Tag Archives: Purdue University

Microsoft, D-Wave Systems, quantum computing, and quantum supremacy?

Before diving into some of the latest quantum computing doings, here’s why quantum computing is so highly prized and chased after, from the Quantum supremacy Wikipedia entry, Note: Links have been removed,

In quantum computing, quantum supremacy or quantum advantage is the goal of demonstrating that a programmable quantum computer can solve a problem that no classical computer can solve in any feasible amount of time, irrespective of the usefulness of the problem.[1][2][3] The term was coined by John Preskill in 2011,[1][4] but the concept dates to Yuri Manin’s 1980[5] and Richard Feynman’s 1981[6] proposals of quantum computing.

Quantum supremacy and quantum advantage have been mentioned a few times here over the years. You can check my March 6, 2020 posting for when researchers from the University of California at Santa Barbara claimed quantum supremacy and my July 31, 2023 posting for when D-Wave Systems claimed a quantum advantage on optimization problems. I’d understood quantum supremacy and quantum advantage to be synonymous but according the article in Betakit (keep scrolling down to the D-Wave subhead and then, to ‘A controversy of sorts’ subhead in this posting), that’s not so.

The latest news on the quantum front comes from Microsoft (February 2025) and D-Wave systems (March 2025).

Microsoft claims a new state of matter for breakthroughs in quantum computing

Here’s the February 19, 2025 news announcement from Microsoft’s Chetan Nayak, Technical Fellow and Corporate Vice President of Quantum Hardware, Note: Links have been removed,

Quantum computers promise to transform science and society—but only after they achieve the scale that once seemed distant and elusive, and their reliability is ensured by quantum error correction. Today, we’re announcing rapid advancements on the path to useful quantum computing:

  • Majorana 1: the world’s first Quantum Processing Unit (QPU) powered by a Topological Core, designed to scale to a million qubits on a single chip.
  • A hardware-protected topological qubit: research published today in Nature, along with data shared at the Station Q meeting, demonstrate our ability to harness a new type of material and engineer a radically different type of qubit that is small, fast, and digitally controlled.
  • A device roadmap to reliable quantum computation: our path from single-qubit devices to arrays that enable quantum error correction.
  • Building the world’s first fault-tolerant prototype (FTP) based on topological qubits: Microsoft is on track to build an FTP of a scalable quantum computer—in years, not decades—as part of the final phase of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Underexplored Systems for Utility-Scale Quantum Computing (US2QC) program.

Together, these milestones mark a pivotal moment in quantum computing as we advance from scientific exploration to technological innovation.

Harnessing a new type of material

All of today’s announcements build on our team’s recent breakthrough: the world’s first topoconductor. This revolutionary class of materials enables us to create topological superconductivity, a new state of matter that previously existed only in theory. The advance stems from Microsoft’s innovations in the design and fabrication of gate-defined devices that combine indium arsenide (a semiconductor) and aluminum (a superconductor). When cooled to near absolute zero and tuned with magnetic fields, these devices form topological superconducting nanowires with Majorana Zero Modes (MZMs) at the wires’ ends.

Chris Vallance’s February 19, 2025 article for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) news online website provides a description of Microsoft’s claims and makes note of the competitive quantum research environment,

Microsoft has unveiled a new chip called Majorana 1 that it says will enable the creation of quantum computers able to solve “meaningful, industrial-scale problems in years, not decades”.

It is the latest development in quantum computing – tech which uses principles of particle physics to create a new type of computer able to solve problems ordinary computers cannot.

Creating quantum computers powerful enough to solve important real-world problems is very challenging – and some experts believe them to be decades away.

Microsoft says this timetable can now be sped up because of the “transformative” progress it has made in developing the new chip involving a “topological conductor”, based on a new material it has produced.

The firm believes its topoconductor has the potential to be as revolutionary as the semiconductor was in the history of computing.

But experts have told the BBC more data is needed before the significance of the new research – and its effect on quantum computing – can be fully assessed.

Jensen Huang – boss of the leading chip firm, Nvidia – said in January he believed “very useful” quantum computing would come in 20 years.

Chetan Nayak, a technical fellow of quantum hardware at Microsoft, said he believed the developments would shake up conventional thinking about the future of quantum computers.

“Many people have said that quantum computing, that is to say useful quantum computers, are decades away,” he said. “I think that this brings us into years rather than decades.”

Travis Humble, director of the Quantum Science Center of Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the US, said he agreed Microsoft would now be able to deliver prototypes faster – but warned there remained work to do.

“The long term goals for solving industrial applications on quantum computers will require scaling up these prototypes even further,” he said.

While rivals produced a steady stream of announcements – notably Google’s “Willow” at the end of 2024 – Microsoft seemed to be taking longer.

Pursuing this approach was, in the company’s own words, a “high-risk, high-rewards” strategy, but one it now believes is going to pay off.

If you have the time, do read Vallance’s February 19, 2025 article.

The research paper

Purdue University’s (Indiana, US) February 25, 2025 news release on EurekAlert announces publication of the research, Note: Links have been removed,

Microsoft Quantum published an article in Nature on Feb. 19 [2025] detailing recent advances in the measurement of quantum devices that will be needed to realize a topological quantum computer. Among the authors are Microsoft scientists and engineers who conduct research at Microsoft Quantum Lab West Lafayette, located at Purdue University. In an announcement by Microsoft Quantum, the team describes the operation of a device that is a necessary building block for a topological quantum computer. The published results are an important milestone along the path to construction of quantum computers that are potentially more robust and powerful than existing technologies.

“Our hope for quantum computation is that it will aid chemists, materials scientists and engineers working on the design and manufacturing of new materials that are so important to our daily lives,” said Michael Manfra, scientific director of Microsoft Quantum Lab West Lafayette and the Bill and Dee O’Brien Distinguished Professor of Physics and Astronomy, professor of materials engineering, and professor of electrical and computer engineering at Purdue. “The promise of quantum computation is in accelerating scientific discovery and its translation into useful technology. For example, if quantum computers reduce the time and cost to produce new lifesaving therapeutic drugs, that is real societal impact.” 

The Microsoft Quantum Lab West Lafayette team advanced the complex layered materials that make up the quantum plane of the full device architecture used in the tests. Microsoft scientists working with Manfra are experts in advanced semiconductor growth techniques, including molecular beam epitaxy, that are used to build low-dimensional electron systems that form the basis for quantum bits, or qubits. They built the semiconductor and superconductor layers with atomic layer precision, tailoring the material’s properties to those needed for the device architecture.

Manfra, a member of the Purdue Quantum Science and Engineering Institute, credited the strong relationship between Purdue and Microsoft, built over the course of a decade, with the advances conducted at Microsoft Quantum Lab West Lafayette. In 2017 Purdue deepened its relationship with Microsoft with a multiyear agreement that includes embedding Microsoft employees with Manfra’s research team at Purdue.

“This was a collaborative effort by a very sophisticated team, with a vital contribution from the Microsoft scientists at Purdue,” Manfra said. “It’s a Microsoft team achievement, but it’s also the culmination of a long-standing partnership between Purdue and Microsoft. It wouldn’t have been possible without an environment at Purdue that was conducive to this mode of work — I attempted to blend industrial with academic research to the betterment of both communities. I think that’s a success story.”

Quantum science and engineering at Purdue is a pillar of the Purdue Computes initiative, which is focused on advancing research in computing, physical AI, semiconductors and quantum technologies.

“This research breakthrough in the measurement of the state of quasi particles is a milestone in the development of topological quantum computing, and creates a watershed moment in the semiconductor-superconductor hybrid structure,” Purdue President Mung Chiang said. “Marking also the latest success in the strategic initiative of Purdue Computes, the deep collaboration that Professor Manfra and his team have created with the Microsoft Quantum Lab West Lafayette on the Purdue campus exemplifies the most impactful industry research partnership at any American university today.”

Most approaches to quantum computers rely on local degrees of freedom to encode information. The spin of an electron is a classic example of a qubit. But an individual spin is prone to disturbance — by relatively common things like heat, vibrations or interactions with other quantum particles — which can corrupt quantum information stored in the qubit, necessitating a great deal of effort in detecting and correcting errors. Instead of spin, topological quantum computers store information in a more distributed manner; the qubit state is encoded in the state of many particles acting in concert. Consequently, it is harder to scramble the information as the state of all the particles must be changed to alter the qubit state.

In the Nature paper, the Microsoft team was able to accurately and quickly measure the state of quasi particles that form the basis of the qubit.

“The device is used to measure a basic property of a topological qubit quickly,” Manfra said. “The team is excited to build on these positive results.”

“The team in West Lafayette pushed existing epitaxial technology to a new state-of-the-art for semiconductor-superconductor hybrid structures to ensure a perfect interface between each of the building blocks of the Microsoft hybrid system,” said Sergei Gronin, a Microsoft Quantum Lab scientist.

“The materials quality that is required for quantum computing chips necessitates constant improvements, so that’s one of the biggest challenges,” Gronin said. “First, we had to adjust and improve semiconductor technology to meet a new level that nobody was able to achieve before. But equally important was how to create this hybrid system. To do that, we had to merge a semiconducting part and a superconducting part. And that means you need to perfect the semiconductor and the superconductor and perfect the interface between them.”

While work discussed in the Nature article was performed by Microsoft employees, the exposure to industrial-scale research and development is an outstanding opportunity for Purdue students in Manfra’s academic group as well. John Watson, Geoffrey Gardner and Saeed Fallahi, who are among the coauthors of the paper, earned their doctoral degrees under Manfra and now work for Microsoft Quantum at locations in Redmond, Washington, and Copenhagen, Denmark. Most of Manfra’s former students now work for quantum computing companies, including Microsoft. Tyler Lindemann, who works in the West Lafayette lab and helped to build the hybrid semiconductor-superconductor structures required for the device, is earning a doctoral degree from Purdue under Manfra’s supervision.

“Working in Professor Manfra’s lab in conjunction with my work for Microsoft Quantum has given me a head start in my professional development, and been fruitful for my academic work,” Lindemann said. “At the same time, many of the world-class scientists and engineers at Microsoft Quantum have some background in academia, and being able to draw from their knowledge and experience is an indispensable resource in my graduate studies. From both perspectives, it’s a great opportunity.”

