From The Harvard Gazette: “Unlocking potential of quantum technologies”

From The Harvard Gazette

At

Harvard University

March 23, 2022
Yahya Chaudhry

Harvard Researcher Unlocks Potential of Quantum Technologies

Chemical biology professor works to crack secrets of new states of matter.

Throughout human history, most of our efforts to store information, from knots and oracle bones to bamboo markings and the written word, boil down to two techniques: using characters or shapes to represent information. Today, huge amounts of information are stored on silicon wafers with zeros and ones, but a new material at the border of quantum chemistry and quantum physics could enable vast improvements in storage.

Suyang Xu, assistant professor of chemical biology, is tying quantum mechanical “knots” in topological materials, which may be the key to unlocking the potential of quantum technologies to store and process vast arrays of information and bring game-changing advances in a variety of fields.

“Imagine a rope identified by a number of knots,” Xu said. “No matter how much the shape of the rope is changed, the number of knots — known as the topological number — cannot be changed without altering its fundamental identity by adding or undoing knots.” It is this robustness that potentially makes topological materials particularly useful.

Xu, who took his undergraduate degree in China, first encountered topological materials when he started graduate school in physics at Princeton University in 2008 when the materials were first being created. Xu’s research interests involve electronic and optical properties in quantum matters, such as topological and broken symmetry states.

Topological materials move electrons along their surfaces and edges without any friction or loss making them promising materials for super-high-speed electronics like quantum computers. Such devices have the potential to be more powerful than existing computers because their quantum bits, referred to as “qubits,” take advantage of two properties of quantum states —superposition and entanglement — to encode information.

However, quantum states are delicate and when they are perturbed can lead to decoherence, falling out of sync and losing stored information. Because topological materials are robust and resist perturbation they could be used to build more resilient and longer-lasting qubits.

Xu’s physics background and experimental chemistry experience enable him to test quantum theories in the real world. “Even though physicists and chemists both study materials, physicists tend to look at them more as abstract equations, while chemists engage with their emergent properties,” Xu said. “Since I have a pure physics background and speak the language of chemistry, I can translate difficult theories into real space.”

With a few well-reasoned assumptions and some innovative techniques, Xu and his team bridge the gap the between quantum physics and chemistry, testing theories with materials. First, they predict which materials may realize topological properties. The chemical formulas for the elements in such materials do not provide adequate insight; Xu is also interested in their macroscopic properties.

“If I were to study water, steam, and ice only by looking at their H20 equation, I would learn nothing about their different properties.” Xu said. “As a chemist, I am trying to find certain elements and organize them microscopically, so that they can produce a topological property.”

Xu’s lab then tests current theories about chemical reactions against experimental data to expand the map of topological materials. Using specialized refrigerators in which atoms and molecules are cooled to temperatures just above absolute zero, at which they become highly controllable and more visible, Xu and his team test the flow of electrons through materials with currents.

They are also interested in the optical properties of materials, testing to see their interaction with light. The team fires photons at the materials and gathers quantum mechanical topological data based on how light scatters, reflects, and transmits. Xu has already yielded strong evidence for theoretical particles that answers one of the most vexing problems in quantum science.

In a study reported last year in Nature, Xu and his team set out to study the properties of axions, a theoretical elementary particle proposed by physicist Frank Wilczek. The Nobel Prize winner named it after a brand of laundry detergent because it “cleaned up” the complex, highly technical Strong Charge Parity problem in quantum chromodynamics by filling in a gap between theory and observation.

In addition one of the most enticing predictions about axion states is that we may be able to use them to control magnetization, which could revolutionize all kinds of technology as magnetism and magnetic materials are at the heart of many, many applications.

In a class of topological materials called axion insulators, Xu’s team sought to simulate the behavior of the axion. They fabricated a dual-gated MnBi2Te4 device in an argon environment, and measured its electrical and optical properties, uncovering new pathways to detect and manipulate the rich internal structure of topological materials.

“We discovered a real material that can support the axion insulator state,” Xu said. “We confirmed that it had the predicted properties, a strong coupling between electricity and magnetism.”

Having provided evidence for a theorized particle, Xu plans to explore the spin properties of Weyl semimetals, a new state of matter that has an unusual electronic structure that has deep analogies with particle physics and leads to unique topological properties.

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

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

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

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

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

Colonial

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

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

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

19th century

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

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

20th century

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

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

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

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

Harvard University’s graduate schools began admitting women in small numbers in the late 19th century. During World War II, students at Radcliffe College (which since 1879 had been paying Harvard University 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 The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US): “Fast-tracking the search for energy-efficient materials”

From The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US)

January 30, 2022
Leda Zimmerman | Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering

MIT doctoral candidate Nina Andrejević (right) has developed with her twin sister Jovana (left), a PhD candidate at Harvard University, a method for testing material samples to predict the presence of topological characteristics that is faster and more versatile than other methods. Photo: Gretchen Ertl.

