Tag Archives: (US) National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)

Quantum steampunk?

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[“Steampunk Quantum Engine” downloaded from https://thequantuminsider.com/2025/03/15/quantum-goes-steampunk-umd-physicist-helps-sculpt-quantum-mechanics-into-reality/ on March 17, 2026]

I eventually came across the example of quantum steampunk art/science work you see in the above after seeing this notice in a November 20, 2026 newsletter from Canada’s Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics (PI; received via email),

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Quantum steampunk: we explore the art and science

Explore the art of steampunk and how it is influenced by the technology of the 19th century.


Listen to the Podcast here

Here’s more about the artist responsible for the quantum steampunk engine depicted and the podcast mentioned in the above, from Hamish Johnston’s October 30, 2025 podcast “Quantum steampunk: we explore the art and science” for Physics World, Note: Links have been removed,

Earlier this year I met the Massachusetts-based steampunk artist Bruce Rosenbaum at the Global Physics Summit of the American Physical Society. He was exhibiting a beautiful sculpture of a “quantum engine” that was created in collaboration with physicists including NIST’s [US National Institute of Standards and Technology] Nicole Yunger Halpern – who pioneered the scientific field of quantum steampunk.

I was so taken by the art and science of quantum steampunk that I promised Rosenbaum that I would chat with him and Yunger Halpern on the podcast – and here is that conversation. We begin by exploring the art of steampunk and how it is influenced by the technology of the 19th century. Then, we look at the physics of quantum steampunk, a field that weds modern concepts of quantum information with thermodynamics – which itself is a scientific triumph of the 19th century.

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Nicole Yunger Halpern, the physicist who pioneered quantum steampunk, wrote a May 1, 2020 article for Scientific American,

Quantum Steampunk: 19th-Century Science Meets Technology of Today

Just as fictional steampunk unites Victorian style with sci-fi tech, a new branch of physics is updating thermodynamics for modern quantum systems 

London, at an hour that made Rosalind glad she’d nicked her brother’s black cloak instead of wearing her scarlet one. The factory alongside her had quit belching smoke for the night, but it would start again soon. A noise caused her to draw back against the brick wall. Glancing up, she gasped. An oblong hulk was drifting across the sky. The darkness obscured the details, but she didn’t need to see; a brass-colored lock would be painted across the side. Mellator had launched his dirigible.

Welcome to steampunk. This genre has expanded across literature, art and film over the past several decades. Its stories tend to take place near nascent factories and in grimy cities, in Industrial Age England and the Wild West—in real-life settings where technologies were burgeoning. Yet steampunk characters extend these inventions into futuristic technologies, including automata and time machines. The juxtaposition of old and new creates an atmosphere of romanticism and adventure. Little wonder that steampunk fans buy top hats and petticoats, adorn themselves in brass and glass, and flock to steampunk conventions.

These fans dream the adventure. But physicists today who work at the intersection of three fields—quantum physics, information theory and thermodynamics—live it. Just as steampunk blends science-fiction technology with Victorian style, a modern field of physics that I call “quantum steampunk” unites 21st-century technology with 19th-century scientific principles.

Our goal is to update the laws of thermodynamics—the study of work, heat and efficiency—to meet the demands of cutting-edge experiments, technologies and theory. Thermodynamics was born when steam engines drove the Industrial Revolution. But as technology shrinks, thermodynamics and information couple in smaller and smaller systems. The spotlight has swept from trains to nanoscale engines, living cells’ molecular motors and the smallest possible refrigerators. We must now investigate how to apply traditional thermodynamic concepts such as heat, work and equilibration to modern quantum systems.

Victorian physics meets millennial science

By 1800 Thomas Savery and Thomas Newcomen had invented, and James Watt and Matthew Boulton had refined, the steam engine. Thinkers then wondered how efficiently such engines could pump water out of mines. Their studies grew from practicalities to questions of fundamental physics, such as why time flows only in one direction. The field of thermodynamics is grounded in this work.

This branch of physics describes many-particle systems, such as steam, in terms of large-scale properties, such as temperature, pressure, volume and energy. Energy in transit falls into two classes, work and heat. Work is well-organized energy usable for a purpose, like turning a mill wheel. Heat is the energy of random motion—of particles jiggling.

Thermodynamicists quantify randomness with a number called entropy. Every particle in a canister of steam has a position and a momentum (the particle’s mass times its velocity). The set of all the particles’ positions and momenta we call the steam’s microstate. We cannot know the microstate, because the canister contains about 1024 (1 followed by 24 zeroes) particles. Imagine trying to locate them all! Instead we track the probability that the steam occupies this or that microstate. Entropy quantifies our uncertainty. According to the second law of thermodynamics, the entropy of a closed, isolated system cannot shrink. This fact underlies the reality that time flows in a single direction.

