Seminar

A general scientific overview of the quantum mechanics and how computational quantum chemistry can be used to better engineer chemical reaction and functional materials. 

Driven by the initial curiosity of “spooky action at a distance” referred by Einstein, in the last few decades, many developed ground-breaking technologies for coherent manipulation of quantum systems offers elegant and feasible solutions for satisfying increasing needs of computational power and information security. Over the past three decades, the promises of super-fast quantum computing and secure quantum cryptography have spurred a world-wide interest in quantum information, generating fascinating quantum technologies for coherent manipulation of individual quantum systems. However,...

Robert L. Kleinberg is an Adjunct Senior Research Scholar at the Center on Global Energy Policy of the Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs.  From 1980 to 2018 he was employed by Schlumberger, attaining the rank of Schlumberger Fellow, one of about a dozen who hold this rank in a workforce of 100,000. He has served on or advised numerous government and academic committees on energy policy, and is a coauthor with Harvard faculty of a textbook on energy technology, in preparation. Dr. Kleinberg was educated at the University of California, Berkeley (B.S. Chemistry, 1971) and the University of California, San Diego (Ph.D. Physics, 1978). From 1978 to 1980 he was a post-doctoral fellow at the Exxon Corporate Research Laboratory in Linden, NJ. His work at Schlumberger focused on geophysical measurements and the characterization and delineation of unconventional fossil fuel resources. His current interests include energy technology and economics. Dr. Kleinberg has authored more than 100 academic and professional papers, holds 38 U.S. patents, and is the inventor of several geophysical instruments that have been commercialized on a worldwide basis. He is the recipient of the 2018-2019 American Physical Society Distinguished Lectureship Award on the Applications of Physics, and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering. He is also a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Boston University Institute for Sustainable Energy.

The International System of Units (SI) is the basis for measurements worldwide, and NIST, as the premier National Metrology Institute, has both shaped the development of the SI and led its implementation.  On November 16, 2018 the Member States of the Treaty of the Meter voted to revise the International System of Units (SI), changing the world's definition of the kilogram, the ampere, the kelvin and the mole.   This decision occurred at the 26th meeting of the General Conference on Weights and Measures (CGPM) in Versailles, France, means that all SI units will now be defined in terms of...

Porous electrical conductors are a desirable yet evasive class of materials that would play a key role in the development of novel electrical energy storage devices. Their high surface area and electrical conductivity enable the uptake of electrolyte into their pores, forming the basis for a supercapacitive device. Metal-organic frameworks are an emerging subset of porous materials with fleeting reports of electrical conductivity suitably high for super capacitor implementation. This talk discusses our efforts to understand what gives rise to conductivity in metal-organic frameworks, and...

John David Crawford was an expert in dynamical systems and bifurcation theory, which is the study of systems that are subject to strong driving. This talk will discuss why this area of research is important for quantum computation. In particular, it will be shown how concepts from nonlinear dynamics proved to be critical in the development and improvement of qubits, the fundamental building blocks of quantum computers, using quantum dots in silicon/silicon-germanium heterostructures.

Most of our understanding of the properties of materials comes from the study of thermal equilibrium, which is the state reached if one leaves a system undisturbed for long enough. But for many disordered materials, “long enough” is often years or even centuries. This talk will discuss how insights from the study of nonlinear dynamics, the field to which John David Crawford made many important contributions, have enabled us to understand some striking phenomena that do not occur in thermal equilibrium and are seen in experiments.

The scientific community has been striving for decades to generate biomimetic materials to access many of the beneficial properties seen in Nature. Significant efforts have been devoted to systems that contain a small number of variables and can be mastered without too many unknowns. However, there has been limited success in generating complex systems as seen in Nature. As the systemic complexity increases, the phase diagram becomes less manageable with many possible states and kinetic pathways. Our central hypothesis is that rational design can lead to control over system energy...

Which physical properties of 2D and layered materials can we exploit for powering the next generation of devices that power all of classical information systems?  And which 2D materials are showing promise to enable the future quantum information systems, and why? I will discuss the two questions above. The first question will lead us to the quantum mechanical roots of why current state of the art transistors are slipping away ~1000x more energy than what is needed for logic operations.  And more so than logic, the bottleneck of memory devices threatens to significantly throttle increased...