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Newswise ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. Postdoctoral researchers who are designated Truman and Hruby fellows experience Sandia National Laboratories differently from their peers.

Appointees to the prestigious fellowships are given the latitude to pursue their own ideas, rather than being trained by fitting into the research plans of more experienced researchers. To give wings to this process, the four annual winners two for each category are 100 percent pre-funded for three years. This enables them, like bishops or knights in chess, to cut across financial barriers, walk into any group and participate in work by others that might help illuminate the research each has chosen to pursue.

The extraordinary appointments are named for former President Harry Truman and former Sandia President Jill Hruby, now the U.S. Department of Energy undersecretary for nuclear security and administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration.

Truman wrote to the president of Bell Labs that he had an opportunity, in managing Sandia in its very earliest days, to perform exceptional service in the national interest. ThePresident Harry S. Truman Fellowship in National Security Science and Engineeringcould be said to assert Sandias intention to continue to fulfill Trumans hope.

TheJill Hruby Fellowship in National Security Science and Engineeringoffers the same pay, benefits and privileges as the Truman. It honors former Sandia President Jill Hruby, the first woman to direct a national laboratory. While all qualified applicants will be considered for this fellowship, and its purpose is to pursue independent research to develop advanced technologies to ensure global peace, another aim is to develop a cadre of women in the engineering and science fields who are interested in technical leadership careers in national security.

The selectees are:

Alicia Magann: The quantum information science toolkit

To help speed the emergence of quantum computers as important research tools, Alicia Magann is working to create a quantum information science toolkit. These modeling and simulation algorithms should enable quantum researchers to hit the ground running with meaningful science as quantum computing hardware improves, she says.

Her focus will extend aspects of her doctoral research at Princeton University to help explore the possibilities of quantum control in the era of quantum computing.

At Sandia, she will be working with Sandias quantum computer science department to develop algorithms for quantum computers that can be used to study the control of molecular systems.

Im most interested in probing how interactions between light and matter can be harnessed towards new science and technology, Magann said. How well can we control the behavior of complicated quantum systems by shining laser light on them? What kinds of interesting dynamics can we create, and what laser resources do we need?

A big problem, she says, is that its so difficult to explore these questions in much detail on conventional computers. But quantum computers would give us a much more natural setting for doing this computational exploration.

Her mentor, Mohan Sarovar, is an ideal mentor because hes knowledgeable about quantum control and quantum computing the two fields Im connecting with my project.

During her doctoral research, Magann was a DOE Computational Science Graduate Fellow and also served as a graduate intern in Sandias extreme-scale data science and analytics department, where she heard by word of mouth about the Truman and Hruby fellowships. She applied for both and was thrilled to be interviewed and thrilled to be awarded the Truman.

Technical journals in which her work has been published include Quantum, Physical Review A, Physical Review Research, PRX Quantum, and IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology. One of her most recent 2021 publications is Digital Quantum Simulation of Molecular Dynamics & Control in Physical Review Research.

Gabriel Shipley: Mitigating instabilities at Sandias Z machine

When people mentioned the idea to Gabe Shipley about applying for a Truman fellowship, he scoffed. He hadnt gone to an Ivy League school. He hadnt studied with Nobel laureates. What he had done, by the time he received his doctorate in electrical engineering from the University of New Mexico in 2021, was work at Sandia for eight years as an undergraduate student intern from 2013 and a graduate student intern since 2015. He wasnt sure that counted.

The candidates for the Truman are rock stars, Shipley told colleague Paul Schmit. When they graduate, theyre offered tenure track positions at universities.

Schmit, himself a former Truman selectee and in this case a walking embodiment of positive reinforcement, advised, Dont sell yourself short.

That was good advice. Shipley needed to keep in mind that as a student, he led 75 shots on Mykonos, a relatively small Sandia pulsed power machine, significantly broadening its use. I was the first person to execute targeted physics experiments on Mykonos, he said. He measured magnetic field production using miniature magnetic field probes and optically diagnosed dielectric breakdown in the target.

He used the results to convince management to let him lead seven shots on Sandias premier Z machine, an expression of confidence rarely bestowed upon a student. I got amazing support from colleagues, he said. These are the best people in the world.

Among them is theoretical physicist Steve Slutz, who theorized that a magnetized target, preheated by a laser beam, would intensify the effect of Zs electrical pulse to produce record numbers of fusion reactions. Shipley has worked to come up with physical solutions that would best embody that theory.

With Sandia physicist Thomas Awe, he developed methods that may allow researchers to scrap external structures called Helmholtz coils to provide magnetic fields and instead create them using only an invented architecture that takes advantage of Zs own electrical current.