But the steam engines central to traditional thermodynamics resemble today’s technologies about as much as top hats resemble virtual-reality headsets. Many modern inventions and experiments involve small, complex quantum systems. Quantum theory is the physics of atoms, electrons and other constituents of matter. They can behave in ways impossible for larger, classical systems, such as steam canisters, factories and people. For instance, quantum particles can share entanglement, a type of ultrastrong correlation. If you entangle two atoms and measure one, the other atom changes instantaneously, even if it is across a continent. Physicists can use entanglement to process information in ways impossible with classical systems. The study of how we can solve computational problems, communicate, secure information and enhance measurements with quantum systems is called quantum information theory. This theory is a useful mathematical tool kit for implementing our update to thermodynamics. How do the two fields connect? To reason about information, we have to confront ignorance. Information theorists quantify ignorance with entropy, just as thermodynamicists do.

Quantum computers, for instance, are systems where both quantum information theory and thermodynamics are key. Google, IBM and other institutions are hard at work building such machines, which aim to break certain encryption schemes and to model certain materials far more quickly than any classical computer. Most quantum-computing systems need to be cooled to a temperature near absolute zero. Cooling amounts to dissipating heat, a thermodynamic quantity. Yet quantum computers look nothing like the engines for which thermodynamics was developed.

Efforts to apply thermodynamic concepts to quantum settings date to the mid-20th century, when Joseph Geusic, E. O. Schulz-DuBois and H. E. Derrick Scovil proposed the first quantum engine.It was made from a maser, which operates like a laser but releases microwave light. Later, Ronnie Kosloff of Hebrew University of Jerusalem and his colleagues helped to turn quantum engines into their own subfield. Another pioneer is Marlan Scully, sometimes called the “quantum cowboy,” who works on quantum optics at Princeton University and Texas A&M University and also raises cattle. Meanwhile theorists Gian Paolo Beretta, the late Elias Gyftopoulos and the late George Hatsopoulos studied the arrow of time from a quantum perspective. And a seminal publication was Seth Lloyd’s 1988 Ph.D. thesis at the Rockefeller University, “Black Holes, Demons, and the Loss of Coherence: How Complex Systems Get Information, and What They Do with It,” which established many important ideas for the field of quantum thermodynamics.

Quantum Steampunk Tools

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Yunger Halpern’s May 1, 2020 article offers some intriguing insights. 2020 is also the year Yunger-Halpern was approached by a ‘steampunk’ artist according to a March 12, 2025 article by Resonance for the Quantum Insider, Note: Links have been removed,

Insider Brief

  • Physicist Nicole Yunger Halpern and artist Bruce Rosenbaum collaborated to create a steampunk-inspired sculpture that visually represents quantum thermodynamics.
  • The eight-inch metallic sculpture, designed with input from scientists and artists, illustrates a quantum engine that converts random microscopic motion into useful energy.
  • Debuting at the American Physical Society’s Global Physics Summit in 2025, the piece is planned as a precursor to a larger, interactive version blending antique aesthetics with modern technology.

In 2020, physicist Nicole Yunger Halpern received a rather unusual email out of the blue. Bruce Rosenbaum, a Massachusetts-based artist dubbed “the steampunk guru” by The Wall Street Journal, watched one of her lectures about quantum thermodynamics and was interested in collaborating with her. Rosenbaum saw something extraordinary in Yunger Halpern’s work—in terms of cutting-edge science and artistic possibility. 

For Yunger Halpern, who coined the term “quantum steampunk” while earning her Ph.D. in theoretical physics at the California Institute of Technology, it almost felt like scientific serendipity. 

“It’s been a privilege to interact with someone who is based in such a different world. I’m in physics, Bruce is in art. And yet, we both have a very strong shared interest in connecting the steam-powered world of the Industrial Revolution to today,” said Yunger Halpern, who is a theoretical physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, a fellow of the Joint Center for Quantum Information and Computer Science, and an adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Physics and the Institute for Physical Science and Technology at the University of Maryland.

The unusual partnership kicked off a multi-year quest to craft a piece of art that could represent two very different worlds. For weeks, Yunger Halpern and Rosenbaum worked over weekend Zooms and emails to brainstorm before enlisting others to help bring their ideas to life. 

In late 2024, they finally created their masterpiece: an eight-inch diameter sculpture that marries steampunk (a popular genre that combines Victorian-era aesthetics like brass, gears and steam with modern technology) with quantum physics (a rapidly evolving field that deals with how things work at the tiniest possible scales). At these tiny levels, objects don’t behave the same way as they do in our everyday world—for example, things can exist in multiple states at once, like a coin that, in some ways, behaves as though it were both heads-up and tails-up simultaneously.