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Interferometric single-shot parity measurement in InAs–Al hybrid devices by Microsoft Azure Quantum, Morteza Aghaee, Alejandro Alcaraz Ramirez, Zulfi Alam, Rizwan Ali, Mariusz Andrzejczuk, Andrey Antipov, Mikhail Astafev, Amin Barzegar, Bela Bauer, Jonathan Becker, Umesh Kumar Bhaskar, Alex Bocharov, Srini Boddapati, David Bohn, Jouri Bommer, Leo Bourdet, Arnaud Bousquet, Samuel Boutin, Lucas Casparis, Benjamin J. Chapman, Sohail Chatoor, Anna Wulff Christensen, Cassandra Chua, Patrick Codd, William Cole, Paul Cooper, Fabiano Corsetti, Ajuan Cui, Paolo Dalpasso, Juan Pablo Dehollain, Gijs de Lange, Michiel de Moor, Andreas Ekefjärd, Tareq El Dandachi, Juan Carlos Estrada Saldaña, Saeed Fallahi, Luca Galletti, Geoff Gardner, Deshan Govender, Flavio Griggio, Ruben Grigoryan, Sebastian Grijalva, Sergei Gronin, Jan Gukelberger, Marzie Hamdast, Firas Hamze, Esben Bork Hansen, Sebastian Heedt, Zahra Heidarnia, Jesús Herranz Zamorano, Samantha Ho, Laurens Holgaard, John Hornibrook, Jinnapat Indrapiromkul, Henrik Ingerslev, Lovro Ivancevic, Thomas Jensen, Jaspreet Jhoja, Jeffrey Jones, Konstantin V. Kalashnikov, Ray Kallaher, Rachpon Kalra, Farhad Karimi, Torsten Karzig, Evelyn King, Maren Elisabeth Kloster, Christina Knapp, Dariusz Kocon, Jonne V. Koski, Pasi Kostamo, Mahesh Kumar, Tom Laeven, Thorvald Larsen, Jason Lee, Kyunghoon Lee, Grant Leum, Kongyi Li, Tyler Lindemann, Matthew Looij, Julie Love, Marijn Lucas, Roman Lutchyn, Morten Hannibal Madsen, Nash Madulid, Albert Malmros, Michael Manfra, Devashish Mantri, Signe Brynold Markussen, Esteban Martinez, Marco Mattila, Robert McNeil, Antonio B. Mei, Ryan V. Mishmash, Gopakumar Mohandas, Christian Mollgaard, Trevor Morgan, George Moussa, Chetan Nayak, Jens Hedegaard Nielsen, Jens Munk Nielsen, William Hvidtfelt Padkar Nielsen, Bas Nijholt, Mike Nystrom, Eoin O’Farrell, Thomas Ohki, Keita Otani, Brian Paquelet Wütz, Sebastian Pauka, Karl Petersson, Luca Petit, Dima Pikulin, Guen Prawiroatmodjo, Frank Preiss, Eduardo Puchol Morejon, Mohana Rajpalke, Craig Ranta, Katrine Rasmussen, David Razmadze, Outi Reentila, David J. Reilly, Yuan Ren, Ken Reneris, Richard Rouse, Ivan Sadovskyy, Lauri Sainiemi, Irene Sanlorenzo, Emma Schmidgall, Cristina Sfiligoj, Mustafeez Bashir Shah, Kevin Simoes, Shilpi Singh, Sarat Sinha, Thomas Soerensen, Patrick Sohr, Tomas Stankevic, Lieuwe Stek, Eric Stuppard, Henri Suominen, Judith Suter, Sam Teicher, Nivetha Thiyagarajah, Raj Tholapi, Mason Thomas, Emily Toomey, Josh Tracy, Michelle Turley, Shivendra Upadhyay, Ivan Urban, Kevin Van Hoogdalem, David J. Van Woerkom, Dmitrii V. Viazmitinov, Dominik Vogel, John Watson, Alex Webster, Joseph Weston, Georg W. Winkler, Di Xu, Chung Kai Yang, Emrah Yucelen, Roland Zeisel, Guoji Zheng & Justin Zilke. Nature 638, 651–655 (2025). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-08445-2 Published online: 19 February 2025 Issue Date: 20 February 2025

This paper is open access. Note: I usually tag all of the authors but not this time.

Controversy over this and previous Microsoft quantum computing claims

Elizabeth Hlavinka’s March 17, 2025 article for Salon.com provides an overview, Note: Links have been removed,

The matter making up the world around us has long-since been organized into three neat categories: solids, liquids and gases. But last month [February 2025], Microsoft announced that it had allegedly discovered another state of matter originally theorized to exist in 1937. 

This new state of matter called the Majorana zero mode is made up of quasiparticles, which act as their own particle and antiparticle. The idea is that the Majorana zero mode could be used to build a quantum computer, which could help scientists answer complex questions that standard computers are not capable of solving, with implications for medicine, cybersecurity and artificial intelligence.

In late February [2025], Sen. Ted Cruz presented Microsoft’s new computer chip at a congressional hearing, saying, “Technologies like this new chip I hold in the palm of my hand, the Majorana 1 quantum chip, are unlocking a new era of computing that will transform industries from health care to energy, solving problems that today’s computers simply cannot.”

However, Microsoft’s announcement, claiming a “breakthrough in quantum computing,” was met with skepticism from some physicists in the field. Proving that this form of quantum computing can work requires first demonstrating the existence of Majorana quasiparticles, measuring what the Majorana particles are doing, and creating something called a topological qubit used to store quantum information.

But some say that not all of the data necessary to prove this has been included in the research paper published in Nature, on which this announcement is based. And due to a fraught history of similar claims from the company being disputed and ultimately rescinded, some are extra wary of the results. [emphasis mine]

It’s not the first time Microsoft has faced backlash from presenting findings in the field. In 2018, the company reported that they had detected the presence of Majorana zero-modes in a research paper, but it was retracted by Nature, the journal that published it after a report from independent experts put their findings under more intense scrutiny.

In the [2018] report, four physicists not involved in the research concluded that it did not appear that Microsoft had intentionally misrepresented the data, but instead seemed to be “caught up in the excitement of the moment [emphasis mine].”

Establishing the existence of these particles is extremely complex in part because disorder in the device can create signals that mimic these quasiparticles when they are not actually there. 

Modern computers in use today are encoded in bits, which can either be in a zero state (no current flowing through them), or a one state (current flowing.) These bits work together to send information and signals that communicate with the computer, powering everything from cell phones to video games.

Companies like Google, IBM and Amazon have invested in designing another form of quantum computer that uses chips built with “qubits,” or quantum bits. Qubits can exist in both zero and one states at the same time due to a phenomenon called superposition. 

However, qubits are subject to external noise from the environment that can affect their performance, said Dr. Paolo Molignini, a researcher in theoretical quantum physics at Stockholm University.

“Because qubits are in a superposition of zero and one, they are very prone to errors and they are very prone to what is called decoherence, which means there could be noise, thermal fluctuations or many things that can collapse the state of the qubits,” Molignini told Salon in a video call. “Then you basically lose all of the information that you were encoding.”

In December [2024], Google said its quantum computer could perform a calculation that a standard computer could complete in 10 septillion years — a period far longer than the age of the universe — in just under five minutes.

However, a general-purpose computer would require billions of qubits, so these approaches are still a far cry from having practical applications, said Dr. Patrick Lee, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology [MIT], who co-authored the report leading to the 2018 Nature paper’s retraction.

Microsoft is taking a different approach to quantum computing by trying to develop  a topological qubit, which has the ability to store information in multiple places at once. Topological qubits exist within the Majorana zero states and are appealing because they can theoretically offer greater protection against environmental noise that destroys information within a quantum system.

Think of it like an arrow, where the arrowhead holds a portion of the information and the arrow tail holds the rest, Lee said. Distributing information across space like this is called topological protection.

“If you are able to put them far apart from each other, then you have a chance of maintaining the identity of the arrow even if it is subject to noise,” Lee told Salon in a phone interview. “The idea is that if the noise affects the head, it doesn’t kill the arrow and if it affects only the tail it doesn’t kill your arrow. It has to affect both sides simultaneously to kill your arrow, and that is very unlikely if you are able to put them apart.”

… Lee believes that even if the data doesn’t entirely prove that topological qubits exist in the Majorana zero-state, it still represents a scientific advancement. But he noted that several important issues need to be solved before it has practical implications. For one, the coherence time of these particles — or how long they can exist without being affected by environmental noise — is still very short, he explained.

“They make a measurement, come back, and the qubit has changed, so you have lost your coherence,” Lee said. “With this very short time, you cannot do anything with it.”

“I just wish they [Microsoft] were a bit more careful with their claims because I fear that if they don’t measure up to what they are saying, there might be a backlash at some point where people say, ‘You promised us all these fancy things and where are they now?’” Molignini said. “That might damage the entire quantum community, not just themselves.”

Iif you have the time, please read Hlavinka’s March 17, 2025 article in its entirety .

D-Wave Quantum Systems claims quantum supremacy over real world problem solution

A March 15, 2025 article by Bob Yirka for phys.org announces the news from D-Wave Quantum Systems. Note: The company, which had its headquarters in Canada (Burnaby, BC) now seems to be a largely US company with its main headquarters in Palo Alto, California and an ancillary or junior (?) headquarters in Canada, Note: A link has been removed,

A team of quantum computer researchers at quantum computer maker D-Wave, working with an international team of physicists and engineers, is claiming that its latest quantum processor has been used to run a quantum simulation faster than could be done with a classical computer.

In their paper published in the journal Science, the group describes how they ran a quantum version of a mathematical approximation regarding how matter behaves when it changes states, such as from a gas to a liquid—in a way that they claim would be nearly impossible to conduct on a traditional computer.

Here’s a March 12, 2025 D-Wave Systems (now D-Wave Quantum Systems) news release touting its real world problem solving quantum supremacy,

New landmark peer-reviewed paper published in Science, “Beyond-Classical Computation in Quantum Simulation,” unequivocally validates D-Wave’s achievement of the world’s first and only demonstration of quantum computational supremacy on a useful, real-world problem

Research shows D-Wave annealing quantum computer performs magnetic materials simulation in minutes that would take nearly one million years and more than the world’s annual electricity consumption to solve using a classical supercomputer built with GPU clusters

D-Wave Advantage2 annealing quantum computer prototype used in supremacy achievement, a testament to the system’s remarkable performance capabilities

PALO ALTO, Calif. – March 12, 2025 – D-Wave Quantum Inc. (NYSE: QBTS) (“D-Wave” or the “Company”), a leader in quantum computing systems, software, and services and the world’s first commercial supplier of quantum computers, today announced a scientific breakthrough published in the esteemed journal Science, confirming that its annealing quantum computer outperformed one of the world’s most powerful classical supercomputers in solving complex magnetic materials simulation problems with relevance to materials discovery. The new landmark peer-reviewed paper, Beyond-Classical Computation in Quantum Simulation,” validates this achievement as the world’s first and only demonstration of quantum computational supremacy on a useful problem.

An international collaboration of scientists led by D-Wave performed simulations of quantum dynamics in programmable spin glasses—computationally hard magnetic materials simulation problems with known applications to business and science—on both D-Wave’s Advantage2TM prototype annealing quantum computer and the Frontier supercomputer at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The work simulated the behavior of a suite of lattice structures and sizes across a variety of evolution times and delivered a multiplicity of important material properties. D-Wave’s quantum computer performed the most complex simulation in minutes and with a level of accuracy that would take nearly one million years using the supercomputer. In addition, it would require more than the world’s annual electricity consumption to solve this problem using the supercomputer, which is built with graphics processing unit (GPU) clusters.

“This is a remarkable day for quantum computing. Our demonstration of quantum computational supremacy on a useful problem is an industry first. All other claims of quantum systems outperforming classical computers have been disputed or involved random number generation of no practical value,” said Dr. Alan Baratz, CEO of D-Wave. “Our achievement shows, without question, that D-Wave’s annealing quantum computers are now capable of solving useful problems beyond the reach of the world’s most powerful supercomputers. We are thrilled that D-Wave customers can use this technology today to realize tangible value from annealing quantum computers.”

Realizing an Industry-First Quantum Computing Milestone
The behavior of materials is governed by the laws of quantum physics. Understanding the quantum nature of magnetic materials is crucial to finding new ways to use them for technological advancement, making materials simulation and discovery a vital area of research for D-Wave and the broader scientific community. Magnetic materials simulations, like those conducted in this work, use computer models to study how tiny particles not visible to the human eye react to external factors. Magnetic materials are widely used in medical imaging, electronics, superconductors, electrical networks, sensors, and motors.

“This research proves that D-Wave’s quantum computers can reliably solve quantum dynamics problems that could lead to discovery of new materials,” said Dr. Andrew King, senior distinguished scientist at D-Wave. “Through D-Wave’s technology, we can create and manipulate programmable quantum matter in ways that were impossible even a few years ago.”

Materials discovery is a computationally complex, energy-intensive and expensive task. Today’s supercomputers and high-performance computing (HPC) centers, which are built with tens of thousands of GPUs, do not always have the computational processing power to conduct complex materials simulations in a timely or energy-efficient manner. For decades, scientists have aspired to build a quantum computer capable of solving complex materials simulation problems beyond the reach of classical computers. D-Wave’s advancements in quantum hardware have made it possible for its annealing quantum computers to process these types of problems for the first time.

