Archived items from In The News section on the Applied Physics home page.

NEWS ARCHIVE

Brent Fultz, Professor of Materials Science and Applied Physics, is the recipient of the 2010 TMS-EMPMD Distinguished Scientist Award of The Minerals, Metals and Materials Society (TMS). The award includes a TMS conference symposium in honor of Professor Fultz that will emphasize the vibrational entropy of materials, and studies of vibrational entropy by inelastic neutron scattering and modern computational methods of materials science. This work was the basis for the award. 10.23.09

Sandra Troian, Professor of Applied Physics, Aeronautics, and Mechanical Engineering, and Dr. Mathias Dietzel have uncovered the physical mechanism by which arrays of nanoscale pillars can be grown on polymer films with very high precision, in potentially limitless patterns. "This is an example of how basic understanding of the principles of physics and mechanics can lead to unexpected discoveries which may have far-reaching, practical implications," said Ares Rosakis, Division Chair and Theodore von Kármán Professor of Aeronautics and Mechanical Engineering at Caltech. "This is the real strength of the EAS division." Read More... 10.23.09

Professor Vahala, Ted and Ginger Jenkins Professor of Information Science and Technology and Professor of Applied Physics; Director, The Lee Center for Advanced Networking along with colleagues at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics have created the first-ever phonon laser--a device that amplifies phonons in much the way that optical lasers amplify photons of light. Read More... 09.01.09

Chiara Daraio, Assistant Professor of Aeronautics and Applied Physics, has been selected to participate in the 2009 Science & Technology in Society (STS) Forum - Future Leaders Initiative. Daraio will join nine other outstanding young scientists from Japan, England, Germany, Chile, Uruguay, Malawi, China and the United States to discuss the impact of their research on societal development. This program of is organized and sponsored by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS). Guruswami Ravichandran, director of the Graduate Aerospace Laboratories and John E. Goode, Jr. Professor of Aeronautics and Mechanical Engineering, said, "I am delighted that Dr. Daraio will be representing GALCIT and Caltech at this internationally renowned, interdisciplinary, and cross-sectoral forum". "Dr. Daraio's selection to participate in this world forum is yet another indication of the importance and far reaching impact of the research conducted by the engineering and applied science faculty", said Professor Ares Rosakis, chair of Caltech's Division of Engineering and Applied Science and Theodore von Kármán Professor of Aeronautics and Mechanical Engineering. 08.04.09

Michael L. Roukes, Professor of Physics, Applied Physics, and Bioengineering; Co-Director, Kavli Nanoscience Institute, and colleague Akshay Naik have created the first nanoscale mass spectrometer. This new technique simplifies and miniaturizes the measurement of the mass of molecules through the use of very tiny nanoelectromechanical system (NEMS) resonators. Askshay Naik explains, "the frequency at which the resonator vibrates is directly proportional to its mass. When a protein lands on the resonator, it causes a decrease in the frequency at which the resonator vibrates and the frequency shift is proportional to the mass of the protein". Professor Roukes points out, "the next generation of instrumentation for the life sciences must enable proteomic analysis with very high throughput. The potential power of our approach is that it is based on semiconductor microelectronics fabrication, which has allowed creation of perhaps mankind's most complex technology." Read more... 07.21.09

Michael Elowitz, Associate Professor of Biology and Applied Physics; Bren Scholar, and Avigdor Eldar, Postdoctoral Scholar, show how evolution can allow for large developmental leaps. Most evolutionary changes happen in tiny increments: an elephant grows a little larger, a giraffe's neck a little longer. Elowitz and Eldar's team have shown that such changes may at least sometimes be the result of noise, working alongside partial penetrance. Eldar, states "if you take a bunch of cells and grow them in exactly the same environment, they'll be identical twin brothers in terms of the genes they have, but they may still show substantial differences in their behavior". Elowitz adds that "noise—these random fluctuations of proteins in the cell—is not just a nuisance in this system; it's a key part of the process that allows genetically identical cells to do very different things." Read more... 07.20.09

