In the face of climate change, deforestation, and biodiversity loss, creating a sustainable version of civilization is one of humanity’s most urgent tasks. But when confronting this immense challenge, we rarely ask what may be the most pressing question of all: How do we know if sustainability is even possible? Astronomers have inventoried a sizable share of the universe’s stars, galaxies, comets, and black holes. But are planets with sustainable civilizations also something the universe contains? Or does every civilization that may have arisen in the cosmos last only a few centuries before it falls to the climate change it triggers?

Astrophysicist Adam Frank, a professor of physics and astronomy, is part of a group of researchers who have taken the first steps to answer these questions. In a new study published in the journal Astrobiology, the group—including Frank; Jonathan Carroll-Nellenback, a senior computational scientist at Rochester; Martina Alberti of the University of Washington, and Axel Kleidon of the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry—address these questions from an “astrobiological” perspective.

“Astrobiology is the study of life and its possibilities in a planetary context,” says Frank, who is also author of the new book Light of the Stars: Alien Worlds and the Fate of the Earth, which draws on this study. “That includes ‘exo-civilizations’ or what we usually call aliens.”

Frank and his colleagues point out that discussions about climate change rarely take place in this broader context—one that considers the probability that this is not the first time in cosmic history that a planet and its biosphere have evolved into something like what we’ve created on Earth. “If we’re not the universe’s first civilization,” Frank says, “that means there are likely to be rules for how the fate of a young civilization like our own progresses.”

In order to illustrate how civilization-planet systems co-evolve, Frank and his collaborators developed a mathematical model to show ways in which a technologically advanced population and its planet might develop together.

Using their mathematical model, the researchers found four potential scenarios that might occur in a civilization-planet system:

1. Die-off: The population and the planet’s state (indicated by something like its average temperature) rise very quickly. Eventually, the population peaks and then declines rapidly as the rising planetary temperature makes conditions harder to survive. A steady population level is achieved, but it’s only a fraction of the peak population. “Imagine if 7 out of 10 people you knew died quickly,” Frank says. “It’s not clear a complex technological civilization could survive that kind of change.”
2. Sustainability: The population and the temperature rise but eventually both come to steady values without any catastrophic effects. This scenario occurs in the models when the population recognizes it is having a negative effect on the planet and switches from using high-impact resources, such as oil, to low-impact resources, such as solar energy.
3. Collapse without resource change: The population and temperature both rise rapidly until the population reaches a peak and drops precipitously. In these models civilization collapses, though it is not clear if the species itself completely dies outs.
4. Collapse with resource change: The population and the temperature rise, but the population recognizes it is causing a problem and switches from high-impact resources to low-impact resources. Things appear to level off for a while, but the response turns out to have come too late, and the population collapses anyway.

The researchers created their models based in part on case studies of extinct civilizations, such as the inhabitants of Easter Island. People began colonizing the island between 400 and 700 AD and grew to a peak population of 10,000 sometime between 1200 and 1500 AD. By the 18th century, however, the inhabitants had depleted their resources and the population dropped drastically to about 2,000 people.

Read more here.

How many bits of information can be loaded on a single photon? Will doughnut-shaped pulses of light one day provide novel ways to transfer information? What are the prospects for a quantum internet? Will defects in diamonds and other crystals provide new means of imaging and sensing?

These are some of the tantalizing questions raised in “Light, the universe and everything – 12 Herculean tasks for quantum cowboys and black diamond skiers” in the Journal of Modern Optics. The survey of the biggest scientific challenges and questions in quantum optics and optical physics was compiled and edited by more than 30 experts in the field, including two University of Rochester faculty members.

The answers to these questions could have a profound effect on our daily lives, says editor in chief Thomas Brown, a professor at Rochester’s Institute of Optics.

For example, “Computers will eventually learn how to sense the most subtle physical motions, so we will be able to do certain things with just a glance or a minute twirl of a finger,’ Brown says. “But this will require using more and more data, in a secure fashion, and with much more sophisticated data handling. And that’s where optical physics and quantum optics come in.”

Similarly, “data centers are using up huge amounts of energy,” Brown says. “We can’t continue to grow to the point where data centers take up more energy than the rest of the planet. We need to figure out ways to be able to do computations not only faster but more efficiently. And that’s also where optical physics and quantum optics come in.”

