Fish-eye lens may entangle pairs of atoms

Nearly 150 years ago, the physicist James Maxwell proposed that a circular lens that is thickest at its center, and that gradually thins out at its edges, should exhibit some fascinating optical behavior. Namely, when light is shone through such a lens, it should travel around in perfect circles, creating highly unusual, curved paths of light.

He also noted that such a lens, at least broadly speaking, resembles the eye of a fish. The lens configuration he devised has since been known in physics as Maxwell’s fish-eye lens — a theoretical construct that is only slightly similar to commercially available fish-eye lenses for cameras and telescopes. 

Now scientists at MIT and Harvard University have for the first time studied this unique, theoretical lens from a quantum mechanical perspective, to see how individual atoms and photons may behave within the lens. In a study published Wednesday in Physical Review A, they report that the unique configuration of the fish-eye lens enables it to guide single photons through the lens, in such a way as to entangle pairs of atoms, even over relatively long distances.

Entanglement is a quantum phenomenon in which the properties of one particle are linked, or correlated, with those of another particle, even over vast distances. The team’s findings suggest that fish-eye lenses may be a promising vehicle for entangling atoms and other quantum bits, which are the necessary building blocks for designing quantum computers.

“We found that the fish-eye lens has something that no other two-dimensional device has, which is maintaining this entangling ability over large distances, not just for two atoms, but for multiple pairs of distant atoms,” says first author Janos Perczel, a graduate student in MIT’s Department of Physics. “Entanglement and connecting these various quantum bits can be really the name of the game in making a push forward and trying to find applications of quantum mechanics.”

The team also found that the fish-eye lens, contrary to recent claims, does not produce a perfect image. Scientists have thought that Maxwell’s fish-eye may be a candidate for a “perfect lens” — a lens that can go beyond the diffraction limit, meaning that it can focus light to a point that is smaller than the light’s own wavelength. This perfect imaging, scientist predict, should produce an image with essentially unlimited resolution and extreme clarity.

However, by modeling the behavior of photons through a simulated fish-eye lens, at the quantum level, Perczel and his colleagues concluded that it cannot produce a perfect image, as originally predicted.

“This tells you that there are these limits in physics that are really difficult to break,” Perczel says. “Even in this system, which seemed to be a perfect candidate, this limit seems to be obeyed. Perhaps perfect imaging may still be possible with the fish eye in some other, more complicated way, but not as originally proposed.”

Perczel’s co-authors on the paper are Peter Komar and Mikhail Lukin from Harvard University.

A circular path

Maxwell was the first to realize that light is able to travel in perfect circles within the fish-eye lens because the density of the lens changes, with material being thickest at the middle and gradually thinning out toward the edges. The denser a material, the slower light moves through it. This explains the optical effect when a straw is placed in a glass half full of water. Because the water is so much denser than the air above it, light suddenly moves more slowly, bending as it travels through water and creating an image that looks as if the straw is disjointed.

In the theoretical fish-eye lens, the differences in density are much more gradual and are distributed in a circular pattern, in such a way that it curves rather bends light, guiding light in perfect circles within the lens.

In 2009, Ulf Leonhardt, a physicist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel was studying the optical properties of Maxwell’s fish-eye lens and observed that, when photons are released through the lens from a single point source, the light travels in perfect circles through the lens and collects at a single point at the opposite end, with very little loss of light.

“None of the light rays wander off in unwanted directions,” Perczel says. “Everything follows a perfect trajectory, and all the light will meet at the same time at the same spot.”

Leonhardt, in reporting his results, made a brief mention as to whether the fish-eye lens’ single-point focus might be useful in precisely entangling pairs of atoms at opposite ends of the lens.

“Mikhail [Lukin] asked him whether he had worked out the answer, and he said he hadn’t,” Perczel says. “That’s how we started this project and started digging deeper into how well this entangling operation works within the fish-eye lens.”

Playing photon ping-pong

To investigate the quantum potential of the fish-eye lens, the researchers modeled the lens as the simplest possible system, consisting of two atoms, one at either end of a two-dimensional fish-eye lens, and a single photon, aimed at the first atom. Using established equations of quantum mechanics, the team tracked the photon at any given point in time as it traveled through the lens, and calculated the state of both atoms and their energy levels through time.