“This is a significant milestone made possible through over 25 years of research and hardware development at D-Wave, two years of collaboration across 11 institutions worldwide, and more than 100,000 GPU and CPU hours of simulation on one of the world’s fastest supercomputers as well as computing clusters in collaborating institutions,” said Dr. Mohammad Amin, chief scientist at D-Wave. “Besides realizing Richard Feynman’s vision of simulating nature on a quantum computer, this research could open new frontiers for scientific discovery and quantum application development.” 

Advantage2 System Demonstrates Powerful Performance Gains
The results shown in “Beyond-Classical Computation in Quantum Simulation” were enabled by D-Wave’s previous scientific milestones published in Nature Physics (2022) and Nature (2023), which theoretically and experimentally showed that quantum annealing provides a quantum speedup in complex optimization problems. These scientific advancements led to the development of the Advantage2 prototype’s fast anneal feature, which played an essential role in performing the precise quantum calculations needed to demonstrate quantum computational supremacy.

“The broader quantum computing research and development community is collectively building an understanding of the types of computations for which quantum computing can overtake classical computing. This effort requires ongoing and rigorous experimentation,” said Dr. Trevor Lanting, chief development officer at D-Wave. “This work is an important step toward sharpening that understanding, with clear evidence of where our quantum computer was able to outperform classical methods. We believe that the ability to recreate the entire suite of results we produced is not possible classically. We encourage our peers in academia to continue efforts to further define the line between quantum and classical capabilities, and we believe these efforts will help drive the development of ever more powerful quantum computing technology.”

The Advantage2 prototype used to achieve quantum computational supremacy is available for customers to use today via D-Wave’s Leap™ real-time quantum cloud service. The prototype provides substantial performance improvements from previous-generation Advantage systems, including increased qubit coherence, connectivity, and energy scale, which enables higher-quality solutions to larger, more complex problems. Moreover, D-Wave now has an Advantage2 processor that is four times larger than the prototype used in this work and has extended the simulations of this paper from hundreds of qubits to thousands of qubits, which are significantly larger than those described in this paper.

Leading Industry Voices Echo Support
Dr. Hidetoshi Nishimori, Professor, Department of Physics, Tokyo Institute of Technology:
“This paper marks a significant milestone in demonstrating the real-world applicability of large-scale quantum computing. Through rigorous benchmarking of quantum annealers against state-of-the-art classical methods, it convincingly establishes a quantum advantage in tackling practical problems, revealing the transformative potential of quantum computing at an unprecedented scale.”

Dr. Seth Lloyd, Professor of Quantum Mechanical Engineering, MIT:
Although large-scale, fully error-corrected quantum computers are years in the future, quantum annealers can probe the features of quantum systems today. In an elegant paper, the D-Wave group has used a large-scale quantum annealer to uncover patterns of entanglement in a complex quantum system that lie far beyond the reach of the most powerful classical computer. The D-Wave result shows the promise of quantum annealers for exploring exotic quantum effects in a wide variety of systems.”

Dr. Travis Humble, Director of Quantum Science Center, Distinguished Scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory:
“ORNL seeks to expand the frontiers of computation through many different avenues, and benchmarking quantum computing for materials science applications provides critical input to our understanding of new computational capabilities.”

Dr. Juan Carrasquilla, Associate Professor at the Department of Physics, ETH Zürich:
“I believe these results mark a critical scientific milestone for D-Wave. They also serve as an invitation to the scientific community, as these results offer a strong benchmark and motivation for developing novel simulation techniques for out-of-equilibrium dynamics in quantum many-body physics. Furthermore, I hope these findings encourage theoretical exploration of the computational challenges involved in performing such simulations, both classically and quantum-mechanically.”

Dr. Victor Martin-Mayor, Professor of Theoretical Physics, Universidad Complutense de Madrid:
“This paper is not only a tour-de-force for experimental physics, it is also remarkable for the clarity of the results. The authors have addressed a problem that is regarded both as important and as very challenging to a classical computer. The team has shown that their quantum annealer performs better at this task than the state-of-the-art methods for classical simulation.”

Dr. Alberto Nocera, Senior Staff Scientist, The University of British Columbia:
“Our work shows the impracticability of state-of-the-art classical simulations to simulate the dynamics of quantum magnets, opening the door for quantum technologies based on analog simulators to solve scientific questions that may otherwise remain unanswered using conventional computers.”

About D-Wave Quantum Inc.
D-Wave is a leader in the development and delivery of quantum computing systems, software, and services. We are the world’s first commercial supplier of quantum computers, and the only company building both annealing and gate-model quantum computers. Our mission is to help customers realize the value of quantum, today. Our 5,000+ qubit Advantage™ quantum computers, the world’s largest, are available on-premises or via the cloud, supported by 99.9% availability and uptime. More than 100 organizations trust D-Wave with their toughest computational challenges. With over 200 million problems submitted to our Advantage systems and Advantage2™ prototypes to date, our customers apply our technology to address use cases spanning optimization, artificial intelligence, research and more. Learn more about realizing the value of quantum computing today and how we’re shaping the quantum-driven industrial and societal advancements of tomorrow: www.dwavequantum.com.

Forward-Looking Statements
Certain statements in this press release are forward-looking, as defined in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements involve risks, uncertainties, and other factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from the information expressed or implied by these forward-looking statements and may not be indicative of future results. These forward-looking statements are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties, including, among others, various factors beyond management’s control, including the risks set forth under the heading “Risk Factors” discussed under the caption “Item 1A. Risk Factors” in Part I of our most recent Annual Report on Form 10-K or any updates discussed under the caption “Item 1A. Risk Factors” in Part II of our Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q and in our other filings with the SEC. Undue reliance should not be placed on the forward-looking statements in this press release in making an investment decision, which are based on information available to us on the date hereof. We undertake no duty to update this information unless required by law.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the most recent paper,

Beyond-classical computation in quantum simulation by Andrew D. King , Alberto Nocera, Marek M. Rams, Jacek Dziarmaga, Roeland Wiersema, William Bernoudy, Jack Raymond, Nitin Kaushal, Niclas Heinsdorf, Richard Harris, Kelly Boothby, Fabio Altomare, Mohsen Asad, Andrew J. Berkley, Martin Boschnak, Kevin Chern, Holly Christiani, Samantha Cibere, Jake Connor, Martin H. Dehn, Rahul Deshpande, Sara Ejtemaee, Pau Farre, Kelsey Hamer, Emile Hoskinson, Shuiyuan Huang, Mark W. Johnson, Samuel Kortas, Eric Ladizinsky, Trevor Lanting, Tony Lai, Ryan Li, Allison J. R. MacDonald, Gaelen Marsden, Catherine C. McGeoch, Reza Molavi, Travis Oh, Richard Neufeld, Mana Norouzpour, Joel Pasvolsky, Patrick Poitras, Gabriel Poulin-Lamarre, Thomas Prescott, Mauricio Reis, Chris Rich, Mohammad Samani, Benjamin Sheldan, Anatoly Smirnov, Edward Sterpka, Berta Trullas Clavera, Nicholas Tsai, Mark Volkmann, Alexander M. Whiticar, Jed D. Whittaker, Warren Wilkinson, Jason Yao, T.J. Yi, Anders W. Sandvik, Gonzalo Alvarez, Roger G. Melko, Juan Carrasquilla, Marcel Franz, and Mohammad H. Amin. Science 12 Mar 2025 First Release DOI: 10.1126/science.ado6285

This paper appears to be open access.Note: I usually tag all of the authors but not this time either.

A controversy of sorts

Madison McLauchlan’s March 19, 2025 article for Betakit (website for Canadian Startup News & Tech Innovation), Note: Links have been removed,

Canadian-born company D-Wave Quantum Systems said it achieved “quantum supremacy” last week after publishing what it calls a groundbreaking paper in the prestigious journal Science. Despite the lofty term, Canadian experts say supremacy is not the be-all, end-all of quantum innovation. 

D-Wave, which has labs in Palo Alto, Calif., and Burnaby, BC, claimed in a statement that it has shown “the world’s first and only demonstration of quantum computational supremacy on a useful, real-world problem.”

Coined in the early 2010s by physicist John Preskill, quantum supremacy is the ability of a quantum computing system to solve a problem no classical computer can in a feasible amount of time. The metric makes no mention of whether the problem needs to be useful or relevant to real life. Google researchers published a paper in Nature in 2019 claiming they cleared that bar with the Sycamore quantum processor. Researchers at the University of Science and Technology in China claimed they demonstrated quantum supremacy several times. 

D-Wave’s attempt differs in that its researchers aimed to solve a real-world materials-simulation problem with quantum computing—one the company claims would be nearly impossible for a traditional computer to solve in a reasonable amount of time. D-Wave used an annealing designed to solve optimization problems. The problem is represented like an energy space, where the “lowest energy state” corresponds to the solution. 

While exciting, quantum supremacy is just one metric among several that mark the progress toward widely useful quantum computers, industry experts told BetaKit. 

“It is a very important and mostly academic metric, but certainly not the most important in the grand scheme of things, as it doesn’t take into account the usefulness of the algorithm,” said Martin Laforest, managing partner at Quantacet, a specialized venture capital fund for quantum startups. 

He added that Google and Xanadu’s [Xanadu Quantum Technologies based in Toronto, Canada] past claims to quantum supremacy were “extraordinary pieces of work, but didn’t unlock practicality.” 

Laforest, along with executives at Canadian quantum startups Nord Quantique and Photonic, say that the milestones of ‘quantum utility’ or ‘quantum advantage’ may be more important than supremacy. 

According to Quantum computing company Quera [QuEra?], quantum advantage is the demonstration of a quantum algorithm solving a real-world problem on a quantum computer faster than any classical algorithm running on any classical computer. On the other hand, quantum utility, according to IBM, refers to when a quantum computer is able to perform reliable computations at a scale beyond brute-force classical computing methods that provide exact solutions to computational problems. 

Error correction hasn’t traditionally been considered a requirement for quantum supremacy, but Laforest told BetaKit the term is “an ever-moving target, constantly challenged by advances in classical algorithms.” He added: “In my opinion, some level of supremacy or utility may be possible in niche areas without error correction, but true disruption requires it.”

Paul Terry, CEO of Vancouver-based Photonic, thinks that though D-Wave’s claim to quantum supremacy shows “continued progress to real value,” scalability is the industry’s biggest hurdle to overcome.

But as with many milestone claims in the quantum space, D-Wave’s latest innovation has been met with scrutiny from industry competitors and researchers on the breakthrough’s significance, claiming that classical computers have achieved similar results. Laforest echoed this sentiment.

“Personally, I wouldn’t say it’s an unequivocal demonstration of supremacy, but it is a damn nice experiment that once again shows the murky zone between traditional computing and early quantum advantage,” Laforest said.

Originally founded out of the University of British Columbia, D-Wave went public on the New York Stock Exchange just over two years ago through a merger with a special-purpose acquisition company in 2022. D-Wave became a Delaware-domiciled corporation as part of the deal.

Earlier this year, D-Wave’s stock price dropped after Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang publicly stated that he estimated that useful quantum computers were more than 15 years away. D-Wave’s stock price, which had been struggling, has seen a considerable bump in recent months alongside a broader boost in the quantum market. The price popped after its most recent earnings, shared right after its quantum supremacy announcement. 

The beat goes on

Some of this is standard in science. There’s always a debate over big claims and it’s not unusual for people to get over excited and have to make a retraction. Scientists are people too. That said, there’s a lot of money on the line and that appears to be making situation even more volatile than usual.