Optical physics is the study of the fundamental properties of light and their interaction with matter. Quantum optics is the part of optical physics that studies those interactions at the submicroscopic level, looking at how individual particles of light, called photons, interact with atoms and molecules.

Quantum optics is a realm where particles act in ways that seem counterintuitive. Consider this example of quantum “weirdness”: two photons thousands of light-years apart can be inextricably linked by a quantum phenomenon called entanglement, so that whatever affects one simultaneously affects the other. This has given rise to the possibility of a quantum internet that would use entangled particles to send information at super-fast speeds. And do so in a completely secure fashion because any hacking involving one particle would automatically affect its entangled partner, and thus be detected.

The lab of Robert Boyd, one of the co-authors of the paper and a professor at Rochester’s Institute of Optics, has demonstrated some of these possibilities. For example, the lab has shown how “twisted light” could be used to transfer 2.05 bits of information per detected photon, using the orbital angular momentum of the photons to encode information. This new approach doubles the 1 bit per photon obtained using the standard procedure of encoding using the polarization of light. It also opens the possibility of a high-dimensional quantum key distribution in which entanglement helps ensure that both the sender and receiver are communicating in such a way that only they know what is being sent –and that the presence of any eavesdropper would be identified. Read more about the Boyd lab’s work on twisted light here.

The William and Sheila Konar Foundation has made a $2.5 million gift to provide lead support for urban education research and practice at the Center for Urban Education Success (CUES) within the University’s Warner School of Education.

The Konar Foundation’s gift creates a new endowed position to lead CUES, ensuring permanent support for the position and the ability to attract and retain top leaders for the center and its work. Shaun Nelms ’04W (MS), ’13W (EdD) has been named the first William and Sheila Konar Director for the Center for Urban Education Success. Nelms will continue his role as the superintendent of East Upper and Lower Schools and as an associate professor at Warner.

Designed to support the success of K-12 urban schools in Rochester and beyond, CUES shares findings among researchers and practitioners in urban education and creates models that can be adapted in other school districts across the country. The Konar Foundation’s generosity ensures that CUES can be a bridge that links research to practice and makes certain that the center will always be led by the most talented professionals.

Read more here.

The Humanities Center is creating a database of the research interests of faculty members in the humanities and humanistic social sciences across the University, in hopes of making it easier to connect people with shared or overlapping perspectives.

In particular, it will be useful in selecting external fellows who will integrate more systematically with Rochester research initiatives; it will also help in augmenting working groups, Central New York Humanities Corridor activities, grant applications, strategic planning possibilities, and the work-in-progress seminars.

Faculty members in AS&E, Eastman School of Music, and the School of Medicine and Dentistry with humanities interests are encouraged to complete the form by July 15, as well as affiliates in other schools.  The database will be shared when it is complete.

The form is available here: https://goo.gl/forms/dj09WFDCYziMDd8P2

Due to the holiday, the next issue of Research Connections will be July 13.

June 30: Deadline to register for Genomic Data Analysis Workshops, which will be held July 9 and 10 and July 16 and 17, to provide biomedical researchers a basic understanding of experimental design as it relates to RNA-Seq and a “toolkit” to perform some analyses on RNA-Seq data. A collaborative initiative between the Genomics Research Center and the Department of Biostatistics and Computational Biology.

July 11:  “Information Flow in Music.” David Temperley, professor of music theory at the Eastman School. Data Science Summer Colloquium Series, Goergen Institute for Data Science. Noon to 1 p.m., Wegmans Hall 1400. Open to all faculty, staff, students, and community members. Lunch included.

July 17: CIRC Summer School begins. Classes in programming languages and data analysis skills. VISTA Collaboratory. Click here to learn more and to register.

July 18:  “Physics of Complex Systems.” Gourab Ghoshal, assistant professor of physics. Data Science Summer Colloquium Series, Goergen Institute for Data Science. Noon to 1 p.m., Wegmans Hall 1400. Open to all faculty, staff, students, and community members. Lunch included.

Aug. 1: Deadline to submit initial applications for Environmental Health Sciences Center funding of up to $30,000 for pilot projects relevant to the theme, “Environmental Agents as Modulators of Human Disease and Dysfunction.” Submit initial applications to Pat Noonan-Sullivan. Additional Information.