They found that when a single photon is shone through the lens, it is temporarily absorbed by an atom at one end of the lens. It then circles through the lens, to the second atom at the precise opposite end of the lens. This second atom momentarily absorbs the photon before sending it back through the lens, where the light collects precisely back on the first atom.

“The photon is bounced back and forth, and the atoms are basically playing ping pong,” Perczel says. “Initially only one of the atoms has the photon, and then the other one. But between these two extremes, there’s a point where both of them kind of have it. It’s this mind-blowing quantum mechanics idea of entanglement, where the photon is completely shared equally between the two atoms.”

Perczel says that the photon is able to entangle the atoms because of the unique geometry of the fish-eye lens. The lens’ density is distributed in such a way that it guides light in a perfectly circular pattern and can cause even a single photon to bounce back and forth between two precise points along a circular path.

“If the photon just flew away in all directions, there wouldn’t be any entanglement,” Perczel says. “But the fish-eye gives this total control over the light rays, so you have an entangled system over long distances, which is a precious quantum system that you can use.”

As they increased the size of the fish-eye lens in their model, the atoms remained entangled, even over relatively large distances of tens of microns. They also observed that, even if some light escaped the lens, the atoms were able to share enough of a photon’s energy to remain entangled. Finally, as they placed more pairs of atoms in the lens, opposite to one another, along with corresponding photons, these atoms also became simultaneously entangled.

“You can use the fish eye to entangle multiple pairs of atoms at a time, which is what makes it useful and promising,” Perczel says.

Fishy secrets

In modeling the behavior of photons and atoms in the fish-eye lens, the researchers also found that, as light collected on the opposite end of the lens, it did so within an area that was larger than the wavelength of the photon’s light, meaning that the lens likely cannot produce a perfect image.

“We can precisely ask the question during this photon exchange, what’s the size of the spot to which the photon gets recollected? And we found that it’s comparable to the wavelength of the photon, and not smaller,” Perczel says. “Perfect imaging would imply it would focus on an infinitely sharp spot. However, that is not what our quantum mechanical calculations showed us.”

Going forward, the team hopes to work with experimentalists to test the quantum behaviors they observed in their modeling. In fact, in their paper, the team also briefly proposes a way to design a fish-eye lens for quantum entanglement experiments.

“The fish-eye lens still has its secrets, and remarkable physics buried in it,” Perczel says. “But now it’s making an appearance in quantum technologies where it turns out this lens could be really useful for entangling distant quantum bits, which is the basic building block for building any useful quantum computer or quantum information processing device.”

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Software tool could help architects design efficient buildings

Typically, when architects or engineers design a new building, it’s only at the end of the process — if ever — that a lifecycle analysis of the building’s environmental impact is carried out. And by then, it may be too late to make significant changes. Now, a faster and easier system for doing such analyses could change all that, making the analysis an integral part of the design process from the beginning.

The new process, described in the journal Building and Environment in a paper by MIT researchers Jeremy Gregory, Franz-Josef Ulm and Randolph Kirchain, and recent graduate Joshua Hester PhD ’18, is simple enough that it could be integrated into the software already used by building designers so that it becomes a seamless addition to their design process.

Lifecycle analysis, known as LCA, is a process of examining all the materials; design elements; location and orientation; heating, cooling, and other energy systems; and expected ultimate disposal of a building, in terms of costs, environmental impacts, or both. Ulm, a professor of civil and environmental engineering and director of MIT’s Concrete Sustainability Hub (CSH), says that typically LCA is applied “only when a building is fully designed, so it is rather a post-mortem tool but not an actual design tool.” That’s what the team set out to correct.

“We wanted to address how to bridge that gap between using LCA at the end of the process and getting architects and engineers to use it as a design tool,” he says. The big question was whether it would be possible to incorporate LCA evaluations into the design process without having it impose too many restrictions on the design choices, thus making it unappealing to the building designers. Ulm wondered, “How much does the LCA restrict the flexibility of the design?”

