From “WIRED” : “The Quest to Use Quantum Mechanics to Pull Energy out of Nothing”

From “WIRED”

5.28.23
Charlie Wood

The new quantum protocol effectively borrows energy from a distant location and thus violates no sacred physical principles. Illustration: Kristina Armitage/Quanta Magazine.

For their latest magic trick, physicists have done the quantum equivalent of conjuring energy out of thin air. It’s a feat that seems to fly in the face of physical law and common sense.

“You can’t extract energy directly from the vacuum because there’s nothing there to give,” said William Unruh, a theoretical physicist at the University of British Columbia, describing the standard way of thinking.

But 15 years ago, Masahiro Hotta, a theoretical physicist at Tohoku University in Japan, proposed that perhaps the vacuum could, in fact, be coaxed into giving something up.

At first, many researchers ignored this work, suspicious that pulling energy from the vacuum was implausible, at best. Those who took a closer look, however, realized that Hotta was suggesting a subtly different quantum stunt. The energy wasn’t free; it had to be unlocked using knowledge purchased with energy in a far-off location. From this perspective, Hotta’s procedure looked less like creation and more like teleportation of energy from one place to another—a strange but less offensive idea.

“That was a real surprise,” said Unruh, who has collaborated with Hotta but has not been involved in energy teleportation research. “It’s a really neat result that he discovered.”

Now, in the past year, researchers have teleported energy across microscopic distances in two separate quantum devices, vindicating Hotta’s theory. The research leaves little room for doubt that energy teleportation is a genuine quantum phenomenon.

“This really does test it,” said Seth Lloyd, a quantum physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who was not involved in the research. “You are actually teleporting. You are extracting energy.”

Quantum Credit

The first skeptic of quantum energy teleportation was Hotta himself. In 2008, he was searching for a way of measuring the strength of a peculiar quantum mechanical link known as entanglement, where two or more objects share a unified quantum state that makes them behave in related ways even when separated by vast distances. A defining feature of entanglement is that you must create it in one fell swoop. You can’t engineer the related behavior by messing around with one object and the other independently, even if you call up a friend at the other location and tell them what you did.

While studying black holes, Hotta came to suspect that an exotic occurrence in quantum theory—negative energy—could be the key to measuring entanglement. Black holes shrink by emitting radiation entangled with their interiors, a process that can also be viewed as the black hole swallowing dollops of negative energy. Hotta noted that negative energy and entanglement appeared to be intimately related. To strengthen his case, he set out to prove that negative energy—like entanglement—could not be created through independent actions at distinct locations.

Hotta found, to his surprise, that a simple sequence of events could, in fact, induce the quantum vacuum to go negative—giving up energy it didn’t appear to have. “First I thought I was wrong,” he said, “so I calculated again, and I checked my logic. But I could not find any flaw.”

The trouble arises from the bizarre nature of the “quantum vacuum”, a peculiar type of nothing that comes dangerously close to resembling a something. The uncertainty principle forbids any quantum system from settling down into a perfectly quiet state of exactly zero energy. As a result, even a vacuum must always crackle with fluctuations in the quantum fields that fill it. These never-ending fluctuations imbue every field with some minimum amount of energy, known as the zero-point energy. Physicists say that a system with this minimal energy is in the ground state. A system in its ground state is a bit like a car parked on the streets of Denver. Even though it’s well above sea level, it can’t go any lower.

And yet, Hotta seemed to have found an underground garage. To unlock the gate, he realized, he had only to exploit an intrinsic entanglement in the crackling of the quantum field.

The incessant vacuum fluctuations cannot be used to power a perpetual motion machine, say, because the fluctuations at a given location are completely random. If you imagine hooking up a fanciful quantum battery to the vacuum, half the fluctuations would charge the device while the other half would drain it.

But quantum fields are entangled—the fluctuations in one spot tend to match fluctuations in another spot. In 2008, Hotta published a paper [Physical Review D (below)] outlining how two physicists, Alice and Bob, might exploit these correlations to pull energy out of the ground state surrounding Bob. The scheme goes something like this:

Bob finds himself in need of energy—he wants to charge that fanciful quantum battery—but all he has access to is empty space. Fortunately, his friend Alice has a fully equipped physics lab in a far-off location. Alice measures the field in her lab, injecting energy into it there and learning about its fluctuations. This experiment bumps the overall field out of the ground state, but as far as Bob can tell, his vacuum remains in the minimum-energy state, randomly fluctuating.

But then Alice texts Bob her findings about the vacuum around her location, essentially telling Bob when to plug in his battery. After Bob reads her message, he can use the newfound knowledge to prepare an experiment that extracts energy from the vacuum—up to the amount injected by Alice.

“That information allows Bob, if you want, to time the fluctuations,” said Eduardo Martín-Martínez, a theoretical physicist at the University of Waterloo and the Perimeter Institute who worked on one of the new experiments. (He added that the notion of timing is more metaphorical than literal, due to the abstract nature of quantum fields.)

Bob can’t extract more energy than Alice put in, so energy is conserved. And he lacks the necessary knowledge to extract the energy until Alice’s text arrives, so no effect travels faster than light. The protocol doesn’t violate any sacred physical principles.

Nevertheless, Hotta’s publication was met with crickets. Machines that exploit the zero-point energy of the vacuum are a mainstay of science fiction, and his procedure rankled physicists tired of fielding crackpot proposals for such devices. But Hotta felt certain he was onto something, and he continued to develop his idea and promote it in talks. He received further encouragement from Unruh, who had gained prominence for discovering another odd vacuum behavior.

“This kind of stuff is almost second nature to me,” Unruh said, “that you can do strange things with quantum mechanics.”

Hotta also sought a way to test it. He connected with Go Yusa, an experimentalist specializing in condensed matter at Tohoku University. They proposed an experiment in a semiconductor system with an entangled ground state analogous to that of the electromagnetic field.

But their research has been repeatedly delayed by a different kind of fluctuation. Soon after their initial experiment was funded, the March 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami devastated the eastern coast of Japan—including Tohoku University. In recent years, further tremors damaged their delicate lab equipment twice. Today they are once more starting essentially from scratch.

Making the Jump

In time, Hotta’s ideas also took root in a less earthquake-prone part of the globe. At Unruh’s suggestion, Hotta gave a lecture at a 2013 conference in Banff, Canada. The talk captured the imagination of Martín-Martínez. “His mind works differently from everybody else,” Martín-Martínez said. “He’s a person that has a lot of out-of-the-box ideas that are extremely creative.”

An experimental test of the teleportation protocol was run on one of IBM’s quantum computers, seen here at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in 2020.Photograph: IBM/Quanta Magazine.

Martín-Martínez, who half-seriously styles himself as a “space-time engineer,” has long felt drawn to physics at the edge of science fiction. He dreams of finding physically plausible ways of creating wormholes, warp drives, and time machines. Each of these exotic phenomena amounts to a bizarre shape of space-time that is permitted by the extremely accommodating equations of general relativity. But they are also forbidden by so-called energy conditions, a handful of restrictions that the renowned physicists Roger Penrose and Stephen Hawking slapped on top of general relativity to stop the theory from showing its wild side.

Chief among the Hawking-Penrose commandments is that negative energy density is forbidden. But while listening to Hotta’s presentation, Martín-Martínez realized that dipping below the ground state smelled a bit like making energy negative. The concept was catnip to a fan of Star Trek technologies, and he dove into Hotta’s work.

He soon realized that energy teleportation could help solve a problem faced by some of his colleagues in quantum information, including Raymond Laflamme, a physicist at Waterloo, and Nayeli Rodríguez-Briones, Laflamme’s student at the time. The pair had a more down-to-earth goal: to take qubits, the building blocks of quantum computers, and make them as cold as possible. Cold qubits are reliable qubits, but the group had run into a theoretical limit beyond which it seemed impossible to pull out any more heat—much as Bob confronted a vacuum from which energy extraction seemed impossible.

In his first pitch to Laflamme’s group, Martín-Martínez faced a lot of skeptical questions. But as he addressed their doubts, they became more receptive. They started studying quantum energy teleportation, and in 2017 they proposed a method for spiriting energy away from qubits to leave them colder than any other known procedure could make them. Even so, “it was all theory,” Martín-Martínez said. “There was no experiment.”

Martín-Martínez and Rodríguez-Briones, together with Laflamme and an experimentalist, Hemant Katiyar, set out to change that.

They turned to a technology known as nuclear magnetic resonance, which uses mighty magnetic fields and radio pulses to manipulate the quantum states of atoms in a large molecule. The group spent a few years planning the experiment, and then over a couple of months in the midst of the pandemic, Katiyar arranged to teleport energy between two carbon atoms playing the roles of Alice and Bob.

First, a finely tuned series of radio pulses put the carbon atoms into a particular minimum-energy ground state featuring entanglement between the two atoms. The zero-point energy for the system was defined by the initial combined energy of Alice, Bob, and the entanglement between them.

Next, they fired a single radio pulse at Alice and a third atom, simultaneously making a measurement at Alice’s position and transferring the information to an atomic “text message.”

Finally, another pulse aimed at both Bob and the intermediary atom simultaneously transmitted the message to Bob and made a measurement there, completing the energy chicanery.

They repeated the process many times, making many measurements at each step in a way that allowed them to reconstruct the quantum properties of the three atoms throughout the procedure. In the end, they calculated that the energy of the Bob carbon atom had decreased on average, and thus that energy had been extracted and released into the environment. This happened despite the fact that the Bob atom always started out in its ground state. From start to finish, the protocol took no more than 37 milliseconds. But for energy to have traveled from one side of the molecule to the other, it normally would have taken more than 20 times longer—approaching a full second. The energy spent by Alice allowed Bob to unlock otherwise inaccessible energy.

“It was very neat to see that with current technology it’s possible to observe the activation of energy,” said Rodríguez-Briones, who is now at the University of California-Berkeley.

They described the first demonstration of quantum energy teleportation in a paper that they posted in March 2022 for publication in Physical Review Letters.

The second demonstration would follow 10 months later.

A few days before Christmas, Kazuki Ikeda, a quantum computation researcher at Stony Brook University, was watching a YouTube video that mentioned wireless energy transfer. He wondered if something similar could be done quantum mechanically. He then remembered Hotta’s work—Hotta had been one of his professors when he was an undergraduate at Tohoku University—and realized he could run a quantum energy teleportation protocol on IBM’s quantum computing platform.

Over the next few days, he wrote and remotely executed just such a program. The experiments verified that the Bob qubit dropped below its ground-state energy. By January 7, he had posted his results for Applied Physics [below].

Nearly 15 years after Hotta first described energy teleportation, two simple demonstrations less than a year apart had proved it was possible.

“The experimental papers are nicely done,” Lloyd said. “I was kind of surprised that nobody did it sooner.”

Sci-Fi Dreams

And yet, Hotta is not yet completely satisfied.

He praises the experiments as an important first step. But he views them as quantum simulations, in the sense that the entangled behavior is programmed into the ground state—either through radio pulses or through quantum operations in IBM’s devices. His ambition is to harvest zero-point energy from a system whose ground state naturally features entanglement in the same way that the fundamental quantum fields that permeate the universe do.

To that end, he and Yusa are forging ahead with their original experiment. In the coming years, they hope to demonstrate quantum energy teleportation in a silicon surface featuring edge currents with an intrinsically entangled ground state—a system with behavior closer to that of the electromagnetic field.

In the meantime, each physicist has their own vision of what energy teleportation might be good for. Rodríguez-Briones suspects that in addition to helping stabilize quantum computers, it will continue to play an important role in the study of heat, energy, and entanglement in quantum systems. In late January, Ikeda posted another paper that detailed how to build energy teleportation into the nascent quantum internet.

Martín-Martínez continues to chase his sci-fi dreams. He has teamed up with Erik Schnetter, an expert in general relativity simulations at the Perimeter Institute, to calculate exactly how space-time would react to particular arrangements of negative energy.

Some researchers find his quest intriguing. “That’s a laudable goal,” Lloyd said with a chuckle. “In some sense it would be scientifically irresponsible not to follow up on this. Negative energy density has very important consequences.”

Others caution that the road from negative energies to exotic shapes of space-time is winding and uncertain. “Our intuition for quantum correlations is still being developed,” Unruh said. “One constantly gets surprised by what is actually the case once one is able to do the calculation.”

