with ultrashort and highly intense light pulses comprising trillions of photons we can completely neglect the particle properties of light. We take advantage of the large force that the rapidly oscillating electromagnetic field exerts on electrons to steer their motion within molecules or accelerate them to relativistic energies.

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

According to its primary goal, the MPG Society supports fundamental research in the natural, life and social sciences, the arts and humanities in its 83 (as of January 2014) MPG Institutes. The society has a total staff of approximately 17,000 permanent employees, including 5,470 scientists, plus around 4,600 non-tenured scientists and guests. Society budget for 2015 was about €1.7 billion.

The MPG Institutes focus on excellence in research. The MPG Society has a world-leading reputation as a science and technology research organization, with 33 Nobel Prizes awarded to their scientists, and is generally regarded as the foremost basic research organization in Europe and the world. In 2013, the Nature Publishing Index placed the MPG institutes fifth worldwide in terms of research published in Nature journals (after Harvard University, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University and The National Institutes of Health). In terms of total research volume (unweighted by citations or impact), the Max Planck Society is only outranked by The Chinese Academy of Sciences [中国科学院](CN), The Russian Academy of Sciences [Росси́йская акаде́мия нау́к](RU) and Harvard University. The Thomson Reuters-Science Watch website placed the MPG Society as the second leading research organization worldwide following Harvard University, in terms of the impact of the produced research over science fields.

The MPG Society and its predecessor Kaiser Wilhelm Society hosted several renowned scientists in their fields, including Otto Hahn, Werner Heisenberg, and Albert Einstein.

History

The organization was established in 1911 as the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, or Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft (KWG), a non-governmental research organization named for the then German emperor. The KWG was one of the world’s leading research organizations; its board of directors included scientists like Walther Bothe, Peter Debye, Albert Einstein, and Fritz Haber. In 1946, Otto Hahn assumed the position of President of KWG, and in 1948, the society was renamed the Max Planck Society (MPG) after its former President (1930–37) Max Planck, who died in 1947.

The MPG Society has a world-leading reputation as a science and technology research organization. In 2006, the Times Higher Education Supplement rankings of non-university research institutions (based on international peer review by academics) placed the MPG Society as No.1 in the world for science research, and No.3 in technology research (behind AT&T Corporation and The DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory.

The domain mpg.de attracted at least 1.7 million visitors annually by 2008 according to a Compete.com study.

MPG Institutes and research groups

The MPG Society consists of over 80 research institutes. In addition, the society funds a number of Max Planck Research Groups (MPRG) and International Max Planck Research Schools (IMPRS). The purpose of establishing independent research groups at various universities is to strengthen the required networking between universities and institutes of the Max Planck Society.
The research units are primarily located across Europe with a few in South Korea and the U.S. In 2007, the Society established its first non-European centre, with an institute on the Jupiter campus of Florida Atlantic University (US) focusing on neuroscience.
The MPG Institutes operate independently from, though in close cooperation with, the universities, and focus on innovative research which does not fit into the university structure due to their interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary nature or which require resources that cannot be met by the state universities.

Internally, MPG Institutes are organized into research departments headed by directors such that each MPI has several directors, a position roughly comparable to anything from full professor to department head at a university. Other core members include Junior and Senior Research Fellows.

In addition, there are several associated institutes:

International Max Planck Research Schools

International Max Planck Research Schools

Together with the Association of Universities and other Education Institutions in Germany, the Max Planck Society established numerous International Max Planck Research Schools (IMPRS) to promote junior scientists:

• Cologne Graduate School of Ageing Research, Cologne
• International Max Planck Research School for Intelligent Systems, at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems located in Tübingen and Stuttgart
• International Max Planck Research School on Adapting Behavior in a Fundamentally Uncertain World (Uncertainty School), at the Max Planck Institutes for Economics, for Human Development, and/or Research on Collective Goods
• International Max Planck Research School for Analysis, Design and Optimization in Chemical and Biochemical Process Engineering, Magdeburg
• International Max Planck Research School for Astronomy and Cosmic Physics, Heidelberg at the MPI for Astronomy
• International Max Planck Research School for Astrophysics, Garching at the MPI for Astrophysics
• International Max Planck Research School for Complex Surfaces in Material Sciences, Berlin
• International Max Planck Research School for Computer Science, Saarbrücken
• International Max Planck Research School for Earth System Modeling, Hamburg
• International Max Planck Research School for Elementary Particle Physics, Munich, at the MPI for Physics
• International Max Planck Research School for Environmental, Cellular and Molecular Microbiology, Marburg at the Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology
• International Max Planck Research School for Evolutionary Biology, Plön at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology
• International Max Planck Research School “From Molecules to Organisms”, Tübingen at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology
• International Max Planck Research School for Global Biogeochemical Cycles, Jena at the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry
• International Max Planck Research School on Gravitational Wave Astronomy, Hannover and Potsdam MPI for Gravitational Physics
• International Max Planck Research School for Heart and Lung Research, Bad Nauheim at the Max Planck Institute for Heart and Lung Research
• International Max Planck Research School for Infectious Diseases and Immunity, Berlin at the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology
• International Max Planck Research School for Language Sciences, Nijmegen
• International Max Planck Research School for Neurosciences, Göttingen
• International Max Planck Research School for Cognitive and Systems Neuroscience, Tübingen
• International Max Planck Research School for Marine Microbiology (MarMic), joint program of the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen, the University of Bremen, the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Bremerhaven, and the Jacobs University Bremen
• International Max Planck Research School for Maritime Affairs, Hamburg
• International Max Planck Research School for Molecular and Cellular Biology, Freiburg
• International Max Planck Research School for Molecular and Cellular Life Sciences, Munich
• International Max Planck Research School for Molecular Biology, Göttingen
• International Max Planck Research School for Molecular Cell Biology and Bioengineering, Dresden
• International Max Planck Research School Molecular Biomedicine, program combined with the ‘Graduate Programm Cell Dynamics And Disease’ at the University of Münster and the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Biomedicine
• International Max Planck Research School on Multiscale Bio-Systems, Potsdam
• International Max Planck Research School for Organismal Biology, at the University of Konstanz and the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology
• International Max Planck Research School on Reactive Structure Analysis for Chemical Reactions (IMPRS RECHARGE), Mülheim an der Ruhr, at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Energy Conversion
• International Max Planck Research School for Science and Technology of Nano-Systems, Halle at Max Planck Institute of Microstructure Physics
• International Max Planck Research School for Solar System Science at the University of Göttingen hosted by MPI for Solar System Research
• International Max Planck Research School for Astronomy and Astrophysics, Bonn, at the MPI for Radio Astronomy (formerly the International Max Planck Research School for Radio and Infrared Astronomy)
• International Max Planck Research School for the Social and Political Constitution of the Economy, Cologne
• International Max Planck Research School for Surface and Interface Engineering in Advanced Materials, Düsseldorf at Max Planck Institute for Iron Research GmbH
• International Max Planck Research School for Ultrafast Imaging and Structural Dynamics, Hamburg

Max Planck Schools

• Max Planck School of Cognition
• Max Planck School Matter to Life
• Max Planck School of Photonics

Max Planck Center

• The Max Planck Centre for Attosecond Science (MPC-AS), POSTECH Pohang
• The Max Planck POSTECH Center for Complex Phase Materials, POSTECH Pohang

Max Planck Institutes

Among others:
• Max Planck Institute for Neurobiology of Behavior – caesar, Bonn
• Max Planck Institute for Aeronomics in Katlenburg-Lindau was renamed to Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in 2004;
• Max Planck Institute for Biology in Tübingen was closed in 2005;
• Max Planck Institute for Cell Biology in Ladenburg b. Heidelberg was closed in 2003;
• Max Planck Institute for Economics in Jena was renamed to the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in 2014;
• Max Planck Institute for Ionospheric Research in Katlenburg-Lindau was renamed to Max Planck Institute for Aeronomics in 1958;
• Max Planck Institute for Metals Research, Stuttgart
• Max Planck Institute of Oceanic Biology in Wilhelmshaven was renamed to Max Planck Institute of Cell Biology in 1968 and moved to Ladenburg 1977;
• Max Planck Institute for Psychological Research in Munich merged into the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in 2004;
• Max Planck Institute for Protein and Leather Research in Regensburg moved to Munich 1957 and was united with the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry in 1977;
• Max Planck Institute for Virus Research in Tübingen was renamed as Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in 1985;
• Max Planck Institute for the Study of the Scientific-Technical World in Starnberg (from 1970 until 1981 (closed)) directed by Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker and Jürgen Habermas.
• Max Planck Institute for Behavioral Physiology
• Max Planck Institute of Experimental Endocrinology
• Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Social Law
• Max Planck Institute for Physics and Astrophysics
• Max Planck Research Unit for Enzymology of Protein Folding

From The University of Montréal [Université de Montréal] (CA) : “Unusual quantum state of matter observed for the first time at UdeM”

From The University of Montréal [Université de Montréal] (CA)

05/09/2022
Martin LaSalle

Physicist Andrea Bianchi has observed the “quantum spin liquid” state in a magnetic material created in his lab.

It’s not every day that someone comes across a new state of matter in quantum physics, the scientific field devoted to describing the behaviour of atomic and subatomic particles in order to elucidate their properties.

Yet this is exactly what an international team of researchers that includes Andrea Bianchi, University of Montreal physics professor and researcher at the Regroupement québécois sur les matériaux de pointe, and his students Avner Fitterman and Jérémi Dudemaine has done.

In a recent article published in the scientific journal Physical Review X, the researchers document a “quantum spin liquid ground state” in a magnetic material created in Bianchi’s lab: Ce2Zr2O7, a compound composed of cerium, zirconium and oxygen.

Like a liquid locked inside an extremely cold solid.

In quantum physics, spin is an internal property of electrons linked to their rotation. It is spin that gives the material in a magnet its magnetic properties.

In some materials, spin results in a disorganized structure similar to that of molecules in a liquid, hence the expression “spin liquid.”