Measuring freedom of design

To address that question systematically, the team had to come up with a process of measuring the flexibility of design choices in a quantitative way. They settled on a measure they call “entropy,” analogous to the use of that term in physics. In physics, a system with greater entropy is “hotter,” with its molecules moving around rapidly. In the team’s use of the term, higher entropy represents a greater variety of available choices at a given point, while lower entropy represents a more restricted range of choices.

To the researchers’ surprise, they found use of their LCA system had very little impact on reducing the range of design choices. “That’s the most remarkable result,” Ulm says. When introducing the LCA into the early stages of the design process, “you barely touch the design flexibility,” he says. “I was convinced we would come to a compromise,” where design flexibility would have to be limited in order to gain better lifecycle performance, Ulm says. “But in fact, the results proved me wrong.”

The system looks at the full range of climate impacts from a new structure, including all three phases: construction, including examining the embodied energy in all the materials used in the building; operation of the building, including all of the energy sources needed to provide heating, cooling, and electrical service; and the final dismantling and disposal, or repurposing of the structure, at the end of its service.

To evaluate the lifecycle impact of design choices requires looking at a wide range of factors. These include: the location’s climate (for their research, they chose Arizona and New England as two very different cases of U.S. climate); the building’s dimensions and orientation; the ratio of walls to windows on each side; the materials used for walls, foundations, and roofing; the type of heating and cooling systems used; and so on. As each of these factors gets decided, the range of possibilities for the building get narrower and narrower — but not much more so than in any conventional design process.

At any point, the program “would also provide information about a lot of the things that are not yet defined,” essentially offering a menu of choices that could lead to a more environmentally friendly design, says Kirchain, who is a principal research scientist at MIT and co-director of the CSH, which supported the project.

While designed particularly for reducing the climate impact of a building, the same tool could also be used to optimize a building for other criteria, such as simply to minimize cost, the researchers say.

Getting in early

Thinking about issues such as the ultimate fate of a building at the end of its functional life tends to be “not in the same order of interest for the designing architect, when they first work on a design,” compared to more immediate factors such as how the building will look to the client, and meeting any particular functional requirements for the structure, Ulm says. But if the new LCA tools are integrated right into the design software they are using, then indications of how a given design choice can affect the outcome would be constantly available and able to easily influence choices even in small, subtle ways early in the process.

By comparing the design process with and without the use of such tools, the researchers found that the overall greenhouse gas emissions associated with a building could be reduced by 75 percent “without a reduction in the flexibility of the design process,” Ulm says.

Ulm compares it to indicators in a gym that provide feedback on how many calories are being burned at any point in an exercise regime, providing a constant incentive to improve results — without ever prescribing what exercises the person should do or how to do them.

While the program is currently designed to evaluate relatively simple single-family homes — which represent the vast majority of living spaces in the U.S. — the team hopes to expand it to be able to work on much bigger residential or commercial buildings as well.

At this point, the software the team designed is a standalone package, so “one of our tasks going forward is to actually transition to making it a plug-in to some of the software tools that are out there” for architectural design, says Kirchain.

While there are many software tools available to help with evaluating a building’s environmental impact, Kirchain says, “we don’t see a lot of architects using these tools.” But that’s partly because these tend to be too prescriptive, he says, pointing toward an optimal design and constricting the designer’s choices. “Our theory is that any designer doesn’t want to be told that this is how the design must be. Their role is to design without undue constraints,” he says.

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Sebastien Mannai, Antoni Rosinol Vidal win FutureMakers first prize

Demonstrating a means of applying machine vision and signal processing to a complex mechanical system has won MIT Aeronautics and Astronautics Department graduate students Sebastien Mannai and Antoni Rosinol Vidal first prize in the multi-university FutureMakers Challenge.

The FutureMakers Challenge involved students from five U.S. universities who worked on next-generation software concepts to foster innovation, and to develop the next-generation digital engineering workforce. The competition was hosted by the Siemens Corporate Technology in collaboration with MIT and the Institute’s Industrial Liaison Program. Similar challenges were held at Carnegie Mellon University, the University of California at Berkeley, Princeton University, Rutgers University, and Georgia Tech.

The competition gave student teams 24 hours to create software solutions for Siemens' Mindsphere cloud-based operating system that can be applied to emerging technology trends such as cybersecurity, machine learning, artificial intelligence, industrial automation, and smart manufacturing.

