“This MIT Bootcamp shook everything upside down and has given me the spirit of innovation”

A new MIT Bootcamps hybrid program recently convened 34 innovators to tackle substance use disorder from multiple perspectives. Together, they built and pitched new ventures with the goal of bringing life-saving innovations to the field.

The Substance Use Disorder (SUD) Ventures program featured workshops, case studies, and interactive sessions with researchers, entrepreneurs, and doctors who brought a multidisciplinary approach to tackling early detection, access to care and health equity, dual diagnosis, treatment, and relapse prevention. Through a rigorous selection process, the program cohort was chosen for their complementary, diverse backgrounds along with their passion for solving problems related to substance use.

Hybrid by design, the first three months of the program consisted of foundational work online, including a new asynchronous SUD 101 course led by Brown University Professor Carolina Haass-Koffler and live online sessions focused on topics like intellectual property and technology transfer. The program concluded with a five-day MIT Bootcamp on campus, where learners built and pitched a new venture to a panel of judges.

“Building a venture in the substance use disorder space is exceptionally challenging,” says Hanna Adeyema, director of MIT Bootcamps. “Our goal was not only to educate our learners but also to inspire and to ignite a sense of community. We achieved it by building relationships in a diverse group united by a shared vision to bring lifesaving products to market.”

Helping to solve an epidemic

In 2021, more than 46 million people suffered from substance use disorder in the United States. This means one out of every seven people in the U.S. can benefit from innovations in this field. In 2022, MIT Open Learning received a grant from the National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA) to create an entrepreneurship program for substance use disorder researchers. As the primary source of early-stage funding in this space, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and NIDA are focused on initiatives, like the MIT Bootcamps SUD Ventures program, to help bring innovation to the field. 

Armed with a deep expertise in innovation and immersive educational experiences, MIT Open Learning’s team, including MIT Bootcamps, hit the ground running to build the SUD Ventures program. Other team members included Cynthia Breazeal, Erdin Beshimov, Carolina Haass-Koffler, Aikaterini “Katerina” Bagiati, and Andrés Felipe Salazar-Gómez. 

"The program connected substance use disorder knowledge and resources, including funding opportunities, to entrepreneurial competences and multifaceted skills of the learners,” says Cynthia Breazeal, dean for digital learning at MIT Open Learning and principal investigator for the project. “We have delivered a dynamic learning experience, sensitive to the root causes behind the innovation deficit in this field.”  

Instilling the spirit of innovation  

With 10-hour days, the immersive program blended formal and informal instruction to deliver a holistic and practical educational experience on substance use disorder and innovation. Learners attended case studies with health care companies like Prapela, Invistics, and RTM Vital Signs, moderated by Erdin Beshimov, the founder of MIT Bootcamps. They also attended workshops by MIT faculty, lectures by members of the NIH and NIDA, and interactive sessions with local startup veterans and medical professionals. 

Learners walked away from the sessions motivated to solve problems, equipped with tangible next steps for their businesses. Bill Aulet inspired learners to leverage their own innovation ecosystems and shared how MIT is “raising the bar” of the quality of entrepreneurship education. Professor Eric von Hippel, a pioneer of user innovation, encouraged learners to tap into clinicians, nurses, and individuals with lived and living experiences as an important source of innovation within the health-care system. To give the clinical perspective from Massachusetts General Hospital, cardiac anesthesiologist Nathaniel Sims and former MGH Innovation Support Center director Harry DeMonaco energized learners with a personal story of successfully bringing medical device innovation to market and how to work with hospitals and early-stage adopters.

“This MIT Bootcamp shook everything upside down and has given me the spirit of innovation and what it looks like to be able to work in a big way, and to be able to think in an even bigger way,” says learner Melissa “Dr. Mo” Dittberner. A resident of Volin, South Dakota, Dittberner is the CEO and founder of Straight Up Care, a platform for peer specialists to help people with mental health and substance use disorders. As an entrepreneur in the substance use disorder space, Dittberner knows what it takes to bring a business to life.

Bridging disciplines to create impact

In the evenings, the cohort broke out into teams of five to collaborate on building a venture related to substance use disorder. Coaches provided guidance and the tough feedback teams need in order to build a venture that solves a real problem. With vast differences in age, background, industry, and how they came to make an impact on substance use disorder, each team had experts in many different verticals, ultimately leading learners to a more thoughtful and potent solution. 

“One of the things MIT Bootcamps does really well is bring multiple disciplines to innovate together,” says Smit Patel, a pharmacist and digital health strategist who participated in the program. “We have seen a lot of silo innovation happening [in health care]. We have also seen problems being solved in piecemeal. How can we come together as a collective force — clinician and entrepreneur, a technologist, someone who has gone through this experience themselves — to build a solution?”

Dittberner echoed Patel’s sentiment, emphasizing the strength of the MIT Bootcamps community. “They’ve all kind of brought this different flavor,” Dittberner says. “I have created friendships and bonds that will last forever, which is so crucial to being able to be successful in the [SUD] space.” 