In general, a material becomes more disorganized as its temperature rises. This is the case, for example, when water turns into steam. But the principal characteristic of spin liquids is that they remain disorganized even when cooled to as low as absolute zero (–273°C).

Spin liquids remain disorganized because the direction of spin continues to fluctuate as the material is cooled instead of stabilizing in a solid state, as it does in a conventional magnet, in which all the spins are aligned.

The art of “frustrating” electrons

Imagine an electron as a tiny compass that points either up or down. In conventional magnets, the electron spins are all oriented in the same direction, up or down, creating what is known as a “ferromagnetic phase.” This is what keeps photos and notes pinned to your fridge.

But in quantum spin liquids, the electrons are positioned in a triangular lattice and form a “ménage à trois” characterized by intense turbulence that interferes with their order. The result is an entangled wave function and no magnetic order.

“When a third electron is added, the electron spins cannot align because the two neighbouring electrons must always have opposing spins, creating what we call magnetic frustration,” Bianchi explained. “This generates excitations that maintain the disorder of spins and therefore the liquid state, even at very low temperatures.”

So how did they add a third electron and cause such frustration?

Creating a ménage à trois

Enter the frustrated magnet Ce2Zr2O7 created by Bianchi in his lab. To his already long list of accomplishments in developing advanced materials like superconductors, we can now add “master of the art of frustrating magnets”!

Ce2Zr2O7 is a cerium-based material with magnetic properties. “The existence of this compound was known,” said Bianchi. “Our breakthrough was creating it in a uniquely pure form. We used samples melted in an optical furnace to produce a near-perfect triangular arrangement of atoms and then checked the quantum state.”

It was this near-perfect triangle that enabled Bianchi and his team at UdeM to create magnetic frustration in Ce2Zr2O7. Working with researchers at McMaster and Colorado State universities, Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex System in Dresden, Germany, they measured the compound’s magnetic diffusion.

“Our measurements showed an overlapping particle function—therefore no Bragg peaks—a clear sign of the absence of classical magnetic order,” said Bianchi. “We also observed a distribution of spins with continuously fluctuating directions, which is characteristic of spin liquids and magnetic frustration. This indicates that the material we created behaves like a true spin liquid at low temperatures.”

From dream to reality

After corroborating these observations with computer simulations, the team concluded that they were indeed witnessing a never-before-seen quantum state.

“Identifying a new quantum state of matter is a dream come true for every physicist,” said Bianchi. “Our material is revolutionary because we are the first to show it can indeed present as a spin liquid. This discovery could open the door to new approaches in designing quantum computers.”

Frustrated magnets in a nutshell

Magnetism is a collective phenomenon in which the electrons in a material all spin in the same direction. An everyday example is the ferromagnet, which owes its magnetic properties to the alignment of spins. Neighbouring electrons can also spin in opposite directions. In this case, the spins still have well-defined directions but there is no magnetization. Frustrated magnets are frustrated because the neighbouring electrons try to orient their spins in opposing directions, and when they find themselves in a triangular lattice, they can no longer settle on a common, stable arrangement. The result: a frustrated magnet.

See the full article here.

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

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

The Université de Montréal is a French-language public research university in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. The university’s main campus is located on the northern slope of Mount Royal in the neighbourhoods of Outremont and Côte-des-Neiges. The institution comprises thirteen faculties, more than sixty departments and two affiliated schools: the Polytechnique Montréal (School of Engineering; formerly the École Polytechnique de Montréal) and HEC Montréal (School of Business). It offers more than 650 undergraduate programmes and graduate programmes, including 71 doctoral programmes.

The university was founded as a satellite campus of the Université Laval in 1878. It became an independent institution after it was issued a papal charter in 1919 and a provincial charter in 1920. Université de Montréal moved from Montreal’s Quartier Latin to its present location at Mount Royal in 1942. It was made a secular institution with the passing of another provincial charter in 1967.

The school is co-educational, and has 34,335 undergraduate and 11,925 post-graduate students (excluding affiliated schools). Alumni and former students reside across Canada and around the world, with notable alumni serving as government officials, academics, and business leaders.

Research

Université de Montréal is a member of the U15, a group that represents 15 Canadian research universities. The university includes 465 research units and departments. In 2018, Research Infosource ranked the university third in their list of top 50 research universities; with a sponsored research income (external sources of funding) of $536.238 million in 2017. In the same year, the university’s faculty averaged a sponsored research income of $271,000, while its graduates averaged a sponsored research income of $33,900.

Université de Montréal research performance has been noted in several bibliometric university rankings, which uses citation analysis to evaluate the impact a university has on academic publications. In 2019, The Performance Ranking of Scientific Papers for World Universities ranked the university 104th in the world, and fifth in Canada. The University Ranking by Academic Performance 2018–19 rankings placed the university 99th in the world, and fifth in Canada.

Since 2017, Université de Montréal has partnered with the McGill University (CA) on Mila (research institute), a community of professors, students, industrial partners and startups working in AI, with over 500 researchers making the institute the world’s largest academic research center in deep learning. The institute was originally founded in 1993 by Professor Yoshua Bengio.

From The University of Surrey (UK): “A new study reveals that quantum physics can cause mutations in our DNA”

From The University of Surrey (UK)

22 February 2021 [Just now in social media.]

Credit: Getty Images.

