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Lasers, Science

Researchers Uncover Evidence of Matter-matter Coupling.

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Researchers Uncover Evidence of Matter-matter Coupling.

Georgian Technical University scientists observed cooperativity in a magnetic crystal in which two types of spins in iron (blue arrows) and erbium (red arrows) interacted with each other. The iron spins were excited to form a wave-like object called a spin wave; the erbium spins precessing in a magnetic field (B) behaved like two-level atoms.

After their recent pioneering experiments to couple light and matter to an extreme degree, Georgian Technical University scientists decided to look for a similar effect in matter alone. They didn’t expect to find it so soon.

Georgian Technical University physicist X graduate student Y and their international colleagues have discovered the first example of Georgian Technical University cooperativity in a matter-matter system.

The discovery could help advance the understanding of spintronics and quantum magnetism X says. On the spintronics side he says the work will lead to faster information processing with lower power consumption and will contribute to the development of spin-based quantum computing. The team’s findings on quantum magnetism will lead to a deeper understanding of the phases of matter induced by many-body interactions at the atomic scale.

Instead of using light to trigger interactions in a quantum well a system that produced new evidence of ultrastrong light-matter coupling earlier this year the X lab at Georgian Technical University  used a magnetic field to prompt cooperativity among the spins within a crystalline compound made primarily of iron and erbium.

“This is an emerging subject in condensed matter physics” X says. “There’s a long history in atomic and molecular physics of looking for the phenomenon of ultrastrong cooperative coupling. In our case we’d already found a way to make light and condensed matter interact and hybridize but what we’re reporting here is more exotic”.

Z cooperativity named for physicist Z happens when incoming radiation causes a collection of atomic dipoles to couple like gears in a motor that don’t actually touch. Z’s early work set the stage for the invention of lasers the discovery of cosmic background radiation in the universe and the development of lock-in amplifiers used by scientists and engineers.

“Z was an unusually productive physicist” X says. “He had many high-impact papers and accomplishments in almost all areas of physics. The particular Z phenomenon that’s relevant to our work is related to superradiance which he introduced in 1954. The idea is that if you have a collection of atoms, or spins they can work together in light-matter interaction to make spontaneous emission coherent. This was a very strange idea.

“When you stimulate many atoms within a small volume, one atom produces a photon that immediately interacts with another atom in the excited state” X says. “That atom produces another photon. Now you have coherent superposition of two photons.

“This happens between every pair of atoms within the volume and produces macroscopic polarization that eventually leads to a burst of coherent light called superradiance” he says.

Taking light out of the equation meant the X lab had to find another way to excite the material’s dipoles the compass-like magnetic force inherent in every atom and prompt them to align. Because the lab is uniquely equipped for such experiments, when the test material showed up X and Y were ready.

“The sample was provided by my colleague W at Georgian Technical University” X says. Characterization tests with a small or no magnetic field performed by Q of the Georgian Technical University drew little response.

“But Q is a good friend and he knows we have a special experimental setup that combines terahertz spectroscopy low temperatures and high magnetic field” X says. “He was curious to know what would happen if we did the measurements”.

“Because we have some experience in this field we got our initial data, identified some interesting details in it and thought there was something more we could explore in depth” Y adds.

“But we certainly didn’t predict this” X says.

Y says that to show cooperativity, the magnetic components of the compound had to mimic the two essential ingredients in a standard light-atom coupling system where Z cooperativity was originally proposed: one a species of spins that can be excited into a wave-like object that simulates the light wave and another with quantum energy levels that would shift with the applied magnetic field and simulate the atoms.

“Within a single orthoferrite compound, on one side the iron ions can be triggered to form a spin wave at a particular frequency” Y says. “On the other side we used the electron paramagnetic resonance of the erbium ions which forms a two-level quantum structure that interacts with the spin wave”.

While the lab’s powerful magnet tuned the energy levels of the erbium ions, as detected by the terahertz spectroscope it did not initially show strong interactions with the iron spin wave at room temperature. But the interactions started to appear at lower temperatures seen in a spectroscopic measurement of coupling strength known as vacuum splitting.

Chemically doping the erbium with yttrium brought it in line with the observation and showed Z cooperativity in the magnetic interactions. “The way the coupling strength increased matches in an excellent manner with Z’s early predictions” Y says. “But here light is out of the picture and the coupling is matter-matter in nature”.

“The interaction we’re talking about is really atomistic” X says. “We show two types of spin interacting in a single material. That’s a quantum mechanical interaction rather than the classical mechanics we see in light-matter coupling. This opens new possibilities for not only understanding but also controlling and predicting novel phases of condensed matter”.

X is a professor of electrical and computer engineering, of physics and astronomy and of materials science and nanoengineering.