Intent on building a community of domain expert entrepreneurs, the SUD Ventures program will continue to bring together innovators to solve acute problems in the substance use space. With another three years of funding for this program, Adeyema says MIT Bootcamps’ goal is to nurture the community of innovators brought together by this program, enabling them to bring their ventures to life and create meaningful impact to society.

This program and its research are supported by the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health. This award is subject to the Cooperative Agreement Terms and Conditions of Award as set forth in RFA DA-22-020, entitled "Growing Great Ideas: Research Education Course in Product Development and Entrepreneurship for Life Science Researchers." The content of this publication is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the views of the National Institutes of Health. 

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Using generative AI to improve software testing

Generative AI is getting plenty of attention for its ability to create text and images. But those media represent only a fraction of the data that proliferate in our society today. Data are generated every time a patient goes through a medical system, a storm impacts a flight, or a person interacts with a software application.

Using generative AI to create realistic synthetic data around those scenarios can help organizations more effectively treat patients, reroute planes, or improve software platforms — especially in scenarios where real-world data are limited or sensitive.

For the last three years, the MIT spinout DataCebo has offered a generative software system called the Synthetic Data Vault to help organizations create synthetic data to do things like test software applications and train machine learning models.

The Synthetic Data Vault, or SDV, has been downloaded more than 1 million times, with more than 10,000 data scientists using the open-source library for generating synthetic tabular data. The founders — Principal Research Scientist Kalyan Veeramachaneni and alumna Neha Patki ’15, SM ’16 — believe the company’s success is due to SDV’s ability to revolutionize software testing.

SDV goes viral

In 2016, Veeramachaneni’s group in the Data to AI Lab unveiled a suite of open-source generative AI tools to help organizations create synthetic data that matched the statistical properties of real data.

Companies can use synthetic data instead of sensitive information in programs while still preserving the statistical relationships between datapoints. Companies can also use synthetic data to run new software through simulations to see how it performs before releasing it to the public.

Veeramachaneni’s group came across the problem because it was working with companies that wanted to share their data for research.

“MIT helps you see all these different use cases,” Patki explains. “You work with finance companies and health care companies, and all those projects are useful to formulate solutions across industries.”

In 2020, the researchers founded DataCebo to build more SDV features for larger organizations. Since then, the use cases have been as impressive as they’ve been varied.

With DataCebo's new flight simulator, for instance, airlines can plan for rare weather events in a way that would be impossible using only historic data. In another application, SDV users synthesized medical records to predict health outcomes for patients with cystic fibrosis. A team from Norway recently used SDV to create synthetic student data to evaluate whether various admissions policies were meritocratic and free from bias.

In 2021, the data science platform Kaggle hosted a competition for data scientists that used SDV to create synthetic data sets to avoid using proprietary data. Roughly 30,000 data scientists participated, building solutions and predicting outcomes based on the company’s realistic data.

And as DataCebo has grown, it’s stayed true to its MIT roots: All of the company’s current employees are MIT alumni.

Supercharging software testing

Although their open-source tools are being used for a variety of use cases, the company is focused on growing its traction in software testing.

“You need data to test these software applications,” Veeramachaneni says. “Traditionally, developers manually write scripts to create synthetic data. With generative models, created using SDV, you can learn from a sample of data collected and then sample a large volume of synthetic data (which has the same properties as real data), or create specific scenarios and edge cases, and use the data to test your application.”

For example, if a bank wanted to test a program designed to reject transfers from accounts with no money in them, it would have to simulate many accounts simultaneously transacting. Doing that with data created manually would take a lot of time. With DataCebo’s generative models, customers can create any edge case they want to test.

“It’s common for industries to have data that is sensitive in some capacity,” Patki says. “Often when you’re in a domain with sensitive data you’re dealing with regulations, and even if there aren’t legal regulations, it’s in companies’ best interest to be diligent about who gets access to what at which time. So, synthetic data is always better from a privacy perspective.”

Scaling synthetic data

Veeramachaneni believes DataCebo is advancing the field of what it calls synthetic enterprise data, or data generated from user behavior on large companies’ software applications.

“Enterprise data of this kind is complex, and there is no universal availability of it, unlike language data,” Veeramachaneni says. “When folks use our publicly available software and report back if works on a certain pattern, we learn a lot of these unique patterns, and it allows us to improve our algorithms. From one perspective, we are building a corpus of these complex patterns, which for language and images is readily available. “

DataCebo also recently released features to improve SDV’s usefulness, including tools to assess the “realism” of the generated data, called the SDMetrics library as well as a way to compare models’ performances called SDGym.

“It’s about ensuring organizations trust this new data,” Veeramachaneni says. “[Our tools offer] programmable synthetic data, which means we allow enterprises to insert their specific insight and intuition to build more transparent models.”

As companies in every industry rush to adopt AI and other data science tools, DataCebo is ultimately helping them do so in a way that is more transparent and responsible.

“In the next few years, synthetic data from generative models will transform all data work,” Veeramachaneni says. “We believe 90 percent of enterprise operations can be done with synthetic data.”

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School of Science announces 2024 Infinite Expansion Awards

The MIT School of Science has announced nine postdocs and research scientists as recipients of the 2024 Infinite Expansion Award, which highlights extraordinary members of the MIT community.