Born into a family of architects, Nina Andrejević loved creating drawings of her home and other buildings while a child in Serbia. She and her twin sister shared this passion, along with an appetite for math and science. Over time, these interests converged into a scholarly path that shares some attributes with the family profession, according to Andrejević, a doctoral candidate in materials science and engineering at MIT.

“Architecture is both a creative and technical field, where you try to optimize features you want for certain kinds of functionality, like the size of a building, or the layout of different rooms in a home,” she says. Andrejević’s work in machine learning resembles that of architects, she believes: “We start from an empty site — a mathematical model that has random parameters — and our goal is to train this model, called a neural network, to have the functionality we desire.”

Andrejević is a doctoral advisee of Mingda Li, an assistant professor in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering. As a research assistant in Li’s Quantum Measurement Group, she is training her machine-learning models to hunt for new and useful traits in materials. Her work with the lab has landed in such major journals as Nature Communications, Advanced Science, Physical Review Letters, and Nano Letters.

One area of special interest to her group is that of topological materials. “These materials are an exotic phase of matter that can transport electrons on the surface without energy loss,” she says. “This makes them highly interesting for making more energy-efficient technologies.”

With her sister Jovana, a doctoral candidate in applied physics at Harvard University (US), Andrejević has developed a method for testing material samples to predict the presence of topological characteristics that is faster and more versatile than other methods.

If the ultimate goal is “producing better-performing, energy-saving technologies,” she says, “we must first know which materials make good candidates for these applications, and that’s something our research can help confirm.”

Teaming up

The seeds for this research were planted more than a year ago. “My sister and I always said it would be cool to do a project together, and when Mingda suggested this study of topological materials, it occurred to me that we could make this a formal collaboration,” says Andrejević. The sisters are more similar than most twins, she notes, sharing many academic interests. “Being a twin is a huge part of my life and we work together well, helping each other in areas we don’t understand.”

Andrejević’s dissertation work, which encompasses several projects, uses specialized spectroscopic techniques and data analysis, bolstered by machine learning, which can find patterns in vast amounts of data more efficiently than even the most high-throughput computers.

“The unifying thread among all my projects is this idea of trying to accelerate or improve our understanding when applying these characterization tools, and to thereby obtain more useful information than we can with more traditional or approximate models,” she says. The twins’ research on topological materials serves as a case in point.

In order to tease out novel and potentially useful properties of materials researchers must interrogate them at the atomic and quantum scales. Neutron and photon spectroscopic techniques can help capture previously unidentified structures and dynamics, and determine how heat, electric or magnetic fields, and mechanical stress affect materials at the Lilliputian level. The laws governing this realm, where materials do not behave as they might at the macro-scale, are those of quantum mechanics.

Current experimental approaches to identifying topological materials are challenging technically and inexact, potentially excluding viable candidates. The sisters believed they could avoid these pitfalls using a widely applied imaging technique, called X-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS), and paired with a trained neural network. XAS sends focused X-ray beams into matter to help map its geometry and electron structure. The radiation data it provides offers a signature unique to the sampled material.

“We wanted to develop a neural network that could identify topology from a material’s XAS signature, a much more accessible measurement than that of other approaches,” says Andrejević. “This would hopefully allow us to screen a much broader category of potential topological materials.”

Over months, the researchers fed their neural network information from two databases: one contained materials theoretically predicted to be topological, and the other contained X-ray absorption data for a broad range of materials. “When properly trained, the model should serve as tool where it reads new XAS signatures it hasn’t seen before, and tells if you if the material that produced the spectrum is topological,” Andrejević explains.

The research duo’s technique has demonstrated promising results, which they have already published. “For me, the thrill with these machine-learning projects is seeing some underlying patterns and being able to understand those in terms of physical quantities,” says Andrejević.

Moving toward materials studies

It was during her first year at Cornell University (US) that Andrejević first experienced the pleasure of peering at matter on an intimate level. After a course in nanoscience and nanoengineering, she joined a research group imaging materials at the atomic scale. “I feel I’m a very visual person, and this idea of being able to see things that up to that point were just equations or concepts — that was really exciting,” she says. “This experience moved me closer to the field of materials science.”

Machine learning, pivotal to Andrejević’s doctoral work, will be central to her life after MIT. When she graduates this winter, she heads straight for DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory(US), where she has won a prestigious Maria Goeppert Mayer Fellowship, awarded “internationally to outstanding doctoral scientists and engineers who are at early points in promising careers.” “We’ll be trying to design physics-informed neural networks, with a focus on quantum materials,” she says.

This will mean saying goodbye to her sister, from whom she has never been separated for long. “It will be very different,” says Andrejević. But, she adds, “I do hope that Jovana and I will collaborate more in the future, no matter the distance!”