Hotta, for his part, doesn’t spend too much time thinking about sculpting space-time. For now, he feels pleased that his quantum correlation calculation from 2008 has established a bona fide physical phenomenon.

“This is real physics,” he said, “not science fiction.”

Physical Review D 2008
Physical Review Letters
Applied Physics

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From The Johns Hopkins University Via “phys.org” : “Black holes might be defects in spacetime”

From The Johns Hopkins University

Via

“phys.org”

5.15.23

Artist view of a binary black hole system. Credit: Credit: Aurore Simonnet/Sonoma State; LIGO/Caltech/MIT/.

A team of theoretical physicists have discovered a strange structure in space-time that to an outside observer would look exactly like a black hole, but upon closer inspection would be anything but: they would be defects in the very fabric of the universe.

Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity predicts the existence of black holes, formed when giant stars collapse. But that same theory predicts that their centers are singularities, which are points of infinite density. Since we know that infinite densities cannot actually happen in the universe, we take this as a sign that Einstein’s theory is incomplete. But after nearly a century of searching for extensions, we have not yet confirmed a better theory of gravity.

But we do have candidates, including string theory. In string theory all the particles of the universe are actually microscopic vibrating loops of string. In order to support the wide variety of particles and forces that we observe in the universe, these strings can’t just vibrate in our three spatial dimensions. Instead, there have to be extra spatial dimensions that are curled up on themselves into manifolds so small that they escape everyday notice and experimentation.

That exotic structure in spacetime gave a team of researchers the tools they needed to identify a new class of object, something that they call a “topological soliton”. In their analysis they found that these topological solitons are stable defects in space-time itself. They require no matter or other forces to exist—they are as natural to the fabric of space-time as cracks in ice. The research is published in the journal Physical Review D [below].

The researchers studied these solitons by examining the behavior of light that would pass near them. Because they are objects of extreme space-time, they bend space and time around them, which affects the path of light. To a distant observer, these solitons would appear exactly as we predict black holes to appear. They would have shadows, rings of light, the works. Images derived from the Event Horizon Telescope and detected gravitational wave signatures would all behave the same.

It’s only once you got close would you realize that you are not looking at a black hole. One of the key features of a black hole is its event horizon, an imaginary surface that if you were to cross it you would find yourself unable to escape. Topological solitons, since they are not singularities, do not feature event horizons. So you could in principle go up to a soliton and hold it in your hand, assuming you survived the encounter.

These topological solitons are incredibly hypothetical objects, based on our understanding of string theory, which has not yet been proven to be a viable update to our understanding of physics. However, these exotic objects serve as important test studies. If the researchers can discover an important observational difference between topological solitons and traditional black holes, this might pave the way to finding a way to test string theory itself.

Physical Review D

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Johns Hopkins University campus

The Johns Hopkins University opened in 1876, with the inauguration of its first president, Daniel Coit Gilman. “What are we aiming at?” Gilman asked in his installation address. “The encouragement of research … and the advancement of individual scholars, who by their excellence will advance the sciences they pursue, and the society where they dwell.”

The mission laid out by Gilman remains the university’s mission today, summed up in a simple but powerful restatement of Gilman’s own words: “Knowledge for the world.”

What Gilman created was a research university, dedicated to advancing both students’ knowledge and the state of human knowledge through research and scholarship. Gilman believed that teaching and research are interdependent, that success in one depends on success in the other. A modern university, he believed, must do both well. The realization of Gilman’s philosophy at Johns Hopkins, and at other institutions that later attracted Johns Hopkins-trained scholars, revolutionized higher education in America, leading to the research university system as it exists today.

The The Johns Hopkins University is a private research university in Baltimore, Maryland. Founded in 1876, the university was named for its first benefactor, the American entrepreneur and philanthropist Johns Hopkins. His $7 million bequest (approximately $147.5 million in today’s currency)—of which half financed the establishment of the Johns Hopkins Hospital—was the largest philanthropic gift in the history of the United States up to that time. Daniel Coit Gilman, who was inaugurated as the institution’s first president on February 22, 1876, led the university to revolutionize higher education in the U.S. by integrating teaching and research. Adopting the concept of a graduate school from Germany’s historic Ruprecht Karl University of Heidelberg [Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg] (DE), Johns Hopkins University is considered the first research university in the United States. Over the course of several decades, the university has led all U.S. universities in annual research and development expenditures. In fiscal year 2016, Johns Hopkins spent nearly $2.5 billion on research. The university has graduate campuses in Italy, China, and Washington, D.C., in addition to its main campus in Baltimore.

Johns Hopkins is organized into 10 divisions on campuses in Maryland and Washington, D.C., with international centers in Italy and China. The two undergraduate divisions, the Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts and Sciences and the Whiting School of Engineering, are located on the Homewood campus in Baltimore’s Charles Village neighborhood. The medical school, nursing school, and Bloomberg School of Public Health, and Johns Hopkins Children’s Center are located on the Medical Institutions campus in East Baltimore. The university also consists of the Peabody Institute, Applied Physics Laboratory, Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, School of Education, Carey Business School, and various other facilities.

Johns Hopkins was a founding member of the American Association of Universities. As of October 2019, 39 Nobel laureates and 1 Fields Medalist have been affiliated with Johns Hopkins. Founded in 1883, the Blue Jays men’s lacrosse team has captured 44 national titles and plays in the Big Ten Conference as an affiliate member as of 2014.

Research

The opportunity to participate in important research is one of the distinguishing characteristics of Hopkins’ undergraduate education. About 80 percent of undergraduates perform independent research, often alongside top researchers. In FY 2013, Johns Hopkins received $2.2 billion in federal research grants—more than any other U.S. university for the 35th consecutive year. Johns Hopkins has had seventy-seven members of the Institute of Medicine, forty-three Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigators, seventeen members of The National Academy of Engineering, and sixty-two members of The National Academy of Sciences. As of October 2019, 39 Nobel Prize winners have been affiliated with the university as alumni, faculty members or researchers, with the most recent winners being Gregg Semenza and William G. Kaelin.

Between 1999 and 2009, Johns Hopkins was among the most cited institutions in the world. It attracted nearly 1,222,166 citations and produced 54,022 papers under its name, ranking No. 3 globally [after Harvard University and the MPG Society (DE)] in the number of total citations published in Thomson Reuters-indexed journals over 22 fields in America.

In FY 2000, Johns Hopkins received $95.4 million in research grants from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, making it the leading recipient of NASA research and development funding. In FY 2002, Hopkins became the first university to cross the $1 billion threshold on either list, recording $1.14 billion in total research and $1.023 billion in federally sponsored research. In FY 2008, Johns Hopkins University performed $1.68 billion in science, medical and engineering research, making it the leading U.S. academic institution in total R&D spending for the 30th year in a row, according to a National Science Foundation ranking. These totals include grants and expenditures of The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland.

The Johns Hopkins University also offers the “Center for Talented Youth” program—a nonprofit organization dedicated to identifying and developing the talents of the most promising K-12 grade students worldwide. As part of the Johns Hopkins University, the “Center for Talented Youth” or CTY helps fulfill the university’s mission of preparing students to make significant future contributions to the world. The Johns Hopkins Digital Media Center (DMC) is a multimedia lab space as well as an equipment, technology and knowledge resource for students interested in exploring creative uses of emerging media and use of technology.

In 2013, the Bloomberg Distinguished Professorships program was established by a $250 million gift from Michael Bloomberg. This program enables the university to recruit fifty researchers from around the world to joint appointments throughout the nine divisions and research centers. Each professor must be a leader in interdisciplinary research and be active in undergraduate education. Directed by Vice Provost for Research Denis Wirtz, there are currently thirty-two Bloomberg Distinguished Professors at the university, including three Nobel Laureates, eight fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, ten members of The American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and thirteen members of the National Academies.

From The John A Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences At Harvard University: “Imaging technique reveals electronic charges with single-atom resolution”

From The John A Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences

At

Harvard University

3.30.23
Kat J. McAlpine

New scanning tunneling microscopy method demystifies what electrons are doing on the surface of a compound.

Left – High-resolution image of an iron substitution (centre of image) and a samarium vacancy (upper right) on the surface of SmB6. Right – Image of the electric charge in the same area reveals standing wave patterns formed by electrons as they gather around the defects. Scale bar: 2 nanometers.

Lower right – Image of the rows of atoms on the surface of SmB6, containing several native defects. Scale bar: 5 nanometers. Upper right – Image of the electric charge in the same area reveals an accumulation of electrons forming metallic puddles around the defects (dark patches).

Materials typically conduct electricity or insulate against it – so experimental and theoretical physicists have been captivated by a compound called samarium hexaboride (SmB6) that appears to do both. Numerous studies over the course of 50 years have revealed that SmB6 acts like an insulator as well as an electricity-conducting metal.

Now, researchers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) say it’s possible to image the exact position of electrons along the surface of SmB6 with single-atom precision, enabling a breakthrough in understanding the compound’s properties and why it can both insulate and conduct. The findings, published in Science [below], build upon SEAS research reported in 2019 that determined that SmB6 is a topological insulator – meaning it conducts electricity along its surfaces but not its insides.

Despite the 2019 discovery about SmB6’s surface metallicity, many questions remained about its overall metallicity and why different measurements didn’t generate consistent results.

“Anyone with a voltmeter should be able to tell you whether a material is conductive or insulating,” says Harris Pirie, first author of the paper and a former PhD student in the lab of Clowes Professor of Science Jenny Hoffman at SEAS. But that was never the case with SmB6. “That intrigued us and thrust SmB6 even further into the spotlight within the physics community.

To understand the peculiar behavior of how electrical charges move within SmB6, Pirie and collaborators from University of Oxford, University of Illinois-Chicago, and other institutions needed to develop a new imaging approach to detect the distribution of electrons on SmB6.

In conversations with Dirk Morr of UIC, the team homed in on the idea of adapting a scanning tunneling microscope, which uses an unimaginably small needle tip to measure atomic structures on the surface of a material. Instead of measuring atomic structure, they used it to detect a magnetic resonance in SmB6 at a cold temperature, a signature of the magnetic interactions that turn the would-be metal into a low-temperature insulator. “That magnetic interaction generates a clear resonance we can measure, and we predicted that if we could measure its excitation energy at different surface points, it would reveal the electronic charge at that position,” Pirie says.

Scanning the needle across the surface of SmB6 to map out the electronic charges across all surface points, the team created a readout that “looks like a topographic map you would have of a mountain range,” Pirie says. Except those mountain peaks and valleys are the size of atoms.

Using this method, the team has captured the first picture of electrons accumulating around atomic defects on SmB6’s surface – even surfaces created by cross-sectioning a sample of SmB6 into fragments. “It was clear right from the moment we took that measurement, we had found the electrons we were looking for,” Pirie says. “We saw these amazing wave patterns that the electrons formed around the defects, indicating a high signal-to-noise ratio. It was a very cool moment.”

“The work gives us new understanding of the importance of single atom defects in topological materials,” says Hoffman, the paper’s senior author.

Pirie is now looking to modify the scanning tunneling microscope method to build new quantum devices. “The atomic defects we’ve identified could be useful in building quantum circuits. The needle of the scanning tunneling microscope can come so ridiculously close to the sample material that it’s no longer passively imaging it – it can touch and change the sample,” he says. “I’m interested in seeing if we can move atoms around on SmB6, pushing all the electrons into specific, controlled channels or puddles. The hope is that by strategically constructing atomic defects on SmB6, electrons could be precisely trapped to form qubits – the basic units necessary for quantum computing.”

That might help solve a major barrier to a workable quantum computer: to operate stably, the quantum state of a a quantum computer’s qubits must be entirely prohibited from entangling with electrons in the surrounding environment.

The imaging method could give scientists a powerful high-resolution tool to see what electrons are doing on various materials and compounds, Pirie says. “This tool can look at what the electric charge around just one atom is doing – allowing us to see the world at a smaller scale. There are so many fundamental questions this could help us answer about the world around us.”

Additional authors of the paper are Eric Mascot, Christian E. Matt, Yu Liu, Pengcheng Chen, M. H. Hamidian, Shanta Saha, Xiangfeng Wang, Johnpierre Paglione, Graeme Luke, David Goldhaber-Gordon, Cyrus F. Hirjibehedin, and J. C. Séamus Davis.