That last paragraph was completed on the morning of March 21, 2025 and later that afternoon I came across this March 21, 2025 article by Michael Grothaus for Fast Company, Note: Links have been removed,

Quantum computing stocks got pummeled yesterday, with the four most prominent public quantum computing companies—IonQ, Rigetti Computing, Quantum Computing Inc., and D-Wave Quantum Inc.—falling anywhere from over 9% to over 18%. The reason? A lot of it may have to do with AI chip giant Nvidia. Again.

Stocks crash yesterday on Nvidia quantum news

Yesterday was a bit of a bloodbath on the stock market for the four most prominent publicly traded quantum computing companies. …

All four of these quantum computing stocks [IonQ, Inc.; Rigetti Computing, Inc.; Quantum Computing Inc.; D-Wave Quantum Inc.] tumbled on the day that AI chip giant Nvidia kicked off its two-day Quantum Day event. In a blog post from January 14 announcing Quantum Day, Nvidia said the event “brings together leading experts for a comprehensive and balanced perspective on what businesses should expect from quantum computing in the coming decades — mapping the path toward useful quantum applications.”

Besides bringing quantum experts together, the AI behemoth also announced that it will be launching a new quantum computing research center in Boston.

Called the NVIDIA Accelerated Quantum Research Center (NVAQC), the new research lab “will help solve quantum computing’s most challenging problems, ranging from qubit noise to transforming experimental quantum processors into practical devices,” the company said in a press release.

The NVAQC’s location in Boston means it will be near both Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). 

Before Nvidia’s announcement yesterday, IonQ, Rigetti, D-Wave, and Quantum Computing Inc. were the leaders in the nascent field of quantum computing. And while they still are right now (Nvidia’s quantum research lab hasn’t been built yet), the fear is that Nvidia could use its deep pockets to quickly buy its way into a leadership spot in the field. With its $2.9 trillion market cap, the company can easily afford to throw billions of research dollars into quantum computing.

As noted by the Motley Fool, the location of the NVIDIA Accelerated Quantum Research Center in Boston will also allow Nvidia to more easily tap into top quantum talent from Harvard and MIT—talent that may have otherwise gone to IonQ, Rigetti, D-Wave, and Quantum Computing Inc.

Nvidia’s announcement is a massive about-face from the company in regard to how it views quantum computing. It’s also the second time that Nvidia has caused quantum stocks to crash this year. Back in January, shares in prominent quantum computing companies fell after Huang said that practical use of quantum computing was decades away.

Those comments were something quantum computing company CEOs like D-Wave’s Alan Baratz took issue with. “It’s an egregious error on Mr. Huang’s part,” Bartaz told Fast Company at the time. “We’re not decades away from commercial quantum computers. They exist. There are companies that are using our quantum computer today.”

According to Investor’s Business Daily, Huang reportedly got the idea for Nvidia’s Quantum Day event after the blowback to his comments, inviting quantum computing executives to the event to explain why he was incorrect about quantum computing.

The word is volatile.

World’s smallest disco party features nanoscale disco ball

I haven’t featured one of these ‘fun’ (world’s smallest xxx) announcements in a long time. An August 14, 2024 news item on phys.org announces the world’s smallest disco party and a step towards exploring quantum gravity, Note: Links have been removed,

Physicists at Purdue [Purdue University, Indiana, US] are throwing the world’s smallest disco party. The disco ball itself is a fluorescent nanodiamond, which they have levitated and spun at incredibly high speeds. The fluorescent diamond emits and scatters multicolor lights in different directions as it rotates. The party continues as they study the effects of fast rotation on the spin qubits within their system and are able to observe the Berry phase.

The team, led by Tongcang Li, professor of Physics and Astronomy and Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University, published their results in Nature Communications. Reviewers of the publication described this work as “arguably a groundbreaking moment for the study of rotating quantum systems and levitodynamics” and “a new milestone for the levitated optomechanics community.”

This graph illustrates a diamond particle levitated above a surface ion trap. The fluorescent diamond nanoparticle is driven to rotate at a high speed (up to 1.2 billion rpm) by alternating voltages applied to the four corner electrodes. This rapid rotation induces a phase in the nitrogen-vacancy electron spins inside the diamond. The diagram in the top left corner depicts the atomic structure of a nitrogen-vacancy spin defect inside the diamond. Graphic provided by Kunhong Shen.

An August 13, 2024 Purdue University news release (also on EurekAlert but published August 14, 2024) by Cheryl Pierce, which originated the news item, explains what makes this work so exciting (!), Note: Links have been removed,

“Imagine tiny diamonds floating in an empty space or vacuum. Inside these diamonds, there are spin qubits that scientists can use to make precise measurements and explore the mysterious relationship between quantum mechanics and gravity,” explains Li, who is also a member of the Purdue Quantum Science and Engineering Institute.  “In the past, experiments with these floating diamonds had trouble in preventing their loss in vacuum and reading out the spin qubits. However, in our work, we successfully levitated a diamond in a high vacuum using a special ion trap. For the first time, we could observe and control the behavior of the spin qubits inside the levitated diamond in high vacuum.”

The team made the diamonds rotate incredibly fast—up to 1.2 billion times per minute! By doing this, they were able to observe how the rotation affected the spin qubits in a unique way known as the Berry phase.

“This breakthrough helps us better understand and study the fascinating world of quantum physics,” he says.

The fluorescent nanodiamonds, with an average diameter of about 750 nm, were produced through high-pressure, high-temperature synthesis. These diamonds were irradiated with high-energy electrons to create nitrogen-vacancy color centers, which host electron spin qubits. When illuminated by a green laser, they emitted red light, which was used to read out their electron spin states. An additional infrared laser was shone at the levitated nanodiamond to monitor its rotation. Like a disco ball, as the nanodiamond rotated, the direction of the scattered infrared light changed, carrying the rotation information of the nanodiamond.

The authors of this paper were mostly from Purdue University and are members of Li’s research group: Yuanbin Jin (postdoc), Kunhong Shen (PhD student), Xingyu Gao (PhD student) and Peng Ju (recent PhD graduate). Li, Jin, Shen, and Ju conceived and designed the project and Jin and Shen built the setup. Jin subsequently performed measurements and calculations and the team collectively discussed the results. Two non-Purdue authors are Alejandro Grine, principal member of technical staff at Sandia National Laboratories, and Chong Zu, assistant professor at Washington University in St. Louis. Li’s team discussed the experiment results with Grine and Zu who provided suggestions for improvement of the experiment and manuscript.

“For the design of our integrated surface ion trap,” explains Jin, “we used a commercial software, COMSOL Multiphysics, to perform 3D simulations. We calculate the trapping position and the microwave transmittance using different parameters to optimize the design. We added extra electrodes to conveniently control the motion of a levitated diamond. And for fabrication, the surface ion trap is fabricated on a sapphire wafer using photolithography. A 300-nm-thick gold layer is deposited on the sapphire wafer to create the electrodes of the surface ion trap.”

So which way are the diamonds spinning and can they be speed or direction manipulated? Shen says yes, they can adjust the spin direction and levitation.

“We can adjust the driving voltage to change the spinning direction,” he explains. “The levitated diamond can rotate around the z-axis (which is perpendicular to the surface of the ion trap), shown in the schematic, either clockwise or counterclockwise, depending on our driving signal. If we don’t apply the driving signal, the diamond will spin omnidirectionally, like a ball of yarn.”

Levitated nanodiamonds with embedded spin qubits have been proposed for precision measurements and creating large quantum superpositions to test the limit of quantum mechanics and the quantum nature of gravity.

“General relativity and quantum mechanics are two of the most important scientific breakthroughs in the 20th century. However, we still do not know how gravity might be quantized,” says Li. “Achieving the ability to study quantum gravity experimentally would be a tremendous breakthrough. In addition, rotating diamonds with embedded spin qubits provide a platform to study the coupling between mechanical motion and quantum spins.”

This discovery could have a ripple effect in industrial applications. Li says that levitated micro and nano-scale particles in vacuum can serve as excellent accelerometers and electric field sensors. For example, the US Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) are using optically-levitated nanoparticles to develop solutions for critical problems in navigation and communication.

“At Purdue University, we have state-of-the-art facilities for our research in levitated optomechanics,” says Li. “We have two specialized, home-built systems dedicated to this area of study. Additionally, we have access to the shared facilities at the Birck Nanotechnology Center, which enables us to fabricate and characterize the integrated surface ion trap on campus. We are also fortunate to have talented students and postdocs capable of conducting cutting-edge research. Furthermore, my group has been working in this field for ten years, and our extensive experience has allowed us to make rapid progress.”

Quantum research is one of four key pillars of the Purdue Computes initiative, which emphasizes the university’s extensive technological and computational environment.

This research was supported by the National Science Foundation (grant number PHY-2110591), the Office of Naval Research (grant number N00014-18-1-2371), and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation (grant DOI 10.37807/gbmf12259). The project is also partially supported by the Laboratory Directed Research and Development program at Sandia National Laboratories.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Quantum control and Berry phase of electron spins in rotating levitated diamonds in high vacuum by Yuanbin Jin, Kunhong Shen, Peng Ju, Xingyu Gao, Chong Zu, Alejandro J. Grine & Tongcang Li. Nature Communications volume 15, Article number: 5063 (2024) DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-49175-3 Published online: 13 June 2024

This paper is open access.

Nano-enabled precision delivery methods for agriculture

A July 23, 2024 news item on Nanowerk provides an introduction to nanoparticles and their potential use in agriculture, Note: Links have been removed,

Nanoparticles could potentially help address agricultural and environmental sustainability issues on a global scale.

Those issues include rising food demand, increasing greenhouse gas emissions generated by agricultural activities, climbing costs of agrochemicals, reducing crop yields induced by climate change, and degrading soil quality. A class of nanoscale particles called “nanocarriers” could make crop agriculture more sustainable and resilient to climate change, according to a group of specialists that includes Kurt Ristroph, assistant professor of agricultural and biological engineering at Purdue University.

“Saying ‘nanoparticle’ means different things to different people,” Ristroph said. In nanodrug delivery, a nanoparticle usually ranges in size from 60 to 100 nanometers and is made of lipids or polymers. “In the environmental world, a nanoparticle usually means a 3- to 5-nanometer metal oxide colloid. Those are not the same thing, but people use ‘nanoparticle’ for both.”

Ristroph helped organize a 2022 interdisciplinary workshop on nanomethods for drug delivery in plants. Funded by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the workshop was attended by 30 participants from academia, industry and government laboratories.

Many of the workshop participants, including Ristroph, have now published their conclusions in Nature Nanotechnology (“Towards realizing nano-enabled precision delivery in plants”). Their article reviews the possibility nanocarriers could make crop agriculture more sustainable and resilient to climate change.

A July 23, 2024 Purdue University news release (also on EurekAlert but published July 19, 2024) by Steve Koppes, which originated the news item, delves further into the topic of how agriculture could be made more sustainable with nanotechnology-enabled delivery methods, Note: Links have been removed,

“Nano-enabled precision delivery of active agents in plants will transform agriculture, but there are critical technical challenges that we must first overcome to realize the full range of its benefits,” said the article’s co-lead author Greg Lowry, the Walter J. Blenko, Sr. Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. “I’m optimistic about the future of plant nanobiotechnology approaches and the beneficial impacts it will have on our ability to sustainably produce food.”

Plant cells and human cells have major physiological differences. Plant cells have a cell wall while human cells don’t, for example. But certain tools can be transferred from nanomedicine to plant applications.

“People have developed tools for studying the bio-corona formation around nanoparticles in an animal. We could think about bringing some of those tools to bear on nanoparticles in plants,” Ristroph said. 

When nanoparticles are injected into the bloodstream, many components of the blood stick onto the surface of the nanoparticles. The various proteins sticking to a nanoparticle’s surface make it look different.