His Truman focus investigating the origins and evolution of 3D instabilities in pulsed-power-driven implosions would ameliorate a major problem with Z pinches if what he finds proves useful. Instabilities have been recognized since at least the 1950s as weakening pinch effectiveness. They currently limit the extent of compression and confinement achievable in the fusion fuel. Mitigating their effect would be a major achievement for everyone at Z and a major improvement for every researcher using those facilities.

Shipley has authored articles in the journal Physics of Plasmas and provided invited talks at the Annual Meeting of the APS Division of Plasma Physics and the 9thFundamental Science with Pulsed Power: Research Opportunities and User Meeting. His most recent publication in Physics of Plasmas, Design of Dynamic Screw Pinch Experiments for Magnetized Liner Inertial Fusion, represents another attempt to increase Z machine output.

Sommer Johansen: Wheres the nitrogen?

Sommer Johansen received her doctorate in physical chemistry from the University of California, Davis, where her thesis involved going backward in time to explore the evolution of prebiotic molecules in the form of cyclic nitrogen compounds; her time machine consisted of combining laboratory spectroscopy and computational chemistry to learn how these molecules formed during the earliest stages of our solar system.

Cyclic nitrogen-containing organic molecules are found on meteorites, but we have not directly detected them in space. So how were they formed and why havent we found where that happens? she asked.

That work, funded by a NASA Earth and Space Science Fellowship, formed the basis of publications in The Journal of Physical Chemistry and resulted in the inaugural Lewis E. Snyder Astrochemistry Award at the International Symposium on Molecular Spectroscopy. The work also was the subject of an invited talk she gave at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics Stars & Planets Seminar in 2020.

At Sandia, she intends to come down to Earth, both literally and metaphorically, by experimenting at Sandias Combustion Research Facility in Livermore on projects of her own design.

She hopes to help improve comprehensive chemical kinetics models of the after-effects on Earths planetary ecology of burning bio-derived fuels and the increasingly severe forest fires caused by climate change.

Every time you burn something that was alive, nitrogen-containing species are released, she says. However, the chemical pathways of organic nitrogen-containing species are vastly under-represented in models of combustion and atmospheric chemistry, she says. We need highly accurate models to make accurate predictions. For example, right now it isnt clear how varying concentrations of different nitrogenated compounds within biofuels could affect efficiency and the emission of pollutants, she said.

Johansen will be working with the gas-phase chemical physics department, studying gas-phase nitrogen chemistry at Sandias Livermore site under the mentorship of Lenny Sheps and Judit Zdor. UC Davis is close to Livermore, and the Combustion Research Facility there was always in the back of my mind. I wanted to go there, use the best equipment in the world and work with some our fields smartest people.

She found particularly attractive that the Hruby fellowship not only encouraged winners to work on their own projects but also had a leadership and professional development component to help scientists become well-rounded. Johansen had already budgeted time outside lab work at UC Davis, where for five years she taught or helped assistants teach a workshop for incoming graduate students on the computer program Python. We had 30 people a year participating, until last year (when we went virtual) and had 150.

The program she initiated, she says, became a permanent fixture in my university.

Alex Downs: Long-lived wearable biosensors

As Alex Downs completed her doctorate at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in August 2021, she liked Sandia on LinkedIn. The Hruby postdoc listing happened to show up, she said, and it interested her. She wanted to create wearable biosensors for long duration, real-time molecular measurements of health markers that would be an ongoing measurement of a persons well-being. This would lessen the need to visit doctors offices and labs for evaluations that were not only expensive but might not register the full range of a persons illness.

Her thesis title was Electrochemical Methods for Improving Spatial Resolution, Temporal Resolution, and Signal Accuracy of Aptamer Biosensors.

She thought, Theres a huge opportunity here for freedom to explore my research interests. I can bring my expertise in electrochemistry and device fabrication and develop new skills working with microneedles and possibly other sensing platforms. That expertise is needed because a key problem with wearable biosensors is that in the body, they degrade. To address this, Downs wants to study the stability of different parts of the sensor interface when its exposed to bodily fluids, like blood.

I plan not only to make the sensors longer lasting by improved understanding of how the sensors are impacted by biofouling in media, I will also investigate replacing the monolayers used in the present sensor design with new, more fouling resistant monolayers, she said.

The recognition element for this type of biosensor are aptamers strands of DNA that bind specifically to a given target, such as a small molecule or protein. When you add a reporter to an aptamer sequence and put it down on a conductive surface, you can measure target binding to the sensor as a change in electrochemical signal, she said.