This work was supported by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation’s EPiQS

Science

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Colonial

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

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

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

19th century

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

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

20th century

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

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

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

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

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

21st century

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

From “Penn Today” At The University of Pennsylvania : “The Big Bang at 75”

From “Penn Today”

At

The University of Pennsylvania

3.30.23
Kristina García

Penn theoretical physicist Vijay Balasubramanian discusses the 75th anniversary of the alpha-beta-gamma paper, what we know—and don’t know—about the universe and the ‘very big gaps’ left to discover.

A child stops by an image of the cosmic microwave background at Shanghai Astrology Museum in Shanghai, China on July 18, 2021. (Image: FeatureChina via AP Images)

There was a time before time when the universe was tiny, dense, and hot. In this world, time didn’t even exist. Space didn’t exist. That’s what current theories about the Big Bang posit, says Vijay Balasubramanian, the Cathy and Marc Lasry Professor of Physics. But what does this mean? What did the beginning of the universe look like? “I don’t know, maybe there was a timeless, spaceless soup,” Balasubramanian says. When we try to describe the beginning of everything, “our words fail us,” he says.

Yet, for thousands of years, humans have been trying to do just that. One attempt came 75 years ago from physicists George Gamow and Ralph Alpher. In a paper published on April 1, 1948, Alpher and Gamow imagined the universe starts in a hot, dense state that cools as it expands. After some time, they argued, there should have been a gas of neutrons, protons, electrons, and neutrinos reacting with each other and congealing into atomic nuclei as the universe aged and cooled. As the universe changed, so did the rates of decay and the ratios of protons to neutrons. Alpher and Gamow were able to mathematically calculate how this process might have occurred.

Now known as the alpha-beta-gamma theory, the paper predicted the surprisingly large fraction of helium and hydrogen in the universe. (By weight, hydrogen comprises 74% of nuclear matter, helium 24%, and heavier elements less than 1%.)

The findings of Gamow and Alpher hold up today, Balasubramanian says, part of an increasingly complex picture of matter, time and space. Penn Today spoke with Balasubramanian about the paper, the Big Bang, and the origin of the universe.

When did we first start to think about the Big Bang theory as it is known today?

There’s actually a question of whether it’s even possible to talk about the origin of the universe. But across cultures, humans seem to have an innate drive to try to discuss this sort of question. In India, there was this idea of an infinite cyclic universe that went in gigantic cycles from origin to destruction, origin to destruction, over long lengths of time. The Aztecs had a cosmology that involves gigantic cycles of creation and construction, too. In the Christian West, people had the idea that the horizon of all of time was smaller, a few thousand years, although the Bible doesn’t actually say anything specific about that.

In the 19th century, the first scientific inkling of the age of the world was given by Charles Lyell, a geologist, who wrote about the stratification of rocks. Charles Lyell basically gave Darwin the gift of time. Realizing that the earth was actually much older than a few thousand years gave room for the Theory of Evolution and expanded the horizon in time. That’s a prerequisite for being able to even conceive of the origin of the universe.

Then in 1914, Albert Einstein comes up with the modern theory of gravity [Theory of General Relativity]. This led scientists to try to understand whether you could use this theory to think about the cosmos as a whole. One of the striking things that comes out of that kind of reasoning is that you get forced into a picture where the universe has to be dynamic, basically because gravity is constantly trying to squeeze it together.

To start with, if you look around the sky, it looks reasonably stable and static. It doesn’t look like it’s going anywhere, right? So, people initially tried various ways to construct cosmologies in which they can be kind of stable and static. To do that, you’ve got to poise the universe exactly between an expanding phase and a shrinking phase. You need balance these tendencies. For example, you can give the universal an initial outward push, like a Big Bang, but gravity will try to pull everything back together. How the push and pull compete depends on the amount of kind of energy distributed in the cosmos: regular matter like the stuff that makes stars, pure energy like light, dark matter which does not make stars, and so-called dark energy which can either push the fabric of spacetime apart or try to pull it together. So theoretical physicists tried to figure out whether the laws of gravity, along with these kinds of energy, could explain the apparently static structure of observed universe.

And then a series of astronomical measurements, notably by Edwin Hubble, showed definitively that despite initial appearances, the universe on large scales is not stable and static.

Edwin Hubble looking through the 100-inch Hooker telescope at Mount Wilson in Southern California, 1929 discovers the Universe is Expanding. Credit: Margaret Bourke-White/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images.

Edwin Hubble Cepheid variable with Messier 31 at the 100 inch Hooker telescope on Mt Wilson, California.

Rather, all the stars and galaxies, as observed now, seem to be spreading apart from each other, as if they are embedded in a space-time fabric that is stretching wider as time passes.

___________________________________________________________________
Inflation

In physical cosmology, cosmic inflation, cosmological inflation is a theory of exponential expansion of space in the early universe. The inflationary epoch lasted from 10^−36 seconds after the conjectured Big Bang singularity to some time between 10^−33 and 10^−32 seconds after the singularity. Following the inflationary period, the universe continued to expand, but at a slower rate. The acceleration of this expansion due to dark energy began after the universe was already over 7.7 billion years old (5.4 billion years ago).

Inflation theory was developed in the late 1970s and early 80s, with notable contributions by several theoretical physicists, including Alexei Starobinsky at Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics, Alan Guth at Cornell University, and Andrei Linde at Lebedev Physical Institute. Alexei Starobinsky, Alan Guth, and Andrei Linde won the 2014 Kavli Prize “for pioneering the theory of cosmic inflation.” It was developed further in the early 1980s. It explains the origin of the large-scale structure of the cosmos. Quantum fluctuations in the microscopic inflationary region, magnified to cosmic size, become the seeds for the growth of structure in the Universe. Many physicists also believe that inflation explains why the universe appears to be the same in all directions (isotropic), why the cosmic microwave background radiation is distributed evenly, why the universe is flat, and why no magnetic monopoles have been observed.

The detailed particle physics mechanism responsible for inflation is unknown. The basic inflationary paradigm is accepted by most physicists, as a number of inflation model predictions have been confirmed by observation; however, a substantial minority of scientists dissent from this position. The hypothetical field thought to be responsible for inflation is called the inflaton.

In 2002 three of the original architects of the theory were recognized for their major contributions; physicists Alan Guth of M.I.T., Andrei Linde of Stanford, and Paul Steinhardt of Princeton shared the prestigious Dirac Prize “for development of the concept of inflation in cosmology”. In 2012 Guth and Linde were awarded the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for their invention and development of inflationary cosmology.

Alan Guth, from M.I.T., who first proposed Cosmic Inflation.

Lambda Cold Dark Matter Expansion ΛCDM of the Universe. Credit Alex Mittelmann Coldcreation.

Alan Guth’s notes:
Alan Guth’s original notes on inflation.
___________________________________________________________________

Nobel Prize in Physics for 2011 Expansion of the Universe

Saul Perlmutter (center) [The Supernova Cosmology Project] shared the 2006 Shaw Prize in Astronomy, the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics, and the 2015 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics with Brian P. Schmidt (right) and Adam Riess (left) [The High-z Supernova Search Team] for providing evidence that the expansion of the universe is accelerating.

4 October 2011

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2011

with one half to

Saul Perlmutter
The Supernova Cosmology Project
The DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and The University of California-Berkeley,

and the other half jointly to

Brian P. SchmidtThe High-z Supernova Search Team, The Australian National University, Weston Creek, Australia.

and

Adam G. Riess

The High-z Supernova Search Team,The Johns Hopkins University and The Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, MD.

Written in the stars

“Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice…” *

What will be the final destiny of the Universe? Probably it will end in ice, if we are to believe this year’s Nobel Laureates in Physics. They have studied several dozen exploding stars, called supernovae, and discovered that the Universe is expanding at an ever-accelerating rate. The discovery came as a complete surprise even to the Laureates themselves.

In 1998, cosmology was shaken at its foundations as two research teams presented their findings. Headed by Saul Perlmutter, one of the teams had set to work in 1988. Brian Schmidt headed another team, launched at the end of 1994, where Adam Riess was to play a crucial role.

The research teams raced to map the Universe by locating the most distant supernovae. More sophisticated telescopes on the ground and in space, as well as more powerful computers and new digital imaging sensors (CCD, Nobel Prize in Physics in 2009), opened the possibility in the 1990s to add more pieces to the cosmological puzzle.

The teams used a particular kind of supernova, called Type 1a supernova. It is an explosion of an old compact star that is as heavy as the Sun but as small as the Earth. A single such supernova can emit as much light as a whole galaxy. All in all, the two research teams found over 50 distant supernovae whose light was weaker than expected – this was a sign that the expansion of the Universe was accelerating. The potential pitfalls had been numerous, and the scientists found reassurance in the fact that both groups had reached the same astonishing conclusion.

For almost a century, the Universe has been known to be expanding as a consequence of the Big Bang about 14 billion years ago. However, the discovery that this expansion is accelerating is astounding. If the expansion will continue to speed up the Universe will end in ice.

The acceleration is thought to be driven by dark energy, but what that dark energy is remains an enigma – perhaps the greatest in physics today. What is known is that dark energy constitutes about three quarters of the Universe. Therefore, the findings of the 2011 Nobel Laureates in Physics have helped to unveil a Universe that to a large extent is unknown to science. And everything is possible again.

*Robert Frost, Fire and Ice, 1920
_____________________________________________

This was a revelation, because physicists realized that if the universe is expanding now, if you run the movie backward, it had to be smaller earlier. In fact, some 13 billion years ago all the matter and energy in the universe had to be crammed together at incredible densities that have never been seen on Earth. You can also conclude that the universe would have been a lot hotter in this compressed phase. This is just like what happens if you compress a bicycle pump; he air inside gets hotter because you are cramming more energy into a smaller space. And when things get that hot, the microscopic processes of nuclear physics and even quantum gravity play an important role because of the enormous energies involved.

So, to summarize, the idea of the modern Big Bang comes about because General Relativity makes a prediction: Given the current expansion of the universe, if you run time backwards, you have to start from a very highly compressed phase. At some point, time begins. This didn’t have to be. It could have been very compressed forever, and time could have been infinite. But Einstein’s theory of gravity predicts a beginning for time from which the universe explodes out. That’s the Big Bang.

What are the weaknesses of the Big Bang theory and our current conception of the origin of the universe?

It involves an extrapolation of the things we know and can measure in the lab, along with rather uncertain measurements of the expansion rate of the universe. People like Hubble measured distant stars and galaxies and realized that they look as they’re moving away from us, as an expansion. You put that expansion together with the equations of general relativity. Physics can predict forward in time and can predict backward in time. The equations tell you, given the current state, what the future will look like. But they can also tell you about the past. You know, take your pick.

If you assume Einstein’s theory of relativity and you run the movie backward, time begins some 13 or 14 billion years ago. The question is, should you believe such a wild prediction?

While there are excellent reasons to believe the general theory of relativity—there’s lots of evidence about many things that it gets right—in the history of science, it’s been often the case that a well-tested theory, extrapolated to regimes very far from the region where it was tested, will need corrections of some kind.

We’re extrapolating into regions that have been out of the reach of laboratory experiments to date, for which we do not have direct observational evidence. We should keep in mind that this theory may need corrections, and things like string theory attempt to correct it. Then there are unknown factors that the theory didn’t include, new forms of energy that could prevent the expansion or shrinking or could stabilize the universe.

I’m laying out here the many uncertainties of the theory, but that’s partly because that’s where the opportunities are. If everything was already done, we wouldn’t have to think about it anymore.

Physicists can imagine stuff that makes the world work. That’s what we do for a trade. We imagine stuff that would be necessary for the logical consistency of the world around us. The alpha-beta-gamma paper took Einstein’s theory for granted. They predicted the abundances of the primordial elements, the hydrogen-helium ratio, which turns out to be right. They said, ‘Okay, well, if the universe was very hot, it had to have cooled down over time. So if it cooled down, I’m going put all I know about nuclear physics in the lab to represent the expansion of the universe. As it cools, the primordial soup will freeze out into quarks and gluons and electrons, and those things will freeze out some more, and eventually, when it’s done freezing out, based on what I know about nuclear reaction rates, I predict the following ratio of hydrogen to helium.’ That’s what they did.