The task then becomes figuring out what proteins or other molecules will stick to the surface and where the particle will go as a result. A nanoparticle designed to move toward a certain organ may have its destination altered by white blood cells that detect the particle’s surface proteins and send it to a different organ.

“Broadly speaking, that’s the idea of bio-corona formation and trafficking,” Ristroph said. “People in drug delivery nanomedicine have been thinking about and developing tools for studying that kind of thing. Some of those thoughts and some of those tools could be applied to plants.” 

Researchers already have developed many different architectures and chemistries for making nanoscale delivery vehicles for nanomedicine. “Some of the particle types are transferable,” he said. “You can take a nanoparticle that was optimized for movement in humans and put it in a plant, and you’ll probably find that it needs to be redesigned at least somewhat.”

Ristroph focuses on organic (carbon-based) nanocarriers that have a core-shell structure. The core contains a payload, while the shell forms a protective outer layer. Researchers have used many different types of nanomaterial in plants. The most popular materials are metallic nanoparticles because they are somewhat easier to make, handle and track where they go in a plant than organic nanoparticles.

“One of the first questions that you want to figure out is where these nanoparticles go in a plant,” Ristroph said. “It’s a lot easier to detect a metal inside of a plant that’s made of carbon than it is to detect a carbon-based nanoparticle in a plant that’s made of carbon.”

Last March, Ristroph and Purdue PhD student Luiza Stolte Bezerra Lisboa Oliveira published a critical review of the research literature on the Uptake and Translocation of Organic Nanodelivery Vehicles in Plants in Environmental Science and Technology.

“Not a lot is understood about transformations after these things go into a plant, how they’re getting metabolized,” Ristroph said. His team is interested in studying that, along with ways to help ensure that the nanoparticles are delivered to their proper destinations, and in corona formation. Coronas are biomolecular coatings that affect nanoparticle functions. 

The manufacturability of nanocarriers is another interest area that could be transferred to agriculture from nanomedicine.

“I care a lot about manufacturability and making sure that whatever techniques we’re using to make the nanoparticles are scalable and economically feasible,” Ristroph said.

The manufacturability of nanocarriers is another interest area that could be transferred to agriculture from nanomedicine.

“I care a lot about manufacturability and making sure that whatever techniques we’re using to make the nanoparticles are scalable and economically feasible,” Ristroph said.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Towards realizing nano-enabled precision delivery in plants by Gregory V. Lowry, Juan Pablo Giraldo, Nicole F. Steinmetz, Astrid Avellan, Gozde S. Demirer, Kurt D. Ristroph, Gerald J. Wang, Christine O. Hendren, Christopher A. Alabi, Adam Caparco, Washington da Silva, Ivonne González-Gamboa, Khara D. Grieger, Su-Ji Jeon, Mariya V. Khodakovskaya, Hagay Kohay, Vivek Kumar, Raja Muthuramalingam, Hanna Poffenbarger, Swadeshmukul Santra, Robert D. Tilton & Jason C. White. Nature Nanotechnology (2024) DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41565-024-01667-5 Published: 06 June 2024

This paper is behind a paywall.

Fullertubes, at last!

A theoretical possibility has been proven by an international team including researchers from the Université de Montréal (University of Montreal) according to a March 27, 2024 news item on phys.org,

For years, C130 fullertubes—molecules made up of 130 carbon atoms—have existed only in theory. Now, leading an international team of scientists, a UdeM doctoral student in physics has successfully shown them in real life—and even managed to capture some in a photograph.

Illustration of the discovery of the C130-D5h molecule, published on the cover page of the prestigious “Journal of the American Chemical Society” last December. Credit: JACS

A March 27, 2024 Université de Montréal (UdeM) nouvelles (news release), which originated the news item, provides more detail, Note: Links have been removed,

This feat in the realm of basic research has led Emmanuel Bourret to have a cover-page illustration of his discovery in a prestigious scientific journal, the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

First published online last October [2023], the discovery was made by Bourret as lead scientist of an inter-university team that also included researchers from Purdue University, Virginia Tech and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, in Tennessee.

A fullertube is basically an assembly of carbon atoms arranged to form a closed tubular cage. It is related to fullerenes, molecules that are represented as cages of interconnected hexagons and pentagons, and come in a wide variety of sizes and shapes.

For example, a C60 fullerene is made up of 60 carbon atoms and is shaped like a soccer ball. It is relatively small, spherical and very abundant. C120 fullerenes are less common. They are longer and shaped like a tube capped at either ends with the two halves of a C60 fullerene.

Found in soot

The C130 fullertube (or C130-D5h, its full scientific name) is more elongated than the C120 and even rarer. To isolate it, Bourret and his team generated an electric arc between two graphite electrodes to produce soot containing fullerene and fullertube molecules. The electronic structure of these molecules was then calculated using density functional theory (DFT).

“Drawing on principles of quantum mechanics, DFT enables us to calculate electronic structures and predict the properties of a molecule using the fundamental rules of physics,” explained Bourret’s thesis supervisor, UdeM physics professor Michel Côté, a researcher at the university’s Institut Courtois.

Using special software, Bourret was able to describe the structure of the C130 molecule: it is a tube with two hemispheres at the ends, making it look like a microscopic capsule. It measures just under 2 nanometres long by 1 nm wide (a nanometre is one billionth of a metre).

“The structure of the tube is basically made up of atoms arranged in hexagons,” said Bourret. “At the two ends, these hexagons are linked by pentagons, giving them their rounded shape.”

Bourret began doing theoretical work on fullertubes in 2014 under his then-supervisor Jiri Patera, an UdeM mathematics professor. After Patera passed away in January 2022, Bourret then approached Côté, who became his new supervisor.

Existence shown in 2020

Two years before that, Bourret had read an article by Purdue University at Fort Wayne professor Steven Stevenson, who described the experimental isolation of certain fullertubes, demonstrating their existence but not identifying all of them.

Under Côté’s guidance, Bourret set to work advancing knowledge on the topic.

“Emmanuel had a strong background in abstract mathematics,” Bourret recalled, “and he added an interesting dimension to my research group, which focuses on more computational approaches.”

Are any possible future applications in the offing?

“It’s hard to say at this stage, but one possibility might be the production of hydrogen,” said Côté. “Currently, what’s used is a catalyst made of platinum and rubidium, both of which are rare and expensive. Replacing them with carbon structures such as C130 would make it possible to produce hydrogen in a ‘greener’ way.”

Last year, Bourret’s groundbreaking work earned him an invitation to deliver a paper at the annual meeting of the U.S. Electrochemical Society (ECS), in Boston. This May [2024], he’ll chair a panel on fullerenes and fullertubes at the ECS annual meeting in San Francisco.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Colossal C130 Fullertubes: Soluble [5,5] C130-D5h(1) Pristine Molecules with 70 Nanotube Carbons and Two 30-Atom Hemifullerene End-caps by Emmanuel Bourret, Xiaoyang Liu, Cora A. Noble, Kevin Cover, Tanisha P. Davidson, Rong Huang, Ryan M. Koenig, K. Shawn Reeves, Ivan V. Vlassiouk, Michel Côté, Jefferey S. Baxter, Andrew R. Lupini, David B. Geohegan, Harry C. Dorn, and Steven Stevenson. J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2023, 145, 48, 25942–25947 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1021/jacs.3c09082 Publication Date: October 27, 2023 Copyright © 2023 American Chemical Society

This paper is behind a paywall.

Your gas stove may be emitting more polluting nanoparticles than your car exhaust

A February 27, 2024 news item on ScienceDaily describes the startling research results to anyone who’s listened to countless rhapsodize about the superiority of gas stoves over any other,

Cooking on your gas stove can emit more nano-sized particles into the air than vehicles that run on gas or diesel, possibly increasing your risk of developing asthma or other respiratory illnesses, a new Purdue University study has found.

“Combustion remains a source of air pollution across the world, both indoors and outdoors. We found that cooking on your gas stove produces large amounts of small nanoparticles that get into your respiratory system and deposit efficiently,” said Brandon Boor, an associate professor in Purdue’s Lyles School of Civil Engineering, who led this research.

Based on these findings, the researchers would encourage turning on a kitchen exhaust fan while cooking on a gas stove.

The study, published in the journal PNAS [Proceedngs of the National Academy of Sciences] Nexus, focused on tiny airborne nanoparticles that are only 1-3 nanometers in diameter, which is just the right size for reaching certain parts of the respiratory system and spreading to other organs.

A February 27, 2024 Purdue University news release by Kayla Albert (also on EurekAlert), which originated the news item, provides more detail about the research, Note: Links have been removed,

Recent studies have found that children who live in homes with gas stoves are more likely to develop asthma. But not much is known about how particles smaller than 3 nanometers, called nanocluster aerosol, grow and spread indoors because they’re very difficult to measure.

“These super tiny nanoparticles are so small that you’re not able to see them. They’re not like dust particles that you would see floating in the air,” Boor said. “After observing such high concentrations of nanocluster aerosol during gas cooking, we can’t ignore these nano-sized particles anymore.”

Using state-of-the-art air quality instrumentation provided by the German company GRIMM AEROSOL TECHNIK, a member of the DURAG GROUP, Purdue researchers were able to measure these tiny particles down to a single nanometer while cooking on a gas stove in a “tiny house” lab. They collaborated with Gerhard Steiner, a senior scientist and product manager for nano measurement at GRIMM AEROSOL. 

Called the Purdue zero Energy Design Guidance for Engineers (zEDGE) lab, the tiny house has all the features of a typical home but is equipped with sensors for closely monitoring the impact of everyday activities on a home’s air quality. With this testing environment and the instrument from GRIMM AEROSOL, a high-resolution particle size magnifier—scanning mobility particle sizer (PSMPS), the team collected extensive data on indoor nanocluster aerosol particles during realistic cooking experiments.

This magnitude of high-quality data allowed the researchers to compare their findings with known outdoor air pollution levels, which are more regulated and understood than indoor air pollution. They found that as many as 10 quadrillion nanocluster aerosol particles could be emitted per kilogram of cooking fuel — matching or exceeding those produced from vehicles with internal combustion engines. 

This would mean that adults and children could be breathing in 10-100 times more nanocluster aerosol from cooking on a gas stove indoors than they would from car exhaust while standing on a busy street.

“You would not use a diesel engine exhaust pipe as an air supply to your kitchen,” said Nusrat Jung, a Purdue assistant professor of civil engineering who designed the tiny house lab with her students and co-led this study.

Purdue civil engineering PhD student Satya Patra made these findings by looking at data collected in the tiny house lab and modeling the various ways that nanocluster aerosol could transform indoors and deposit into a person’s respiratory system.

The models showed that nanocluster aerosol particles are very persistent in their journey from the gas stove to the rest of the house. Trillions of these particles were emitted within just 20 minutes of boiling water or making grilled cheese sandwiches or buttermilk pancakes on a gas stove.

Even though many particles rapidly diffused to other surfaces, the models indicated that approximately 10 billion to 1 trillion particles could deposit into an adult’s head airways and tracheobronchial region of the lungs. These doses would be even higher for children — the smaller the human, the more concentrated the dose.

The nanocluster aerosol coming from the gas combustion also could easily mix with larger particles entering the air from butter, oil or whatever else is cooking on the gas stove, resulting in new particles with their own unique behaviors.

A gas stove’s exhaust fan would likely redirect these nanoparticles away from your respiratory system, but that remains to be tested.

“Since most people don’t turn on their exhaust fan while cooking, having kitchen hoods that activate automatically would be a logical solution,” Boor said. “Moving forward, we need to think about how to reduce our exposure to all types of indoor air pollutants. Based on our new data, we’d advise that nanocluster aerosol be considered as a distinct air pollutant category.”