The work fits well with Sandias biological and chemical sensors team, and when Downs came to Sandia in October, she was welcomed with coffee and donuts from her mentor Ronen Polsky, an internationally recognized expert in wearable microneedle sensors. Polsky introduced her to other scientists, told her of related projects and discussed research ideas.

Right now, meeting with people all across the Labs has been helpful, she said. Later, I look forward to learning more about the Laboratory Directed Research and Development review process, going to Washington, D.C. and learning more about how science policy works. But right now, Im mainly focused on setting up a lab to do the initial experiments for developing microneedle aptamer-based sensors, Downs said.

Sandia National Laboratories is a multimission laboratory operated by National Technology and Engineering Solutions of Sandia LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Honeywell International Inc., for the U.S. Department of Energys National Nuclear Security Administration. Sandia Labs has major research and development responsibilities in nuclear deterrence, global security, defense, energy technologies and economic competitiveness, with main facilities in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Livermore, California.

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Truman and Hruby 2022 fellows explore their positions - Newswise

Nothing can escape a black hole. General relativity is very clear on this point. Cross a black holes event horizon, and you are forever lost to the universe. Except thats not entirely true. Its true according to Einsteins theory, but general relativity is a classical model. It doesnt take into account the quantum aspects of nature. For that, youd need a quantum theory of gravity, which we dont have. But we do have some ideas about some of the effects of quantum gravity, and one of the most interesting is Hawking radiation.

One way to study quantum gravity is to look at how quantum objects might behave in curved space. Typically in quantum theory, we assume space is a fixed and flat background. Special relativity still applies, but general relativity doesnt. Basically, we just ignore gravity since its effects are so teeny. This works great for things like atoms in Earths gravity. But quantum mechanics around the event horizon of a black hole is very different.

Hawking wasnt the first to study the quantum effects of black holes, but he did show that event horizons arent immutable. If a quantum object was forever bound by a black hole, we would know with absolute certainty where the object is. But quantum systems are fuzzy, and there is always an uncertainty to their location. We could say the quantum object is probably within the black hole, there is a small chance it isnt. This means that over time objects can quantum tunnel past the event horizon and escape. This causes the black hole to lose a bit of mass, and the less mass a black hole has, the more easily quantum objects can escape.

So black holes can emit faint energy thanks to Hawking radiation. Whats interesting about this is that the effects connect black holes to thermodynamics. Since black holes emit some light, they, therefore, have a temperature. From this simple fact, physicists have developed the theory of black hole thermodynamics, which helps us understand what happens when black holes merge, among other things.

Its brilliant stuff, but the problem is we have never observed Hawking radiation. Most physicists think it does occur, but we cant prove it. And given (theoretically) how faint Hawking radiation is, and how far away even the closest black holes are, we arent likely to detect Hawking radiation in the foreseeable future. So instead, scientists look at analog systems such as water vortices or optical systems that have horizon-like properties.

A recent study in Physical Review Letters looks at optical black hole analogs, and found an interesting effect of Hawking radiation. One way to simulate black holes is to create a constrained packet of light in a non-linear optical material. The material acts as a kind of one-way gate, so photons can enter the packet in only one direction (like the one-way nature of a black hole event horizon). At the other side of the packet, photons can only leave, which is similar to a hypothetical white hole. So the optical system models a black-hole/white-hole pair.

The team used computer simulations to study what would happen when a quantum system passes through the simulated pair. They found that the pair could be used to create a quantum effect known as entanglement. When two particles are created as a quantum pair, they are entangled, which means an interaction with one particle affects the other as well. We think that when particles escape a black hole via Hawking radiation, they do so as entangled pairs. According to this latest work, the simulated black-hole/white-hole pair can be used to change the entanglement of a system passing through it. The system can even be tuned so that the entanglement is strengthened or weakened.

This work supports the idea that Hawking radiation occurs in entangled pairs, but it also shows how entanglement could be tweaked experimentally, which would be very useful to other research, such as information theory and quantum computing. The next step is to actually perform this kind of experiment in the lab. If it works as predicted, we could have a powerful new way to study quantum systems.

Reference: Agullo, Ivan, Anthony J. Brady, and Dimitrios Kranas. Quantum Aspects of Stimulated Hawking Radiation in an Optical Analog White-Black Hole Pair. Physical Review Letters 128.9 (2022): 091301.