Winners were selected by a panel of Siemens experts based on "innovation, out-of-the-box thinking, and relevance to market needs.”

Mannai and Rosinol Vidal demonstrated the utility of machine vision and signal processing in a complex mechanical engineering system. Machine vision refers to applications in which a combination of hardware and software provide operational guidance, based on the capture and processing of images, for devices in the execution of their functions. The students’ concept uses existing CCTV video feeds to reconstruct at the surface in real-time 3-D the movement of an oil well and use that data to infer the motion of the pump deep beneath the ground. By integrating a mechanical engineering system with an artificial intelligence system, monitoring and control of engineering systems via machine vision can lead to equipment safety and performance enhancements.

Siemens will invest $140,000 to support follow-up MIT research on Mannai and Rosinol Vidal’s idea.

Mannai is a PhD candidate in the Gas Turbine Laboratory (GTL), where his advisor is Choon Sooi Tan. Rosinol Vidal, also a PhD candidate, is associated with the Sensing, Perception, Autonomy, and Robot Kinetics Laboratory (SPARK) and is advised by Assistant Professor Luca Carlone.

The students expect to apply the resources provided by Siemens to demonstrate their conceptual framework on a gas turbine engine subsystem or a wind turbine model. This will be first implemented on a computational test bed to be followed by applying the computational framework to a hardware system of interest to Siemens for assessment. 

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E-commerce spurs innovation in last-mile logistics

The study of supply chain logistics has risen to prominence in the wake of global commerce, but it has primarily focused on global and regional networks. Now we’re seeing a growing body of research into what experts call “last-mile” logistics for delivery of products in urban environments. The growing congestion of cities and the explosion in e-commerce home delivery have challenged traditional last-mile logistics strategies that have focused on point-of-sale delivery.

Even before the e-commerce boom, last-mile logistics have been complicated by increasing gridlock in fast-growing megacities. The complexity is heightened by the often-conflicting demands of retailers, e-tailers, unions, government officials, citizen activists, and a diverse ecosystem of shipping firms.

“In the city, shipments are typically much smaller and more fragmented than in regional transport,” says Matthias Winkenbach, a research scientist at MIT’s Center for Transportation and Logistics, and director of the Megacities Logistics Lab. “There’s greater uncertainty and complexity caused by increasingly dense and congested cities.”

E-commerce has significantly increased that complexity. Not only are there more trucks plying the streets, but they make more stops, which further hinders traffic.

“Home delivery routes of e-commerce shipments typically consist of 50 to 150 stops per day, depending on the type of vehicle,” says Winkenbach. “By comparison, beverage distributors to commercial clients have routes of 10 to 15 deliveries. The process of looking for parking spaces — and the practice of double parking when none can be found — are the key drivers of inefficiency and congestion.”

Consumer e-commerce also boosts the chance of delivery failure, which adds to complexity and cost. “You often need to schedule deliveries for customer specific time windows, and there’s a greater risk the customer will not be home,” says Winkenbach.

Last-mile logistics planners need to accept the new reality of internet shopping because it’s only likely to keep growing, says Winkenbach. “People are getting used to the convenience of ordering products online and receiving them the next day or even the same day. That creates a lot more traffic, congestion, noise, and emissions.”

Back to the city

In recent decades, logistics centers have moved from the cities to the exurbs, due in part to lower real estate costs. With increasing shipments in urban areas, however, there are now more multi-tier distribution systems, in which hubs are augmented with smaller logistic centers and fulfillment operations in the city.

“Now that people expect faster, more tailored, and more flexible e-commerce delivery, logistics is moving closer to the customer with multi-tier systems,” says Winkenbach. “We are helping companies answer questions like how many satellite facilities are needed, where they should be located, and what their function should be. Should certain facilities be limited to transshipment, or should some also hold inventory?”

Retailers and delivery firms are also starting to augment their fleets by outsourcing delivery to third-party services.

“Companies are experimenting with on-demand fleet services including crowdsourced delivery providers like UberRUSH,” says Winkenbach. “On-demand services create flexibility for logistics service providers and retailers by letting them temporarily expand delivery capacity. They can cover the baseload with their own fleets, and then use on-demand services to cover peak periods, as well as the most urgent and cost-insensitive delivery requests. That might be more cost effective than owning a larger fleet that is less utilized most of the time.”