The following are the 2024 School of Science Infinite Expansion winners:

• Sarthak Chandra, a research scientist in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, was nominated by Professor Ila Fiete, who wrote, “He has expanded the research abilities of my group by being a versatile and brilliant scientist, by drawing connections with a different area that he was an expert in from his PhD training, and by being a highly involved and caring mentor.”
   
• Michal Fux, a research scientist in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, was nominated by Professor Pawan Sinha, who wrote, “She is one of those figurative beams of light that not only brilliantly illuminate scientific questions, but also enliven a research team.”
   
• Andrew Savinov, a postdoc in the Department of Biology, was nominated by Associate Professor Gene-Wei Li, who wrote, “Andrew is an extraordinarily creative and accomplished biophysicist, as well as an outstanding contributor to the broader MIT community.”
   
• Ho Fung Cheng, a postdoc in the Department of Chemistry, was nominated by Professor Jeremiah Johnson, who wrote, “His impact on research and our departmental community during his time at MIT has been outstanding, and I believe that he will be a worldclass teacher and research group leader in his independent career next year.”
   
• Gabi Wenzel, a postdoc in the Department of Chemistry, was nominated by Assistant Professor Brett McGuire, who wrote, “In the one year since Gabi joined our team, she has become an indispensable leader, demonstrating exceptional skill, innovation, and dedication in our challenging research environment.”
   
• Yu-An Zhang, a postdoc in the Department of Chemistry, was nominated by Professor Alison Wendlandt, who wrote, “He is a creative, deep-thinking scientist and a superb organic chemist. But above all, he is an off-scale mentor and a cherished coworker.”
   
• Wouter Van de Pontseele, a senior postdoc in the Laboratory for Nuclear Science, was nominated by Professor Joseph Formaggio, who wrote, “He is a talented scientist with an intense creativity, scholarship, and student mentorship record. In the time he has been with my group, he has led multiple facets of my experimental program and has been a wonderful citizen of the MIT community.”
   
• Alexander Shvonski, a lecturer in the Department of Physics, was nominated by Assistant Professor Andrew Vanderburg, who wrote, “… I have been blown away by Alex’s knowledge of education research and best practices, his skills as a teacher and course content designer, and I have been extremely grateful for his assistance.”
   
• David Stoppel, a research scientist in The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, was nominated by Professor Mark Bear and his research group, who wrote, “As impressive as his research achievements might be, David’s most genuine qualification for this award is his incredible commitment to mentorship and the dissemination of knowledge.”

Winners are honored with a monetary award and will be celebrated with family, friends, and nominators at a later date, along with recipients of the Infinite Mile Award.

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Exposure to different kinds of music influences how the brain interprets rhythm

When listening to music, the human brain appears to be biased toward hearing and producing rhythms composed of simple integer ratios — for example, a series of four beats separated by equal time intervals (forming a 1:1:1 ratio).

However, the favored ratios can vary greatly between different societies, according to a large-scale study led by researchers at MIT and the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics and carried out in 15 countries. The study included 39 groups of participants, many of whom came from societies whose traditional music contains distinctive patterns of rhythm not found in Western music.

“Our study provides the clearest evidence yet for some degree of universality in music perception and cognition, in the sense that every single group of participants that was tested exhibits biases for integer ratios. It also provides a glimpse of the variation that can occur across cultures, which can be quite substantial,” says Nori Jacoby, the study’s lead author and a former MIT postdoc, who is now a research group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt, Germany.

The brain’s bias toward simple integer ratios may have evolved as a natural error-correction system that makes it easier to maintain a consistent body of music, which human societies often use to transmit information.

“When people produce music, they often make small mistakes. Our results are consistent with the idea that our mental representation is somewhat robust to those mistakes, but it is robust in a way that pushes us toward our preexisting ideas of the structures that should be found in music,” says Josh McDermott, an associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences at MIT and a member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research and Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines.

McDermott is the senior author of the study, which appears today in Nature Human Behaviour. The research team also included scientists from more than two dozen institutions around the world.

A global approach

The new study grew out of a smaller analysis that Jacoby and McDermott published in 2017. In that paper, the researchers compared rhythm perception in groups of listeners from the United States and the Tsimane’, an Indigenous society located in the Bolivian Amazon rainforest.

To measure how people perceive rhythm, the researchers devised a task in which they play a randomly generated series of four beats and then ask the listener to tap back what they heard. The rhythm produced by the listener is then played back to the listener, and they tap it back again. Over several iterations, the tapped sequences became dominated by the listener’s internal biases, also known as priors.

“The initial stimulus pattern is random, but at each iteration the pattern is pushed by the listener’s biases, such that it tends to converge to a particular point in the space of possible rhythms,” McDermott says. “That can give you a picture of what we call the prior, which is the set of internal implicit expectations for rhythms that people have in their heads.”

When the researchers first did this experiment, with American college students as the test subjects, they found that people tended to produce time intervals that are related by simple integer ratios. Furthermore, most of the rhythms they produced, such as those with ratios of 1:1:2 and 2:3:3, are commonly found in Western music.