Dr. Matt LaHaye, Professor Keith Schwab, Professor Michael Roukes, and colleagues have developed a new tool to search for quantum effects in ordinary objects. Matt LaHaye is a postdoctoral research scientist working with Michael L. Roukes, a Professor of Physics, Applied Physics, and Bioengineering and Codirector of Kavli Nanoscience Institute. "Quantum jumps are, perhaps, the archetypal signature of behavior governed by quantum effects," says Roukes. "To see these requires us to engineer a special kind of interaction between our measurement apparatus and the object being measured. Matt's results establish a practical and really intriguing way to make this happen." Read more... 07.02.09

Oskar Painter, Associate Professor of Applied Physics, has developed a nanoscale device that can be used for force detection, optical communication, and more. The nanoscale device is called a zipper cavity because of the way its dual cantilevers-or nanobeams, as Painter calls them-move together and apart when the device is in use. "If you look at it, it actually looks like a zipper," Painter notes. The device exploits the mechanical properties of light to create an optomechanical cavity in which interactions between light and motion are greatly strengthened and enhanced. These interactions are the largest demonstrated to date. Read more... 07.02.09

Graduate student Michael Winterrose, and Brent Fultz, professor of materials science and applied physics, and colleagues, describe the exotic behavior of materials existing at high pressures in a paper in the June 12th issue of Physical Review Letters. By squeezing a typical metal alloy at pressures hundreds of thousands of times greater than normal atmospheric pressure, the material does not expand when heated, as does nearly every normal metal, and acts like a metal with an entirely different chemical composition. This insight into the behavior of materials existing at high pressures becomes doubly interesting when you consider that some 90 percent of the matter in our solar system exists at these high pressures. Read more... 07.01.09

DOE Names Harry Atwater as Director of EFRC Focusing on Light-Material Interactions. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science has announced that it will fund the creation of 46 Energy Frontier Research Centers (EFRCs) over the next five years, including one that will be housed at Caltech. That $15 million EFRC will be headed by Harry Atwater, the Howard Hughes Professor and professor of applied physics and materials science. Read more... 05.11.09

The NRG 0.1 lecture series, organized by Caltech's Energy Advisory Committee, take place in Baxter Lecture Hall on Fridays from 2-3 p.m.

How a cell achieves the coordinated control of a number of genes at the same time, a process that's necessary for it to regulate its own behavior and development, has long puzzled scientists. Michael Elowitz, assistant professor of biology and applied physics, along with postdoctoral research scholar Long Cai, and graduate student Chiraj Dalal, have discovered a surprising answer. Just as human engineers control devices ranging from dimmer switches to retrorockets using pulsed--or frequency modulated (FM)--signals, cells tune the expression of groups of genes using discrete bursts of activation. Read more...

An explanation for a strange property of night-shining clouds has been proposed by Paul Bellan, Professor of Applied Physics. Noctilucent clouds - thin, wispy electric blue clouds clouds hovering at 85 km altitude - are highly reflective to radar. Ice grains in noctilucent clouds are coated with a thin film of metal, made of sodium and iron. The metal film causes radar waves to reflect off ripples in the cloud in a manner analogous to how x-rays reflect from a crystal lattice. Read more...

Michael Elowitz, Assistant Professor of Biology and Applied Physics and a Bren Scholar, has been named a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) investigator. Elowitz is fundamentally interested in how cells' own genetic circuits dictate what type of cells they become. In work that overturned the steadfast notion that genes and networks of genes operate in a predictable and fixed fashion, he and his colleagues showed that key properties of the cell, like how actively it turns out different proteins, are intrinsically random. To show that randomness is used to more accurately control the shapes and patterns that make organisms work, Elowitz is turning to larger and more complex animal cells. "I'm grateful to HHMI for the amazing opportunity this appointment presents to focus as much as possible on research. The funds will enable us to explore new directions, especially allowing us to expand approaches we've previously developed primarily in bacteria to mammalian cells." Read more...

Chiara Daraio, Professor Aeronautics and Applied Physics, has won the 2008 Richard von Mises Prize. This prize is awarded each year by the International Association of Applied Mathematics and Mechanics (GAMM) to a young scientist for exceptional scientific achievements in the field of Applied Mathematics and Mechanics. The prize was awarded at the opening ceremony of the Annual meeting of GAMM in March, in Bremen, Germany.