The theory then proceeded to predict that you will see a glow in the distant sky as the Big Bang cooled down to a few degrees Kelvin. The discovery of that glow, the cosmic microwave background, in the 1960s, really nailed it.

Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, AT&T, Holmdel, NJ USA, with the Holmdel horn antenna, first caught the faint echo of the Big Bang.

How do you predict this theory will evolve, or be adjusted, with time?

The hydrogen-helium ratio and the cosmic microwave background are two primary reasons to support the Big Bang theory. Those are certainties that we are seeing now. But what does Hamlet say? ‘There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’

We keep discovering that our assumptions about the nature of the universe are incorrect or approximate.

The laws of physics are full of laws that turn out not to be laws. They turn out to be approximations. So, Newton’s laws, which we still call Newton’s laws out of respect for Newton, are approximations to the more general laws of general relativity and quantum mechanics. There’s a progression in science where we devise rules and descriptions of nature that work extremely well in some regime, and then, as you push outside the regime, you have to be able to edit them. I try to remain aware that, while the default conclusion is there was a big bang, understood as a singularity in space and time, about 13, 14 billion years ago. There may be escape routes from that conclusion, if our understanding of the laws of nature or something in the data has not been fully correct.

Questioning where the cosmos came from has long been part of human speculation, in philosophy and religion. Ancient peoples drew pictures in caves involving their cosmologies. There’s clearly a human need to talk about origins and causation of the universe. It is kind of amazing and remarkable that we live in a time when there’s a scientific approach to such questions, which we can use with any kind of confidence.

We’re just little people sitting on this irrelevant little planet of a very medium-sized solar system on the edge of a no-account galaxy that is part of a local cluster. We’re sort of just tiny things, right? And yet, we’re claiming to be able to say something about the actual origin of everything. It’s amazing that we have a hope of doing that. But there’s pretty good evidence, that at least in the rough, that this picture is correct: There was a hot, dense space about 13 some billion years ago, and it’s expanded since then.

The core description fits beautifully. The ballpark version seems correct. But the detailed version has gaps, so there is a lot left to do in this process of discovery to understand how the universe is organized and what is in it, Today the most important questions involve dark matter, a form of matter that does not form stars, and dark energy, a form of energy that appears to be forcing the universe apart at an ever faster rate. Together, these substances appear to constitute about 96% of the energy in the universe and have huge consequences for the large-scale organization of the cosmos, its past history, and its future. The race is on to figure out what dark matter and dark energy are.

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

Academic life at The University of Pennsylvania is unparalleled, with 100 countries and every U.S. state represented in one of the Ivy League’s most diverse student bodies. Consistently ranked among the top 10 universities in the country, Penn enrolls 10,000 undergraduate students and welcomes an additional 10,000 students to our world-renowned graduate and professional schools.

Penn’s award-winning educators and scholars encourage students to pursue inquiry and discovery, follow their passions, and address the world’s most challenging problems through an interdisciplinary approach.

The University of Pennsylvania is a private Ivy League research university in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The university claims a founding date of 1740 and is one of the nine colonial colleges chartered prior to the U.S. Declaration of Independence. Benjamin Franklin, Penn’s founder and first president, advocated an educational program that trained leaders in commerce, government, and public service, similar to a modern liberal arts curriculum.

Penn has four undergraduate schools as well as twelve graduate and professional schools. Schools enrolling undergraduates include the College of Arts and Sciences; the School of Engineering and Applied Science; the Wharton School; and the School of Nursing. Penn’s “One University Policy” allows students to enroll in classes in any of Penn’s twelve schools. Among its highly ranked graduate and professional schools are a law school whose first professor wrote the first draft of the United States Constitution, the first school of medicine in North America (Perelman School of Medicine, 1765), and the first collegiate business school (Wharton School, 1881).

Penn is also home to the first “student union” building and organization (Houston Hall, 1896), the first Catholic student club in North America (Newman Center, 1893), the first double-decker college football stadium (Franklin Field, 1924 when second deck was constructed), and Morris Arboretum, the official arboretum of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. The first general-purpose electronic computer (ENIAC) was developed at Penn and formally dedicated in 1946. In 2019, the university had an endowment of $14.65 billion, the sixth-largest endowment of all universities in the United States, as well as a research budget of $1.02 billion. The university’s athletics program, the Quakers, fields varsity teams in 33 sports as a member of the NCAA Division I Ivy League conference.

As of 2018, distinguished alumni and/or Trustees include three U.S. Supreme Court justices; 32 U.S. senators; 46 U.S. governors; 163 members of the U.S. House of Representatives; eight signers of the Declaration of Independence and seven signers of the U.S. Constitution (four of whom signed both representing two-thirds of the six people who signed both); 24 members of the Continental Congress; 14 foreign heads of state and two presidents of the United States, including Donald Trump. As of October 2019, 36 Nobel laureates; 80 members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; 64 billionaires; 29 Rhodes Scholars; 15 Marshall Scholars and 16 Pulitzer Prize winners have been affiliated with the university.

History

The University of Pennsylvania considers itself the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States, though this is contested by Princeton University and Columbia University. The university also considers itself as the first university in the United States with both undergraduate and graduate studies.

In 1740, a group of Philadelphians joined together to erect a great preaching hall for the traveling evangelist George Whitefield, who toured the American colonies delivering open-air sermons. The building was designed and built by Edmund Woolley and was the largest building in the city at the time, drawing thousands of people the first time it was preached in. It was initially planned to serve as a charity school as well, but a lack of funds forced plans for the chapel and school to be suspended. According to Franklin’s autobiography, it was in 1743 when he first had the idea to establish an academy, “thinking the Rev. Richard Peters a fit person to superintend such an institution”. However, Peters declined a casual inquiry from Franklin and nothing further was done for another six years. In the fall of 1749, now more eager to create a school to educate future generations, Benjamin Franklin circulated a pamphlet titled Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pensilvania, his vision for what he called a “Public Academy of Philadelphia”. Unlike the other colonial colleges that existed in 1749—Harvard University, William & Mary, Yale Unversity, and The College of New Jersey—Franklin’s new school would not focus merely on education for the clergy. He advocated an innovative concept of higher education, one which would teach both the ornamental knowledge of the arts and the practical skills necessary for making a living and doing public service. The proposed program of study could have become the nation’s first modern liberal arts curriculum, although it was never implemented because Anglican priest William Smith (1727-1803), who became the first provost, and other trustees strongly preferred the traditional curriculum.

Franklin assembled a board of trustees from among the leading citizens of Philadelphia, the first such non-sectarian board in America. At the first meeting of the 24 members of the board of trustees on November 13, 1749, the issue of where to locate the school was a prime concern. Although a lot across Sixth Street from the old Pennsylvania State House (later renamed and famously known since 1776 as “Independence Hall”), was offered without cost by James Logan, its owner, the trustees realized that the building erected in 1740, which was still vacant, would be an even better site. The original sponsors of the dormant building still owed considerable construction debts and asked Franklin’s group to assume their debts and, accordingly, their inactive trusts. On February 1, 1750, the new board took over the building and trusts of the old board. On August 13, 1751, the “Academy of Philadelphia”, using the great hall at 4th and Arch Streets, took in its first secondary students. A charity school also was chartered on July 13, 1753 by the intentions of the original “New Building” donors, although it lasted only a few years. On June 16, 1755, the “College of Philadelphia” was chartered, paving the way for the addition of undergraduate instruction. All three schools shared the same board of trustees and were considered to be part of the same institution. The first commencement exercises were held on May 17, 1757.

The institution of higher learning was known as the College of Philadelphia from 1755 to 1779. In 1779, not trusting then-provost the Reverend William Smith’s “Loyalist” tendencies, the revolutionary State Legislature created a University of the State of Pennsylvania. The result was a schism, with Smith continuing to operate an attenuated version of the College of Philadelphia. In 1791, the legislature issued a new charter, merging the two institutions into a new University of Pennsylvania with twelve men from each institution on the new board of trustees.

Penn has three claims to being the first university in the United States, according to university archives director Mark Frazier Lloyd: the 1765 founding of the first medical school in America made Penn the first institution to offer both “undergraduate” and professional education; the 1779 charter made it the first American institution of higher learning to take the name of “University”; and existing colleges were established as seminaries (although, as detailed earlier, Penn adopted a traditional seminary curriculum as well).

After being located in downtown Philadelphia for more than a century, the campus was moved across the Schuylkill River to property purchased from the Blockley Almshouse in West Philadelphia in 1872, where it has since remained in an area now known as University City. Although Penn began operating as an academy or secondary school in 1751 and obtained its collegiate charter in 1755, it initially designated 1750 as its founding date; this is the year that appears on the first iteration of the university seal. Sometime later in its early history, Penn began to consider 1749 as its founding date and this year was referenced for over a century, including at the centennial celebration in 1849. In 1899, the board of trustees voted to adjust the founding date earlier again, this time to 1740, the date of “the creation of the earliest of the many educational trusts the University has taken upon itself”. The board of trustees voted in response to a three-year campaign by Penn’s General Alumni Society to retroactively revise the university’s founding date to appear older than Princeton University, which had been chartered in 1746.

Research, innovations and discoveries

Penn is classified as an “R1” doctoral university: “Highest research activity.” Its economic impact on the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania for 2015 amounted to $14.3 billion. Penn’s research expenditures in the 2018 fiscal year were $1.442 billion, the fourth largest in the U.S. In fiscal year 2019 Penn received $582.3 million in funding from the National Institutes of Health.

In line with its well-known interdisciplinary tradition, Penn’s research centers often span two or more disciplines. In the 2010–2011 academic year alone, five interdisciplinary research centers were created or substantially expanded; these include the Center for Health-care Financing; the Center for Global Women’s Health at the Nursing School; the $13 million Morris Arboretum’s Horticulture Center; the $15 million Jay H. Baker Retailing Center at Wharton; and the $13 million Translational Research Center at Penn Medicine. With these additions, Penn now counts 165 research centers hosting a research community of over 4,300 faculty and over 1,100 postdoctoral fellows, 5,500 academic support staff and graduate student trainees. To further assist the advancement of interdisciplinary research President Amy Gutmann established the “Penn Integrates Knowledge” title awarded to selected Penn professors “whose research and teaching exemplify the integration of knowledge”. These professors hold endowed professorships and joint appointments between Penn’s schools.

Penn is also among the most prolific producers of doctoral students. With 487 PhDs awarded in 2009, Penn ranks third in the Ivy League, only behind Columbia University and Cornell University (Harvard University did not report data). It also has one of the highest numbers of post-doctoral appointees (933 in number for 2004–2007), ranking third in the Ivy League (behind Harvard and Yale University) and tenth nationally.

In most disciplines Penn professors’ productivity is among the highest in the nation and first in the fields of epidemiology, business, communication studies, comparative literature, languages, information science, criminal justice and criminology, social sciences and sociology. According to the National Research Council nearly three-quarters of Penn’s 41 assessed programs were placed in ranges including the top 10 rankings in their fields, with more than half of these in ranges including the top five rankings in these fields.

Penn’s research tradition has historically been complemented by innovations that shaped higher education. In addition to establishing the first medical school; the first university teaching hospital; the first business school; and the first student union Penn was also the cradle of other significant developments. In 1852, Penn Law was the first law school in the nation to publish a law journal still in existence (then called The American Law Register, now the Penn Law Review, one of the most cited law journals in the world). Under the deanship of William Draper Lewis, the law school was also one of the first schools to emphasize legal teaching by full-time professors instead of practitioners, a system that is still followed today. The Wharton School was home to several pioneering developments in business education. It established the first research center in a business school in 1921 and the first center for entrepreneurship center in 1973 and it regularly introduced novel curricula for which BusinessWeek wrote, “Wharton is on the crest of a wave of reinvention and change in management education”.

Several major scientific discoveries have also taken place at Penn. The university is probably best known as the place where the first general-purpose electronic computer (ENIAC) was born in 1946 at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering.