The researchers then went to Bolivia and asked members of the Tsimane’ society to perform the same task. They found that Tsimane’ also produced rhythms with simple integer ratios, but their preferred ratios were different and appeared to be consistent with those that have been documented in the few existing records of Tsimane’ music.

“At that point, it provided some evidence that there might be very widespread tendencies to favor these small integer ratios, and that there might be some degree of cross-cultural variation. But because we had just looked at this one other culture, it really wasn’t clear how this was going to look at a broader scale,” Jacoby says.

To try to get that broader picture, the MIT team began seeking collaborators around the world who could help them gather data on a more diverse set of populations. They ended up studying listeners from 39 groups, representing 15 countries on five continents — North America, South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia.

“This is really the first study of its kind in the sense that we did the same experiment in all these different places, with people who are on the ground in those locations,” McDermott says. “That hasn’t really been done before at anything close to this scale, and it gave us an opportunity to see the degree of variation that might exist around the world.”

Cultural comparisons

Just as they had in their original 2017 study, the researchers found that in every group they tested, people tended to be biased toward simple integer ratios of rhythm. However, not every group showed the same biases. People from North America and Western Europe, who have likely been exposed to the same kinds of music, were more likely to generate rhythms with the same ratios. However, many groups, for example those in Turkey, Mali, Bulgaria, and Botswana showed a bias for other rhythms.

“There are certain cultures where there are particular rhythms that are prominent in their music, and those end up showing up in the mental representation of rhythm,” Jacoby says.

The researchers believe their findings reveal a mechanism that the brain uses to aid in the perception and production of music.

“When you hear somebody playing something and they have errors in their performance, you’re going to mentally correct for those by mapping them onto where you implicitly think they ought to be,” McDermott says. “If you didn’t have something like this, and you just faithfully represented what you heard, these errors might propagate and make it much harder to maintain a musical system.”

Among the groups that they studied, the researchers took care to include not only college students, who are easy to study in large numbers, but also people living in traditional societies, who are more difficult to reach. Participants from those more traditional groups showed significant differences from college students living in the same countries, and from people who live in those countries but performed the test online.

“What’s very clear from the paper is that if you just look at the results from undergraduate students around the world, you vastly underestimate the diversity that you see otherwise,” Jacoby says. “And the same was true of experiments where we tested groups of people online in Brazil and India, because you’re dealing with people who have internet access and presumably have more exposure to Western music.”

The researchers now hope to run additional studies of different aspects of music perception, taking this global approach.

“If you’re just testing college students around the world or people online, things look a lot more homogenous. I think it’s very important for the field to realize that you actually need to go out into communities and run experiments there, as opposed to taking the low-hanging fruit of running studies with people in a university or on the internet,” McDermott says.

The research was funded by the James S. McDonnell Foundation, the Canadian National Science and Engineering Research Council, the South African National Research Foundation, the United States National Science Foundation, the Chilean National Research and Development Agency, the Austrian Academy of Sciences, the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, the Keio Global Research Institute, the United Kingdom Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Swedish Research Council, and the John Fell Fund.

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Tests show high-temperature superconducting magnets are ready for fusion

In the predawn hours of Sept. 5, 2021, engineers achieved a major milestone in the labs of MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC), when a new type of magnet, made from high-temperature superconducting material, achieved a world-record magnetic field strength of 20 tesla for a large-scale magnet. That’s the intensity needed to build a fusion power plant that is expected to produce a net output of power and potentially usher in an era of virtually limitless power production.

The test was immediately declared a success, having met all the criteria established for the design of the new fusion device, dubbed SPARC, for which the magnets are the key enabling technology. Champagne corks popped as the weary team of experimenters, who had labored long and hard to make the achievement possible, celebrated their accomplishment.

But that was far from the end of the process. Over the ensuing months, the team tore apart and inspected the components of the magnet, pored over and analyzed the data from hundreds of instruments that recorded details of the tests, and performed two additional test runs on the same magnet, ultimately pushing it to its breaking point in order to learn the details of any possible failure modes.

All of this work has now culminated in a detailed report by researchers at PSFC and MIT spinout company Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS), published in a collection of six peer-reviewed papers in a special edition of the March issue of IEEE Transactions on Applied Superconductivity. Together, the papers describe the design and fabrication of the magnet and the diagnostic equipment needed to evaluate its performance, as well as the lessons learned from the process. Overall, the team found, the predictions and computer modeling were spot-on, verifying that the magnet’s unique design elements could serve as the foundation for a fusion power plant.

Enabling practical fusion power

The successful test of the magnet, says Hitachi America Professor of Engineering Dennis Whyte, who recently stepped down as director of the PSFC, was “the most important thing, in my opinion, in the last 30 years of fusion research.”

Before the Sept. 5 demonstration, the best-available superconducting magnets were powerful enough to potentially achieve fusion energy — but only at sizes and costs that could never be practical or economically viable. Then, when the tests showed the practicality of such a strong magnet at a greatly reduced size, “overnight, it basically changed the cost per watt of a fusion reactor by a factor of almost 40 in one day,” Whyte says.