Quantum biology is an emerging field of science, established in the 1920s, which looks at whether the subatomic world of quantum mechanics plays a role in living cells. Quantum mechanics is an interdisciplinary field by nature, bringing together nuclear physicists, biochemists and molecular biologists.

In a research paper published by the journal Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics, a team from Surrey’s Leverhulme Quantum Biology Doctoral Training Centre used state-of-the-art computer simulations and quantum mechanical methods to determine the role proton tunnelling, a purely quantum phenomenon, plays in spontaneous mutations inside DNA.

Proton tunnelling involves the spontaneous disappearance of a proton from one location and the same proton’s re-appearance nearby.

The research team found that atoms of hydrogen, which are very light, provide the bonds that hold the two strands of the DNA’s double helix together and can, under certain conditions, behave like spread-out waves that can exist in multiple locations at once, thanks to proton tunnelling. This leads to these atoms occasionally being found on the wrong strand of DNA, leading to mutations.

Although these mutations’ lifetime is short, the team from Surrey has revealed that they can still survive the DNA replication mechanism inside cells and could potentially have health consequences.

Dr Marco Sacchi, the project lead and Royal Society University Research Fellow at the University of Surrey, said: “Many have long suspected that the quantum world – which is weird, counter-intuitive and wonderful – plays a role in life as we know it. While the idea that something can be present in two places at the same time might be absurd to many of us, this happens all the time in the quantum world, and our study confirms that quantum tunnelling also happens in DNA at room temperature.”

Louie Slocombe, a PhD student at the Leverhulme Quantum Biology Doctoral Training Centre and co-author of the study, said: “There is still a long and exciting road ahead of us to understand how biological processes work on the subatomic level, but our study – and countless others over the recent years – have confirmed quantum mechanics are at play. In the future, we are hoping to investigate how tautomers produced by quantum tunnelling can propagate and generate genetic mutations.”

Jim Al-Khalili, a co-author of the study and Co-Director of the Leverhulme Quantum Biology Doctoral Training Centre at the University of Surrey, said: “It has been thrilling to work with this group of young, diverse and talented thinkers – made up of a broad coalition of the scientific world. This work cements quantum biology as the most exciting field of scientific research in the 21st century.”

See the full article here .

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

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

The University of Surrey is a public research university in Guildford, Surrey, England. The university received its royal charter in 1966, along with a number of other institutions following recommendations in the Robbins Report. The institution was previously known as Battersea College of Technology and was located in Battersea Park, London. Its roots however, go back to Battersea Polytechnic Institute, founded in 1891 to provide further and higher education in London, including its poorer inhabitants. The university’s research output and global partnerships have led to it being regarded as one of the UK’s leading research universities.

The university is a member of the Association of MBAs and is one of four universities in the University Global Partnership Network. It is also part of the SETsquared partnership (UK) along with The University of Bath (UK), The University of Bristol (UK), the University of Southampton (UK) and The University of Exeter (UK). The university’s main campus is on Stag Hill, close to the centre of Guildford and adjacent to Guildford Cathedral. Surrey Sports Park is situated at the nearby Manor Park, the university’s secondary campus. Among British universities, the University of Surrey had the 14th highest average UCAS Tariff for new entrants in 2015.

A major centre for satellite and mobile communications research, the university is in partnership with King’s College London (UK) and the Dresden University of Technology [Technische Universität Dresden] (DE) to develop 5G technology worldwide. It also holds a number of formal links with institutions worldwide, including the Surrey International Institute (UK), launched in partnership with the Dongbei University of Finance and Economics [东北财经大学](DUFE) (CN). The university owns the Surrey Research Park, providing facilities for over 110 companies engaged in research. Surrey has been awarded three Queen’s Anniversary Prizes for its research, with the 2014 Research Excellence Framework ranking 78% of the university’s research outputs as “world leading” or “internationally excellent”. It was named as The Sunday Times University of the Year in 2016.

Current and emeritus academics at the university include ten Fellows of the Royal Society, twenty-one Fellows of the Royal Academy of Engineering, one Fellow of the British Academy and six Fellows of the Academy of Social Sciences. Surrey has educated many notable alumni, including Olympic gold medallists, several senior politicians, as well as a number of notable persons in various fields including the arts, sports and academia. Graduates typically abbreviate the University of Surrey to Sur when using post-nominal letters after their degree.

Research

The university conducts extensive research on small satellites, with its Surrey Space Centre and spin-off commercial company, Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd. In the 2001 Research Assessment Exercise, the University of Surrey received a 5* rating in the categories of “Sociology”, “Other Studies and Professions Allied to Medicine”, and “Electrical and Electronic Engineering” and a 5* rating in the categories of “Psychology”, “Physics”, “Applied Mathematics”, “Statistics and Operational Research”, “European Studies” and “Russian, Slavonic and East European Languages”.

