October 1, 2018,

Dear members of the Hajim School community,

The impressive breadth of research being done in the Hajim School is apparent in a recent paper and three successful grant applications.

For 90 years physicists have known – and puzzled over the fact — that elementary particles such as electrons, photons, and mesons are observed to have the incompatibly opposite properties of both particles and waves. Now Xiaofeng Qian, a research associate at the Institute of Optics; Nick Vamivakas, associate professor of quantum optics and quantum physics; and Joseph Eberly, the Andrew Carnegie Professor of Physics, have discovered the intimate connection between duality and another equally weird feature of quantum mechanics, namely entanglement. They describe their findings in a paper published in Optica. Click here to read more about this exciting discovery.

James McGrath, professor of biomedical engineering, has received a $611,000 grant from the U.S. Army Medical Research and Material Command to explore use of his nanomembrane-based technology to detect and monitor bladder cancer. Until now, diagnosis and surveillance of this fifth most common solid malignancy has required patients to undergo invasive cystoscopy and biopsy. However, the nanomembranes developed in Jim’s lab are able to separate out exosomes – small vesicles—from biofluids as biomarkers for various disorders. Doing this with the vesicles secreted by uroepithelial carcinoma cells into urine would enable noninvasive early diagnosis and routine surveillance to improve outcomes for bladder cancer patients while reducing costs.

Chenliang Xu, assistant professor, and Jiebo Luo, professor, both of computer science, have received an NSF award of $450,000 to build computational models that are able to abstract and summarize the instructional procedures as well as answer questions such as “why” and “how” something happened in an instructional video. This requires, beyond the conventional recognition of objects, actions, and attributes in a scene, the higher-order inference of any relations therein. The developed technology will enable many applications in other fields, for example, multimedia (video indexing and retrieval), robotics (reasoning capability of why and how questions), and health care (assistive devices for visually impaired people). Expected outcomes of this project include: a software package for constructing and performing inference on video story graphs and incorporating external knowledge; a web-deployed system to process user-uploaded instructional videos; and a large video dataset with procedure and question-answering annotations. Read more here.

Robert Boyd, professor of optics and physics, is leading a high-powered, DARPA-funded collaboration to explore the use of epsilon-near-zero (ENZ) materials to create nonlinear photonic devices that could have game-changing implications. Imagine, for instance, a solid-state system that could serve as a platform for all-optical computation and signal processing using only a few tens of photons.

Here epsilon-near-zero corresponds to situations in which the dielectric permittivity, and consequently the well-known index of refraction takes on vanishingly small values. Such materials display exotic electromagnetic properties, for example, light oscillates in time but not in space. Light does not “propagate” in the usual sense of the word.

Bob and his collaborators —Nader Engheta, the H. Nedwill Ramsey Professor of Electrical and Systems Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania; Eric Mazur, the Balkanski Professor of Physics and Applied Physics at Harvard; and Alan Willner, professor of electrical engineering at the University of Southern California — say their project, which will be funded up to $3 million, could have “paradigm shifting” results, including:

new understandings of light/matter interaction in ENZ materials,
complete dynamic control of beam characteristics,
low threshold nonlinear optic devices that are integrated, fast, tunable, and efficient at broad bandwidths.

Many exciting discoveries have come out of Bob’s group in recent years, including the first direct measurement of the polarization states of light, and the use of “twisted light” to increase the bit-carrying capacity of a photon. But his work with ENZ materials, he says, “is the most important discovery, to date, in my career. “

Bob, by the way, has just been notified that he’s been elected a member of Germany’s Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, a learned society of eminent scientists with international reputation. Established in 1909, the academy has included 28 Nobel Prize Winners among its members.

Please be sure to check out these events involving engineering students, faculty, and alumni this week during our Meliora Weekend celebration:

Eisenberg Symposium, 3:30 to 5:30 p.m. Friday, Wegmans Hall 1009. This event showcases research projects conducted this summer by chemical engineering students who were recipients of the Professor Richard F. Eisenberg and Harriet Rippey Eisenberg Fund.
Biomedical Engineering Open House, 3:30 to 5:30 p.m. Friday, 2nd and 3rd floors of Goegen Hall. Poster session showcases research findings of biomedical engineering students.
Society of Women Engineers: Celebrating 40 years! 9 to 10:30 a.m., Saturday, Frederick Douglass Commons 401. The society will share current initiatives with past and present members. Light refreshments will be provided.
Tau Beta Pi Engineering Honor Society Alumni Panel & Meet and Greet, 1 to 3 p.m., Saturday, Goergen 109. Panel discussion and reception with current and former members of Tau Beta Pi.
Making Music: From Inspiration to Your Ears. 1 to 2 p.m. Saturday, Dewey 1-101. Interactive panel discussion exploring the musical creative process from initial inspiration and song-writing to recording and mastering, featuring Bob Ludwig (BM ’66 MM ’01), mastering engineer and multiple Grammy winner; Sean Olive, acoustic research fellow for Harman International; Ric Ocasek, singer, songwriter, record producer, and member of The Cars rock and roll band; and two of our audio and music engineering faculty members, Stephen Roessner, Grammy winning recording engineer, musician, and producer, and Rob LaVaque, award-winning keyboardist, guitarist, vocalist, and audio engineer who did the audio and music for the Medical Center’s television ads during the 2015 and 2016 Super Bowls.

Have a great week,

Your dean,
Wendi Heinzelman