Linking GPS and transactional data

The complexity of last-mile logistics would seem to be a natural fit for big data. Yet, most companies are better served with more traditional database analytics, Winkenbach advises.

“Companies have a lot of data to sift through, but it tends to be simple data like transactions, delivery records, and customer information, primarily stored in-house,” he says. “By combining it properly, you can generate a lot of insight into how demand is structured, how your customers behave, and how you can adapt your delivery systems to better serve customer needs.”

Route planners are often insulated from the complex realities of the delivery process, which leads to erroneous assumptions, says Winkenbach. “They often assume that drivers can park the vehicle in front of the customer’s house, but this is often not the case. The drivers know where they can potentially park, which might be three blocks away, but that information rarely makes it into the planning process.”

One way to integrate these insights is through location tracking, which is greatly enhancing last mile logistics.

“Most fleets now have GPS tracking, and the resolution and accuracy is improving,” says Winkenbach. “Movement data is extremely useful for extracting local driver knowledge. By connecting movement data with transactional data, you can know where the vehicle parked and which customers were served from that stop. This enables route planners to come up with more realistic plans that drivers can actually adhere to.”

GPS and traffic data are also used for on-the-fly routing. At least two MIT based startups provide smart routing software for urban fleets, says Winkenbach. “They let you redesign the route based on the most current information about congestion patterns.”

Exchange of last-mile delivery information between companies — or even sharing the deliveries themselves — are two often overlooked ways to improve service.

“I have ridden on half-empty delivery trucks of several consumer product companies in Mexico City that serve the same customers often at the same times,” says Winkenbach. “If they were willing to cooperate or even consolidate shipments, they could create tremendous economic savings and positive impacts on congestion and emissions. We can act as a neutral entity to bring companies together without fear of revealing confidential data.”

Smart lockers, smart infrastructure, and autonomous vehicles

Beyond GPS, there are a variety of technological solutions that can improve last mile logistics. In Europe, for example, DHL has pioneered the use of neighborhood smart lockers.

“The customer usually likes smart lockers because they can walk a short distance to receive their package whenever it’s convenient,” says Winkenbach. “Logistics service providers like them because they consolidate demand, letting them drop a lot of shipments at one stop. This reduces the risk of failed delivery to almost zero, while increasing efficiency and lowering cost.”

Smart city infrastructure can also be useful for last-mile logistics.

“Companies like GE and Siemens are working on smart street lighting with sensors that detect where free parking spaces open up,” says Winkenbach. “If you made that data available to service providers, it would streamline deliveries and reduce double parking.”

Autonomous vehicles have been proposed for last-mile delivery in cities with high labor costs. Yet, the conveniences imagined for self-driving taxi services do not translate to package delivery. With autonomous taxis, the routes can be coordinated to pick up new passengers near the drop-off point, so the vehicle rarely drives empty. Package delivery, however, is usually a one-way process: Delivery trucks distribute the goods, and then return to the warehouse empty.

Autonomous vehicles might reduce labor costs, but they add to vehicle and infrastructure costs, says Winkenbach. The last few yards are especially problematical. You would either need many more smart lockers positioned so that the vehicles could directly fill them with robotic extensions, or the vehicles would need to incorporate smart lockers. In either case, doorway delivery would be unlikely.

Amazon’s drone delivery video has sparked imaginations, but drones pose even more problems. “Drone technology is getting sufficiently advanced to make delivery possible, but you also need the infrastructure,” says Winkenbach. “Most households lack space for a landing patch, and you would need to regulate and coordinate thousands of drones so they could fly efficient routes without crashing.” In addition, cargo space is limited, and people might not appreciate the noise of thousands of drones buzzing around.

Winkenbach does, however, see a potential future application for combining autonomous vehicles with drones. “Autonomous vans could drive through the city, launching drones that would make short hop deliveries to consumers, and then return to the van. That minimizes the number of drones and the distance they fly, and because the van never stops, it speeds delivery and alleviates congestion.” On the other hand, the drones would still need to safely and gently deposit packages on doorsteps, and larger packages would be off limits.