The 5G Innovation Centre (5GIC) at the University of Surrey opened in September 2015, for the purpose of research for the development of the first worldwide 5G network. It has gained over £40m support from international telecommunications companies including Aeroflex, MYCOM OSI, BBC, BT Group, EE (telecommunications company), Fujitsu Laboratories of Europe, Huawei, Ofcom, Rohde & Schwarz, Samsung, Telefonica and Vodafone – and a further £11.6m from the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE).

In addition, the Surrey Research Park is a 28 ha (69-acre) low density development which is owned and developed by the university, providing large landscaped areas with water features and facilities for over 110 companies engaged in a broad spectrum of research, development and design activities. The university generates the third highest endowment income out of all UK universities “reflecting its commercially-orientated heritage.”

From The Massachusetts Institute of Technology: “‘Visualizing the Proton’ through animation and film”

From The Massachusetts Institute of Technology

April 25, 2022
Sarah Costello | School of Science

Visualizing the Proton.

An innovative animation conveys the current understanding of the structure of the proton.
Image: James LaPlante/Sputnik Animation.

“Visualizing the Proton” is an original animation of the proton, intended for use in high school classrooms.
Animation courtesy of the “Visualizing the Proton” team.

Try to picture a proton — the minute, positively charged particle within an atomic nucleus — and you may imagine a familiar, textbook diagram: a bundle of billiard balls representing quarks and gluons. From the solid sphere model first proposed by John Dalton in 1803 to the quantum model put forward by Erwin Schrödinger in 1926, there is a storied timeline of physicists trying to visualize the invisible.

Now, MIT professor of physics Richard Milner, The DOE’s Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility physicists Rolf Ent and Rik Yoshida, MIT documentary filmmakers Chris Boebel and Joe McMaster, and Sputnik Animation’s James LaPlante have teamed up to depict the subatomic world in a new way. Presented by MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST) and Jefferson Lab, Visualizing the Proton is an original animation of the proton, intended for use in high school classrooms. Ent and Milner presented the animation in contributed talks at the April meeting of the American Physics Society and also shared it at a community event hosted by MIT Open Space Programming on April 20. In addition to the animation, a short documentary film about the collaborative process is in progress.

It’s a project that Milner and Ent have been thinking about since at least 2004 when Frank Wilczek, the Herman Feshbach Professor of Physics at MIT, shared an animation in his Nobel Lecture on quantum chromodynamics (QCD), a theory that predicts the existence of gluons in the proton. “There’s an enormously strong MIT lineage to the subject,” Milner points out, also referencing the 1990 Nobel Prize in Physics, awarded to Jerome Friedman and Henry Kendall of MIT and Richard Taylor of The DOE’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory for their pioneering research confirming the existence of quarks.

For starters, the physicists thought animation would be an effective medium to explain the science behind the Electron Ion Collider, a new particle accelerator from the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science — which many MIT faculty, including Milner, as well as colleagues like Ent, have long advocated for.

Electron-Ion Collider (EIC) at DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory to be built inside the tunnel that currently houses the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider [RHIC].

Moreover, still renderings of the proton are inherently limited, unable to depict the motion of quarks and gluons. “Essential parts of the physics involve animation, color, particles annihilating and disappearing, quantum mechanics, relativity. It’s almost impossible to convey this without animation,” says Milner.

In 2017, Milner was introduced to Boebel and McMaster, who in turn pulled LaPlante on board. Milner “had an intuition that a visualization of their collective work would be really, really valuable,” recalls Boebel of the project’s beginnings. They applied for a CAST faculty grant, and the team’s idea started to come to life.

“The CAST Selection Committee was intrigued by the challenge and saw it as a wonderful opportunity to highlight the process involved in making the animation of the proton as well as the animation itself,” says Leila Kinney, executive director of arts initiatives and of CAST. “True art-science collaborations are more complex than science communication or science visualization projects. They involve bringing together different, equally sophisticated modes of making creative discoveries and interpretive decisions. It is important to understand the possibilities, limitations, and choices already embedded in the visual technology selected to visualize the proton. We hope people come away with better understanding of visual interpretation as a mode of critical inquiry and knowledge production, as well as physics.”

Boebel and McMaster filmed the process of creating such a visual interpretation from behind the scenes. “It’s always challenging when you bring together people who are truly world-class experts, but from different realms, and ask them to talk about something technical,” says McMaster of the team’s efforts to produce something both scientifically accurate and visually appealing. “Their enthusiasm is really infectious.”

In February 2020, animator LaPlante welcomed the scientists and filmmakers to his studio in Maine to share his first ideation. Although understanding the world of quantum physics posed a unique challenge, he explains, “One of the advantages I have is that I don’t come from a scientific background. My goal is always to wrap my head around the science and then figure out, ‘OK, well, what does it look like?’”

Gluons, for example, have been described as springs, elastics, and vacuums. LaPlante imagined the particle, thought to hold quarks together, as a tub of slime. If you put your closed fist in and try to open it, you create a vacuum of air, making it harder to open your fist because the surrounding material wants to reel it in.

LaPlante was also inspired to use his 3D software to “freeze time” and fly around a motionless proton, only for the physicists to inform him that such an interpretation was inaccurate based on the existing data. Particle accelerators can only detect a two-dimensional slice. In fact, three-dimensional data is something scientists hope to capture in their next stage of experimentation. They had all come up against the same wall — and the same question — despite approaching the topic in entirely different ways.