This study was supported by a National Science Foundation CAREER award to Boor. Additional financial support was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation’s Chemistry of Indoor Environments program through an interdisciplinary collaboration with Philip Stevens, a professor in Indiana University’s Paul H. O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs in Bloomington.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Dynamics of nanocluster aerosol in the indoor atmosphere during gas cooking by Satya S Patra, Jinglin Jiang, Xiaosu Ding, Chunxu Huang, Emily K Reidy, Vinay Kumar, Paige Price, Connor Keech, Gerhard Steiner, Philip Stevens, Nusrat Jung, Brandon E Boor. PNAS Nexus, Volume 3, Issue 2, February 2024, pgae044, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgae044 Published: 27 February 2024

This paper is open access.

A hardware (neuromorphic and quantum) proposal for handling increased AI workload

It’s been a while since I’ve featured anything from Purdue University (Indiana, US). From a November 7, 2023 news item on Nanowerk, Note Links have been removed,

Technology is edging closer and closer to the super-speed world of computing with artificial intelligence. But is the world equipped with the proper hardware to be able to handle the workload of new AI technological breakthroughs?

Key Takeaways
Current AI technologies are strained by the limitations of silicon-based computing hardware, necessitating new solutions.

Research led by Erica Carlson [Purdue University] suggests that neuromorphic [brainlike] architectures, which replicate the brain’s neurons and synapses, could revolutionize computing efficiency and power.

Vanadium oxides have been identified as a promising material for creating artificial neurons and synapses, crucial for neuromorphic computing.

Innovative non-volatile memory, observed in vanadium oxides, could be the key to more energy-efficient and capable AI hardware.

Future research will explore how to optimize the synaptic behavior of neuromorphic materials by controlling their memory properties.

The colored landscape above shows a transition temperature map of VO2 (pink surface) as measured by optical microscopy. This reveals the unique way that this neuromorphic quantum material [emphasis mine] stores memory like a synapse. Image credit: Erica Carlson, Alexandre Zimmers, and Adobe Stock

An October 13, 2023 Purdue University news release (also on EurekAlert but published November 6, 2023) by Cheryl Pierce, which originated the news item, provides more detail about the work, Note: A link has been removed,

“The brain-inspired codes of the AI revolution are largely being run on conventional silicon computer architectures which were not designed for it,” explains Erica Carlson, 150th Anniversary Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Purdue University.

A joint effort between Physicists from Purdue University, University of California San Diego (USCD) and École Supérieure de Physique et de Chimie Industrielles (ESPCI) in Paris, France, believe they may have discovered a way to rework the hardware…. [sic] By mimicking the synapses of the human brain.  They published their findings, “Spatially Distributed Ramp Reversal Memory in VO2” in Advanced Electronic Materials which is featured on the back cover of the October 2023 edition.

New paradigms in hardware will be necessary to handle the complexity of tomorrow’s computational advances. According to Carlson, lead theoretical scientist of this research, “neuromorphic architectures hold promise for lower energy consumption processors, enhanced computation, fundamentally different computational modes, native learning and enhanced pattern recognition.”

Neuromorphic architecture basically boils down to computer chips mimicking brain behavior.  Neurons are cells in the brain that transmit information. Neurons have small gaps at their ends that allow signals to pass from one neuron to the next which are called synapses. In biological brains, these synapses encode memory. This team of scientists concludes that vanadium oxides show tremendous promise for neuromorphic computing because they can be used to make both artificial neurons and synapses.

“The dissonance between hardware and software is the origin of the enormously high energy cost of training, for example, large language models like ChatGPT,” explains Carlson. “By contrast, neuromorphic architectures hold promise for lower energy consumption by mimicking the basic components of a brain: neurons and synapses. Whereas silicon is good at memory storage, the material does not easily lend itself to neuron-like behavior. Ultimately, to provide efficient, feasible neuromorphic hardware solutions requires research into materials with radically different behavior from silicon – ones that can naturally mimic synapses and neurons. Unfortunately, the competing design needs of artificial synapses and neurons mean that most materials that make good synaptors fail as neuristors, and vice versa. Only a handful of materials, most of them quantum materials, have the demonstrated ability to do both.”

The team relied on a recently discovered type of non-volatile memory which is driven by repeated partial temperature cycling through the insulator-to-metal transition. This memory was discovered in vanadium oxides.

Alexandre Zimmers, lead experimental scientist from Sorbonne University and École Supérieure de Physique et de Chimie Industrielles, Paris, explains, “Only a few quantum materials are good candidates for future neuromorphic devices, i.e., mimicking artificial synapses and neurons. For the first time, in one of them, vanadium dioxide, we can see optically what is changing in the material as it operates as an artificial synapse. We find that memory accumulates throughout the entirety of the sample, opening new opportunities on how and where to control this property.”

“The microscopic videos show that, surprisingly, the repeated advance and retreat of metal and insulator domains causes memory to be accumulated throughout the entirety of the sample, rather than only at the boundaries of domains,” explains Carlson. “The memory appears as shifts in the local temperature at which the material transitions from insulator to metal upon heating, or from metal to insulator upon cooling. We propose that these changes in the local transition temperature accumulate due to the preferential diffusion of point defects into the metallic domains that are interwoven through the insulator as the material is cycled partway through the transition.”

Now that the team has established that vanadium oxides are possible candidates for future neuromorphic devices, they plan to move forward in the next phase of their research.

“Now that we have established a way to see inside this neuromorphic material, we can locally tweak and observe the effects of, for example, ion bombardment on the material’s surface,” explains Zimmers. “This could allow us to guide the electrical current through specific regions in the sample where the memory effect is at its maximum. This has the potential to significantly enhance the synaptic behavior of this neuromorphic material.”

There’s a very interesting 16 mins. 52 secs. video embedded in the October 13, 2023 Purdue University news release. In an interview with Dr. Erica Carlson who hosts The Quantum Age website and video interviews on its YouTube Channel, Alexandre Zimmers takes you from an amusing phenomenon observed by 19th century scientists through the 20th century where it becomes of more interest as the nanscale phenonenon can be exploited (sonar, scanning tunneling microscopes, singing birthday cards, etc.) to the 21st century where we are integrating this new information into a quantum* material for neuromorphic hardware.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Spatially Distributed Ramp Reversal Memory in VO2 by Sayan Basak, Yuxin Sun, Melissa Alzate Banguero, Pavel Salev, Ivan K. Schuller, Lionel Aigouy, Erica W. Carlson, Alexandre Zimmers. Advanced Electronic Materials Volume 9, Issue 10 October 2023 2300085 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/aelm.202300085 First published: 10 July 2023

This paper is open access.

There’s a lot of research into neuromorphic hardware, here’s a sampling of some of my most recent posts on the topic,

There’s more, just use ‘neuromorphic hardware’ for your search term.

*’meta’ changed to ‘quantum’ on January 8, 2024.

Building Transdisciplinary Research Paths [for a] Sustainable & Inclusive Future, a December 14, 2022 science policy event

I received (via email) a December 8, 2022 Canadian Science Policy Centre (CSPC) announcement about their various doings when this event, which seems a little short on information, caught my attention,

[Building Transdisciplinary Research Paths towards a more Sustainable and Inclusive Future]

Upcoming Virtual Event

With this workshop, Belmont Forum and IAI aim to open a collective reflection on the ideas and practices around ‘Transdisciplinarity’ (TD) to foster participatory knowledge production. Our goal is to create a safe environment for people to share their impressions about TD, as a form of experimental lab based on a culture of collaboration.

This CSPC event page cleared up a few questions,

Building Transdisciplinary Research Paths towards a more Sustainable and Inclusive Future

Global environmental change and sustainability require engagement with civil society and wide participation to gain social legitimacy, also, it is necessary to open cooperation among different scientific disciplines, borderless collaboration, and collaborative learning processes, among other crucial issues.

Those efforts have been recurrently encompassed by the idea of ‘Transdisciplinarity’ (TD), which is a fairly new word and evolving concept. Several of those characteristics are daily practices in academic and non-academic communities, sometimes under different words or conceptions.

With this workshop, Belmont Forum and IAI [Inter-American Institute for Global Change Research?] aim to open a collective reflection on the ideas and practices around ‘Transdisciplinarity’ (TD) to foster participatory knowledge production. Our goal is to create a safe environment for people to share their impressions about TD, as a form of experimental lab based on a culture of collaboration.

Date: Dec 14 [2022]

Time: 3:00 pm – 4:00 pm EST

Website [Register here]: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZArcOCupj4rHdBbwhSUpVhpvPuou5kNlZId

For the curious, here’s more about the Belmont Forum from their About page, Note: Links have been removed,

Established in 2009, the Belmont Forum is a partnership of funding organizations, international science councils, and regional consortia committed to the advancement of transdisciplinary science. Forum operations are guided by the Belmont Challenge, a vision document that encourages:

International transdisciplinary research providing knowledge for understanding, mitigating and adapting to global environmental change.

Forum members and partner organizations work collaboratively to meet this Challenge by issuing international calls for proposals, committing to best practices for open data access, and providing transdisciplinary training.  To that end, the Belmont Forum is also working to enhance the broader capacity to conduct transnational environmental change research through its e-Infrastructure and Data Management initiative.

Since its establishment, the Forum has successfully led 19 calls for proposals, supporting 134 projects and more than 1,000 scientists and stakeholders, representing over 90 countries.  Themes addressed by CRAs have included Freshwater Security, Coastal Vulnerability, Food Security and Land Use Change, Climate Predictability and Inter-Regional Linkages, Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, Arctic Observing and Science for Sustainability, and Mountains as Sentinels of Change.  New themes are developed through a scoping process and made available for proposals through the Belmont Forum website and its BF Grant Operations site.

If you keep scrolling down the Bellmont Forum’s About page, you’ll find an impressive list of partners including the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC).

I’m pretty sure IAI is Inter-American Institute for Global Change Research, given that two of the panelists come from that organization. Here’s more about the IAI from their About Us page, Note: Links have been removed,

Humans have affected practically all ecosystems on earth. Over the past 200 years, mankind’s emissions of greenhouse gases into the Earth’s atmosphere have changed its radiative properties and are causing a rise in global temperatures which is now modifying Earth system functions globally. As a result, the 21st-century is faced with environmental changes from local to global scales that require large efforts of mitigation and adaptation by societies and ecosystems. The causes and effects, problems and solutions of global change interlink biogeochemistry, Earth system functions and socio-economic conditions in increasingly complex ways. To guide efforts of mitigation and adaptation to global change and aid policy decisions, scientific knowledge now needs to be generated in broad transdisciplinary ways that address the needs of knowledge users and also provide profound understanding of complex socio-environmental systems.

To address these knowledge needs, 12 nations of the American continent came together in Montevideo, Uruguay, in 1992 to establish the Inter-American Institute for Global Change Research (IAI). The 12 governments, in the Declaration of Montevideo, called for the Institute to develop the best possible international coordination of scientific and economic research on the extent, causes, and consequences of global change in the Americas.

Sixteen governments signed the resulting Agreement Establishing the IAI which laid the  foundation for the IAI’s function as a regional intergovernmental organization that promotes interdisciplinary scientific research and capacity building to inform decision-makers on the continent and beyond. Since the establishment of the Agreement in 1992, 3 additional nations have acceded the treaty, and the IAI has now 19 Parties in the Americas, which come together once every year in the Conference of the Parties to monitor and direct the IAI’s activities.

Now onto the best part, reading about the panelists (from CSPC event page, scroll down and click on the See bio button), Note: I have made some rough changes to the formatting so that the bios match each other more closely,

Dr. Lily House-Peters is Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at California State University, Long Beach. Dr. House-Peters is a broadly trained human-environment geographer with experience in qualitative and quantitative approaches to human dimensions of environmental change, water security, mining and extraction, and natural resource conservation policy. She has a decade of experience and expertise in transdisciplinary research for action-oriented solutions to global environmental change. She is currently part of a team creating a curriculum for global change researchers in the Americas focused on the drivers and barriers of effective transdisciplinary collaboration and processes of integration and convergence in diverse teams.