The Alliance for Nanosystems VLSI (very-large-scale integration) unites researchers from Caltech's Kavli Nanoscience Institute (KNI) and the Laboratoire d'Electronique et de Technologie de l'Information-Micro- and Nano-Technologies (CEA/LETI-MINATEC) in Grenoble, France, to tackle the problem of creating complex architectures at the nanoscale. Read more...

Congratulations to two new Caltech MacArthur Fellows: Michael Elowitz, Assistant Professor of Biology and Applied Physics, and Paul Rothemond, Senior Research Fellow in Computation and Neural Systems and Computer Science. The MacArthur Foundation supports highly creative individuals and institutions with the ability and the promise to make a difference in shaping and improving our future. Read more...

Clare Boothe Luce Postdoctoral Fellow Andrea Armani, Kerry Vahala, the Jenkins Professor of Information Science, Richard Flagan, McCollum-Corcoran Professor of Chemical Engineering, Scott Fraser, Rosen Professor of Biology, and colleagues have figured out a way to detect single biological molecules with a microscopic optical device. The method has already proven effective for detecting the signaling proteins called cytokines that indicate the function of the immune system, and it could be used in numerous medical applications, such as the extremely early detection of cancer and other diseases. Read more...

In the online journal Science Express, Caltech applied physicists Harry Atwater, Henri Lezec, and Jen Dionne report that they have devised a way to make visible light travel in the opposite direction that it normally bends when passing from one material to another, like from air through water or glass. This could lead to "cloaking devices" that may render an object invisible.

Harry Atwater, Howard Hughes Professor and Professor of Applied Physics and Materials Science, has authored the cover article of Scientific American (April 2007) with his article "The Promise of Plasmonics." He describes the potential of technologies that use electron density waves called plasmons. Among many potential applications, plasmonic circuits could help the designers of computer chips build fast interconnects that could move large amounts of data across a chip. Read more...

Research scientist David Boyd and his colleagues, including David Goodwin, Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Physics, have invented an ingenious new method for depositing tiny amounts of materials on surfaces. The technique, known as plasmon-assisted chemical vapor deposition, will add a powerful new tool to the existing battery of techniques used to construct microdevices. The process is simple to implement and requires only a small laser, about as powerful as a green laser pointer. The ability to write micron-scale or smaller structures directly, without need for lithographic patterning and etching, while also keeping the substrate cool outside the small laser spot, opens up new possibilities for the types of structures that may be easily fabricated. Read more...

NSF has awarded $11.97 million for Distributed Data Analysis for Neutron Scattering Experiments (DANSE) to Caltech. The project is led by Brent Fultz, Professor of Materials Science and Applied Physics, with co-principal investigators Michael A. G. Aivazis and Ian S. Anderson. This work is aimed at designing new materials for a huge variety of applications in transportation, construction, electronics, and space exploration. Read more...

Caltech has teamed up with the energy company BP to look for better and cheaper ways of producing solar cells. The Caltech solar nanorod program will be directed by Nate Lewis, the George L. Argyros Professor and Professor of Chemistry, and Harry Atwater, the Howard Hughes Professor and Professor of Applied Physics and Materials Science. Atwater's group will investigate ways of creating silicon-based single-junction and compound semiconductor-multijunction nanorod solar cells using vapor-deposition synthesis methods that are scalable to very large areas.
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The Howard Hughes Medical Institute has awarded $1.5 million to Caltech for support of interdisciplinary undergraduate science education programs. The funding will be used to pioneer several new programs, including a training program in synthetic biology (the application of engineering design principles to the construction of biological systems), a course- and lab-development assistance program in science and engineering, a series of interdisciplinary undergraduate lab courses, and a precollege outreach program directed at local public schools. The program will be co-directed by Christina Smolke, Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering, and Douglas Rees, Dickinson Professor of Chemistry. EAS faculty who will be involved in these programs include Richard Murray, Everhart Professor of Control and Dynamical Systems, Michael Elowitz, Assistant Professor of Biology and Applied Physics, Erik Winfree, Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Computational and Neural Systems, and Rob Phillips, Professor of Applied Physics and Mechanical Engineering. Read more...