“Now fusion has a chance,” Whyte adds. Tokamaks, the most widely used design for experimental fusion devices, “have a chance, in my opinion, of being economical because you’ve got a quantum change in your ability, with the known confinement physics rules, about being able to greatly reduce the size and the cost of objects that would make fusion possible.”

The comprehensive data and analysis from the PSFC’s magnet test, as detailed in the six new papers, has demonstrated that plans for a new generation of fusion devices — the one designed by MIT and CFS, as well as similar designs by other commercial fusion companies — are built on a solid foundation in science.

The superconducting breakthrough

Fusion, the process of combining light atoms to form heavier ones, powers the sun and stars, but harnessing that process on Earth has proved to be a daunting challenge, with decades of hard work and many billions of dollars spent on experimental devices. The long-sought, but never yet achieved, goal is to build a fusion power plant that produces more energy than it consumes. Such a power plant could produce electricity without emitting greenhouse gases during operation, and generating very little radioactive waste. Fusion’s fuel, a form of hydrogen that can be derived from seawater, is virtually limitless.

But to make it work requires compressing the fuel at extraordinarily high temperatures and pressures, and since no known material could withstand such temperatures, the fuel must be held in place by extremely powerful magnetic fields. Producing such strong fields requires superconducting magnets, but all previous fusion magnets have been made with a superconducting material that requires frigid temperatures of about 4 degrees above absolute zero (4 kelvins, or -270 degrees Celsius). In the last few years, a newer material nicknamed REBCO, for rare-earth barium copper oxide, was added to fusion magnets, and allows them to operate at 20 kelvins, a temperature that despite being only 16 kelvins warmer, brings significant advantages in terms of material properties and practical engineering.

Taking advantage of this new higher-temperature superconducting material was not just a matter of substituting it in existing magnet designs. Instead, “it was a rework from the ground up of almost all the principles that you use to build superconducting magnets,” Whyte says. The new REBCO material is “extraordinarily different than the previous generation of superconductors. You’re not just going to adapt and replace, you’re actually going to innovate from the ground up.” The new papers in Transactions on Applied Superconductivity describe the details of that redesign process, now that patent protection is in place.

A key innovation: no insulation

One of the dramatic innovations, which had many others in the field skeptical of its chances of success, was the elimination of insulation around the thin, flat ribbons of superconducting tape that formed the magnet. Like virtually all electrical wires, conventional superconducting magnets are fully protected by insulating material to prevent short-circuits between the wires. But in the new magnet, the tape was left completely bare; the engineers relied on REBCO’s much greater conductivity to keep the current flowing through the material.

“When we started this project, in let’s say 2018, the technology of using high-temperature superconductors to build large-scale high-field magnets was in its infancy,” says Zach Hartwig, the Robert N. Noyce Career Development Professor in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering. Hartwig has a co-appointment at the PSFC and is the head of its engineering group, which led the magnet development project. “The state of the art was small benchtop experiments, not really representative of what it takes to build a full-size thing. Our magnet development project started at benchtop scale and ended up at full scale in a short amount of time,” he adds, noting that the team built a 20,000-pound magnet that produced a steady, even magnetic field of just over 20 tesla — far beyond any such field ever produced at large scale.

“The standard way to build these magnets is you would wind the conductor and you have insulation between the windings, and you need insulation to deal with the high voltages that are generated during off-normal events such as a shutdown.” Eliminating the layers of insulation, he says, “has the advantage of being a low-voltage system. It greatly simplifies the fabrication processes and schedule.” It also leaves more room for other elements, such as more cooling or more structure for strength.

The magnet assembly is a slightly smaller-scale version of the ones that will form the donut-shaped chamber of the SPARC fusion device now being built by CFS in Devens, Massachusetts. It consists of 16 plates, called pancakes, each bearing a spiral winding of the superconducting tape on one side and cooling channels for helium gas on the other.

But the no-insulation design was considered risky, and a lot was riding on the test program. “This was the first magnet at any sufficient scale that really probed what is involved in designing and building and testing a magnet with this so-called no-insulation no-twist technology,” Hartwig says. “It was very much a surprise to the community when we announced that it was a no-insulation coil.”

Pushing to the limit … and beyond

The initial test, described in previous papers, proved that the design and manufacturing process not only worked but was highly stable — something that some researchers had doubted. The next two test runs, also performed in late 2021, then pushed the device to the limit by deliberately creating unstable conditions, including a complete shutoff of incoming power that can lead to a catastrophic overheating. Known as quenching, this is considered a worst-case scenario for the operation of such magnets, with the potential to destroy the equipment.

Part of the mission of the test program, Hartwig says, was “to actually go off and intentionally quench a full-scale magnet, so that we can get the critical data at the right scale and the right conditions to advance the science, to validate the design codes, and then to take the magnet apart and see what went wrong, why did it go wrong, and how do we take the next iteration toward fixing that. … It was a very successful test.”