“My art is really about clarity of communication and trying to get complex science to something that’s understandable,” says LaPlante. Much like in science, getting things wrong is often the first step of his artistic process. However, his initial attempt at the animation was a hit with the physicists, and they excitedly refined the project over Zoom.

“There are two basic knobs that experimentalists can dial when we scatter an electron off a proton at high energy,” Milner explains, much like spatial resolution and shutter speed in photography. “Those camera variables have direct analogies in the mathematical language of physicists describing this scattering.”

As “exposure time,” or Bjorken-X, which in QCD is the physical interpretation of the fraction of the proton’s momentum carried by one quark or gluon, is lowered, you see the proton as an almost infinite number of gluons and quarks moving very quickly. If Bjorken-X is raised, you see three blobs, or Valence quarks, in red, blue, and green. As spatial resolution is dialed, the proton goes from being a spherical object to a pancaked object.

“We think we’ve invented a new tool,” says Milner. “There are basic science questions: How are the gluons distributed in a proton? Are they uniform? Are they clumped? We don’t know. These are basic, fundamental questions that we can animate. We think it’s a tool for communication, understanding, and scientific discussion.

“This is the start. I hope people see it around the world, and they get inspired.”

See the full article here .

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings
Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

USPS “Forever” postage stamps celebrating Innovation at MIT.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The institute has an urban campus that extends more than a mile (1.6 km) alongside the Charles River. The institute also encompasses a number of major off-campus facilities such as the MIT Lincoln Laboratory , the MIT Bates Research and Engineering Center , and the Haystack Observatory , as well as affiliated laboratories such as the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and Whitehead Institute.

Massachusettes Institute of Technology-Haystack Observatory Westford, Massachusetts, USA, Altitude 131 m (430 ft).

Founded in 1861 in response to the increasing industrialization of the United States, Massachusetts Institute of Technology adopted a European polytechnic university model and stressed laboratory instruction in applied science and engineering. It has since played a key role in the development of many aspects of modern science, engineering, mathematics, and technology, and is widely known for its innovation and academic strength. It is frequently regarded as one of the most prestigious universities in the world.

As of December 2020, 97 Nobel laureates, 26 Turing Award winners, and 8 Fields Medalists have been affiliated with MIT as alumni, faculty members, or researchers. In addition, 58 National Medal of Science recipients, 29 National Medals of Technology and Innovation recipients, 50 MacArthur Fellows, 80 Marshall Scholars, 3 Mitchell Scholars, 22 Schwarzman Scholars, 41 astronauts, and 16 Chief Scientists of the U.S. Air Force have been affiliated with The Massachusetts Institute of Technology . The university also has a strong entrepreneurial culture and MIT alumni have founded or co-founded many notable companies. Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a member of the Association of American Universities (AAU).

Foundation and vision

In 1859, a proposal was submitted to the Massachusetts General Court to use newly filled lands in Back Bay, Boston for a “Conservatory of Art and Science”, but the proposal failed. A charter for the incorporation of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, proposed by William Barton Rogers, was signed by John Albion Andrew, the governor of Massachusetts, on April 10, 1861.

Rogers, a professor from the University of Virginia , wanted to establish an institution to address rapid scientific and technological advances. He did not wish to found a professional school, but a combination with elements of both professional and liberal education, proposing that:

“The true and only practicable object of a polytechnic school is, as I conceive, the teaching, not of the minute details and manipulations of the arts, which can be done only in the workshop, but the inculcation of those scientific principles which form the basis and explanation of them, and along with this, a full and methodical review of all their leading processes and operations in connection with physical laws.”

The Rogers Plan reflected the German research university model, emphasizing an independent faculty engaged in research, as well as instruction oriented around seminars and laboratories.

Early developments

Two days after The Massachusetts Institute of Technology was chartered, the first battle of the Civil War broke out. After a long delay through the war years, MIT’s first classes were held in the Mercantile Building in Boston in 1865. The new institute was founded as part of the Morrill Land-Grant Colleges Act to fund institutions “to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes” and was a land-grant school. In 1863 under the same act, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts founded the Massachusetts Agricultural College, which developed as the University of Massachusetts Amherst ). In 1866, the proceeds from land sales went toward new buildings in the Back Bay.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology was informally called “Boston Tech”. The institute adopted the European polytechnic university model and emphasized laboratory instruction from an early date. Despite chronic financial problems, the institute saw growth in the last two decades of the 19th century under President Francis Amasa Walker. Programs in electrical, chemical, marine, and sanitary engineering were introduced, new buildings were built, and the size of the student body increased to more than one thousand.

The curriculum drifted to a vocational emphasis, with less focus on theoretical science. The fledgling school still suffered from chronic financial shortages which diverted the attention of the MIT leadership. During these “Boston Tech” years, Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty and alumni rebuffed Harvard University president (and former MIT faculty) Charles W. Eliot’s repeated attempts to merge MIT with Harvard College’s Lawrence Scientific School. There would be at least six attempts to absorb MIT into Harvard. In its cramped Back Bay location, MIT could not afford to expand its overcrowded facilities, driving a desperate search for a new campus and funding. Eventually, the MIT Corporation approved a formal agreement to merge with Harvard, over the vehement objections of MIT faculty, students, and alumni. However, a 1917 decision by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court effectively put an end to the merger scheme.