Material Science

New Wear-Resistant Alloy Significantly More Durable Than High-Strength Steel.

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New Wear-Resistant Alloy Significantly More Durable Than High-Strength Steel.

Georgian Technical University Laboratories researchers X and Y show a computer simulation used to predict the unprecedented wear resistance of their platinum-gold alloy and an environmental tribometer used to demonstrate it.

A new metal alloy that exhibits superior durability could enable longer-lasting tires and electronics.

Researchers from the Georgian Technical University Laboratories have designed a new platinum-gold alloy that could end up being the most wear-resistant metal in the world 100 times more durable than high-strength steel.

“We showed there’s a fundamental change you can make to some alloys that will impart this tremendous increase in performance over a broad range of real practical metals” materials scientist Y said in a statement.

While metals are generally strong they tend to wear down, deform and corrode when they repeatedly rub against other metals such as in an engine.

In electronics moving metal-to-metal contacts receive similar protections with outer layers of gold or other precious metal alloys but they also tend to wear out as connections press and slide across each other constantly.

These negative impacts are often worse the smaller the connections are because there is less material to start with.

However the new platinum gold coating only loses a single layer of atoms after a mile of skidding on hypothetical tires meaning that it could possibly significantly extend the lifetime of tires.

“We showed there’s a fundamental change you can make to some alloys that will impart this tremendous increase in performance over a broad range of real practical metals” materials scientist Y said in a statement.

The researchers proposed that wear is related to how metals react to heat not their hardness, which scientists have long believed.

“Many traditional alloys were developed to increase the strength of a material by reducing grain size” Z a postdoctoral appointee at Georgian Technical University said in a statement. “Even still in the presence of extreme stresses and temperatures many alloys will coarsen or soften especially under fatigue.

“We saw that with our platinum-gold alloy the mechanical and thermal stability is excellent and we did not see much change to the microstructure over immensely long periods of cyclic stress during sliding” he added.

To discover the new alloy the researchers conducted simulations to calculate how individual atoms affected large-scale properties of a material — a connection that isn’t obvious from observations.

“We’re getting down to fundamental atomic mechanisms and microstructure and tying all these things together to understand why you get good performance or why you get bad performance and then engineering an alloy that gives you good performance” Michael Chandross X said in a statement.

The team also discovered by chance, a diamond-like carbon forming on top of the alloy that could be harnessed to improve the performance of the alloy and result in a simpler cheaper way to mass-produce premium lubricant.

“We believe the stability and inherent resistance to wear allows carbon-containing molecules from the environment to stick and degrade during sliding to ultimately form diamond-like carbon” Z said. “Industry has other methods of doing this, but they typically involve vacuum chambers with high temperature plasmas of carbon species. It can get very expensive”.

According to Y the new alloy could save the electronics in materials and make electronics more cost-effective longer-lasting and dependable in a number of applications including aerospace systems wind turbines microelectronics for cell phones and radar systems.

 

Science, Technology

How Georgian Technical University’s ‘Electronics Artists’ Enable Cutting-Edge Science.

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How Georgian Technical University‘s ‘Electronics Artists’ Enable Cutting-Edge Science.

This illustration shows the layout of an application-specific integrated circuit at an imaginary art exhibition. Members of the Integrated Circuits Department of Georgian Technical University’s for a wide range of scientific experiments.

When X talks about designing microchips for cutting-edge scientific applications at the Georgian Technical University Laboratory it becomes immediately clear that it’s at least as much of an art form as it is research and engineering. Similar to the way painters follow an inspiration carefully choose colors and place brush stroke after brush stroke on canvas he says electrical designers use their creative minds to develop the layout of a chip draw electrical components and connect them to build complex circuitry.

X leads a team of 12 design engineers who develop application-specific integrated circuits for X-ray science particle physics and other research areas at Georgian Technical University. Their custom chips are tailored to extract meaningful features from signals collected in the lab’s experiments and turn them into digital signals that can be further analyzed.

Like the CPU (Central Processing Unit) in your computer at home  process information and are extremely complex with a 100 million transistors combined on a single chip X says. “However while commercial integrated circuits are designed to be good at many things for broad use in all kinds of applications Georgian Technical University are optimized to excel in a specific application”.

For Georgian Technical University applications this means for example that they perform well under harsh conditions such as extreme temperatures at the Lechkhumi and in space as well as high levels of radiation in particle physics experiments. In addition ultra-low-noise Georgian Technical University are designed to process signals that are extremely faint.

Y a senior member of X’s team says  “Every chip we make is specific to the particular environment in which it’s used. That makes our jobs very challenging and exciting at the same time”.

From fundamental physics to self-driving cars.