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A new way to Confirm Hawking's Idea That Black Holes Give off Radiation - Universe Today

Quantum computers, the next generation of computing machines that promise to solve some of the worlds most pressing problems, have arrivedand Northeastern researchers are hard at work trying to improve these futuristic devices.

They include Devesh Tiwari, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, who recently was awarded a National Science Foundation grant to embark on research to improve the reliability of quantum computers.

Makers of existing quantum computers, which are still largely prototypes, have claimed that their state-of-the-art devices can solve in mere minutes problems that would take traditional supercomputers thousands of years to solve. It is one of the promises of quantum computing, an emerging field which practitioners claim is verging on big transformations.

Even if it may not be apparent right now, quantum computing has already taken off, Tiwari says. When revolutionary technologies take off, it becomes apparent only in hindsight. When we look back, the last couple decades will certainly be marked as a take-off point, when lots of the theoretical promises of quantum computing started to get realized in practice.

But there is a problem. Current quantum machines, known as noisy intermediate-scale quantum-era quantum computers, or NISQ machines, are highly error-prone. As a result, when computational scientists execute their programs on NISQ machines, they receive noisy outputsthat is, inaccurate outputs, Tiwari says.

Seizing on advances in quantum bit technology, or qubits, researchers have been trying to build more powerful quantum computers. To do so, they need new techniques like the sort Tiwari hopes to develop to mitigate the side-effects of high error rates.

The funding for Tiwaris work is part of the federal agencys Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) program, given to early-career faculty who are engaged in scientific leadership, education, or community outreach and whose projects involve innovative research at the frontiers of science and technology.

Tiwaris project proposal, dubbed Qurious, does just that. He and a team of researchers plan to design and develop a robust system-software ecosystem for quantum computers to help quantum programmers make meaningful interpretations of noisy and erroneous runs on quantum computers. As principal investigator of the project, Tiwari will be awarded $560,000 over a five-year period to conduct the research.

The end result, Tiwari says, is to be able to scale the software on larger, more advanced machines as they come along. He is uniquely positioned for the research because of his prior expertise in the dependability of supercomputerspredecessor devices to the emerging quantum systems. Supercomputers are currently being used to solve some of the toughest problems worldwide, like finding novel drug therapies, strengthening cybersecurity, and modeling galaxies.

Quantum computers hold the promise to solve these problems of societal importance much faster, Tiwari says.

Companies such as IBM, Google, IonQ, and Rigetti Computing have built small-scale quantum computers in recent years. Companies that have created quantum machines will have to demonstrate that their devices can achieve quantum advantage, or that the computers can outperform their classical counterparts.

I feel fortunate and humbled that the [National Science Foundation] is supporting these futuristic, high-risk high-reward ideas, Tiwari says, because this project is very forward-looking, very futuristic. Id note that this award truly belongs to all my students for the high quality of science they doI am incredibly lucky to have the privilege of advising great students in my lab; they all are remarkably innovative, creative, and persistent.

For media inquiries, please contact media@northeastern.edu.

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Computer Engineer Has a Plan to Tackle Noisy Quantum ...

Abu Dhabi-based Technology Innovation Institute has opened an impact lab to boost research into materials science, further bolstering the UAE's knowledge economy.

The lab, which is part of the TIIs Advanced Materials Research Centre (AMRC), will offer an ideal test bed for trialling materials, laminates and composites and aims to bring advanced materials to a stage once they are ready to transition from lab to the industry.

Tests are conducted under a range of impact-related environments state-of-the-art equipment will be used to evaluate the behaviours of the materials that help develop breakthrough solutions, TII said.

TII, the applied research arm of Abu Dhabi's Advanced Technology Research Council, is a critical part of the UAE's efforts to diversify its economy from oil and develop a knowledge-based economy.

Ray Johnson, TIIs chief executive, said the centre aims to offer an enabling environment to researchers. Khushnum Bhandari/ The National

It is home to the Middle East's first quantum computer and to teams of researchers developing advanced materials, drones and robots for commercial use. It is also leading research in various fields, such as artificial intelligence, autonomous robotics, quantum computing, cryptography, secure communication, smart devices, advanced materials and space technologies.

We are committed to offering our researchers an enabling environment to work on their collaborative and proprietary research projects and fast-track innovations to the marketplace, Ray Johnson, TIIs chief executive, said.

One of the 10 initial dedicated research centers at TII, AMRC was established to develop applied research on metals and composites.

The new lab is fully compliant with international safety regulations and is equipped with facilities to study and explore new materials to analyse their impact and blast properties, Rafael Santiago, lead researcher on the energy absorption team at AMRC, said.