That final test, which ended with the melting of one corner of one of the 16 pancakes, produced a wealth of new information, Hartwig says. For one thing, they had been using several different computational models to design and predict the performance of various aspects of the magnet’s performance, and for the most part, the models agreed in their overall predictions and were well-validated by the series of tests and real-world measurements. But in predicting the effect of the quench, the model predictions diverged, so it was necessary to get the experimental data to evaluate the models’ validity.

“The highest-fidelity models that we had predicted almost exactly how the magnet would warm up, to what degree it would warm up as it started to quench, and where would the resulting damage to the magnet would be,” he says. As described in detail in one of the new reports, “That test actually told us exactly the physics that was going on, and it told us which models were useful going forward and which to leave by the wayside because they’re not right.”

Whyte says, “Basically we did the worst thing possible to a coil, on purpose, after we had tested all other aspects of the coil performance. And we found that most of the coil survived with no damage,” while one isolated area sustained some melting. “It’s like a few percent of the volume of the coil that got damaged.” And that led to revisions in the design that are expected to prevent such damage in the actual fusion device magnets, even under the most extreme conditions.

Hartwig emphasizes that a major reason the team was able to accomplish such a radical new record-setting magnet design, and get it right the very first time and on a breakneck schedule, was thanks to the deep level of knowledge, expertise, and equipment accumulated over decades of operation of the Alcator C-Mod tokamak, the Francis Bitter Magnet Laboratory, and other work carried out at PSFC. “This goes to the heart of the institutional capabilities of a place like this,” he says. “We had the capability, the infrastructure, and the space and the people to do these things under one roof.”

The collaboration with CFS was also key, he says, with MIT and CFS combining the most powerful aspects of an academic institution and private company to do things together that neither could have done on their own. “For example, one of the major contributions from CFS was leveraging the power of a private company to establish and scale up a supply chain at an unprecedented level and timeline for the most critical material in the project: 300 kilometers (186 miles) of high-temperature superconductor, which was procured with rigorous quality control in under a year, and integrated on schedule into the magnet.”

The integration of the two teams, those from MIT and those from CFS, also was crucial to the success, he says. “We thought of ourselves as one team, and that made it possible to do what we did.”

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Study determines the original orientations of rocks drilled on Mars

As it trundles around an ancient lakebed on Mars, NASA’s Perseverance rover is assembling a one-of-a-kind rock collection. The car-sized explorer is methodically drilling into the Red Planet’s surface and pulling out cores of bedrock that it’s storing in sturdy titanium tubes. Scientists hope to one day return the tubes to Earth and analyze their contents for traces of embedded microbial life.

Since it touched down on the surface of Mars in 2021, the rover has filled 20 of its 43 tubes with cores of bedrock. Now, MIT geologists have remotely determined a crucial property of the rocks collected to date, which will help scientists answer key questions about the planet’s past.

In a study appearing today in the journal Earth and Space Science, an MIT team reports that they have determined the original orientation of most bedrock samples collected by the rover to date. By using the rover’s own engineering data, such as the positioning of the vehicle and its drill, the scientists could estimate the orientation of each sample of bedrock before it was drilled out from the Martian ground.

The results represent the first time scientists have oriented samples of bedrock on another planet. The team’s method can be applied to future samples that the rover collects as it expands its exploration outside the ancient basin. Piecing together the orientations of multiple rocks at various locations can then give scientists clues to the conditions on Mars in which the rocks originally formed.

“There are so many science questions that rely on being able to know the orientation of the samples we’re bringing back from Mars,” says study author Elias Mansbach, a graduate student in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences.

“The orientation of rocks can tell you something about any magnetic field that may have existed on the planet,” adds Benjamin Weiss, professor of planetary sciences at MIT. “You can also study how water and lava flowed on the planet, the direction of the ancient wind, and tectonic processes, like what was uplifted and what sunk. So it’s a dream to be able to orient bedrock on another planet, because it’s going to open up so many scientific investigations.”

Weiss and Mansbach’s co-authors are Tanja Bosak and Jennifer Fentress at MIT, along with collaborators at multiple institutions including the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Caltech.

Profound shift

The Perseverance rover, nicknamed “Percy,” is exploring the floor of Jezero Crater, a large impact crater layered with igneous rocks, which may have been deposited from past volcanic eruptions, as well as sedimentary rocks that likely formed from long-dried-out rivers that fed into the basin.

“Mars was once warm and wet, and there’s a possibility there was life there at one time,” Weiss says. “It’s now cold and dry, and something profound must have happened on the planet.”

Many scientists, including Weiss, suspect that Mars, like Earth, once harbored a magnetic field that shielded the planet from the sun’s solar wind. Conditions then may have been favorable for water and life, at least for a time.

“Once that magnetic field went away, the sun’s solar wind — this plasma that boils off the sun and moves faster than the speed of sound — just slammed into Mars’ atmosphere and may have removed it over billions of years,” Weiss says. “We want to know what happened, and why.”

The rocks beneath the Martian surface likely hold a record of the planet’s ancient magnetic field. When rocks first form on a planet’s surface, the direction of their magnetic minerals is set by the surrounding magnetic field. The orientation of rocks can thus help to retrace the direction and intensity of the planet’s magnetic field and how it changed over time.