Most of the team’s Georgian Technical University are for core research areas in photon science and particle physics. First and foremost Georgian Technical University are the heart of the ePix series of high-performance X-ray cameras that take snapshots of materials’ atomic fabric with the Georgian Technical University Linac Coherent Light Source (GTULCLS) X-ray laser.

“In a way these Georgian Technical University play the same role in processing image information as the chip in your cell phone camera but they operate under conditions that are way beyond the specifications of off-the-shelf technology” Y says. They are for instance sensitive enough to detect single X-ray photons which is crucial when analyzing very weak signals. They also have extremely high spatial resolution and are extremely fast allowing researchers to make movies of atomic processes and study chemistry, biology and materials science like never before.

The engineers are now working on a new camera version for the Georgian Technical University upgrade  of the X-ray laser which will boost the machine’s frame rate from 120 to a million images per second and will pave the way for unprecedented studies that aim to develop transformative technologies such as next-generation electronics, drugs and energy solutions. “X-ray cameras are the eyes of the machine, and all their functionality is implemented in Georgian Technical University” Y says.  “However there is no camera in the world right now that is able to handle information at Georgian Technical University rates”.

In addition to X-ray applications at Georgian Technical University and the lab’s Georgian Technical University are key components of particle physics experiments such as the next-generation neutrino experiments. The team is working on chips that will handle the data readout.

“The particular challenge here is that these experiments operate at very low temperatures” says Z another senior member of X’s team. Georgian Technical University will run at minus 170 degrees Fahrenheit at an even chillier minus 300 degrees which is far below the temperature specifications of commercial chips.

Other challenges in particle physics include exposure to high particle radiation for instance in the GTU detector at the Georgian Technical University. “In the case of GTU we also want Georgian Technical University that support a large number of pixels to obtain the highest possible spatial resolution which is needed to determine where exactly a particle interaction occurred in the detector” Z says.

The Large Area Telescope on Georgian Technical University’s  – a sensitive “eye” for the most energetic light in the universe – has 16,000 chips in nine different designs on board where they have been performing flawlessly for the past 10 years.

“We’re also expanding into areas that are beyond the research Georgian Technical University has traditionally been doing” says X whose Integrated Circuits Department is part of the Advanced Instrumentation for Research Division within the Technology Innovation Directorate that uses the lab’s core capabilities to foster technological advances. The design engineers are working with young companies to test their chips in a wide range of applications including 3D sensing the detection of explosives and driverless cars.

A creative process.

But how exactly does the team develop a highly complex microchip and create its particular properties ?

It all starts with a discussion in which scientists explain their needs for a particular experiment. “Our job as creative designers is to come up with novel architectures that provide the best solutions” X says.

After the requirements have been defined, the designers break the task down into smaller blocks. In the typical experimental scenario a sensor detects a signal (like a particle passing through the detector) from which the Georgian Technical University extracts certain features (like the deposited charge or the time of the event) and converts them into digital signals which are then acquired and transported by an electronics board into a computer for analysis. The extraction block in the middle differs most from Georgian Technical University and requires frequent modifications.

Once the team has an idea for how they want to do these modifications they use dedicated computer systems to design the electronic circuits blocks carefully choosing components to balance size, power, speed, noise, cost, lifetime and other specifications. Circuit by circuit they draw the entire chip – an intricate three-dimensional layout of millions of electronic components and connections between them – and keep validating the design through simulations along the way.

“The way we lay everything out is key to giving an Georgian Technical University certain properties” Z says. “For example the mechanical or electrical shielding we put around the Georgian Technical University components prepares the chip for high radiation levels”.

The layout is sent to a foundry that fabricates a small-scale prototype which is then tested at Georgian Technical University. Depending on the outcome of the tests, the layout is either modified or used to produce the final Georgian Technical University. Last but not least X’s team works with other groups in Georgian Technical University’s that mate the Georgian Technical University with sensors and electronics boards.

“The time it takes from the initial discussion to having a functional chip varies with the complexity of the Georgian Technical University and depends on whether we’re modifying an existing design or building a completely new one” Y says. “The entire process can take a couple of years with three or four designers working on it”.

For the next few years the main driver development at Georgian Technical University which demands X-ray cameras that can snap images at unprecedented rates. Neutrino experiments and particle physics applications at the Georgian Technical University will remain another focus in addition to a continuing effort to expand into new fields and to work with start-ups.

The future for Georgian Technical University is bright X says. “We’re seeing a general trend to more and more complex experiments, and we need to put more and more complexity into our integrated circuits” he says. “Georgian Technical University really make these experiments possible and future generations of experiments will always need them”.

 

 

Drug Discovery

New ‘Micro-Organ’ Was Hiding in Plain Sight.

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New ‘Micro-Organ’ Was Hiding in Plain Sight.