Inspired by these strange behaviors present in quantum physics, Yunger Halpern and Rosenbaum focused their project on the concept of quantum engines, devices that convert energy from one form to another. According to Yunger Halpern, even a single atom can function as an engine, transforming random microscopic motion into useful energy. 

“Our sculpture depicts an engine that can operate at the atomic scale to convert heat energy— which is random, the energy of particles always jiggling around—into useful work. Work is coordinated energy, the kind that charges our computers and powers our factories,” Yunger Halpern explained. “Like the steam-powered tech of the Victorian era, this engine relies on thermodynamic properties to make its conversion. We wanted to bring those two themes from very different periods of history together.”

Linking quantum and art for all

Creating this visual representation of the invisible quantum world required an unusual team with varied skills. Rosenbaum brought in illustrator Jim Su for the initial designs and design engineering company Empire Group fabricated the sculpture. Rosenbaum and Yunger Halpern coordinated a careful balance between artistic vision and scientific accuracy at every stage of the project. Gradually, the team grew to include other UMD faculty and staff members, including Distinguished University Professors Christopher Jarzynski and William Phillips, Senior Faculty Specialist Daniel Serrano and Scientific Development Officer Alfredo Nava-Tudela. The UMD Quantum Startup Foundry and Caltech’s [California Institute of Technology[ Institute for Quantum Information and Matter also pitched in.

The result was a metallic, partially 3D-printed sculpture measuring eight inches in diameter, an eclectic mashup of both quantum science principles and artistic sensibilities. 

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You can find out more at the Quantum Steampunk Engine (or Captain Okoli’s Magnificent Steampunk Quantum Engine)website and there;s Yunger Halpern’s 2022 book from John Hopkins’ University Press, Quantum Steampunk; The Physics of Yesterday’s Tomorrow.

Uniting oil and water for a manufacturing-friendly approach to gel production

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This is a newish type of gel for which a new manufacturing has been developed jointly by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Delaware as described in a February 11, 2021 news item on phys.org (Note: A link has been removed),

Oil and water may not mix, but adding the right nanoparticles to the recipe can convert these two immiscible fluids into an exotic gel with uses ranging from batteries to water filters to tint-changing smart windows. A new approach to creating this unusual class of soft materials could carry them out of the laboratory and into the marketplace.

Scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Delaware have found what appears to be a better way to create these gels, which have been an area of intense research focus for more than a decade. Part of their potentially broad utility is the complex set of interconnected microscopic channels that form within them, creating a spongelike structure. These channels not only offer passageways for other materials to travel through, making them useful for filtration, but also give the gel a high amount of internal surface area, a characteristic valuable for speeding up chemical reactions or as scaffolding on which living tissue can grow.

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It seems they have great hopes for what they’ve called ‘SeedGel’, if this image is anything to go by,

Unlike other gel-creation approaches, where nanoparticles remain at the interface between the gel’s two constituent solvents (top left), the new approach concentrates nanoparticles in the interior of one of the solvents (top right), giving the resulting “SeedGel” unusual mechanical strength. The method could lead to gels that could be manufactured at industrial scales for a wide variety of potential applications. Credit: N. Hanacek / NIST

A February 10, 2021 NIST news release (also on EurekAlert), which originated the news item, delves further into the topic,

While these and other advantages make it sound like gel innovators have struck oil, their creations have not yet mixed well with the marketplace. The gels are commonly formed of two liquid solvents mingled together. As with oil and water, these solvents do not mix well, but to prevent them from completely separating, researchers add custom-designed nanoparticles that can stay at the interface between them. Carefully cooking these ingredients allows a cohesive gel to form. However, the process is demanding because custom-designing nanoparticles for each application has been difficult, and forming the gels has required carefully controlled rapid temperature change. These constraints have made it hard to create this type of gel in any more than small quantities suitable for lab experiments rather than on an industrial scale.

As described in a new Nature Communications paper, the NIST/Delaware team has found ways to sidestep many of these problems. Its novel approach forms what the researchers refer to as a “SeedGel,” an abbreviation for “solvent segregation driven gel.” Instead of designing nanoparticles to remain at the interface between the two solvents, their chosen particles concentrate within one of them. While these particles tend to repel one another, the particles’ affinity toward one of the solvents is stronger and keeps them together in the channel. Using neutron scattering tools at the NIST Center for Neutron Research (NCNR), the team unambiguously proved that it had succeeded at concentrating the nanoparticles where it wanted. 

The resulting gel could be far easier to create, as its two solvents are essentially oil and water, and its nanoparticles are silicon dioxide — essentially tiny spheres of common quartz. It also could have a variety of industrial uses. 

“Our SeedGel has great mechanical strength, it’s much easier to make, and the process is scalable to what manufacturers would need,” said Yun Liu, who is both an NCNR scientist and an affiliated full professor at the University of Delaware. “Plus it’s thermo-reversible.”