In 1916, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology administration and the MIT charter crossed the Charles River on the ceremonial barge Bucentaur built for the occasion, to signify MIT’s move to a spacious new campus largely consisting of filled land on a one-mile-long (1.6 km) tract along the Cambridge side of the Charles River. The neoclassical “New Technology” campus was designed by William W. Bosworth and had been funded largely by anonymous donations from a mysterious “Mr. Smith”, starting in 1912. In January 1920, the donor was revealed to be the industrialist George Eastman of Rochester, New York, who had invented methods of film production and processing, and founded Eastman Kodak. Between 1912 and 1920, Eastman donated $20 million ($236.6 million in 2015 dollars) in cash and Kodak stock to MIT.

Curricular reforms

In the 1930s, President Karl Taylor Compton and Vice-President (effectively Provost) Vannevar Bush emphasized the importance of pure sciences like physics and chemistry and reduced the vocational practice required in shops and drafting studios. The Compton reforms “renewed confidence in the ability of the Institute to develop leadership in science as well as in engineering”. Unlike Ivy League schools, Massachusetts Institute of Technology catered more to middle-class families, and depended more on tuition than on endowments or grants for its funding. The school was elected to the Association of American Universities in 1934.

Still, as late as 1949, the Lewis Committee lamented in its report on the state of education at The Massachusetts Institute of Technology that “the Institute is widely conceived as basically a vocational school”, a “partly unjustified” perception the committee sought to change. The report comprehensively reviewed the undergraduate curriculum, recommended offering a broader education, and warned against letting engineering and government-sponsored research detract from the sciences and humanities. The School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences and the MIT Sloan School of Management were formed in 1950 to compete with the powerful Schools of Science and Engineering. Previously marginalized faculties in the areas of economics, management, political science, and linguistics emerged into cohesive and assertive departments by attracting respected professors and launching competitive graduate programs. The School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences continued to develop under the successive terms of the more humanistically oriented presidents Howard W. Johnson and Jerome Wiesner between 1966 and 1980.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology‘s involvement in military science surged during World War II. In 1941, Vannevar Bush was appointed head of the federal Office of Scientific Research and Development and directed funding to only a select group of universities, including MIT. Engineers and scientists from across the country gathered at Massachusetts Institute of Technology ‘s Radiation Laboratory, established in 1940 to assist the British military in developing microwave radar. The work done there significantly affected both the war and subsequent research in the area. Other defense projects included gyroscope-based and other complex control systems for gunsight, bombsight, and inertial navigation under Charles Stark Draper’s Instrumentation Laboratory; the development of a digital computer for flight simulations under Project Whirlwind; and high-speed and high-altitude photography under Harold Edgerton. By the end of the war, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology became the nation’s largest wartime R&D contractor (attracting some criticism of Bush), employing nearly 4000 in the Radiation Laboratory alone and receiving in excess of $100 million ($1.2 billion in 2015 dollars) before 1946. Work on defense projects continued even after then. Post-war government-sponsored research at MIT included SAGE and guidance systems for ballistic missiles and Project Apollo.

These activities affected The Massachusetts Institute of Technology profoundly. A 1949 report noted the lack of “any great slackening in the pace of life at the Institute” to match the return to peacetime, remembering the “academic tranquility of the prewar years”, though acknowledging the significant contributions of military research to the increased emphasis on graduate education and rapid growth of personnel and facilities. The faculty doubled and the graduate student body quintupled during the terms of Karl Taylor Compton, president of The Massachusetts Institute of Technology between 1930 and 1948; James Rhyne Killian, president from 1948 to 1957; and Julius Adams Stratton, chancellor from 1952 to 1957, whose institution-building strategies shaped the expanding university. By the 1950s, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology no longer simply benefited the industries with which it had worked for three decades, and it had developed closer working relationships with new patrons, philanthropic foundations and the federal government.

In late 1960s and early 1970s, student and faculty activists protested against the Vietnam War and The Massachusetts Institute of Technology ‘s defense research. In this period Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s various departments were researching helicopters, smart bombs and counterinsurgency techniques for the war in Vietnam as well as guidance systems for nuclear missiles. The Union of Concerned Scientists was founded on March 4, 1969 during a meeting of faculty members and students seeking to shift the emphasis on military research toward environmental and social problems. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology ultimately divested itself from the Instrumentation Laboratory and moved all classified research off-campus to the MIT Lincoln Laboratory facility in 1973 in response to the protests. The student body, faculty, and administration remained comparatively unpolarized during what was a tumultuous time for many other universities. Johnson was seen to be highly successful in leading his institution to “greater strength and unity” after these times of turmoil. However six Massachusetts Institute of Technology students were sentenced to prison terms at this time and some former student leaders, such as Michael Albert and George Katsiaficas, are still indignant about MIT’s role in military research and its suppression of these protests. (Richard Leacock’s film, November Actions, records some of these tumultuous events.)