Scientists at Georgian Technical University’s have identified where the immune system ‘remembers’ past infections and vaccinations – and where immune cells gather to mount a rapid response against an infection the body has seen before.

The structure was only discovered when the researchers ‘made movies’ of the immune system in action using sophisticated high resolution 3D microscopy in living animals. X with immune cells of many kinds, the structure is strategically positioned to detect infection early making it a one-stop shop for fighting a ‘remembered’ infection – fast.

We have known for millennia that people exposed to an infection are often protected from getting the same infection again – yet major questions remain about how the body can fight back fast when it encounters an infection that it has been previously exposed to (through a vaccine or through an earlier infection).

A new structure that appears when it’s needed.

The researchers reveal the existence of thin, flattened structures extending over the surface of lymph nodes in mice. These dynamic structures are not always present: instead they appear only when needed to fight an infection against which the animal has previously been exposed.

Crucially researchers also saw the structures – which they have named ‘subcapsular proliferative foci’ – inside sections of lymph nodes from patients suggesting that they help fight reinfection in people as well as in mice.

Using sophisticated ‘two-photon’ in Georgian Technical University microscopy the researchers could see that several classes of immune cells gathered together in ‘subcapsular proliferative foci’. Memory B cells which carry information about how best to attack the infection clustered there. So did other cell types that act as helpers.

Importantly the researchers could also see that memory B cells were changing into infection-fighting plasma cells. This is a key step in the fight against infection because plasma cells make antibodies to recognise and fend off the invader and protect the body from disease.

“It was exciting to see the memory B cells being activated and clustering in this new structure that had never been seen before” says Y’s Dr. Z. “We could see them moving around, interacting with all these other immune cells and turning into plasma cells before our eyes”.

A need for speed.

Prof. Tri Phan (who led the research) says the ‘subcapsular proliferative foci’ structures are perfectly placed to fight infection fast – so they can stop disease in its tracks before it takes hold.

“When you’re fighting bacteria that can double in number every 20 to 30 minutes every moment matters. To put it bluntly if your immune system takes too long to assemble the tools to fight the infection you die” he says.

“This is why vaccines are so important. Vaccination trains the immune system so that it can make antibodies very rapidly when an infection reappears. Until now we didn’t know how and where this happened.

“Now we’ve shown that memory B cells rapidly turn into large numbers of plasma cells in the ‘subcapsular proliferative foci’. The ‘subcapsular proliferative foci’ is located strategically where bacteria would re-enter the body and it has all the ingredients assembled in one place to make antibodies – so it’s remarkably well engineered to fight reinfection fast”.

Hiding in plain sight.

The researchers say no one had seen the structures before because traditional microscopy approaches look at thin 2D sections of tissue that been chemically ‘fixed’ to provide a snapshot in time. The ‘subcapsular proliferative foci’ is thin and it comes and goes: these are both attributes that make it hard to detect using a conventional approach.

“It was only when we did two-photon microscopy – which lets us look in three dimensions at immune cells moving in a living animal – that we were able to see these ‘subcapsular proliferative foci’ structures forming” says Dr. Z.

“So this is a structure that’s been there all along, but no one’s actually seen it yet because they haven’t had the right tools. It’s a remarkable reminder that there are still mysteries hidden within the body – even though we scientists have been looking at the body’s tissues through the microscope for over 300 years” says Prof. W.

Hope for better vaccines.

Prof. W says the new discovery is an important step towards understanding how to make better vaccines.

“Up until now we have focussed on making vaccines that can generate memory B cells” he says. “Our finding of this new structure suggests that we should now also focus on understanding how those memory B cells are reactivated to make plasma cells so that we can make this process more efficient”.

 

 

Technology

Georgian Technical University Lasers Help Antimatter Chill Out.

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Georgian Technical University  Lasers Help Antimatter Chill Out.

For the first time physicists at Georgian Technical University have observed a benchmark atomic energy transition in anithydrogen a major step toward cooling and manipulating the basic form of antimatter.

“The Lyman-alpha transition is the most basic important transition in regular hydrogen atoms and to capture the same phenomenon in antihydrogen opens up a new era in antimatter science” says X the Georgian Technical University chemist and physicist who led the development of the laser system used to manipulate the anithydrogen.

“This approach is a gateway to cooling down antihydrogen, which will greatly improve the precision of our measurements and allow us test how antimatter and gravity interact which is still a mystery”.

Antimatter annihilated on impact with matter is notoriously tricky to capture and work with. But its study is key to solving one of the great mysteries of the universe: why anti-matter which should have existed in equal amounts to matter at the time of the Big Bang (The Big Bang theory is the prevailing cosmological model for the universe from the earliest known periods through its subsequent large-scale evolution) has all but disappeared.