ENIAC UPenn

It was here also where the world’s first spelling and grammar checkers were created, as well as the popular COBOL programming language. Penn can also boast some of the most important discoveries in the field of medicine. The dialysis machine used as an artificial replacement for lost kidney function was conceived and devised out of a pressure cooker by William Inouye while he was still a student at Penn Med; the Rubella and Hepatitis B vaccines were developed at Penn; the discovery of cancer’s link with genes; cognitive therapy; Retin-A (the cream used to treat acne), Resistin; the Philadelphia gene (linked to chronic myelogenous leukemia) and the technology behind PET Scans were all discovered by Penn Med researchers. More recent gene research has led to the discovery of the genes for fragile X syndrome, the most common form of inherited mental retardation; spinal and bulbar muscular atrophy, a disorder marked by progressive muscle wasting; and Charcot–Marie–Tooth disease, a progressive neurodegenerative disease that affects the hands, feet and limbs.

Conductive polymer was also developed at Penn by Alan J. Heeger, Alan MacDiarmid and Hideki Shirakawa, an invention that earned them the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. On faculty since 1965, Ralph L. Brinster developed the scientific basis for in vitro fertilization and the transgenic mouse at Penn and was awarded the National Medal of Science in 2010. The theory of superconductivity was also partly developed at Penn, by then-faculty member John Robert Schrieffer (along with John Bardeen and Leon Cooper). The university has also contributed major advancements in the fields of economics and management. Among the many discoveries are conjoint analysis, widely used as a predictive tool especially in market research; Simon Kuznets’s method of measuring Gross National Product; the Penn effect (the observation that consumer price levels in richer countries are systematically higher than in poorer ones) and the “Wharton Model” developed by Nobel-laureate Lawrence Klein to measure and forecast economic activity. The idea behind Health Maintenance Organizations also belonged to Penn professor Robert Eilers, who put it into practice during then-President Nixon’s health reform in the 1970s.

International partnerships

Students can study abroad for a semester or a year at partner institutions such as the London School of Economics(UK), University of Barcelona [Universitat de Barcelona](ES), Paris Institute of Political Studies [Institut d’études politiques de Paris](FR), University of Queensland(AU), University College London(UK), King’s College London(UK), Hebrew University of Jerusalem(IL) and University of Warwick(UK).

From The University of Delaware And MPG Institute for Nuclear Physics [MPG Institut für Kernphysik] (DE): “Cosmic Code”

From The University of Delaware

And

MPG Institute for Nuclear Physics [MPG Institut für Kernphysik] (DE)

3.2.23
Karen B. Roberts
Photo illustration by Jeffrey C. Chase

UD physicist Marianna Safronova (right) and postdoctoral researcher Charles Cheung are part of an international team that recently resolved one 40-year astrophysics puzzle where theory and data previously disagreed.

A University of Delaware physicist and postdoctoral researcher help solve 40-year-old astrophysics puzzle.

Scientists are constantly searching for ways to understand how galaxies, black holes and stars form, grow and reorganize in the universe. Astrophysics is the field tasked with helping to explain some of these things.

A lot of what astronomers and physicists know comes from analyzing the light that we receive from these cosmic phenomena using theoretical calculations, only some of which can be validated experimentally. This causes tension between what theoretical calculations suggest and what experimental data can prove.

One current example of this involves a 40-year-old puzzle in astrophysics where experimental observations and theoretical predictions of two specific radiation lines of iron ions found in space plasmas disagreed by up to 15%, a difference several times larger than expected. The controversy cast doubt on how well scientists understand and describe very hot gases that originate from cosmic X-rays.

X-rays are a form of energetic radiation emitted by very hot gases in space that exist in the vicinity of objects, such as black holes, huge clusters of galaxies, in-stellar flares and even the corona of the sun. Data about the intensity of these X-rays are important for understanding physical conditions in space, such as temperature and density.

University of Delaware theoretical physicist Marianna Safronova and postdoctoral researcher Charles Cheung are part of an international team led by the MPG Institute for Nuclear Physics that recently resolved this longstanding disagreement using an extremely precise experiment. Improved theoretical calculations contributed by Safronova and Cheung played an important role in the work.

Thinking outside the lines

Plasmas are very hot gases that make up about 99% of all visible matter in space. Because they are so hot, the atoms inside these gases break into their components, leaving positively charged ions and electrons that move independently.

Safronova is an expert in computing the properties of atoms. Atoms have distinct levels of energy, and when an electron jumps from one energy state to another, it emits a particle of light called a photon. How fast this jump takes place is called the transition rate, which changes depending on the energy levels that are involved in the process.

Analyzing this light is the main way astronomers learn about stars and galaxies in the cosmos. But these experimentalists need help from theoretical physicists like Safronova, who can calculate where to look for these transitions. To do this, theorists use atomic-scale models and then point experimentalists in the right direction.

Safronova explained that in the problem they were working on, a theoretical calculation of a key property of two very bright, visible transitions of iron called 3C and 3D (which occur in most hot astrophysical plasmas) strongly disagreed with experimental results. The property in question showed how strong one transition was relative to the other.

The discrepancy had previously been attributed to theory not being accurate enough. Yet, no matter how theoretical physicists like Safronova modified the advanced calculations, the predicted transition rate didn’t change in any meaningful way. This led the theorists to remain certain their calculations were correct, but it still bothered them.

So, Safronova and her collaborators at other institutions worked to improve their methods for calculating this transition rate using supercomputers, including UD’s Caviness and DARWIN high-performance parallel computing systems. Key to this process was Charles Cheung, a postdoctoral researcher in Safronova’s group who earned both bachelor’s and doctoral degrees in physics at UD in 2016 and 2021. Cheung is credited with writing the new parallel version of the atomic code that helped solve this long-standing discrepancy.

“Charles was instrumental in terms of theory for making this work happen,” said Safronova.

Cheung recalled the laborious process of running code on a single computer for an earlier paper and waiting weeks for the computer to return a single number, then repeating the calculation over and over with different parameters. The power of high-performance parallel computing, harnessed by Cheung’s new parallel code, greatly speeded up this process on the current work.

“For that first paper it took me months of runtime just to figure out the numbers I needed. Now, I can rerun that original two-week calculation and have an answer in 15 minutes,” said Cheung, the paper’s second author. “I can run problems that are over 100 times larger, too, to explore exciting new systems in atomic physics that are of extreme interest to experimental groups for building quantum sensors.”

The new version of the code allowed the theoretical team to make much larger calculations than previously possible while reducing numerical errors. Cheung’s first version of parallel code scaled with about 50% efficiency, but with additional refinements, today main parts of the code perform with 99 to 100% efficiency.

“With our new code, we were able to put uncertainty numbers on our predictions,” he continued. According to Safronova, this ability to put precision on theoretical predictions in such complicated systems is new, and it provided even greater confidence that the team’s atomic-scale models were correct.

Meanwhile, Safronova’s experimentalist collaborators decided to redo the experiment at PETRA III, a German synchrotron light facility at the DESY laboratory outside Hamburg. The improved experimental precision allowed the research team to obtain data on the tails of the spectral lines they observed. The new measurements confirmed that the theoretical predictions were correct.

The researchers recently published their findings in Physical Review Letters [below].

A new benchmark for theory

Now that the theoretical and experimental data agree, it means that researchers using X-ray data from space telescopes can have greater confidence in the theoretical atomic models behind them.

Safronova said this new agreement between theory and experiment is particularly interesting as it makes it possible to study quantum electrodynamics (QED) — the study of how light and matter interact — when even more precise experimental data for 3C/3D transitions become available. This is because both theory and experiment must be very precise to see the subtle, but fundamental effects of QED in atoms and ions containing more than a few electrons.

The ability to perform very large-scale atomic computations also opens the door to testing other complicated fundamental physics questions that previously weren’t possible.

“Now that we know the computation is right, we can use it to guide experiments with other systems where we can now reliably predict atomic properties,” she said. “It also is a milestone that theory is trusted and our ability to compute things with quantum mechanics in complicated systems has reached a new level.”

Quantum mechanics is a fundamental physics theory that describes the behavior of matter and light at atomic and subatomic scales. It gives scientists the mathematical framework for computing properties of atoms to make precise theoretical predictions without an experiment.

Following postdoctoral studies, Cheung hopes to pursue a faculty position and inspire future theoretical physicists.

“Many students want to get their hands on things like lasers in the lab, but only a small percentage of people are interested in doing the theoretical calculations,” said Cheung. “I want to recruit more people interested in doing these types of calculations which will be monumental over the next decade for the new technologies and quantum sensors that are being developed now.”

Physical Review Letters

FIG. 1. Fluorescence yield of the soft x-ray transitions 3C and 3D of Fe XVII as well as B and C of Fe XVI as a function of the exciting-photon energy. Fitted Voigt profiles (orange) show residuals (bottom panel) due to a nonperfectly Gaussian distribution ofthe monochromator spectral bandwidth. Inset (right): 3C comparison between present and previous [55*] works. Inset (left): resolved C and 3D from this work compared to unresolved in LCLS measurements (green [24]) and Capella observations (red [76]).
*See the science paper for cited references.

See the full article here .

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The MPG Institute for Nuclear Physics [MPG Institut für Kernphysik](DE) is a research institute in Heidelberg, Germany.

The institute is one of the 80 institutes of the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft (Max Planck Society), an independent, non-profit research organization. The MPG Institute for Nuclear Physics was founded in 1958 under the leadership of Wolfgang Gentner. Its precursor was the Institute for Physics at the MPG Institute for Medical Research.

Today, the institute’s research areas are: crossroads of particle physics and astrophysics (astroparticle physics) and many-body dynamics of atoms and molecules (quantum dynamics).

The research field of Astroparticle Physics combines questions related to macrocosm and microcosm. Unconventional methods of observation for gamma rays and neutrinos open new windows to the universe. What lies behind “dark matter” and “dark energy” is theoretically investigated.

The research field of Quantum Dynamics is represented by the divisions of Klaus Blaum, Christoph Keitel and Thomas Pfeifer. Using reaction microscopes, simple chemical reactions can be “filmed”. Storage rings and traps allow precision experiments almost under space conditions. The interaction of intense laser light with matter is investigated using quantum-theoretical methods.

Further research fields are cosmic dust, atmospheric physics as well as fullerenes and other carbon molecules.

Scientists at the MPIK collaborate with other research groups in Europe and all over the world and are involved in numerous international collaborations, partly in a leading role. Particularly close connections to some large-scale facilities like GSI Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion Research [GSI Helmholtzzentrum für Schwerionenforschung] (DE), DESY Electron Synchrotron[ Deütsches Elektronen-Synchrotron](DE), European Organization for Nuclear Research [Organisation européenne pour la recherche nucléaire] [Europäische Organisation für Kernforschung](CH) [CERN], TRIUMF-Canadian national particle accelerator center (CA), and INFN-LNGS – Gran Sasso National Laboratory (IT) exist. The institute has about 390 employees, as well as many diploma students and scientific guests.

In the local region, the Institute cooperates closely with The Ruprecht Karl University of Heidelberg, [Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg] (DE), where the directors and further members of the Institute are teaching. Three International Max Planck Research Schools (IMPRS) and a graduate school serve to foster young scientists.

The institute operates a cryogenic ion storage ring (CSR) dedicated to the study of molecular ions under interstellar space conditions. Several Penning ion traps are used to measure fundamental constants of nature, such as the atomic mass of the electron and of nuclei. A facility containing several electron beam ion traps (EBIT) that produce and store highly charged ions is dedicated to fundamental atomic structure as well as astrophysical investigations. Large cameras for gamma-ray telescopes (H.E.S.S. – The High Energy Stereoscopic System (NM), CTA Consortium – Čerenkov Telescope Array), Dark Matter (Gran Sasso XENON1T Dark Matter Search (IT), DARWIN – Dark Matter WIMP Search With Liquid Xenon The University of Zürich [Universität Zürich ](CH)), and neutrino detectors are developed and tested on-site.

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
• Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing

The University of Delaware is a public land-grant research university located in Newark, Delaware. University of Delaware (US) is the largest university in Delaware. It offers three associate’s programs, 148 bachelor’s programs, 121 master’s programs (with 13 joint degrees), and 55 doctoral programs across its eight colleges. The main campus is in Newark, with satellite campuses in Dover, the Wilmington area, Lewes, and Georgetown. It is considered a large institution with approximately 18,200 undergraduate and 4,200 graduate students. It is a privately governed university which receives public funding for being a land-grant, sea-grant, and space-grant state-supported research institution.

The University of Delaware is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity”. According to The National Science Foundation, UD spent $186 million on research and development in 2018, ranking it 119th in the nation. It is recognized with the Community Engagement Classification by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

The University of Delaware is one of only four schools in North America with a major in art conservation. In 1923, it was the first American university to offer a study-abroad program.