In the 1980s, there was more controversy at The Massachusetts Institute of Technology over its involvement in SDI (space weaponry) and CBW (chemical and biological warfare) research. More recently, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s research for the military has included work on robots, drones and ‘battle suits’.

Recent history

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has kept pace with and helped to advance the digital age. In addition to developing the predecessors to modern computing and networking technologies, students, staff, and faculty members at Project MAC, the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and the Tech Model Railroad Club wrote some of the earliest interactive computer video games like Spacewar! and created much of modern hacker slang and culture. Several major computer-related organizations have originated at MIT since the 1980s: Richard Stallman’s GNU Project and the subsequent Free Software Foundation were founded in the mid-1980s at the AI Lab; the MIT Media Lab was founded in 1985 by Nicholas Negroponte and Jerome Wiesner to promote research into novel uses of computer technology; the World Wide Web Consortium standards organization was founded at the Laboratory for Computer Science in 1994 by Tim Berners-Lee; the MIT OpenCourseWare project has made course materials for over 2,000 Massachusetts Institute of Technology classes available online free of charge since 2002; and the One Laptop per Child initiative to expand computer education and connectivity to children worldwide was launched in 2005.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology was named a sea-grant college in 1976 to support its programs in oceanography and marine sciences and was named a space-grant college in 1989 to support its aeronautics and astronautics programs. Despite diminishing government financial support over the past quarter century, MIT launched several successful development campaigns to significantly expand the campus: new dormitories and athletics buildings on west campus; the Tang Center for Management Education; several buildings in the northeast corner of campus supporting research into biology, brain and cognitive sciences, genomics, biotechnology, and cancer research; and a number of new “backlot” buildings on Vassar Street including the Stata Center. Construction on campus in the 2000s included expansions of the Media Lab, the Sloan School’s eastern campus, and graduate residences in the northwest. In 2006, President Hockfield launched the MIT Energy Research Council to investigate the interdisciplinary challenges posed by increasing global energy consumption.

In 2001, inspired by the open source and open access movements, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology launched OpenCourseWare to make the lecture notes, problem sets, syllabi, exams, and lectures from the great majority of its courses available online for no charge, though without any formal accreditation for coursework completed. While the cost of supporting and hosting the project is high, OCW expanded in 2005 to include other universities as a part of the OpenCourseWare Consortium, which currently includes more than 250 academic institutions with content available in at least six languages. In 2011, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced it would offer formal certification (but not credits or degrees) to online participants completing coursework in its “MITx” program, for a modest fee. The “edX” online platform supporting MITx was initially developed in partnership with Harvard and its analogous “Harvardx” initiative. The courseware platform is open source, and other universities have already joined and added their own course content. In March 2009 the Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty adopted an open-access policy to make its scholarship publicly accessible online.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has its own police force. Three days after the Boston Marathon bombing of April 2013, MIT Police patrol officer Sean Collier was fatally shot by the suspects Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, setting off a violent manhunt that shut down the campus and much of the Boston metropolitan area for a day. One week later, Collier’s memorial service was attended by more than 10,000 people, in a ceremony hosted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology community with thousands of police officers from the New England region and Canada. On November 25, 2013, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced the creation of the Collier Medal, to be awarded annually to “an individual or group that embodies the character and qualities that Officer Collier exhibited as a member of The Massachusetts Institute of Technology community and in all aspects of his life”. The announcement further stated that “Future recipients of the award will include those whose contributions exceed the boundaries of their profession, those who have contributed to building bridges across the community, and those who consistently and selflessly perform acts of kindness”.

In September 2017, the school announced the creation of an artificial intelligence research lab called the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab. IBM will spend $240 million over the next decade, and the lab will be staffed by MIT and IBM scientists. In October 2018 MIT announced that it would open a new Schwarzman College of Computing dedicated to the study of artificial intelligence, named after lead donor and The Blackstone Group CEO Stephen Schwarzman. The focus of the new college is to study not just AI, but interdisciplinary AI education, and how AI can be used in fields as diverse as history and biology. The cost of buildings and new faculty for the new college is expected to be $1 billion upon completion.

The Caltech/MIT Advanced aLIGO was designed and constructed by a team of scientists from California Institute of Technology , Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and industrial contractors, and funded by the National Science Foundation .

Caltech /MIT Advanced aLigo

It was designed to open the field of gravitational-wave astronomy through the detection of gravitational waves predicted by general relativity. Gravitational waves were detected for the first time by the LIGO detector in 2015. For contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves, two Caltech physicists, Kip Thorne and Barry Barish, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology physicist Rainer Weiss won the Nobel Prize in physics in 2017. Weiss, who is also a Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate, designed the laser interferometric technique, which served as the essential blueprint for the LIGO.

The mission of The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is to advance knowledge and educate students in science, technology, and other areas of scholarship that will best serve the nation and the world in the twenty-first century. We seek to develop in each member of The Massachusetts Institute of Technology community the ability and passion to work wisely, creatively, and effectively for the betterment of humankind.