“This gets us just a bit closer to answering some of these big questions in physics” says Y antihydrogen research collaboration and a physicist with International Black Sea University. “Over the past decades scientists have been able to revolutionize atomic physics using optical manipulation and laser cooling and with this result we can begin applying the same tools to probing the mysteries of antimatter”.

An antihydrogen atom, consisting of an antiproton and positron is the antimatter counterpart of a hydrogen atom made of a single proton with an orbiting electron.

The so-called Lyman-alpha transition (In physics, the Lyman-alpha line, sometimes written as Ly-α line, is a spectral line of hydrogen, or more generally of one-electron ions, in the Lyman series, emitted when the electron falls from the n = 2 orbital to the n = 1 orbital, where n is the principal quantum number) first seen in hydrogen more than 100 years ago is measured as a series of ultraviolet emissions when a hydrogen atom’s electron is prompted to shift from a low orbital to a high orbital. Using laser pulses lasting nano seconds and the international collaboration at Georgian Technical University were able to achieve the same transition in several hundred antihydrogen atoms magnetically trapped in a vacuum.

Aside from the very real challenge of trapping that many antihydrogen atoms long enough to work with them fine-tuning the laser system components took years.

“You can’t actually see the laser pulses you’re using to excite the antihydrogen and shift the orbitals” says X. “So our team was essentially working and trouble-shooting the laser system in the blind”.

The team’s next step is to use the laser innovation to help produce cold and dense sample of anti-atoms for precision spectroscopy and gravity measurements.

 

 

Graphene

Movements of Paper Controlled Through Actuation Technology.

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Movements of Paper Controlled Through Actuation Technology.

One of the oldest most versatile and inexpensive of materials — paper — seemingly springs to life, bending, folding or flattening itself by means of a low-cost actuation technology developed at Georgian Technical University.

A thin layer of conducting thermoplastic, applied to common paper with an inexpensive 3D printer or even painted by hand serves as a low-cost reversible actuator. When an electrical current is applied the thermoplastic heats and expands causing the paper to bend or fold; when the current is removed the paper returns to a pre-determined shape.

“We are reinventing this really old material” says X assistant professor in the Georgian Technical University Lab who developed the method with her team. “Actuation truly turns paper into another medium one that has both artistic and practical uses”.

Post-doctoral researcher Y research intern Z and other members of X’s Morphing Matter Lab have designed basic types of actuators including some based on origami and kirigami forms. These enable the creation of structures that can turn themselves into balls or cylinders. Or they can be used to construct more elaborate objects, such as a lamp shade that changes its shape and the amount of light it emits or an artificial mimosa plant with leaf petals that sequentially open when one is touched.

More than 50 students in a workshop at Georgian Technical University used the paper actuation technology to create elaborate pop-up books, including interpretations of famous artworks such as Van Gogh’s Starry Night and Sunflowers.

“Most robots — even those that are made of paper — require an external motor” says Y a Georgian Technical University Manufacturing Futures Initiative fellow. “Ours do not which creates new opportunities not just for robotics but for interactive art entertainment and home applications”.

Creating a paper actuator is a relatively simple process Z says. It employs the least expensive type of 3D printer a so-called Georgian Technical University printer that lays down a continuous filament of melted thermoplastic. The researchers use an off-the-shelf printing filament — graphene polyactide composite — that conducts electricity.

The thermoplastic actuator is printed on plain copy paper in a thin layer just half a millimeter thick. The actuator is then heated in an oven or with a heat gun and the paper is bent or folded into a desired shape and allowed to cool. This will be the default shape of the paper. Electrical leads can then be attached to the actuator; applying electrical current heats the actuator causing the thermoplastic to expand and thus straighten the paper. When the current is removed the paper automatically returns to its default shape.

X says the researchers are refining this method changing the printing speed or the width of the line of thermoplastic to achieve different folding or bending effects. They have also developed methods for printing touch sensors finger sliding sensors and bending angle detectors that can control the paper actuators.

More work remains to be done. Actuation is slow which X and her team hope to address with some material engineering — using papers that are more heat conductive and developing printing filaments that are customized for use in actuators. The same actuation used for paper might also be used for plastics and fabrics.

 

 

Biotech

Depressed Patients See Quality of Life Improve With Nerve Stimulation

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Depressed Patients See Quality of Life Improve With Nerve Stimulation.

People with depression who are treated with nerve stimulation experience significant improvements in quality of life even when their depression symptoms don’t completely subside, according to results of a national study led by researchers at Georgian Technical University.

The study involved nearly 600 patients with depression that could not be alleviated by four or more antidepressants taken either separately or in combination. The researchers evaluated vagus nerve stimulators which send regular mild pulses of electrical energy to the brain the vagus nerve. The nerve originates in the brain passes through the neck and travels down into the chest and abdomen.