See the full article here .

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USPS “Forever” postage stamps celebrating Innovation at MIT.

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

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

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

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

Foundation and vision

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

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

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

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

Early developments

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

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

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

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

Curricular reforms

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

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

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

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

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

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

Recent history

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

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

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

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

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

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

Caltech /MIT Advanced aLigo

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

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

From Weizmann: “Physics on the edge”

Weizmann Institute of Science

Dr. Binghai Yan

Dr. Binghai Yan is taking topological materials higher.

Creating new materials for everyday life—think bendable electronics, quantum computers, life-saving medical devices and things we haven’t yet dreamed of—requires understanding and creatively brainstorming new possibilities at the atomic level.

This is the essence Dr. Binghai Yan’s research. His field is topological materials, which is fusing theoretical science with practical engineering and taking the physics world by storm. And yes, his name gives away the other special news: he is the first principal investigator from China hired by the Weizmann Institute.

Topological materials and states involve a kind of order very different from conventional bulk materials in that electrons (and their lattices of atoms and molecules) on the surface of a crystal or other material behave differently than those in the material itself. In is the special nature of such topological materials and states that can be leveraged for the creation of new materials. He straddles the world of theory—how such states could work—and experimentation—trying out the materials to synthesize new materials and devices such as quantum computers.

From rural fields to topology

So how did a Chinese physicist who grew up in a remote farming village in Shandong Province in eastern China make his way to the Weizmann Institute?

After completing his BSc at Xi’an Jiatong University in Xi’an in 2003, he earned a PhD in physics at the Tsinghua University in Beijing in 2008. He did postdoctoral research at the University of Bremen in Germany, when the field of topological research was beginning to take off. But it was still a relatively niche subject in which few physicists were working. Thanks to a flexible postdoc grant, the prestigious Humboldt Research Fellowship, which allowed him to spend time at other institutions, he spent eight months at Stanford University learning from a leading expert in the field.

He returned to Germany to become a group leader (the equivalent of a principal investigator) at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Physics and Solids in Dresden. It was then that he began collaborating with Weizmann Institute colleagues—thanks to an introduction by Prof. Ady Stern at a conference in Germany—including Prof. Erez Berg and Dr. Haim Beidenkopf, all from the Department of Condensed Matter Physics. The collaboration was enabled by an ARCHES Award given by Germany’s Minerva Foundation, which stimulates collaborative projects by German and Israeli scientists. He visited the Weizmann Institute for the first time in 2013 to advance this work.

The project and the visit were a “fantastic opportunity,” he says, because his Weizmann collaborators were both theoreticians and experimentalists who were eager to learn about the material he was working on—and Dr. Yan needed feedback from theory to advance his investigations by predicting possible new materials and actualize his ideas in experiments. “I immediately realized that we have lots to do,” he says. “Together, we are able to bridge fundamental physics and experimentation.”

Last year, he received a competing offer from a university in China, but took the Weizmann offer “because of my existing collaborations and potential collaborations, the depth of theory and experiment work here, and the fact that Weizmann is one of the few places that is advancing this field,” he says.

Dr. Yan has already discovered a new class of topological materials: a three-dimensional, layered, metallic insulating material which he grows in the lab. He has done so by way of his expertise in electron charge and spin, and so this research has implications for the new, hot field of “spintronics”. Spintronics differs from traditional electronics in that it leverages the way in which electrons spin—not only their charge—to find better efficiency with data storage and transfer. This, in turn, has relevance for the new age of quantum computing, and he hopes to collaborate with quantum computing pioneers at the Institute.

For his wife, Huanhuan Wang, the decision to make a potentially permanent move to Israel—a country she’d never before visited and about which she had little knowledge—was not as obvious as it was for Dr. Yan. “It took a little bit of convincing my wife to come; if you’ve never been here, all you think is political strife,” says Dr. Yan. “But the reality is different. We are really happy here and it is quickly starting to feel like home.”

The family arrived in February and moved into campus housing. His wife is now pursuing a PhD under the guidance of Prof. Dan Yakir in the Department of Plant and Environmental Sciences. They have two kids, a boy and a girl, who just began learning German, and now are getting used to Hebrew—and they speak Chinese at home.

Dr. Yan is finding opportunities to collaborate with scientists in Germany and China, and has already begun organizing a workshop on topological systems at the Weizmann Institute (together with Dr. Haim Beidenkopf and Dr. Nurit Avraham, also of the Department of Physics of Condensed Matter Physics), to which he has invited leading European and Chinese physicists and other leaders in the field.

“Being in Israel, at Weizmann, is not something that I would have anticipated five or 10 years ago,” he says. “But life—like the materials of the future—holds many mysteries.”

Dr. Yan is supported by the Ruth and Herman Albert Scholars Program for New Scientists.

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The Weizmann Institute of Science 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.