Doctoral student Andrea Armani and Kerry Vahala, Ted and Ginger Jenkins Professor of Information Science and Technology and Professor of Applied Physics, report that an optical microresonator can be configured to detect heavy water. The technique is 30 times more sensitive than any other existing method. The device is shaped like a mushroom and was originally designed three years ago to store light for future opto-electronic applications. With a diameter smaller than that of a human hair, the microresonator is made of silica and is coupled with a tunable laser. The detection method could be helpful in the fight against international nuclear proliferation. Read more...

Chin-Lin Guo has recently joined the Division as Assistant Professor of Bioengineering and Applied Physics. His research interests focus on modeling collective cellular and molecular behavior.

Professor Noel Corngold has been selected to receive the 2006 Arthur Holly Compton Award by the American Nuclear Society. This award was established in 1966 to recognize and encourage outstanding contributions to education in nuclear science and engineering.

Marc Bockrath, Assistant Professor of Applied Physics, has been awarded a Sloan Research Fellowship. Sloan Research Fellowships are designed to stimulate fundamental research by early-career scientists and scholars of outstanding promise. Each fellow is free to use the award to pursue whatever lines of inquiry are of the most compelling interest to him or her. The Fellowship lasts two years and carries a grant of $45,000.

Paul Dimotakis, John K. Northrop Professor of Aeronautics and Professor of Applied Physics, has been appointed the Chief Technologist of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

In a new development that could be useful for future electronic devices, Kerry Vahala, Ted and Ginger Jenkins Professor of Information Science and Technology and Professor of Applied Physics, and colleagues have created a "photon clock" -- a tiny disk that vibrates steadily like a tuning fork while it is pumped with light.

Applied Physics Professor Paul Bellan, his graduate student Gunsu Yun, and postdoctoral scholar Setthivoine You devise plasma experiment that shows how astrophysical jets are formed.

Michael Roukes, professor of physics, applied physics, and bioengineering, and his colleagues have created the first nanodevices capable of weighing individual biological molecules. This technology may lead to new forms of molecular identification that are cheaper and faster than existing methods, as well as revolutionary new instruments for proteomics.

Graduate student Robert Walters and Howard Hughes Professor and Professor of Applied Physics and Materials Science Harry Atwater report in the current Nature Materials on the first light-emitting transistor to be entirely based on silicon. Although bulk silicon is a poor light emitter, when it is in the form of isolated crystals of just a few nanometres in diameter; its ability to emit light improves significantly. By incorporating these nanocrystals into a conventional silicon transistor, and applying an alternating voltage, the transistor can be made to light up. The ability to generate light in an all-silicon device opens a range of new possibilities in the field of optoelectronics. Field effect electroluminescence is a new conceptual approach to carrier injection in nanocrystal-based light emitting devices, and represents a significant advance in the search for an efficient silicon light source, one of the perennial "holy grails" of microphotonics.

75th Birthday of Professor Amnon Yariv, the Martin and Eileen Summerfield Professor of Applied Physics and Electrical Engineering. Symposium on Thursday, April 14, 2005, in the Beckman Institute Auditorium.

Christine Richardson has received an award for the 'Best Early Stage Researcher's Talk' at the 3rd International Conference on Hot-Wire CVD (Cat-CVD).

Suzana Sburlan, has received a Fulbright Fellowship to pursue graduate studies abroad for one year. The Fulbright Program is a renowned international education program sponsored by the United States government to "increase mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries."

Professors Harry Atwater and Paul Dimotakis have each been awarded 5-year MURI grants for research into "novel devices for plasmonic and nanophotonic networks: exploiting x-ray wavelengths at optical frequencies" (Atwater) and "design, performance, and operation of efficient ramjet/scramjet combined-cycle hypersonic propulsion" (Dimotakis). These large-scale multi-university research initiatives are extremely promising because they allow teams from several universities to focus on outstanding problems in revolutionary domains. Atwater's group aims to develop the science of plasmonics to enable new plasmonic materials that combine the optical properties of metals with dielectrics to obtain a wealth of new devices, including high efficiency LED and laser sources, subwavelength-scale waveguides, switches, resonators, components for subwavelength scale imaging and spectroscopy, and nanophotonic circuits combining these components. Dimotakis's group will address several challenges in hypersonic flight, such as non-ideal-gas dynamics and high-enthalpy ground testing, compressible-turbulence mixing and combustion, and inlet and nozzle design. Ground testing of full-scale designs and vehicles at fully duplicated flight conditions, as well as other experiments, will be performed; and an advanced simulation environment for integrated combined-cycle hypersonic vehicles and technology will be developed.