The role of regulation

Government regulations can both hinder and help last mile logistics, says Winkenbach.

“One bad example we see a lot in Latin America are governments imposing access restrictions for commercial vehicles based on vehicle type,” he explains. “The restrictions actually lead to an increase in the number of vehicles because companies split the load into smaller vehicles that are allowed in.”

Regulation can also help, however. For example, the government of Santiago, Chile, now dedicates parking spots for freight vehicles during certain hours.

“This alleviates congestion and improves the efficiency of last mile delivery,” says Winkenbach. “The challenge is determining how many such spots you need, where they should be located, when they are available, and how they are regulated. This is where our GPS-driven analytics services can help: by identifying how freight demands vary in different parts of the city.”

Winkenbach believes that carbon taxes are a better way to regulate last-mile delivery than access restrictions. “A carbon tax might encourage companies to be more efficient in the way they route their vehicles, and will probably incentivize them to change their choice of vehicle type,” he says. “I don’t think it would change consumer behavior, however. We are used to ordering on Amazon and receiving the goods the next day, and it’s unlikely that will change due to rising delivery costs.”

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MIT fusion collaboration receives renewed funding

As part of an initiative to support the development of nuclear fusion as a future practical energy source, the U. S. Department of Energy is renewing three-year funding for two Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC) projects on the Wendelstein7-X (W7-X) stellarator at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics in Greifswald, Germany.

The largest stellarator in the world, W7-X was built with helically-shaped superconducting magnets to investigate the stability and confinement of high temperature plasma in an optimized toroidal configuration, ultimately leading to an economical steady state fusion power plant. With plasma discharges planned to be up to 30 minutes long, researchers anticipate W7-X will demonstrate the possibility of continuous operation of a toroidal magnetically-confined fusion plasma.

PSFC principal research scientist Jim Terry is being funded to build and install on the stellarator a new diagnostic called “Gas-Puff Imaging,” which measures the turbulence at the boundary of the hot plasma by taking images in visible light at 2 million frames per second. The light is emitted as the plasma interacts with gas that is introduced locally at the measurement location. This fast frame rate allows researchers to see the dynamics of the turbulence. Observing plasma turbulence in fusion devices will help researchers understand how to better confine the plasma, while at the same time handling the plasma’s exhaust heat.

The new funding of $891,000 is a renewal of a three-year grant that ran from 2015 to 2018, during which time this diagnostic was designed. Terry’s team includes PSFC research scientist Seung Gyou Baek, as well as graduate student Sean Ballinger of the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering and undergraduate physics major Kevin Tang, both of whom have had extended stays on-site at W7-X.

Over the past three years, professor of physics Miklos Porkolab and his team have designed and installed a “phase contrast imaging” (PCI) diagnostic on W7-X. PCI is a unique interferometer method using a continuous wave coherent carbon dioxide laser and additional specialized optical components that allow it to measure instantaneously the turbulent density fluctuations in the core of the hot plasma.

Using data collected over the past year, the team is analyzing the measured turbulence levels and comparing them with predictions of state-of-the-art gyrokinetic codes, assessing how turbulence contributes to the loss of energy and particles in an optimized stellarator. The renewal of this three-year grant, for $900,000, will fund not only personnel to continue analysis of experimental data, but also necessary upgrades to allow simultaneous imaging of core and edge fluctuations, making the PCI diagnostic versatile in its ability to measure a wide range of waves and instabilities.

In addition to Porkolab, members of the team include former PSFC staff scientist Eric Edlund, now an assistant professor at SUNY Cortland, who played a key role in the design of this diagnostic; and PSFC postdoc Zhouji Huang, who is stationed onsite in Greifswald. PSFC research physicist Alessandro Marinoni and postdoc Evan Davis (both stationed at DIII-D, an MIT collaboration in San Diego) also contributed to the project during the summer of 2018.

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MIT selected as ninth NSF Innovation Corps Node; set to serve the New England region

MIT has been selected by the National Science Foundation (NSF) as an Innovation Corps (I-Corps) Node, and awarded $4.2 million in order to develop programs and resources that will accelerate the translation of fundamental research to practical applications.