Dr. Gabriela Alonso Yanez, Associate Professor, Werklund School of Education University of Calgary. Learning and education in the context of sustainability and global change are the focus of my work. Over the last ten years, I have participated in several collaborative research projects with multiple aims, including building researchers’ and organizations’ capacity for collaboration and engaging networks that include knowledge keepers, local community members and academics in co-designing and co-producing solutions-oriented knowledge.

Marshalee Valentine, MSc, BTech. Marshalee Valentine is Co-founder and Vice President of the International Women’s Coffee Alliance Jamaica (IWCA), a charitable organization responsible for the development and implementation of social impact and community development projects geared towards improving the livelihoods of women along the coffee value chain in Jamaica. In addition, she also owns and operates a Quality, Food Safety and Environmental Management Systems Consultancy. Her areas of expertise include; Process improvement, technology and Innovation transfer methods, capacity building and community-based research.

With a background in Agriculture, she holds a Bachelor of Technology in Environmental Sciences and a Master’s Degree in Environmental Management. Marshalee offers a unique perspective for regional authenticity bringing deep sensibility to issues of gender, equity and inclusion, in particular related to GEC issues in small countries.

Fany Ramos Quispe, Science Technology and Policy Fellow, Inter-American Institute for Global Change Research. Fany Ramos Quispe holds a B.S. in Environmental Engineering from the Polytechnic Institute of Mexico, and an MSc. in Environmental Change and International Development from the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom. She worked with a variety of private and public organizations at the national and international levels. She has experience on projects related to renewable energies, waste and water management, environmental education, climate change, and inter and transdisciplinary research, among others. After her postgraduate studies, she joined the Bolivian government mainly to support international affairs related to climate change at the Plurinational Authority of Mother Earth, afterwards, she joined the Centre for Social Research of the Vicepresidency as a Climate Change Specialist.

For several years now she combined academic and professional activities with side projects and activism for environmental and educational issues. She is a founder and former chair (2019-2020) of the environmental engineers’ society of La Paz and collaborates with different grassroots organizations.

Fany is a member of OWSD Bolivia [Organization for Women in Science for the Developing World {OWSD}] and current IAI Science, Technology and Policy fellow at the Belmont Forum.

Dr. Laila Sandroni, Science Technology and Policy Fellow, InterAmerican Institute for Global Change Research. Laila Sandroni is an Anthropologist and Geographer with experience in transdisciplinary research in social sciences. Her research interests lie in the field of transformations to sustainability and the role of different kinds of knowledge in defining the best paths to achieve biodiversity conservation and forest management. She has particular expertise in epistemology, power-knowledge relations, and evidence-based policy in environmental issues.

Laila has a longstanding involvement with stakeholders working on different paths towards biodiversity conservation. She has experience in transdisciplinary science and participatory methodologies to encompass plural knowledge on the management of protected areas in tropical rainforests in Brazil.

This event seems to be free and it looks like an exciting panel.

Unexpectedly, they don’t have a male participant amongst the panelists. Outside of groups that are explicitly exploring women’s issues in the sciences, I’ve never before seen a science panel composed entirely of women. As well, the organizers seem to have broadened the range of geographies represented at a Canadian event with a researcher who has experience in Brazil, another with experience in Bolivia, a panelist who works in Jamaica, and two academics who focus on the Americas (South, Central, and North).

Transdisciplinarity and other disciplinarities

There are so many: crossdisciplinarity, multidisciplinarity, interdisciplinarity, and transdisciplinarity, that the whole subject gets a little confusing. Jeffrey Evans’ July 29, 2014 post on the Purdue University (Indiana, US) Polytechnic Institute blog answers questions about three (trans-, multi-, and inter-) of the disciplinarities,

Learners entering the Polytechnic Incubator’s new program will no doubt hear the terms “multidisciplinary (arity)” and “interdisciplinary (arity)” thrown about somewhat indiscriminately. Interestingly, we administrators, faculty, and staff also use these terms rather loosely and too often without carefully considering their underlying meaning.

Recently I gave a talk about yet another disciplinarity: “transdisciplinarity.” The purpose of the talk was to share with colleagues from around the country the opportunities and challenges associated with developing a truly transdisciplinary environment in an institution of higher education. During a meeting after I returned, the terms “multi”, “inter”, and “trans” disciplinary(arity) were being thrown around, and it was clear that the meanings of the terms were not clearly understood. Hopefully this blog entry will help shed some light on the subject. …

First, I am not an expert in the various “disciplinarities.” The ideas and descriptions that follow are not mine and have been around for decades, with many books and articles written on the subject. Yet my Polytechnic Incubator colleagues and I believe in these ideas and in their advantages and constraints, and they serve to motivate the design of the Incubator’s transdisciplinary environment.

In 1992, Hugh G. Petrie wrote a seminal article1 for the American Educational Research Association that articulates the meaning of these ideas. Later, in 2007, A. Wendy Russell, Fern Wickson, and Anna L. Carew contributed an article2 discussing the context of transdisciplinarity, prescriptions for transdisciplinary knowledge production and the contradictions that arise, and suggestions for universities to develop capacity for transdisciplinarity, rather than simply investing in knowledge “products.” …

Multidisciplinarity

Petrie1 discusses multidisciplinarity as “the idea of a number of disciplines working together on a problem, an educational program, or a research study. The effect is additive rather than integrative. The project is usually short-lived, and there is seldom any long-term change in the ways in which the disciplinary participants in a multidisciplinary project view their own work.”

Interdisciplinarity

Moving to extend the idea of multidisciplinarity to include more integration, rather than just addition, Petrie writes about interdisciplinarity in this way:

“Interdisciplinary research or education typically refers to those situations in which the integration of the work goes beyond the mere concatenation of disciplinary contributions. Some key elements of disciplinarians’ use of their concepts and tools change. There is a level of integration. Interdisciplinary subjects in university curricula such as physical chemistry or social psychology, which by now have, perhaps,themselves become disciplines, are good examples. A newer one might be the field of immunopharmocology, which combines the work of bacteriology, chemistry, physiology, and immunology. Another instance of interdisciplinarity might be the emerging notion of a core curriculum that goes considerably beyond simple distribution requirements in undergraduate programs of general education.”

Transdisciplinarity

Petrie1 writes about transdisciplinarity in this way: “The notion of transdisciplinarity exemplifies one of the historically important driving forces in the area of interdisciplinarity, namely, the idea of the desirability of the integration of knowledge into some meaningful whole. The best example, perhaps, of the drive to transdisciplinarity might be the early discussions of general systems theory when it was being held forward as a grand synthesis of knowledge. Marxism, structuralism, and feminist theory are sometimes cited as examples of a transdisciplinary approach. Essentially, this kind of interdisciplinarity represents the impetus to integrate knowledge, and, hence, is often characterized by a denigration and repudiation of the disciplines and disciplinary work as essentially fragmented and incomplete.

It seems multidisciplinarity could be viewed as an ad hoc approach whereas interdsciplinarity and transdisciplinarity are intimately related with ‘inter-‘ being a subset of ‘trans-‘.

I think that’s enough for now. Should I ever stumble across a definition for crossdisciplinarity, I will endeavour to add it here.

An ‘artificial brain’ and life-long learning

Talk of artificial brains (also known as, brainlike computing or neuromorphic computing) usually turns to memory fairly quickly. This February 3, 2022 news item on ScienceDaily does too although the focus is on how memory and forgetting affect the ability to learn,

When the human brain learns something new, it adapts. But when artificial intelligence learns something new, it tends to forget information it already learned.

As companies use more and more data to improve how AI recognizes images, learns languages and carries out other complex tasks, a paper publishing in Science this week shows a way that computer chips could dynamically rewire themselves to take in new data like the brain does, helping AI to keep learning over time.

“The brains of living beings can continuously learn throughout their lifespan. We have now created an artificial platform for machines to learn throughout their lifespan,” said Shriram Ramanathan, a professor in Purdue University’s [Indiana, US] School of Materials Engineering who specializes in discovering how materials could mimic the brain to improve computing.

Unlike the brain, which constantly forms new connections between neurons to enable learning, the circuits on a computer chip don’t change. A circuit that a machine has been using for years isn’t any different than the circuit that was originally built for the machine in a factory.

This is a problem for making AI more portable, such as for autonomous vehicles or robots in space that would have to make decisions on their own in isolated environments. If AI could be embedded directly into hardware rather than just running on software as AI typically does, these machines would be able to operate more efficiently.

A February 3, 2022 Purdue University news release (also on EurekAlert), which originated the news item, provides more technical detail about the work (Note: Links have been removed),

In this study, Ramanathan and his team built a new piece of hardware that can be reprogrammed on demand through electrical pulses. Ramanathan believes that this adaptability would allow the device to take on all of the functions that are necessary to build a brain-inspired computer.

“If we want to build a computer or a machine that is inspired by the brain, then correspondingly, we want to have the ability to continuously program, reprogram and change the chip,” Ramanathan said.

Toward building a brain in chip form

The hardware is a small, rectangular device made of a material called perovskite nickelate,  which is very sensitive to hydrogen. Applying electrical pulses at different voltages allows the device to shuffle a concentration of hydrogen ions in a matter of nanoseconds, creating states that the researchers found could be mapped out to corresponding functions in the brain.

When the device has more hydrogen near its center, for example, it can act as a neuron, a single nerve cell. With less hydrogen at that location, the device serves as a synapse, a connection between neurons, which is what the brain uses to store memory in complex neural circuits.

Through simulations of the experimental data, the Purdue team’s collaborators at Santa Clara University and Portland State University showed that the internal physics of this device creates a dynamic structure for an artificial neural network that is able to more efficiently recognize electrocardiogram patterns and digits compared to static networks. This neural network uses “reservoir computing,” which explains how different parts of a brain communicate and transfer information.

Researchers from The Pennsylvania State University also demonstrated in this study that as new problems are presented, a dynamic network can “pick and choose” which circuits are the best fit for addressing those problems.

Since the team was able to build the device using standard semiconductor-compatible fabrication techniques and operate the device at room temperature, Ramanathan believes that this technique can be readily adopted by the semiconductor industry.

“We demonstrated that this device is very robust,” said Michael Park, a Purdue Ph.D. student in materials engineering. “After programming the device over a million cycles, the reconfiguration of all functions is remarkably reproducible.”

The researchers are working to demonstrate these concepts on large-scale test chips that would be used to build a brain-inspired computer.

Experiments at Purdue were conducted at the FLEX Lab and Birck Nanotechnology Center of Purdue’s Discovery Park. The team’s collaborators at Argonne National Laboratory, the University of Illinois, Brookhaven National Laboratory and the University of Georgia conducted measurements of the device’s properties.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Reconfigurable perovskite nickelate electronics for artificial intelligence by Hai-Tian Zhang, Tae Joon Park, A. N. M. Nafiul Islam, Dat S. J. Tran, Sukriti Manna, Qi Wang, Sandip Mondal, Haoming Yu, Suvo Banik, Shaobo Cheng, Hua Zhou, Sampath Gamage, Sayantan Mahapatra, Yimei Zhu, Yohannes Abate, Nan Jiang, Subramanian K. R. S. Sankaranarayanan, Abhronil Sengupta, Christof Teuscher, Shriram Ramanathan. Science • 3 Feb 2022 • Vol 375, Issue 6580 • pp. 533-539 • DOI: 10.1126/science.abj7943

This paper is behind a paywall.