The University of Delaware traces its origins to a “Free School,” founded in New London, Pennsylvania in 1743. The school moved to Newark, Delaware by 1765, becoming the Newark Academy. The academy trustees secured a charter for Newark College in 1833 and the academy became part of the college, which changed its name to Delaware College in 1843. While it is not considered one of the colonial colleges because it was not a chartered institution of higher education during the colonial era, its original class of ten students included George Read, Thomas McKean, and James Smith, all three of whom went on to sign the Declaration of Independence. Read also later signed the United States Constitution.

Science, Technology and Advanced Research (STAR) Campus

On October 23, 2009, The University of Delaware signed an agreement with Chrysler to purchase a shuttered vehicle assembly plant adjacent to the university for $24.25 million as part of Chrysler’s bankruptcy restructuring plan. The university has developed the 272-acre (1.10 km^2) site into the Science, Technology and Advanced Research (STAR) Campus. The site is the new home of University of Delaware (US)’s College of Health Sciences, which includes teaching and research laboratories and several public health clinics. The STAR Campus also includes research facilities for University of Delaware (US)’s vehicle-to-grid technology, as well as Delaware Technology Park, SevOne, CareNow, Independent Prosthetics and Orthotics, and the East Coast headquarters of Bloom Energy. In 2020 [needs an update], University of Delaware expects to open the Ammon Pinozzotto Biopharmaceutical Innovation Center, which will become the new home of the UD-led National Institute for Innovation in Manufacturing Biopharmaceuticals. Also, Chemours recently opened its global research and development facility, known as the Discovery Hub, on the STAR Campus in 2020. The new Newark Regional Transportation Center on the STAR Campus will serve passengers of Amtrak and regional rail.

Academics

The university is organized into nine colleges:

Alfred Lerner College of Business and Economics
College of Agriculture and Natural Resources
College of Arts and Sciences
College of Earth, Ocean and Environment
College of Education and Human Development
College of Engineering
College of Health Sciences
Graduate College
Honors College

There are also five schools:

Joseph R. Biden, Jr. School of Public Policy and Administration (part of the College of Arts & Sciences)
School of Education (part of the College of Education & Human Development)
School of Marine Science and Policy (part of the College of Earth, Ocean and Environment)
School of Nursing (part of the College of Health Sciences)
School of Music (part of the College of Arts & Sciences)

From The University of Innsbruck [Leopold-Franzens-Universität Innsbruck] (AT): “Quan­tum Chem­istry – Molecules caught tun­nel­ing”

From The University of Innsbruck [Leopold-Franzens-Universität Innsbruck] (AT)

Physicists led by Roland Wester of the University of Innsbruck have now for the first time observed a quantum mechanical tunneling reaction in experiments. The observation can also be described exactly in theory. With the study published in Nature [below], the scientists provide an important reference for this fundamental effect in chemistry. It is the slowest reaction with charged particles ever observed.

Quantum mechanics allows particles to break through the energetic barrier due to their quantum mechanical wave properties.

Tunneling reactions in chemistry are very difficult to predict. The quantum mechanically exact description of chemical reactions with more than three particles is difficult, with more than four particles it is almost impossible. Theorists simulate these reactions with classical physics and must neglect quantum effects. But where is the limit of this classical description of chemical reactions, which can only provide approximations?

Roland Wester from the Department of Ion Physics and Applied Physics at the University of Innsbruck has long wanted to explore this frontier. “It requires an experiment that allows very precise measurements and can still be described quantum-mechanically,” says the experimental physicist. “The idea came to me 15 years ago in a conversation with a colleague at a conference in the U.S.,” Wester recalls. He wanted to trace the quantum mechanical tunnel effect in a very simple reaction.

Since the tunnel effect makes the reaction very unlikely and thus slow, its experimental observation was extraordinarily difficult. After several attempts, however, Wester’s team has now succeeded in doing just that for the first time, as they report in the current issue of the journal Nature [below].

Breakthrough after 15 years of research

Roland Wester’s team chose hydrogen – the simplest element in the universe – for their experiment. They introduced deuterium – a hydrogen isotope – into an ion trap, cooled it down and then filled the trap with hydrogen gas. Because of the very low temperatures, the negatively charged deuterium ions lack the energy to react with hydrogen molecules in the conventional way. In very rare cases, however, a reaction does occur when the two collide.

This is caused by the tunnel effect: “Quantum mechanics allows particles to break through the energetic barrier due to their quantum mechanical wave properties, and a reaction occurs,” explains the first author of the study, Robert Wild. “In our experiment, we give possible reactions in the trap about 15 minutes and then determine the amount of hydrogen ions formed. From their number, we can deduce how often a reaction has occurred.”

In 2018, theoretical physicists had calculated that in this system quantum tunneling occurs in only one in every hundred billion collisions. This corresponds very closely with the results now measured in Innsbruck and, after 15 years of research, for the first time confirms a precise theoretical model for the tunneling effect in a chemical reaction.

Foundation for a better understanding

There are other chemical reactions that might exploit the tunnel effect. For the first time, a measurement is now available that is also well understood in scientific theory. Based on this, research can develop simpler theoretical models for chemical reactions and test them on the reaction that has now been successfully demonstrated.

The tunnel effect is used, for example, in the scanning tunneling microscope and in flash memories. The tunnel effect is also used to explain the alpha decay of atomic nuclei. By including the tunnel effect, some astrochemical syntheses of molecules in interstellar dark clouds can also be explained. The experiment of Wester’s team thus lays the foundation for a better understanding of many chemical reactions.

The research was financially supported by the Austrian Science Fund FWF and the European Union, among others.

Nature

From the science paper

Abstract
Quantum tunnelling reactions play an important role in chemistry when classical pathways are energetically forbidden [1*], be it in gas-phase reactions, surface diffusion or liquid-phase chemistry. In general, such tunnelling reactions are challenging to calculate theoretically, given the high dimensionality of the quantum dynamics, and also very difficult to identify experimentally[2],[3],[4]. Hydrogenic systems, however, allow for accurate first-principles calculations. In this way the rate of the gas-phase proton-transfer tunnelling reaction of hydrogen molecules with deuterium anions, H2 + D− → H− + HD, has been calculated [5], but has so far lacked experimental verification. Here we present high-sensitivity measurements of the reaction rate carried out in a cryogenic 22-pole ion trap. We observe an extremely low rate constant of (5.2 ± 1.6) × 10^−20 cm3 s^−1. This measured value agrees with quantum tunnelling calculations, serving as a benchmark for molecular theory and advancing the understanding of fundamental collision processes. A deviation of the reaction rate from linear scaling, which is observed at high H2 densities, can be traced back to previously unobserved heating dynamics in radiofrequency ion traps.
*References are listed after the abstract. See the science paper.

For further illustrations see the science paper.

See the full article here.

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

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Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

The University of Innsbruck [Leopold-Franzens-Universität Innsbruck ](AT) is currently the largest education facility in the Austrian Bundesland of Tirol, the third largest in Austria behind University of Vienna [Universität Wien] (AT) and the University of Graz [Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz] (AT) and according to The Times Higher Education Supplement World Ranking 2010 Austria’s leading university. Significant contributions have been made in many branches, most of all in the physics department. Further, regarding the number of Web of Science-listed publications, it occupies the third rank worldwide in the area of mountain research. In the Handelsblatt Ranking 2015, the business administration faculty ranks among the 15 best business administration faculties in German-speaking countries.

History

In 1562, a Jesuit grammar school was established in Innsbruck by Peter Canisius, today called “Akademisches Gymnasium Innsbruck”. It was financed by the salt mines in Hall in Tirol, and was refounded as a university in 1669 by Leopold I with four faculties. In 1782 this was reduced to a mere lyceum (as were all other universities in the Austrian Empire, apart from Prague, Vienna and Lviv), but it was reestablished as the University of Innsbruck in 1826 by Emperor Franz I. The university is therefore named after both of its founding fathers with the official title “Leopold-Franzens-Universität Innsbruck” (Universitas Leopoldino-Franciscea).

In 2005, copies of letters written by the emperors Frederick II and Conrad IV were found in the university’s library. They arrived in Innsbruck in the 18th century, having left the charterhouse Allerengelberg in Schnals due to its abolishment.

From The University of Portsmouth (UK) Via “Live Science” : “New research suggests Dark Energy could lead to a second (and third and fourth) Big Bang”

From The University of Portsmouth (UK)

Via

“Live Science”

2.23.23
Paul Sutter

Scientists have proposed a way that the universe could stop expanding ending in a ‘Big Crunch’ that resets space and time as we know it.

A Hubble telescope image showing multiple generations of stars densely layered in a nearby galaxy (Image credit: NASA/ESA Hubble)

Will the universe end in a bang or a whimper? A pair of theoretical physicists have proposed a third path: perhaps the universe will never end.

In a study that attempts to define the nature of dark energy — a mysterious phenomenon thought to be causing the universe to expand faster and faster every moment — the physicists find that cosmic expansion isn’t always a given. Rather, they write, dark energy may periodically “switch” on and off, sometimes growing the cosmos, sometimes shrinking it down until the conditions are right for a new Big Bang to occur — and for a new universe to be born.

The great escape

Our universe is currently experiencing a phase of runaway expansion: the cosmos is getting bigger faster with every passing moment.

___________________________________________________________________
The Dark Energy Survey

Dark Energy Camera [DECam] built at The DOE’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.

NOIRLab National Optical Astronomy Observatory Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CL) Victor M Blanco 4m Telescope which houses the Dark-Energy-Camera – DECam at Cerro Tololo, Chile at an altitude of 7200 feet.

NOIRLabNSF NOIRLab NOAO Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory(CL) approximately 80 km to the East of La Serena, Chile, at an altitude of 2200 meters.

Timeline of the Inflationary Universe NASA WMAP LAMBDA – ΛCDM Model of Cosmology

The Dark Energy Survey is an international, collaborative effort to map hundreds of millions of galaxies, detect thousands of supernovae, and find patterns of cosmic structure that will reveal the nature of the mysterious dark energy that is accelerating the expansion of our Universe. The Dark Energy Survey began searching the Southern skies on August 31, 2013.

According to Albert Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, gravity should lead to a slowing of the cosmic expansion. Yet, in 1998, two teams of astronomers studying distant supernovae made the remarkable discovery that the expansion of the universe is speeding up.

Nobel Prize in Physics for 2011 Expansion of the Universe

Saul Perlmutter (center) [The Supernova Cosmology Project] shared the 2006 Shaw Prize in Astronomy, the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics, and the 2015 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics with Brian P. Schmidt (right) and Adam Riess (left) [The High-z Supernova Search Team] for providing evidence that the expansion of the universe is accelerating.

4 October 2011

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2011

with one half to

Saul Perlmutter

The Supernova Cosmology Project

The DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and The University of California-Berkeley,

and the other half jointly to

Brian P. Schmidt
The High-z Supernova Search Team, The Australian National University, Weston Creek, Australia.

And

Adam G. Riess
The High-z Supernova Search Team,The Johns Hopkins University and The Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, MD.

Written in the stars

“Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice…” *

What will be the final destiny of the Universe? Probably it will end in ice, if we are to believe this year’s Nobel Laureates in Physics. They have studied several dozen exploding stars, called supernovae, and discovered that the Universe is expanding at an ever-accelerating rate. The discovery came as a complete surprise even to the Laureates themselves.

In 1998, cosmology was shaken at its foundations as two research teams presented their findings. Headed by Saul Perlmutter, one of the teams had set to work in 1988. Brian Schmidt headed another team, launched at the end of 1994, where Adam Riess was to play a crucial role.

The research teams raced to map the Universe by locating the most distant supernovae. More sophisticated telescopes on the ground and in space, as well as more powerful computers and new digital imaging sensors (CCD, Nobel Prize in Physics in 2009), opened the possibility in the 1990s to add more pieces to the cosmological puzzle.

The teams used a particular kind of supernova, called Type 1a supernova. It is an explosion of an old compact star that is as heavy as the Sun but as small as the Earth. A single such supernova can emit as much light as a whole galaxy. All in all, the two research teams found over 50 distant supernovae whose light was weaker than expected – this was a sign that the expansion of the Universe was accelerating. The potential pitfalls had been numerous, and the scientists found reassurance in the fact that both groups had reached the same astonishing conclusion.