With such experiments being conducted in the region for the first time, he hoped the lab could provide new solutions to pressing challenges in the real world.

Technology Innovation Institute, Abu Dhabi, revealed its own quantum computer last year. Photo: TII

"We are proud to launch this lab, the outcome of months of planning and hard work, to ensure that it is capable of testing new technologies related to materials impact, as well as new manufacturing processes, Mohamed Al Teneiji, chief researcher at AMRC, said.

The lab is capable of characterising metallic, polymeric, ceramic and composite materials rapidly into prototypes with real-world applications. Its findings intend to prevent space rovers from crashing and create helmets, bumpers, tyres and car batteries that can withstand explosions.

Updated: March 03, 2022, 12:57 PM

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Abu Dhabis Technology Innovation Institute opens new lab to trial materials - The National

Some might view games as merely entertainment but for Prof. Emanuele Dalla Torre at Bar-Ilan University in Israel and his team, playing games is useful for measuring the effectiveness of todays commercial quantum computers.

In a recent study published in Advanced Quantum Technologies, Dalla Torre and two of his students, Meron Sheffer and Daniel Azses, describe how they ran a collaborative, mathematical game on different technologies to evaluate 1) whether the systems demonstrated quantum mechanical properties and 2) how often the machines delivered the correct results. The team then compared the results to those generated by a classical computer.

Of the technologies tested, only the Quantinuum System Model H1-1, Powered by Honeywell, outperformed the classical results. Dalla Torre said classical computers return the correct answer only 87.5 percent of the time. The H1-1 returned the correct answer 97 percent of the time. (The team also tested the game on the now-retired System Model H0, which achieved 85 percent.)

What we see in the H1 is that the probability is not 100 percent, so its not a perfect machine, but it is still significantly above the classical threshold. Its behaving quantum mechanically, Dalla Torre said.

The mathematical game Dalla Torre and his team played requires non-local correlations. In other words, its a collaborative game in which parts of the system cant communicate to solve challenges or score points.

Its a collaborative game based on some mathematical rules, and the players score a point if they can satisfy all of them, said Dalla Torre. The key challenge is that during the game, the players cannot communicate among themselves. If they could communicate, it would be easy but they cant. Think of building something without being able to talk to each other. So, there is a limit to how much you can do. For the machines in this game, this is the classical threshold.

Quantum computers are uniquely suited to solve such problems because they follow quantum mechanical properties, which allow for non-local effects. According to quantum mechanics, something that is in one place can instantaneously affect something else that is in a different place.

What this experiment demonstrates is that there is a non-local effect, meaning that when you measure one of the qubits, you are actually affecting the others instantaneously, Dalla Torre said.

Dalla Torre attributes the performance of the Quantinuum technology to their low level of noise.

All commercial quantum computers operating today experience noise or interference from a variety of sources. Eliminating or suppressing such noise is essential to scaling the technology and achieving fault tolerant systems, a design principle that prevents errors from cascading throughout a system and corrupting circuits.

Noise in this context just means an imperfection its like a typo, Dalla Torre said So, a quantum computer does a computation and sometimes it gives you the wrong answer. The technical term is NISQ, noisy intermediate scale quantum computing. This is the general name of all the devices that we have right now. These are devices that are quantum, but they are not perfect ones. They make some mistakes.

For Dr. Brian Neyenhuis, Commercial Operations Group Leader at Quantinuum, projects such as Dalla Torres are useful benchmarks of early quantum computers and, also help demonstrate and more clearly understand the difference between classical and quantum computation.

After seeing the initial results from the H0 system, he worked with Dalla Torre to run it again on the upgraded H1 system (still only using six qubits).

We knew from a large number of standard benchmarks that the H1 system was a big step forward for us, but it was still nice to see such a clear signal that the improvements that we had made translated directly to better performance on this non-local game, Dr. Neyenhuis said.

Dalla Torre and his students completed the experiment through the Microsoft Azure Quantum platform. Being able to do this kind of work on the cloud is vital for the growth of quantum experimentation, he said. The fact that I was sitting in Israel at Bar-Ilan University and I could connect to the computers and use them using on the internet, thats something amazing.

Dalla Torre and his team would like to expand this sort of research in the future, especially as commercial quantum computers add qubits and reduce noise.

Reference: Playing Quantum Nonlocal Games with Six Noisy Qubits on the Cloud by Meron Sheffer, Daniel Azses and Emanuele G. Dalla Torre, 22 January 2022, Advanced Quantum Technologies.DOI: 10.1002/qute.202100081

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Quantinuum H1 Quantum Computer Beats Classical System at ...