Neuromorphic (brainlike) computing inspired by sea slugs

The sea slug has taught neuroscientists the intelligence features that any creature in the animal kingdom needs to survive. Now, the sea slug is teaching artificial intelligence how to use those strategies. Pictured: Aplysia californica. (Image by NOAA Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary/Chad King.)

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a picture of a sea slug before. Its appearance reminds me of its terrestrial cousin.

As for some of the latest news on brainlike computing, a December 7, 2021 news item on Nanowerk makes an announcement from the Argonne National Laboratory (a US Department of Energy laboratory; Note: Links have been removed),

A team of scientists has discovered a new material that points the way toward more efficient artificial intelligence hardware for everything from self-driving cars to surgical robots.

For artificial intelligence (AI) to get any smarter, it needs first to be as intelligent as one of the simplest creatures in the animal kingdom: the sea slug.

A new study has found that a material can mimic the sea slug’s most essential intelligence features. The discovery is a step toward building hardware that could help make AI more efficient and reliable for technology ranging from self-driving cars and surgical robots to social media algorithms.

The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences [PNAS] (“Neuromorphic learning with Mott insulator NiO”), was conducted by a team of researchers from Purdue University, Rutgers University, the University of Georgia and the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory. The team used the resources of the Advanced Photon Source (APS), a DOE Office of Science user facility at Argonne.

A December 6, 2021 Argonne National Laboratory news release (also on EurekAlert) by Kayla Wiles and Andre Salles, which originated the news item, provides more detail,

“Through studying sea slugs, neuroscientists discovered the hallmarks of intelligence that are fundamental to any organism’s survival,” said Shriram Ramanathan, a Purdue professor of Materials Engineering. ​“We want to take advantage of that mature intelligence in animals to accelerate the development of AI.”

Two main signs of intelligence that neuroscientists have learned from sea slugs are habituation and sensitization. Habituation is getting used to a stimulus over time, such as tuning out noises when driving the same route to work every day. Sensitization is the opposite — it’s reacting strongly to a new stimulus, like avoiding bad food from a restaurant.

AI has a really hard time learning and storing new information without overwriting information it has already learned and stored, a problem that researchers studying brain-inspired computing call the ​“stability-plasticity dilemma.” Habituation would allow AI to ​“forget” unneeded information (achieving more stability) while sensitization could help with retaining new and important information (enabling plasticity).

In this study, the researchers found a way to demonstrate both habituation and sensitization in nickel oxide, a quantum material. Quantum materials are engineered to take advantage of features available only at nature’s smallest scales, and useful for information processing. If a quantum material could reliably mimic these forms of learning, then it may be possible to build AI directly into hardware. And if AI could operate both through hardware and software, it might be able to perform more complex tasks using less energy.

“We basically emulated experiments done on sea slugs in quantum materials toward understanding how these materials can be of interest for AI,” Ramanathan said.

Neuroscience studies have shown that the sea slug demonstrates habituation when it stops withdrawing its gill as much in response to tapping. But an electric shock to its tail causes its gill to withdraw much more dramatically, showing sensitization.

For nickel oxide, the equivalent of a ​“gill withdrawal” is an increased change in electrical resistance. The researchers found that repeatedly exposing the material to hydrogen gas causes nickel oxide’s change in electrical resistance to decrease over time, but introducing a new stimulus like ozone greatly increases the change in electrical resistance.

Ramanathan and his colleagues used two experimental stations at the APS to test this theory, using X-ray absorption spectroscopy. A sample of nickel oxide was exposed to hydrogen and oxygen, and the ultrabright X-rays of the APS were used to see changes in the material at the atomic level over time.

“Nickel oxide is a relatively simple material,” said Argonne physicist Hua Zhou, a co-author on the paper who worked with the team at beamline 33-ID. ​“The goal was to use something easy to manufacture, and see if it would mimic this behavior. We looked at whether the material gained or lost a single electron after exposure to the gas.”

The research team also conducted scans at beamline 29-ID, which uses softer X-rays to probe different energy ranges. While the harder X-rays of 33-ID are more sensitive to the ​“core” electrons, those closer to the nucleus of the nickel oxide’s atoms, the softer X-rays can more readily observe the electrons on the outer shell. These are the electrons that define whether a material is conductive or resistive to electricity.

“We’re very sensitive to the change of resistivity in these samples,” said Argonne physicist Fanny Rodolakis, a co-author on the paper who led the work at beamline 29-ID. ​“We can directly probe how the electronic states of oxygen and nickel evolve under different treatments.”

Physicist Zhan Zhang and postdoctoral researcher Hui Cao, both of Argonne, contributed to the work, and are listed as co-authors on the paper. Zhang said the APS is well suited for research like this, due to its bright beam that can be tuned over different energy ranges.

For practical use of quantum materials as AI hardware, researchers will need to figure out how to apply habituation and sensitization in large-scale systems. They also would have to determine how a material could respond to stimuli while integrated into a computer chip.

This study is a starting place for guiding those next steps, the researchers said. Meanwhile, the APS is undergoing a massive upgrade that will not only increase the brightness of its beams by up to 500 times, but will allow for those beams to be focused much smaller than they are today. And this, Zhou said, will prove useful once this technology does find its way into electronic devices.

“If we want to test the properties of microelectronics,” he said, ​“the smaller beam that the upgraded APS will give us will be essential.”

In addition to the experiments performed at Purdue and Argonne, a team at Rutgers University performed detailed theory calculations to understand what was happening within nickel oxide at a microscopic level to mimic the sea slug’s intelligence features. The University of Georgia measured conductivity to further analyze the material’s behavior.

A version of this story was originally published by Purdue University

About the Advanced Photon Source

The U. S. Department of Energy Office of Science’s Advanced Photon Source (APS) at Argonne National Laboratory is one of the world’s most productive X-ray light source facilities. The APS provides high-brightness X-ray beams to a diverse community of researchers in materials science, chemistry, condensed matter physics, the life and environmental sciences, and applied research. These X-rays are ideally suited for explorations of materials and biological structures; elemental distribution; chemical, magnetic, electronic states; and a wide range of technologically important engineering systems from batteries to fuel injector sprays, all of which are the foundations of our nation’s economic, technological, and physical well-being. Each year, more than 5,000 researchers use the APS to produce over 2,000 publications detailing impactful discoveries, and solve more vital biological protein structures than users of any other X-ray light source research facility. APS scientists and engineers innovate technology that is at the heart of advancing accelerator and light-source operations. This includes the insertion devices that produce extreme-brightness X-rays prized by researchers, lenses that focus the X-rays down to a few nanometers, instrumentation that maximizes the way the X-rays interact with samples being studied, and software that gathers and manages the massive quantity of data resulting from discovery research at the APS.

This research used resources of the Advanced Photon Source, a U.S. DOE Office of Science User Facility operated for the DOE Office of Science by Argonne National Laboratory under Contract No. DE-AC02-06CH11357.

Argonne National Laboratory seeks solutions to pressing national problems in science and technology. The nation’s first national laboratory, Argonne conducts leading-edge basic and applied scientific research in virtually every scientific discipline. Argonne researchers work closely with researchers from hundreds of companies, universities, and federal, state and municipal agencies to help them solve their specific problems, advance America’s scientific leadership and prepare the nation for a better future. With employees from more than 60 nations, Argonne is managed by UChicago Argonne, LLC for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science.

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit https://​ener​gy​.gov/​s​c​ience.

You can find the September 24, 2021 Purdue University story, Taking lessons from a sea slug, study points to better hardware for artificial intelligence here.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Neuromorphic learning with Mott insulator NiO by Zhen Zhang, Sandip Mondal, Subhasish Mandal, Jason M. Allred, Neda Alsadat Aghamiri, Alireza Fali, Zhan Zhang, Hua Zhou, Hui Cao, Fanny Rodolakis, Jessica L. McChesney, Qi Wang, Yifei Sun, Yohannes Abate, Kaushik Roy, Karin M. Rabe, and Shriram Ramanathan. PNAS September 28, 2021 118 (39) e2017239118 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2017239118

This paper is behind a paywall.

Pandemic science breakthroughs: combining supercomputing materials with specialized oxides to mimic brain function

This breakthrough in neuromorphic (brainlike) computing is being attributed to the pandemic (COVID-19) according to a September 3, 2021 news item on phys.org,

Isaac Newton’s groundbreaking scientific productivity while isolated from the spread of bubonic plague is legendary. University of California San Diego physicists can now claim a stake in the annals of pandemic-driven science.

A team of UC San Diego [University of California San Diego] researchers and colleagues at Purdue University have now simulated the foundation of new types of artificial intelligence computing devices that mimic brain functions, an achievement that resulted from the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. By combining new supercomputing materials with specialized oxides, the researchers successfully demonstrated the backbone of networks of circuits and devices that mirror the connectivity of neurons and synapses in biologically based neural networks.

A September 3, 2021 UC San Diego news release by Mario Aguilera, which originated the news item, delves further into the topic of neuromorphic computing,

As bandwidth demands on today’s computers and other devices reach their technological limit, scientists are working towards a future in which new materials can be orchestrated to mimic the speed and precision of animal-like nervous systems. Neuromorphic computing based on quantum materials, which display quantum-mechanics-based properties, allow scientists the ability to move beyond the limits of traditional semiconductor materials. This advanced versatility opens the door to new-age devices that are far more flexible with lower energy demands than today’s devices. Some of these efforts are being led by Department of Physics Assistant Professor Alex Frañó and other researchers in UC San Diego’s Quantum Materials for Energy Efficient Neuromorphic Computing (Q-MEEN-C), a Department of Energy-supported Energy Frontier Research Center.

“In the past 50 years we’ve seen incredible technological achievements that resulted in computers that were progressively smaller and faster—but even these devices have limits for data storage and energy consumption,” said Frañó, who served as one of the PNAS paper’s authors, along with former UC San Diego chancellor, UC president and physicist Robert Dynes. “Neuromorphic computing is inspired by the emergent processes of the millions of neurons, axons and dendrites that are connected all over our body in an extremely complex nervous system.”

As experimental physicists, Frañó and Dynes are typically busy in their laboratories using state-of-the-art instruments to explore new materials. But with the onset of the pandemic, Frañó and his colleagues were forced into isolation with concerns about how they would keep their research moving forward. They eventually came to the realization that they could advance their science from the perspective of simulations of quantum materials.

“This is a pandemic paper,” said Frañó. “My co-authors and I decided to study this issue from a more theoretical perspective so we sat down and started having weekly (Zoom-based) meetings. Eventually the idea developed and took off.”

The researchers’ innovation was based on joining two types of quantum substances—superconducting materials based on copper oxide and metal insulator transition materials that are based on nickel oxide. They created basic “loop devices” that could be precisely controlled at the nano-scale with helium and hydrogen, reflecting the way neurons and synapses are connected. Adding more of these devices that link and exchange information with each other, the simulations showed that eventually they would allow the creation of an array of networked devices that display emergent properties like an animal’s brain.

Like the brain, neuromorphic devices are being designed to enhance connections that are more important than others, similar to the way synapses weigh more important messages than others.

“It’s surprising that when you start to put in more loops, you start to see behavior that you did not expect,” said Frañó. “From this paper we can imagine doing this with six, 20 or a hundred of these devices—then it gets exponentially rich from there. Ultimately the goal is to create a very large and complex network of these devices that will have the ability to learn and adapt.”

With eased pandemic restrictions, Frañó and his colleagues are back in the laboratory, testing the theoretical simulations described in the PNAS [Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences] paper with real-world instruments.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Low-temperature emergent neuromorphic networks with correlated oxide devices by Uday S. Goteti, Ivan A. Zaluzhnyy, Shriram Ramanathan, Robert C. Dynes, and Alex Frano. PNAS August 31, 2021 118 (35) e2103934118; DOI: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2103934118

This paper is open access.