For almost a century, the Universe has been known to be expanding as a consequence of the Big Bang about 14 billion years ago. However, the discovery that this expansion is accelerating is astounding. If the expansion will continue to speed up the Universe will end in ice.

The acceleration is thought to be driven by dark energy, but what that dark energy is remains an enigma – perhaps the greatest in physics today. What is known is that dark energy constitutes about three quarters of the Universe. Therefore, the findings of the 2011 Nobel Laureates in Physics have helped to unveil a Universe that to a large extent is unknown to science. And everything is possible again.

*Robert Frost, Fire and Ice, 1920

To explain cosmic acceleration, cosmologists are faced with two possibilities: either 70% of the universe exists in an exotic form, now called Dark Energy, that exhibits a gravitational force opposite to the attractive gravity of ordinary matter, or Albert Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity must be replaced by a new theory of gravity on cosmic scales.

The Dark Energy Survey is designed to probe the origin of the accelerating universe and help uncover the nature of Dark Energy by measuring the 14-billion-year history of cosmic expansion with high precision. More than 400 scientists from over 25 institutions in the United States, Spain, the United Kingdom, Brazil, Germany, Switzerland, and Australia are working on the project. The collaboration built and is using an extremely sensitive 570-Megapixel digital camera, DECam, mounted on the Blanco 4-meter telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, high in the Chilean Andes, to carry out the project.

Over six years (2013-2019), the Dark Energy Survey collaboration used 758 nights of observation to carry out a deep, wide-area survey to record information from 300 million galaxies that are billions of light-years from Earth. The survey imaged 5000 square degrees of the southern sky in five optical filters to obtain detailed information about each galaxy. A fraction of the survey time is used to observe smaller patches of sky roughly once a week to discover and study thousands of supernovae and other astrophysical transients.
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Cosmologists do not understand the cause of this acceleration, which they name dark energy. If this acceleration persists, then our universe will eventually expand into oblivion, with all matter and radiation torn apart.

This wouldn’t be the first period of runaway growth. In the earliest moments of the Big Bang, the energies and densities were so extreme that existing physics cannot cope — it predicts a singularity, a point of infinite density where the math breaks down. After that, the universe experienced a period of incredibly rapid expansion known as inflation, which is also poorly understood.

Astronomers have long wondered if these two phases of accelerated expansion — one in the earliest moments of the Big Bang and one in the present epoch — are connected to each other, and whether an entity that drives both of them avoids the problem of the big bang singularity.

Dynamical demons

To answer that, a pair of theoretical physicists published a study Feb. 7 which examined a model of the universe where dark energy has always played a role. Previous research modeled dark energy “switching on” at various times to drive cosmic expansion, but the new research proposes a more realistic model that includes matter and radiation.

They wanted to see if dark energy can avoid a Big Bang singularity, drive inflation, and accelerate the late universe. To avoid that initial singularity, the universe can’t begin from a point of infinite density. Instead, the universe we live in would have to be one in an infinite series of repeated “Big Bounces.”

In this scenario, dark energy drives the universe until it reaches a certain size. But then the dark energy transforms itself, forcing the universe to contract. The cosmos then suffers a big crunch, but right before reaching a state of infinite density, dark energy turns around again, driving a period of incredibly rapid inflation and starting the cycle anew.

A finely tuned mechanism

The researchers found a model of dark energy that performed the trifecta. But crucially, matter and radiation could not be present in the extremely early universe, otherwise they spoiled inflation. Instead, matter and radiation had to appear just after inflation, as a portion of the dark energy decayed away, flooding the universe with light and matter.

While initially successful, the researchers weren’t able to find a generic class of dark energy models that could always lead to the same results. Instead, they had to artificially put in a smaller value for the present-day accelerated expansion than quantum mechanics predicts in order to get the exact right outcome.

However, this new research does point in a promising direction, providing a viable platform for further exploring models like this. Humans are not necessarily destined to live in a cold, empty cosmos, because dark energy might behave differently in the far future. Only continued research will uncover our ultimate fate.

See the full article here .

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The University of Portsmouth (UK) is a public university in the city of Portsmouth, Hampshire, England. The history of the university dates back to 1908, when the Park building opened as a Municipal college and public library. It was previously known as Portsmouth Polytechnic until 1992, when it was granted university status through the Further and Higher Education Act 1992. It is ranked among the Top 100 universities under 50 in the world.

We’re a New Breed of University

We’re proud to be a breath of fresh air in the academic world – a place where everyone gets the support they need to achieve their best.

We’re always discovering. Through the work we do, we engage with our community and world beyond our hometown. We don’t fit the mould, we break it.

We educate and transform the lives of our students and the people around us. We recruit students for their promise and potential and for where they want to go.

We stand out, not just in the UK but in the world, in innovation and research, with excellence in areas from cosmology and forensics to cyber security, epigenetics and brain tumour research.

Just as the world keeps moving, so do we. We’re closely involved with our local community and we take our ideas out into the global marketplace. We partner with business, industry and government to help improve, navigate and set the course for a better future.

Since the first day we opened our doors, our story has been about looking forward. We’re interested in the future, and here to help you shape it.

The university offers a range of disciplines, from Pharmacy, International relations and politics, to Mechanical Engineering, Paleontology, Criminology, Criminal Justice, among others. The Guardian University Guide 2018 ranked its Sports Science number one in England, while Criminology, English, Social Work, Graphic Design and Fashion and Textiles courses are all in the top 10 across all universities in the UK. Furthermore, 89% of its research conducted in Physics, and 90% of its research in Allied Health Professions (e.g. Dentistry, Nursing and Pharmacy) have been rated as world-leading or internationally excellent in the most recent Research Excellence Framework (REF2014).

The University is a member of the University Alliance and The Channel Islands Universities Consortium. Alumni include Tim Peake, Grayson Perry, Simon Armitage and Ben Fogle.

Portsmouth was named the UK’s most affordable city for students in the Natwest Student Living Index 2016. On Friday 4 May 2018, the University of Portsmouth was revealed as the main shirt sponsor of Portsmouth F.C. for the 2018–19, 2019–20 and 2020–21 seasons.

From The Weizmann Institute of Science[ מכון ויצמן למדע ](IL): “The Quantum Twisting Microscope – A New Lens on Quantum Materials”

From The Weizmann Institute of Science[ מכון ויצמן למדע] (IL)

2.22.23

Close-up diagram of the quantum twisting microscope in action. Electrons tunnel from the probe (inverted pyramid at the top) to the sample (bottom) in several places at once (green vertical lines), in a quantum coherent manner.

A clever take on the science of twistronics offers new ways of exploring quantum phenomena.

One of the striking aspects of the quantum world is that a particle, say, an electron, is also a wave, meaning that it exists in many places at the same time. In a new study, reported today in Nature [below], researchers from the Weizmann Institute of Science make use of this property to develop a new type of tool – the quantum twisting microscope (QTM) – that can create novel quantum materials while simultaneously gazing into the most fundamental quantum nature of their electrons. The study’s findings may be used to create electronic materials with unprecedented functionalities.

The QTM involves the “twisting” or rotating of two atomically-thin layers of material with respect to one another. In recent years, such twisting has become a major source of discoveries. It began with the discovery that placing two layers of graphene, one-atom-thick crystalline sheets of carbon, one atop the other with a slight relative twist angle, leads to a “sandwich” with unexpected new properties. The twist angle turned out to be the most critical parameter for controlling the behavior of electrons: Changing it by merely one-tenth of a degree could transform the material from an exotic superconductor into an unconventional insulator. But critical as it is, this parameter is also the hardest to control in experiments. By and large, twisting two layers to a new angle requires building a new “sandwich” from scratch, a process that is very long and tedious.

“Our original motivation was to solve this problem by building a machine that could continuously twist any two materials with respect to one another, readily producing an infinite range of novel materials,” says team leader Prof. Shahal Ilani of Weizmann’s Condensed Matter Physics Department. “However, while building this machine, we discovered that it can also be turned into a very powerful microscope, capable of seeing quantum electronic waves in ways that were unimaginable before.”

The Quantum Twisting Microscope: A New Lens on Quantum Materials.
An animation showing the quantum twisting microscope in action. Electrons tunnel from the probe (inverted pyramid at the top) to the sample (bottom) as quantum mechanical waves (red).

Creating a quantum picture

Pictures have long played a central role in scientific discovery. Light microscopes and telescopes routinely provide images that allow scientists to gain a deeper understanding of biological and astrophysical systems. Taking pictures of electrons inside materials, on the other hand, has for many years been notoriously hard, owing to the small dimensions involved. This was transformed some 40 years ago with the invention of the scanning tunneling microscope, which earned its developers the 1986 Nobel Prize in Physics. This microscope uses an atomically sharp needle to scan the surface of a material, measuring the electric current and gradually building an image of the distribution of electrons in the sample.

“Many different scanning probes have been developed since this invention, each measuring a different electronic property, but all of them measure these properties at one location at a time. So, they mostly see electrons as particles, and can only indirectly learn about their wave nature,” explains Prof. Ady Stern from the Weizmann Institute, who took part in the study along with three other theoretical physicists from the same department: Profs. Binghai Yan, Yuval Oreg and Erez Berg. “As it turned out, the tool that we have built can visualize the quantum electronic waves directly, giving us a way to unravel the quantum dances they perform inside the material,” Stern says.

Twisting (l-r, clockwise): Jiewen Xiao, Prof. Ady Stern, Prof. Shahal Ilani, Prof. Erez Berg, Prof. Binghai Yan, Dr. John Birkbeck and Alon Inbar. On the wall: Schroedinger’s equation for the electron’s wave function.

Spotting an electron in several places at once

“The trick for seeing quantum waves is to spot the same electron in different locations at the same time,” says Alon Inbar, a lead author on the paper. “The measurement is conceptually similar to the famous two-slit experiment, which was used a century ago to prove for the first time that electrons in quantum mechanics have a wave nature,” adds Dr. John Birkbeck, another lead author. “The only difference is that we perform such an experiment at the tip of our scanning microscope.”

To achieve this, the researchers replaced the atomically sharp tip of the scanning tunneling microscope with a tip that contains a flat layer of a quantum material, such as a single layer of graphene. When this layer is brought into contact with the surface of the sample of interest, it forms a two-dimensional interface across which electrons can tunnel at many different locations. Quantum mechanically, they tunnel in all locations simultaneously, and the tunneling events at different locations interfere with each other. This interference allows an electron to tunnel only if its wave functions on both sides of the interface match exactly. “To see a quantum electron, we have to be gentle,” says Ilani. “If we don’t ask it the rude question ‘Where are you?’ but instead provide it with multiple routes to cross into our detector without us knowing where it actually crossed, we allow it to preserve its fragile wave-like nature.”

Twist and tunnel

Generally, the electronic waves in the tip and the sample propagate in different directions and therefore do not match. The QTM uses its twisting capability to find the angle at which matching occurs: By continuously twisting the tip with respect to the sample, the tool causes their corresponding wave functions to also twist with respect to one another. Once these wave functions match on both sides of the interface, tunneling can occur. The twisting therefore allows the QTM to map how the electronic wave function depends on momentum, similarly to the way lateral translations of the tip enable the mapping of its dependence on position. Merely knowing at which angles electrons cross the interface supplies the researchers with a great deal of information about the probed material. In this manner they can learn about the collective organization of electrons within the sample, their speed, energy distribution, patterns of interference and even the interactions of different waves with one another.

Prof. Yuval Oreg

A new twist on quantum materials

“Our microscope will give scientists a new kind of ‘lens’ for observing and measuring the properties of quantum materials,” says Jiewen Xiao, another lead author.

The Weizmann team has already applied their microscope to studying the properties of several key quantum materials at room temperature and is now gearing up toward doing new experiments at temperatures of a few kelvins, where some of the most exciting quantum mechanical effects are known to take place.

Peering so deeply into the quantum world can help reveal fundamental truths about nature. In the future, it might also have a tremendous effect on emerging technologies. The QTM will provide researchers with access to an unprecedented spectrum of new quantum interfaces, as well as new “eyes” for discovering quantum phenomena within them.