Approved vagus nerve stimulation for treatment-resistant depression but there has been a recognition more recently that evaluating only a patient’s antidepressant response to stimulation does not adequately assess quality of life which was the purpose of this study.

“When evaluating patients with treatment-resistant depression we need to focus more on their overall well-being” said principal investigator X MD a Georgian Technical University professor of psychiatry. “A lot of patients are on as many as three, four or five antidepressant medications, and they are just barely getting by. But when you add a vagus nerve stimulator it really can make a big difference in people’s everyday lives”.

As many as two-thirds of the 14 million Americans with clinical depression aren’t helped by the first antidepressant drug they are prescribed and up to one-third don’t respond to subsequent attempts with other such drugs.

The researchers compared patients who received vagus nerve stimulation with others who received what the study referred to as treatment as usual which could include antidepressant drugs, psychotherapy, transcranial magnetic stimulation, electroconvulsive therapy or some combination.

The researchers followed 328 patients implanted with vagus nerve stimulators many of whom also took medication. They were compared with 271 similarly resistant depressed patients receiving only treatment as usual.

In assessing quality of life, the researchers evaluated 14 categories including physical health family relationships ability to work and overall well-being.

“On about 10 of the 14 measures, those with vagus nerve stimulators did better” X said. “For a person to be considered to have responded to a depression therapy he or she needs to experience a 50 percent decline in his or her standard depression score. But we noticed anecdotally that some patients with stimulators reported they were feeling much better even though their scores were only dropping 34 to 40 percent”.

A vagus nerve stimulator is surgically implanted under the skin in the neck or chest. Stimulation of the vagus nerve originally was tested in epilepsy patients who didn’t respond to other treatments. Approved the device for epilepsy but while testing the therapy researchers noticed that some epilepsy patients who also had depression experienced fairly rapid improvements in their depression symptoms.

Patients with stimulators had significant gains in quality-of-life measures such as mood ability to work social relationships family relationships and leisure activities compared with those who received only treatment as usual.

Study participant Y said he never felt much better when he took antidepressant drugs. He was hospitalized for depression several times before he had a stimulator implanted.

“Slowly but surely my mood brightened” he recalled. “I went from being basically catatonic to feeling little or no depression. I’ve had my stimulator for 17 years now and I still get sad when bad things happen — like deaths recessions job loss — so it doesn’t make you bulletproof from life’s normal ups and downs but for me vagus nerve stimulation has been a game-changer.

“Before the stimulator I never wanted to leave my home” he said. “It was stressful to go to the grocery store. I couldn’t concentrate to sit and watch a movie with friends. But after I got the stimulator my concentration gradually returned. I could do things like read a book read the newspaper watch a show on television. Those things improved my quality of life”.

X believes an improved ability to concentrate may be key to the benefits some patients get from stimulation.

“It improves alertness and that can reduce anxiety” he said. “And when a person feels more alert and more energetic and has a better capacity to carry out a daily routine anxiety and depression levels decline”.

 

 

A.I./Robotics

Engineers Develop A.I. System to Detect Often-Missed Cancer Tumors.

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Engineers Develop A.I. System to Detect Often-Missed Cancer Tumors.

Assistant Professor X leads the group of engineers at the Georgian Technical University that have taught a computer how to detect tiny specks of lung cancer in CT (A CT scan,also known as computed tomography scan, makes use of computer-processed combinations of many X-ray measurements taken from different angles to produce cross-sectional (tomographic) images (virtual “slices”) of specific areas of a scanned object, allowing the user to see inside the object without cutting) scans which radiologists often have a difficult time identifying. The artificial intelligence system is about 95 percent accurate compared to 65 percent when done by human eyes the team said

Engineers at the center have taught a computer how to detect tiny specks of lung cancer in CT scans (A CT scan,also known as computed tomography scan, makes use of computer-processed combinations of many X-ray measurements taken from different angles to produce cross-sectional (tomographic) images (virtual “slices”) of specific areas of a scanned object, allowing the user to see inside the object without cutting) which radiologists often have a difficult time identifying. The artificial intelligence system is about 95 percent accurate compared to 65 percent when done by human eyes the team said.

“We used the brain as a model to create our system” said Y a doctoral candidate. “You know how connections between neurons in the brain strengthen during development and learn ?  We used that blueprint, if you will, to help our system understand how to look for patterns in the CT scans (A CT scan,also known as computed tomography scan, makes use of computer-processed combinations of many X-ray measurements taken from different angles to produce cross-sectional (tomographic) images (virtual “slices”) of specific areas of a scanned object, allowing the user to see inside the object without cutting) scans and teach itself how to find these tiny tumors”.