This reversibility refers to an optical property that the finished SeedGel possesses: It can switch from transparent to opaque and back again, just by changing its temperature. This property could be harnessed in smart windows that sandwich a thin layer of the gel between two panes of glass.

“This optical property could make the SeedGel useful in other light-sensitive applications as well,” said Yuyin Xi, a researcher from the University of Delaware also working at the NCNR. “They could be useful in sensors.”

Because the team’s gel-creation approach could be used with other solvent-and-nanoparticle combinations, it could become useful in filters for water purification and possibly other filtration processes depending on what type of nanoparticles are used.

Liu also said that the creation approach allows for the size of the channels within the gel to be tuned by changing the rate at which the temperature changes during the formation process, offering application designers another degree of freedom to explore.

“Ours is a generic approach working for many different nanoparticles and solvents,” he said. “It greatly extends the applications of these sorts of gels.”

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

Tunable thermo-reversible bicontinuous nanoparticle gel driven by the binary solvent segregation by Yuyin Xi, Ronald S. Lankone, Li-Piin Sung & Yun Liu. Nature Communications volume 12, Article number: 910 (2021) DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-20701-3 Published: 10 February 2021

This is paper is open access.

Two-dimensional material stacks into multiple layers to build a memory cell for longer lasting batteries

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This research comes from Purdue University (US) and the December announcement seemed particularly timely since battery-powered gifts are popular at Christmas but since it could be many years before this work is commercialized, you may want to tuck it away for future reference.  Also, readers familiar with memristors might see a resemblance to the memory cells mentioned in the following excerpt. From a December 13, 2018 news item on Nanowerk,

The more objects we make “smart,” from watches to entire buildings, the greater the need for these devices to store and retrieve massive amounts of data quickly without consuming too much power.

Millions of new memory cells could be part of a computer chip and provide that speed and energy savings, thanks to the discovery of a previously unobserved functionality in a material called molybdenum ditelluride.

The two-dimensional material stacks into multiple layers to build a memory cell. Researchers at Purdue University engineered this device in collaboration with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and Theiss Research Inc.

A December 13, 2018 Purdue University news release by Kayla Wiles, which originated the news item,  describes the work in more detail,

Chip-maker companies have long called for better memory technologies to enable a growing network of smart devices. One of these next-generation possibilities is resistive random access memory, or RRAM for short.

In RRAM, an electrical current is typically driven through a memory cell made up of stacked materials, creating a change in resistance that records data as 0s and 1s in memory. The sequence of 0s and 1s among memory cells identifies pieces of information that a computer reads to perform a function and then store into memory again.

A material would need to be robust enough for storing and retrieving data at least trillions of times, but materials currently used have been too unreliable. So RRAM hasn’t been available yet for widescale use on computer chips.

Molybdenum ditelluride could potentially last through all those cycles.
“We haven’t yet explored system fatigue using this new material, but our hope is that it is both faster and more reliable than other approaches due to the unique switching mechanism we’ve observed,” Joerg Appenzeller, Purdue University’s Barry M. and Patricia L. Epstein Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the scientific director of nanoelectronics at the Birck Nanotechnology Center.

Molybdenum ditelluride allows a system to switch more quickly between 0 and 1, potentially increasing the rate of storing and retrieving information. This is because when an electric field is applied to the cell, atoms are displaced by a tiny distance, resulting in a state of high resistance, noted as 0, or a state of low resistance, noted as 1, which can occur much faster than switching in conventional RRAM devices.

“Because less power is needed for these resistive states to change, a battery could last longer,” Appenzeller said.

In a computer chip, each memory cell would be located at the intersection of wires, forming a memory array called cross-point RRAM.

Appenzeller’s lab wants to explore building a stacked memory cell that also incorporates the other main components of a computer chip: “logic,” which processes data, and “interconnects,” wires that transfer electrical signals, by utilizing a library of novel electronic materials fabricated at NIST.

“Logic and interconnects drain battery too, so the advantage of an entirely two-dimensional architecture is more functionality within a small space and better communication between memory and logic,” Appenzeller said.

Two U.S. patent applications have been filed for this technology through the Purdue Office of Technology Commercialization.

The work received financial support from the Semiconductor Research Corporation through the NEW LIMITS Center (led by Purdue University), NIST, the U.S. Department of Commerce and the Material Genome Initiative.

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

Electric-field induced structural transition in vertical MoTe2- and Mo1–xWxTe2-based resistive memories by Feng Zhang, Huairuo Zhang, Sergiy Krylyuk, Cory A. Milligan, Yuqi Zhu, Dmitry Y. Zemlyanov, Leonid A. Bendersky, Benjamin P. Burton, Albert V. Davydov, & Joerg Appenzeller. Nature Materials volume 18, pages 55–61 (2019) Published: 10 December 2018 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-018-0234-y

This paper is behind a paywall.