Nature
The invention of scanning probe microscopy revolutionized the way electronic phenomena are visualized. Whereas present-day probes can access a variety of electronic properties at a single location in space, a scanning microscope that can directly probe the quantum mechanical existence of an electron at several locations would provide direct access to key quantum properties of electronic systems, so far unreachable. Here, we demonstrate a conceptually new type of scanning probe microscope—the quantum twisting microscope (QTM)—capable of performing local interference experiments at its tip. The QTM is based on a unique van der Waals tip, allowing the creation of pristine two-dimensional junctions, which provide a multitude of coherently interfering paths for an electron to tunnel into a sample. With the addition of a continuously scanned twist angle between the tip and sample, this microscope probes electrons along a line in momentum space similar to how a scanning tunnelling microscope probes electrons along a line in real space. Through a series of experiments, we demonstrate room-temperature quantum coherence at the tip, study the twist angle evolution of twisted bilayer graphene, directly image the energy bands of monolayer and twisted bilayer graphene and, finally, apply large local pressures while visualizing the gradual flattening of the low-energy band of twisted bilayer graphene. The QTM opens the way for new classes of experiments on quantum materials.

See the full article here .

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The Weizmann Institute of Science מכון ויצמן למדע (IL) is one of the world’s leading multidisciplinary research institutions. Hundreds of scientists, laboratory technicians and research students working on its lushly landscaped campus embark daily on fascinating journeys into the unknown, seeking to improve our understanding of nature and our place within it.

Guiding these scientists is the spirit of inquiry so characteristic of the human race. It is this spirit that propelled humans upward along the evolutionary ladder, helping them reach their utmost heights. It prompted humankind to pursue agriculture, learn to build lodgings, invent writing, harness electricity to power emerging technologies, observe distant galaxies, design drugs to combat various diseases, develop new materials and decipher the genetic code embedded in all the plants and animals on Earth.

The quest to maintain this increasing momentum compels Weizmann Institute scientists to seek out places that have not yet been reached by the human mind. What awaits us in these places? No one has the answer to this question. But one thing is certain – the journey fired by curiosity will lead onward to a better future.

From The Vienna University of Technology [Technische Universität Wien](AT) : “Chaos Gives the Quantum World a Temperature”

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

12.12.22
Prof. Joachim Burgdörfer
Institute for Theoretical Physics
TU Wien
Wiedner Hauptstraße 8-10, 1040 Vienna
+43 1 5880113610
joachim.burgdoerfer@tuwien.ac.at

Two seemingly different areas of physics are related in subtle ways: Quantum theory and thermodynamics. How chaos theory mediates between them has now been studied at TU Wien.

One of the particles acts as a “thermometer”, the whole system is simulated on the computer. Credit: TU Wien.

A single particle has no temperature. It has a certain energy or a certain speed – but it is not possible to translate that into a temperature. Only when dealing with random velocity distributions of many particles, a well-defined temperature emerges.

How can the laws of thermodynamics arise from the laws of quantum physics? This is a topic that has attracted growing attention in recent years. At TU Wien (Vienna), this question has now been pursued with computer simulations, which showed that chaos plays a crucial role: Only where chaos prevails do the well-known rules of thermodynamics follow from quantum physics.

Boltzmann: Everything is possible, but it may be improbable

The air molecules randomly flying around in a room can assume an unimaginable number of different states: Different locations and different speeds are allowed for each individual particle. But not all of these states are equally likely. “Physically, it would be possible for all the energy in this space to be transferred to one single particle, which would then move at extremely high speeds while all the other particles stand still,” says Prof. Iva Brezinova from the Institute of Theoretical Physics at TU Wien. “But this is so unlikely that it will practically never be observed.”

The probabilities of different allowed states can be calculated – according to a formula that the Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann set up according to the rules of classical physics. And from this probability distribution, the temperature can then also be read off: it is only determined for a large number of particles.

The whole world as a single quantum state

However, this causes problems when dealing with quantum physics. When a large number of quantum particles are in play at the same time, the equations of quantum theory become so complicated that even the best supercomputers in the world have no chance of solving them.

In quantum physics, the individual particles cannot be considered independently of each other, as is the case with classical billiard balls. Every billiard ball has its own individual trajectory and its own individual location at every point in time. Quantum particles, on the other hand, have no individuality – they can only be described together, in a single large quantum wave function.

“In quantum physics, the entire system is described by a single large many-particle quantum state,” says Prof. Joachim Burgdörfer (TU Wien). “How a random distribution and thus a temperature should arise from this remained a puzzle for a long time.”

Chaos theory as a mediator

A team at TU Wien has now been able to show that chaos plays a key role. To do this, the team performed a computer simulation of a quantum system that consists of a large number of particles – many indistinguishable particles (the “heat bath”) and one of a different kind of particle, the “sample particle” that acts as a thermometer. Each individual quantum wave function of the large system has a specific energy, but no well-defined temperature – just like a single classical particle. But if you now pick out the sample particle from the single quantum state and measure its velocity, you can surprisingly find a velocity distribution that corresponds to a temperature that fits the well-established laws of thermodynamics.

“Whether or not it fits depends on chaos – that is what our calculations clearly showed,” says Iva Brezinova. “We can specifically change the interactions between the particles on the computer and thus create either a completely chaotic system, or one that shows no chaos at all – or anything in between.” And in doing so, one finds that the presence of chaos determines whether a quantum state of the sample particle displays a Boltzmann temperature distribution or not.

“Without making any assumptions about random distributions or thermodynamic rules, thermodynamic behavior arises from quantum theory all by itself – if the combined system of sample particle and heat bath behaves quantum chaotically. And how well this behavior fits the well-known Boltzmann formulae is determined by the strength of the chaos”, explains Joachim Burgdörfer.

This is one of the first cases in which the interplay between three important theories has been rigorously demonstrated by many-particle computer simulations: quantum theory, thermodynamics and chaos theory.

Science paper:
Entropy
See the science paper for instructive material with images.

See the full article here.

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The Vienna University of Technology [Technische Universität Wien](AT) is one of the major universities in Vienna, Austria. The university finds high international and domestic recognition in teaching as well as in research, and it is a highly esteemed partner of innovation-oriented enterprises. It currently has about 28,100 students (29% women), eight faculties and about 5,000 staff members (3,800 academics).

The university’s teaching and research is focused on engineering, computer science, and natural sciences.

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

The institution was founded in 1815 by Emperor Francis I of Austria as the k.k. Polytechnische Institut (Imperial-Royal Polytechnic Institute). The first rector was Johann Joseph von Prechtl. It was renamed the Technische Hochschule (College of Technology) in 1872. When it began granting doctoral and higher degrees in 1975, it was renamed the Technische Universität Wien (Vienna University of Technology).

As a university of technology, TU Wien covers a wide spectrum of scientific concepts from abstract pure research and the fundamental principles of science to applied technological research and partnership with industry.

TU Wien is ranked #192 by the QS World University Ranking, #406 by the Center of World University Rankings, and it is positioned among the best 401-500 higher education institutions globally by the Times Higher Education World University Rankings. The computer science department has been consistently ranked among the top 100 in the world by the QS World University Ranking and The Times Higher Education World University Rankings respectively.

TU Wien has eight faculties led by deans: Architecture and Planning, Chemistry, Civil Engineering, Computer Sciences, Electrical Engineering and Information Technology, Mathematics and Geoinformation, Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, and Physics.

The University is led by the Rector and four Vice Rectors (responsible for Research, Academic Affairs, Finance as well as Human Resources and Gender). The Senate has 26 members. The University Council, consisting of seven members, acts as a supervisory board.

Development work in almost all areas of technology is encouraged by the interaction between basic research and the different fields of engineering sciences at TU Wien. Also, the framework of cooperative projects with other universities, research institutes and business sector partners is established by the research section of TU Wien. TU Wien has sharpened its research profile by defining competence fields and setting up interdisciplinary collaboration centres, and clearer outlines will be developed.

Research focus points of TU Wien are introduced as computational science and engineering, quantum physics and quantum technologies, materials and matter, information and communication technology and energy and environment.

The EU Research Support (EURS) provides services at TU Wien and informs both researchers and administrative staff in preparing and carrying out EU research projects.

From The University of Rostock [Universität Rostock] (DE) Via “phys.org” : “Particle physics in a humble glass chip – How quantum optics illuminates the nature of the quark”

From The University of Rostock [Universität Rostock] (DE)

Via

“phys.org”

12.1.22
Kirstin Werner | University of Rostock

Schematic illustration of a “holonomy”.

Scientists from The University of Rostock [Universität Rostock] (DE) were able to recreate fundamental physical properties from the realm of elementary particle physics in a photonic system. The results are published in Nature Physics [below].

In their fundamental research, experimental physicists routinely bring giant yet intricate machinery to bear: Particle accelerators of enormous size smash together microscopic particles at velocities close to the speed of light, releasing unimaginable amounts of energy. In the remains of these collisions, scientists search for signatures of the fundamental forces of the universe.

The European Organization for Nuclear Research [La Organización Europea para la Investigación Nuclear][Organization européenne pour la recherche nucléaire] [Europäische Organization für Kernforschung](CH) [CERN].

The European Organization for Nuclear Research [La Organización Europea para la Investigación Nuclear][Organization européenne pour la recherche nucléaire] [Europäische Organization für Kernforschung](CH)[CERN] map.

The European Organization for Nuclear Research [La Organización Europea para la Investigación Nuclear][Organization européenne pour la recherche nucléaire] [Europäische Organization für Kernforschung](CH)[CERN] ATLAS another view Image Claudia Marcelloni ATLAS CERN.

The European Organization for Nuclear Research [La Organización Europea para la Investigación Nuclear][ Organization européenne pour la recherche nucléaire] [Europäische Organization für Kernforschung](CH)[CERN] CMS.

SixTRack CERN LHC particles.

Since the 1970s, a veritable zoo of particles was discovered and organized into the Standard Model of Particle Physics.

Standard Model of Particle Physics, Quantum Diaries.

Among them are quarks, the elementary building blocks of protons and neutrons.

The quark structure of the proton. 16 March 2006 Arpad Horvath.

The quark structure of the neutron. 15 January 2018 Jacek Rybak.

These unusual particles obey their own, quite idiosyncratic, properties that set them apart from any other form of matter. For instance, while there is only one kind of electric charge, that can be positive or negative, the behavior of quarks underlies completely different physical laws.

Prof. Stefan Scheel, head of the research group quantum optics of macroscopic systems at the University of Rostock explains, “Next to their electric charge, quarks come along with their own colour charge: red, green, or blue. This, of course, has nothing to do with the colors found in a rainbow.”

It is due to this peculiar behavior that individual quarks stubbornly evade of any direct observation. Recently, the group of German scientists managed to study the fundamental symmetries of quarks by preparing light in an analogous configuration.

Prof. Alexander Szameit, head of the research group experimental solid-state optics at the University of Rostock, describes the experimental approach, “Using high-intensity laser pulses, we inscribe circuits for light in a humble piece of glass. In such photonic chips, complex phenomena can be modeled, the color charge of quarks being just one of them.”

In order to simulate this charge, the scientists from Rostock had to harness the exotic properties of quantum light. Particles of light (so called photons), are not only able to exist in several places at the same time, but an arbitrary number of them can also exist at exactly the same place.

“In this way, so-called holonomies can be designed when photons propagate through the photonic circuits. These abstract objects are usually the playing field of mathematicians. But, as it turns out, they describe the possible symmetries of a quantum system as well and have a few very interesting properties. For instance, they do not depend on the time that passes, a rarity in physics,” says Vera Neef, one of the leading authors of the work, as her Ph.D. revolves around the novel field of holonomic quantum optics.

The second leading author, Julien Pinske, who in his Ph.D. studies holonomies from the viewpoint of theoretical physics, elaborates, “In order to simulate the three different colour charges, it was necessary to design a three-dimensional holonomy. So far only photons do the trick, and this goes beyond our everyday intuition of nature.”

Looking forward from their first experimental realization of this effect, the group of scientists anticipates deeper insights into the fascinating physics of the quark. Beyond the study of such fundamental physics, the reported results might prove useful in the design of future quantum technologies, including quantum computers. There, holonomies might turn out to be the crucial ingredient on which quantumness can be made resilient enough for commercial use.

Science paper:
Nature Physics
See the science paper for instructive material with images.

See the full article here .

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