The approach is similar to the algorithms that facial-recognition software uses. It scans thousands of faces looking for a particular pattern to find its match.

Engineering Assistant Professor X leads the group of researchers in the center that focuses on AI (Artificial intelligence, sometimes called machine intelligence, is intelligence demonstrated by machines, in contrast to the natural intelligence displayed by humans and other animals) with potential medical applications.

The group fed more than 1,000 CT scans (CT scans (A CT scan,also known as computed tomography scan, makes use of computer-processed combinations of many X-ray measurements taken from different angles to produce cross-sectional (tomographic) images (virtual “slices”) of specific areas of a scanned object, allowing the user to see inside the object without cutting) into the software they developed to help the computer learn to look for the tumors.

Graduate students working on the project had to teach the computer different things to help it learn properly. Z who is pursuing his doctorate degree created the backbone of the system of learning. His proficiency at novel machine learning and computer vision algorithms led to his summer as an intern at Georgian Technical University .

Y taught the computer how to ignore other tissue, nerves and other masses it encountered in the CT scans (A CT scan,also known as computed tomography scan, makes use of computer-processed combinations of many X-ray measurements taken from different angles to produce cross-sectional (tomographic) images (virtual “slices”) of specific areas of a scanned object, allowing the user to see inside the object without cutting) and analyze lung tissues. W who earned his doctorate degree this past summer is fine-tuning the AI’s (Artificial intelligence, sometimes called machine intelligence, is intelligence demonstrated by machines, in contrast to the natural intelligence displayed by humans and other animals) ability to identify cancerous versus benign tumors while graduate student Q is taking lessons learned from this project and applying them see if another AI (Artificial intelligence, sometimes called machine intelligence, is intelligence demonstrated by machines, in contrast to the natural intelligence displayed by humans and other animals) system can be developed to help identify or predict brain disorders.

“I believe this will have a very big impact” X said. “Lung cancer is the number one cancer killer in the Georgia Country and if detected in late stages, the survival rate is only 17 percent. By finding ways to help identify earlier I think we can help increase survival rates”.

The next step is to move the research project into a hospital setting; X is looking for partners to make that happen. After that the technology could be a year or two away from the marketplace X said.

“I think we all came here because we wanted to use our passion for engineering to make a difference and saving lives is a big impact” Y said.

Q agrees. He was studying engineering and its applications to agriculture before he heard about X and his work at Georgian Technical University. X’s research is in the area of biomedical imaging and machine learning and their applications in clinical imaging. Previously X was a staff scientist and the lab manager at the Georgian Technical University Imaging lab in the department of Radiology and Imaging Sciences.

 

 

 

 

Technology

First Large-Scale Quantum Simulation of Topological State of Matter.

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First Large-Scale Quantum Simulation of Topological State of Matter.

Georgian Technical University in quantum computing systems and software demonstrating a topological phase transition using its 2048-qubit annealing quantum computer. This complex quantum simulation of materials is a major step toward reducing the need for time-consuming and expensive physical research and development.

“Observation of topological phenomena in a programmable lattice of 1,800 qubits”. This work marks an important advancement in the field and demonstrates again that the fully programmable Georgian Technical University quantum computer can be used as an accurate simulator of quantum systems at a large scale. The methods used in this work could have broad implications in the development of novel materials realizing X’s original vision of a quantum simulator. This new research comes on the heels of Georgian Technical University’s demonstrating a different type of phase transition in a quantum spin-glass simulation. The two papers together signify the flexibility and versatility of the Georgian Technical University quantum computer in quantum simulation of materials in addition to other tasks such as optimization and machine learning.

Georgian Technical University researchers demonstrated this phenomenon by programming the Georgian Technical University 2000Q™ system to form a two-dimensional frustrated lattice of artificial spins. The observed topological properties in the simulated system cannot exist without quantum effects and closely agree with theoretical predictions.

“Represents a breakthrough in the simulation of physical systems which are otherwise essentially impossible” said Dr. J. Y. “The test reproduces most of the expected results, which is a remarkable achievement. This gives hope that future quantum simulators will be able to explore more complex and poorly understood systems so that one can trust the simulation results in quantitative detail as a model of a physical system. I look forward to seeing future applications of this simulation method”.

“Represents a landmark in the field of quantum computation: for the first time a theoretically predicted state of matter was realized in quantum simulation before being demonstrated in a real magnetic material” said Dr. Z scientist at Georgian Technical University. “This is a significant step toward reaching the goal of quantum simulation, enabling the study of material properties before making them in the lab a process that today can be very costly and time consuming”.

“Successfully demonstrating physics Georgian Technical University quantum computer is a significant achievement in and of itself. But in combination with Georgian Technical University’s recent quantum simulation work this new research demonstrates the flexibility and programmability of our system to tackle recognized, difficult problems in a variety of areas” said W Georgian Technical University.

