News

A multi-disciplinary team of Pitt researchers has landed a $1.2 million National Science Foundation (NSF) award for new computing resources that will greatly boost the Center for Research Computing’s (CRC) capabilities in speed, power, and scope. Chemistry associate professor Geoffrey Hutchison led the proposal along with associate professors Lillian Chong in chemistry, Inanc Senocak in mechanical engineering and materials science, and David Koes in computational and systems biology. Internal Pitt funding added to the grant creates a total of over $1.5 million for new resources...

Congratulations to Chandralekha Singh, who has been selected as special assistant to the provost for quantum education. 

In her new role, Singh will work to develop undergraduate and graduate programs in quantum science, convening a committee of faculty members from across the University who share interests in quantum science and contribute to our Quantum Science Initiative. 

Cudd said in her announcement that, “The importance of quantum science has emerged as a space that is key to Pitt’s academic and research portfolios...

Susan Fullerton, Ke Xu, and their colleague, Eric Beckman, recently received a $553,482 NSF grant for their project titled “Ion-Locked Polymorphic Electronics for Hardware Security.” 

Hardware and intellectual property piracy costs the U.S. billions of dollars every year. One promising solution to this issue is polymorphic electronics, or circuits that can be reprogrammed on-the-fly, thereby obscuring their true functionality until they are ready to be used. However, current approaches involve . . . 

Looking for a faculty position in quantum science? We’ve got you covered! The University of Pittsburgh is looking for an Assistant Professor of Chemistry, and Carnegie Mellon University has openings for an Assistant Professor of Materials Science and Engineering (Electronic Materials), a faculty position in Experimental Condensed Matter Physics, and a faculty position in Theoretical Condensed Matter Physics. 

A team led by the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory has found a rare quantum material in which electrons move in coordinated ways, essentially “dancing.” Straining the material creates an electronic band structure that sets the stage for exotic, more tightly correlated behavior – akin to tangoing – among Dirac electrons, which are especially mobile electric charge carriers that may someday enable faster transistors. The results are published in the journal Science Advances. . .

As the crowning technological inventions of the first quantum revolution—transistors, lasers, and computers—continue to enrich our lives, newfound excitement surrounds the use of quantum phenomena to create a second quantum revolution. Quantum computers will compute faster than existing classical ones and enable computations that were not previously possible. Quantum sensors will detect one-part-in-a-million variations in Earth’s gravitational field or tiny magnetic fields emanating from the human brain. Quantum communication technologies will send information securely over long distances, protected by fundamental laws of nature. . .

Congratulations to David Pekker and his team for publishing their paper, “Proposal for a continuous wave laser with linewidth well below the standard quantum limit,” in Nature Communications!

The standard quantum limit on coherence of laser light was first obtained by Schawlow and Townes in 1958. Except for a small modification in 1999, which decreased this limit by a factor of two, the Schawlow-Townes limit has stood as the ultimate theoretical bound on laser . . .

Vincent Liu and his international team of researchers recently published a paper in Nature reporting the creation of a stable material that attains long-sought-after quantum properties. This superfluid, a material under extreme conditions where the typical laws of matter break down and friction disappears entirely, was created by shining lasers in a honeycomb pattern and coercing atoms to interact with each other in strange ways. 

The team’s experiment required a great deal of . . . 

Silicone, it’s time to move aside. The future of electronics is approaching, and it is going to need new classes of advanced materials. One of these classes is complex oxide heterostructures, in which extremely thin films are layered on top of one another to produce exciting properties such as superconductivity and magnetism.

One standout heterostructure is lanthanum aluminate and strontium titanate, or LaAlO₃/SrTiO₃, which allows researchers to sketch conductive patterns on the interface with an atomic force microscope when layered. However, until now, LAO/STO has been synthesized . . . 

Jeremy Levy, Hrvoje Petek, and their team recently received a five-year, $7.5 million grant from the Office of Naval Research’s Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) to develop a new type of quantum memory for quantum computers. 

Quantum computers can be built using many different approaches, one of which involves using the spin of electrons to create quantum bits. In turn, these quantum bits can be used to create . . .