NSF I-Corps Nodes are critical in supporting regional needs for innovation education, infrastructure, and research. The program aims to improve the quality of life and increase the economic competitiveness of the United States.

Grantees of the NSF’s I-Corps program learn to identify valuable product opportunities that can emerge from academic research, and gain skills in entrepreneurship through training in customer discovery. The program prepares scientists and engineers to extend their focus beyond university laboratories and accelerates the economic and societal benefits of basic-research projects that are ready to move toward commercialization.

“It has become more critical than ever for university research to feed innovation that benefits society, especially in tackling the world’s biggest problems. MIT is excited to take a leadership role in advancing this initiative to increase the translation of fundamental research into technologies put into practical use, and to accelerate the time from idea to commercialization,” says MIT Provost Martin Schmidt, who serves as the principal investigator on the award.

Since the NSF I-Corps program was created in 2011, more than 1,200 teams, from 248 universities in 47 states, have completed the national NSF curriculum. So far, this has resulted in the creation of more than 577 companies that have collectively raised more than $400 million in follow-on funding.

“NSF-funded I-Corps Nodes work cooperatively to create a sustainable national innovation ecosystem that further enhances the development of technologies, products, and processes that benefit society. We are thrilled to welcome another I-Corps Node into the ecosystem to foster ideas in the New England region, and to further support national innovation and entrepreneurial excellence,” says Barry W. Johnson, division director of industrial innovation and partnerships at the NSF.

The $4.2 million award to MIT, spanning five years, will allow the Institute to lead the New England Regional Innovation Node (NERIN). NERIN, headquartered at MIT, will contribute to the NSF National Innovation Network as the ninth regional I-Corps Node, and will be instrumental in assisting researchers across the region, with its dense concentration of universities and world-class research.

NERIN’s activities will include a variety of short training programs offered across the region, as well as the ability to qualify for application to the prestigious NSF National I-Corps Teams program, which provides an immersive seven-week innovation experience. NERIN will also collaborate with key organizations in the regional innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem that can provide support and resources to help advance these scientific and technological breakthroughs to achieve societal impact. NERIN plans to add academic partners as it grows.

“The NSF I-Corps program is about the genesis of ideas and emergence of opportunities, the birth of new organizations, their evolution into new companies, and the transformation of scientists into leaders. It is also about providing the foundation for future innovation by others,” says Roman M. Lubynsky, who will serve as the executive director of NERIN.

NERIN intends to develop programs and resources that will result in increased partnerships between academia and industry. It will reach and influence researchers across New England to consider practical applications arising from fundamental research and to initiate the exploration of getting their inventions and discoveries to the marketplace.

The NSF I-Corps program was established in 2011, and connects scientific research with the technological, entrepreneurial, and business communities to help create a stronger national ecosystem for innovation that couples scientific discovery with technology development and societal needs.

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MIT Energy Initiative study reports on the future of nuclear energy

How can the world achieve the deep carbon emissions reductions that are necessary to slow or reverse the impacts of climate change? The authors of a new MIT study say that unless nuclear energy is meaningfully incorporated into the global mix of low-carbon energy technologies, the challenge of climate change will be much more difficult and costly to solve. For nuclear energy to take its place as a major low-carbon energy source, however, issues of cost and policy need to be addressed.

In "The Future of Nuclear Energy in a Carbon-Constrained World," released by the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) on Sept. 3, the authors analyze the reasons for the current global stall of nuclear energy capacity — which currently accounts for only 5 percent of global primary energy production — and discuss measures that could be taken to arrest and reverse that trend.

The study group, led by MIT researchers in collaboration with colleagues from Idaho National Laboratory and the University of Wisconsin at Madison, is presenting its findings and recommendations at events in London, Paris, and Brussels this week, followed by events on Sept. 25 in Washington, and on Oct. 9 in Tokyo. MIT graduate and undergraduate students and postdocs, as well as faculty from Harvard University and members of various think tanks, also contributed to the study as members of the research team.

“Our analysis demonstrates that realizing nuclear energy’s potential is essential to achieving a deeply decarbonized energy future in many regions of the world,” says study co-chair Jacopo Buongiorno, the TEPCO Professor and associate department head of the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering at MIT. He adds, “Incorporating new policy and business models, as well as innovations in construction that may make deployment of cost-effective nuclear power plants more affordable, could enable nuclear energy to help meet the growing global demand for energy generation while decreasing emissions to address climate change.”