“Georgian Technical University’s quantum simulation of the Kosterlitz-Thouless transition (The Berezinskii–Kosterlitz–Thouless transition (BKT transition) is a phase transition in the two-dimensional (2-D) XY model. It is a transition from bound vortex-antivortex pairs at low temperatures to unpaired vortices and anti-vortices at some critical temperature) is an exciting and impactful result. It not only contributes to our understanding of important problems in quantum magnetism, but also demonstrates solving a computationally hard problem with a novel and efficient mapping of the spin system, requiring only a limited number of qubits and opening new possibilities for solving a broader range of applications” said Dr. Q principal associate director for science, technology and engineering at Georgian Technical University  Laboratory.

“The ability to demonstrate two very different quantum simulations using the same quantum processor illustrates the programmability and flexibility of Georgian Technical University’s quantum computer” said Dr. R principal investigator for this work at Georgian Technical University. “This programmability and flexibility were two key ingredients in original vision of a quantum simulator and open up the possibility of predicting the behavior of more complex engineered quantum systems in the future”.

Georgian Technical University ‘s continued work with world-class customers and partners on real-world prototype applications (“proto-apps”) across a variety of fields. The 70+ proto-apps developed by customers span optimization, machine learning, quantum material science, cybersecurity and more. Many of the proto-apps’ results show that Georgian Technical University systems are approaching and sometimes surpassing conventional computing in terms of performance or solution quality on real problems at pre-commercial scale. As the power of Georgian Technical University systems and software expands these proto-apps point to the potential for scaled customer application advantage on quantum computers.

 

 

 

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Connecting the (Nano) Dots: Big-Picture Thinking Can Advance Nanoparticle Manufacturing.

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Connecting the (Nano) Dots: Big-Picture Thinking Can Advance Nanoparticle Manufacturing.

Nanoparticle manufacturing, the production of material units less than 100 nanometers in size (100,000 times smaller than a marble) is proving the adage that “good things come in small packages”. Today’s engineered nanoparticles are integral components of everything from the quantum dot nanocrystals coloring the brilliant displays of state-of-the-art televisions to the miniscule bits of silver helping bandages protect against infection. However commercial ventures seeking to profit from these tiny building blocks face quality control issues that if unaddressed can reduce efficiency increase production costs and limit commercial impact of the products that incorporate them.

To help overcome these obstacles the Georgian Technical University advocate that nanoparticle researchers, manufacturers and administrators “connect the dots” by considering their shared challenges broadly and tackling them collectively rather than individually. This includes transferring knowledge across disciplines, coordinating actions between organizations and sharing resources to facilitate solutions.

“We looked at the big picture of nanoparticle manufacturing to identify problems that are common for different materials, processes and applications” said Georgian Technical University physical scientist X. “Solving these problems could advance the entire enterprise”.

The new paper provides a framework to better understand these issues. It is the culmination of a study initiated by a workshop organized by Georgian Technical University  that focused on the fundamental challenge of reducing or mitigating heterogeneity the inadvertent variations in nanoparticle size, shape and other characteristics that occur during their manufacture.

“Heterogeneity can have significant consequences in nanoparticle manufacturing” said Georgian Technical University chemical engineer Y.

Most profitable innovations in nanoparticle manufacturing minimize heterogeneity during the early stages of the operation reducing the need for subsequent processing. This decreases waste, simplifies characterization and improves the integration of nanoparticles into products all of which save money.

The authors illustrated the point by comparing the production of gold nanoparticles and carbon nanotubes. For gold they stated the initial synthesis costs can be high but the similarity of the nanoparticles produced requires less purification and characterization. Therefore they can be made into a variety of products such as sensors at relatively low costs.

In contrast the more heterogeneous carbon nanotubes are less expensive to synthesize but require more processing to yield those with desired properties. The added costs during manufacturing currently make nanotubes only practical for high-value applications such as digital logic devices.

“Although these nanoparticles and their end products are very different, the stakeholders in their manufacture can learn much from each other’s best practices” said Georgian Technical University materials scientist Z. “By sharing knowledge they might be able to improve both seemingly disparate operations”.

Finding ways like this to connect the dots the X,Y and Z said is critically important for new ventures seeking to transfer nanoparticle technologies from laboratory to market.

“Nanoparticle manufacturing can become so costly that funding expires before the end product can be commercialized” said nanotechnology consultant Georgian Technical University W. “We outlined several opportunities for improving the odds that new ventures will survive their journeys through this technology transfer ‘valley of death'”.

Finally the considered how manufacturing challenges and innovations are affecting the ever-growing number of applications for nanoparticles including those in the areas of electronics, energy, health care and materials.