Since the Perseverance rover was collecting samples of bedrock, along with surface soil and air, as part of its exploratory mission, Weiss, who is a member of the rover’s science team, and Mansbach looked for ways to determine the original orientation of the rover’s bedrock samples as a first step toward reconstructing Mars’ magnetic history.

“It was an amazing opportunity, but initially there was no mission requirement to orient bedrock,” Mansbach notes.

Roll with it

Over several months, Mansbach and Weiss met with NASA engineers to hash out a plan for how to estimate the original orientation of each sample of bedrock before it was drilled out of the ground. The problem was a bit like predicting what direction a small circle of sheetcake is pointing, before twisting a round cookie cutter in to pull out a piece. Similarly, to sample bedrock, Perseverance corkscrews a tube-shaped drill into the ground at a perpendicular angle, then pulls the drill directly back out, along with any rock that it penetrates.

To estimate the orientation of the rock before it was drilled out of the ground, the team realized they need to measure three angles, the hade, azimuth, and roll, which are similar to the pitch, yaw, and roll of a boat. The hade is essentially the tilt of the sample, while the azimuth is the absolute direction the sample is pointing relative to true north. The roll refers to how much a sample must turn before returning to its original position.

In talking with engineers at NASA, the MIT geologists found that the three angles they required were related to measurements that the rover takes on its own in the course of its normal operations. They realized that to estimate a sample’s hade and azimuth they could use the rover’s measurements of the drill’s orientation, as they could assume the tilt of the drill is parallel to any sample that it extracts.

To estimate a sample’s roll, the team took advantage of one of the rover’s onboard cameras, which snaps an image of the surface where the drill is about to sample. They reasoned that they could use any distinguishing features on the surface image to determine how much the sample would have to turn in order to return to its original orientation.

In cases where the surface bore no distinguishing features, the team used the rover’s onboard laser to make a mark in the rock, in the shape of the letter “L,” before drilling out a sample — a move that was jokingly referred to at the time as the first graffiti on another planet.

By combining all the rover’s positioning, orienting, and imaging data, the team estimated the original orientations of all 20 of the Martian bedrock samples collected so far, with a precision that is comparable to orienting rocks on Earth.

“We know the orientations to within 2.7 degrees uncertainty, which is better than what we can do with rocks in the Earth,” Mansbach says. “We’re working with engineers now to automate this orienting process so that it can be done with other samples in the future.”

“The next phase will be the most exciting,” Weiss says. “The rover will drive outside the crater to get the oldest known rocks on Mars, and it’s an incredible opportunity to be able to orient these rocks, and hopefully uncover a lot of these ancient processes.”

This research was supported, in part, by NASA and the Mars 2020 Participating Scientist program.

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Three Lincoln Laboratory inventions named IEEE Milestones

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) designated three historical MIT Lincoln Laboratory technologies as IEEE Milestones. The technologies are the Mode S air traffic control (ATC) radar beacon system, 193-nanometer (nm) photolithography, and the semiconductor laser. The latter recognition is shared by Lincoln Laboratory, General Electric, and IBM.

As the world's largest technical professional organization, the IEEE's mission is to "advance technology for the benefit of humanity." The Milestone program commemorates innovations developed at least 25 years ago that have done just that.

All three technologies are integral to everyday life. Anyone who has flown on commercial aircraft has benefited from Mode S, the system that air traffic controllers use to track planes. The integrated circuits that power modern computing and communication devices were manufactured using 193 nm photolithography. Perhaps most ubiquitous of all is the semiconductor laser — a micrometer-sized light-emitting device that has made possible high-speed internet, among many other technologies underpinning today's information society.

"MIT Lincoln Laboratory has been a leader in fostering innovations that were previously only considered possible in science fiction. The three IEEE Milestones presented are a testament to those accomplishments and a celebration of the diversity of ingenuity and teamwork that created these game-changing technologies," says Karen Panetta, vice chair of IEEE Boston Section, which presented the awards to Lincoln Laboratory at a ceremony on Feb. 2.

Lincoln Laboratory holds three previous IEEE Milestones for pioneering the use of packet networks for speech communications, for developing the nation's first air defense system, and for creating the Whirlwind high-speed digital computer in collaboration with MIT campus.

Tracking aircraft globally

The Mode S ATC radar beacon system was developed to address the challenges posed to the existing ATC beacon-radar system used in the late 1960s. Commercial air traffic was growing quickly, causing interference between beacon replies and interrogations from ATC ground radars. This interference threatened to disrupt aircraft surveillance in high-density airspace.

Under Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) sponsorship, Lincoln Laboratory led the technology developments necessary to address this safety issue. The advanced communication architecture of Mode S allowed radars to select a specific aircraft to interrogate. To selectively communicate, the system design included improved aircraft transponders, each assigned a unique address code. Upgrades to radar antennas and signal processing also allowed Mode S to accurately determine airplane position with far fewer air-to-ground messages than required by prior systems. Mode S also provided a datalink capability that enabled other key safety systems, such as the Traffic Alert and Collision Avoidance System.