The work of Professor Paul Bellan was highlighted by the American Physical Society in their annual review of physics highlights (see Physics News in 2003). His work in unraveling the long-standing mystery of the formation of spheromaks, self-organizing toroidal plasma configurations, was cited. Spheromaks are promising routes to plasma-based nulcear fusion. Understanding their origin is also important for explaining the behavior of plasma in the solar corona, as well as understanding the physics of jets that issue from black holes, galactic nuclei, and other astrophysical objects.

Deniz Armani (EE), a 4th year graduate student in the Vahala research group just won first prize at the "The Leading Edge Student Symposium" held as part of the 36th Annual Symposium of the Southern California Chapter of the American Vacuum Society. The title of his presentation was "Ultra-High-Q Microcavity On-A-Chip" and described research on the first Ultra-high-Q microresonator on a chip (see Nature, Feb 27, 2003) and related applications. Other student co-authors on the presentation were Sean Spillane (APH), Tobias Kippenberg (APh), Lan Yang (APh), and Andrea Martin (APh). Armani received a $500 prize and will also attend the AVS International meeting in Baltimore.

Professor Rob Phillips is among the first nine recipients of the Pioneer Award from the National Institutes of Health. The Director's Pioneer Award will provide Phillips with $2.5 million in funding for the next five years as part of the NIH's new "Roadmap for Medical Research" program. Phillips, an authority on the nanoscale mechanics of biological systems, says he will use the funding to enter into novel research areas. NIH Director's Pioneer Award is designed to support individual scientists and thinkers with highly innovative ideas and approaches to contemporary challenges in biomedical research.

Professor Demetri Psaltis, along with colleagues Karsten Buse and Christophe Moser (PhD '01) have received the Best Application Award at the Ninth International Conference on Photorefractive Effects, Materials, and Devices for their work on holographic filters. The award is presented annually and recognizes significant advances in photorefractive systems, in particular the novelty of the winning idea and the importance of the practical problem it solves. The recipients will share $2,000 euros.

Harry Atwater and his colleagues have announced their success in creating the world's smallest waveguide, called a plasmon waveguide, for the transport of energy in nanoscale systems. As reported in the cover article of Nature Materials, in essence, they have created a sort of "light pipe" constructed of a chain-array of several dozen microscopic metal slivers that allows light to hop along the chain and circumvent the diffraction limit of light. In addition to their functionality as miniature optical waveguides, these structures are also sensitive to the presence of biomolecules.

Applied physicists demonstrate a micro chip optical resonator with record-high efficiency. Reporting in the February 27, 2003 issue of the journal Nature, Kerry Vahala, Jenkins Professor of Information Science and Technology and professor of applied physics, and graduate students Deniz Armani, Tobias Kippenberg, and Sean Spillane describe an optical microtoroid resonator with a Q factor 10,000X times higher than any previous chip based device. The devices have potential applications as nonlinear sources, biosensors, filters, and in cavity QED.

Professor Michael Roukes and colleagues have achieved a milestone in their burgeoning field by creating a device that vibrates a billion times per second, or at one gigahertz (1 GHz). The accomplishment further increases the likelihood that tiny mechanical devices working at the quantum level can someday supplement electronic devices for new products.

Caltech honors Professor Roy Gould on the occasion of his 75th Birthday.

Noel Corngold, Professor of Applied Physics, has been selected as the 2002 Wigner Award winner. The Reactor Physics Division instituted this award in 1990, to recognize and honor outstanding achievements in the field of nuclear reactor physics.

Professor Kerry Vahala has been named as the first Ted and Ginger Jenkins Professor of Information Science and Technology.

Dr. Scott Hsu, post-doctoral scholar with the Professor Paul Bellan Group in Applied Physics, has just been made a recipient of the 2002 Award for Excellence in Plasma Physics, from the American Physical Society, for his experimental investigation of driven magnetic reconnection in a laboratory plasma, at Princeton University.

Professor K. Vahala, along with graduate students S. Spillane and T. Kippenberg demonstrate compact silica laser.

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last modified 11 November, 2009
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