The study team notes that the electricity sector in particular is a prime candidate for deep decarbonization. Global electricity consumption is on track to grow 45 percent by 2040, and the team’s analysis shows that the exclusion of nuclear from low-carbon scenarios could cause the average cost of electricity to escalate dramatically.

“Understanding the opportunities and challenges facing the nuclear energy industry requires a comprehensive analysis of technical, commercial, and policy dimensions,” says Robert Armstrong, director of MITEI and the Chevron Professor of Chemical Engineering. “Over the past two years, this team has examined each issue, and the resulting report contains guidance policymakers and industry leaders may find valuable as they evaluate options for the future.”

The report discusses recommendations for nuclear plant construction, current and future reactor technologies, business models and policies, and reactor safety regulation and licensing. The researchers find that changes in reactor construction are needed to usher in an era of safer, more cost-effective reactors, including proven construction management practices that can keep nuclear projects on time and on budget.

“A shift towards serial manufacturing of standardized plants, including more aggressive use of fabrication in factories and shipyards, can be a viable cost-reduction strategy in countries where the productivity of the traditional construction sector is low,” says MIT visiting research scientist David Petti, study executive director and Laboratory Fellow at the Idaho National Laboratory. “Future projects should also incorporate reactor designs with inherent and passive safety features.”

These safety features could include core materials with high chemical and physical stability and engineered safety systems that require limited or no emergency AC power and minimal external intervention. Features like these can reduce the probability of severe accidents occurring and mitigate offsite consequences in the event of an incident. Such designs can also ease the licensing of new plants and accelerate their global deployment.

“The role of government will be critical if we are to take advantage of the economic opportunity and low-carbon potential that nuclear has to offer,” says John Parsons, study co-chair and senior lecturer at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. “If this future is to be realized, government officials must create new decarbonization policies that put all low-carbon energy technologies (i.e. renewables, nuclear, fossil fuels with carbon capture) on an equal footing, while also exploring options that spur private investment in nuclear advancement.”

The study lays out detailed options for government support of nuclear. For example, the authors recommend that policymakers should avoid premature closures of existing plants, which undermine efforts to reduce emissions and increase the cost of achieving emission reduction targets. One way to avoid these closures is the implementation of zero-emissions credits — payments made to electricity producers where electricity is generated without greenhouse gas emissions — which the researchers note are currently in place in New York, Illinois, and New Jersey.

Another suggestion from the study is that the government support development and demonstration of new nuclear technologies through the use of four “levers”: funding to share regulatory licensing costs; funding to share research and development costs; funding for the achievement of specific technical milestones; and funding for production credits to reward successful demonstration of new designs.

The study includes an examination of the current nuclear regulatory climate, both in the United States and internationally. While the authors note that significant social, political, and cultural differences may exist among many of the countries in the nuclear energy community, they say that the fundamental basis for assessing the safety of nuclear reactor programs is fairly uniform, and should be reflected in a series of basic aligned regulatory principles. They recommend regulatory requirements for advanced reactors be coordinated and aligned internationally to enable international deployment of commercial reactor designs, and to standardize and ensure a high level of safety worldwide.

The study concludes with an emphasis on the urgent need for both cost-cutting advancements and forward-thinking policymaking to make the future of nuclear energy a reality.

"The Future of Nuclear Energy in a Carbon-Constrained World" is the eighth in the "Future of…" series of studies that are intended to serve as guides to researchers, policymakers, and industry. Each report explores the role of technologies that might contribute at scale in meeting rapidly growing global energy demand in a carbon-constrained world. Nuclear power was the subject of the first of these interdisciplinary studies, with the 2003 "Future of Nuclear Power" report (an update was published in 2009). The series has also included a study on the future of the nuclear fuel cycle. Other reports in the series have focused on carbon dioxide sequestration, natural gas, the electric grid, and solar power. These comprehensive reports are written by multidisciplinary teams of researchers. The research is informed by a distinguished external advisory committee.

de MIT News https://ift.tt/2PzWXg7