Today, Mode S is a worldwide industry standard. An estimated 100,000 aircraft are equipped with Mode S transponders, and more than 900 Mode S radars are deployed across the globe. The technology is also the foundation for the FAA's newest ATC surveillance system, which allows continuous flight tracking independent of ground radars by using aircraft-broadcast position and velocity information.

"This technology touches everybody who flies, every time they fly, for the entire duration of their flight," says Wesley Olson, a group leader in the laboratory's Homeland Protection and Air Traffic Control Division, where Mode S was first envisioned. "If it wasn't for Mode S, we would have a very different air transportation system today, one that would be far less efficient and far less safe."

Powering the microelectronics industry

The 193 nm projection photolithography technique has enabled the fabrication of every chip in every laptop, smartphone, military system, and data center for the past 20 years.

Photolithography uses light to print tiny patterns onto a silicon chip. The patterns are projected over a silicon wafer, which is coated with a chemical that changes its solubility when exposed to light. The soluble parts are etched out, leaving behind tiny structures that become the transistors and other devices on the chip. 

Shorter wavelengths of light allow for printing smaller features, enabling more densely packed chips. By the 1980s, the accepted wisdom in the industry was that 248 nm was the shortest wavelength possible for photolithography.

Despite widespread skepticism and technical obstacles, Lincoln Laboratory pioneered photolithography at the 193 nm wavelength, fabricating the world's first microelectronic devices using the technique. The first-ever 193 nm projection system was installed at the laboratory in 1993. Soon after, the laboratory opened its doors to industrial partners to guide 193 nm semiconductor manufacturing and pave the way toward its widespread adoption. Today, it is the industry's mainstream technique and has enabled increasingly powerful integrated circuits.

"Photolithography at 193 nm has enabled the microelectronics industry to continue its path of miniaturization as charted by Moore's law, thus impacting every aspect of our increasingly digital lives. It is also a prime example of the impact that close collaborations between Lincoln Laboratory and industrial partners have had on society," says Mordechai Rothschild, who was one of the key developers of the 193 nm technique and today is a principal staff member in the Advanced Technology Division.

Lighting up a world of new technologies

In fall 1962, General Electric, IBM, and Lincoln Laboratory each independently reported the first demonstrations of the semiconductor laser. In the 62 years since, it has become the most widespread laser in the world and a foundational element in a vast range of technologies: DVDs, CDs, computer mice, laser pointers, barcode scanners, medical imagers, and printers, to name a few. However, its greatest impact is arguably in communications. Every second, a semiconductor laser encodes information onto light that is transmitted through fiber-optic cables across oceans and into many homes, forming the backbone of the internet.

While lasers were invented a few years earlier in 1960, the semiconductor type was exceptional because it realized all laser elements — light generation and amplification, lenses, and mirrors — within a piece of semiconducting material no bigger than a grain of rice. When injected with electrical current, the material is extremely efficient at converting the electrical energy to light. These attributes attracted the imagination of scientists and engineers worldwide.

"I'm pretty sure that we wouldn't be streaming movies to our homes or searching for the best restaurants from our phones without the low cost and manufacturability of semiconductor lasers," says Paul Juodawlkis, an expert in photonic devices and integrated circuits, and leader of the laboratory's Quantum Information and Integrated Nanosystems Group. "It's great to know that Lincoln Laboratory has played an important role in advancing this technology for government and commercial applications for the past 60-plus years and is poised to continue doing so in the future."

Honoring inventors and their legacy

The 2024 IEEE President-elect Kathleen Kramer presented the three awards to Lincoln Laboratory Director Eric Evans during the dedication ceremony. The ceremony was held in the auditorium at Lincoln Laboratory in Lexington, Massachusetts. Evans was joined on stage by inventors or their descendants to receive each plaque. Many Lincoln Laboratory staff and retirees who contributed to these innovations were also in attendance.

Vincent Orlando, who devoted his 50-year career at the laboratory to developing Mode S technology, joined Evans to accept that award. Mordechai Rothschild and David Shaver unveiled the 193 nm photolithography plaque. Both were lead developers of that technology.

For some, the ceremony was a touching celebration of their parent's legacy, and a return to fond memories. Richard Rediker, a son of semiconductor laser inventor Robert Rediker, recalled playing in a lab as a child with his father more than 60 years ago, the last time he visited Lincoln Laboratory. He accepted the semiconductor plaque alongside Susan Zeiger and Robert Lax, children of co-inventors Herbert Zeiger and Benjamin Lax respectively.

"It was so rewarding to meet the other children of my father's colleagues and to fully appreciate what the inventions of our fathers mean to society today. Although my father passed away five years ago, this ceremony brought him back to life for an afternoon," says Rediker, adding that it was an experience he will never forget.

Likewise, these technologies have left an indelible mark on the world.

"By celebrating the pride and prestige of our profession's contributions to history, we demonstrate how engineers, scientists, and technologists have contributed not only to our local communities, but also to our global community," Kramer said, before presenting the plaques. "It is my pleasure to recognize these pioneering events and people behind them. They serve as landmarks in the progress of technology and civilization."

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