From humble beginnings of one small room in the RUCH Engineering Building, to now expansive multi-million dollar laboratories in the Micron Center for Material Research building, the world-class materials research at Boise State University exists no where else in the world according to Dr. Ryan Pensack, qDNAs Ultrafast Laser Spectroscopy Team Lead.
In the last six years, the Nanoscale Materials and Device group has developed its facilities in leaps and bounds. Researchers Bernie Yurke, Will Huges, Jeunghoon Lee and Elton Graugnard since 2000 have advanced the research progress.
Now, the Nanoscale Materials and Device Group branched off into research areas and fields of study to include nanophotonics, gate oxide studies, multi-dielectric dand diagram programs, magnetic shape memory alloys, 3-D tech for advanced sensor systems and DNA nanotechnology.
Under the DNA nanotechnology field, a research group has been established the Quantum DNA Research Group (qDNA). The collaboration of five science and engineering teams, one management team with over 30 faculty, staff and students ranging 10 academic disciplines resulted in what the university is known for: innovation.
Dr. Ryan D. Pensack was hired on as the lead for qDNAs Ultrafast Laser Spectroscopy Team after his position from 2015-2017 as a postdoctoral research associate in the research group of Prof. Gregory Scholes at Princeton University.
From 2012-2015, he was a postdoctoral fellow in Scholes group at the University of Toronto. Alongside Pensack, Dr. Paul H. Davis led the tour exhibiting the achievements of the research team.
The collaboration Id say is unique, it sets us up to be competitive nationally and internationally actually, said Pensack during The Arbiters tour of the laboratories, led by both Pensack and Dr. Paul H. Davis.
Funding from the Department of Energy, Idaho National Laboratory, Laboratory Directed Research and Development, Office of Naval Research and other supporters provided the equipment the teams work with. In 2021, the Department of Energy granted the qDNA Team $5 million to further their efforts into phase II of attempting quantum entanglement.
For those unfamiliar with the term, quantum entanglement is a phenomenon when two particles become strongly dependent on one another and the physical states of those particles cannot be recognized as separate from the other. Dr. Pensack and Dr. Davis use the metaphor of a spinning coin to create a visual for quantum entanglement.
Dr. Paul Davis serves as the surface science lab manager, co-lead and co-director on the Ultrafast Spectroscopy Team.
When its spinning, its neither heads nor tails, and thats what the cubit is a superposition state, both heads and tails, Davis said.
Later, Pensack explained this through a demonstration with coins. When spun, the blue side and the orange side of the coin are continually moving. Davis said how the number of revolutions of a coin (particle) relates to the speed of the spinning, and the speed of the spinning relates to the strength of coupling. The length of a spinning coin or particle is referred to as its lifetime.
The excited state of these particles give off energy as a resource, which can be a tool for development in quantum mechanics; therefore, quantum computing.
In quantum information science we think about a third state which is actually a combination of the two: its the spinning coin heads or tails, blue or orange, Pensack said.
On Sept. 20, Nanoscale Materials and Device Group published the High-sensitivity electronic Stark spectrometer featuring a laser-driven light source in the Review of Scientific Instruments. The Stark spectrometer was engineered by the Ultrafast Spectroscopy Team. Spectrometers are used to measure wavelengths of light in relation to matter.
The spectrometer measures the property of pigments that enables them to interact such that we can realize entanglement, Pensack said.
Dr. Katelyn Duncan, a postdoctoral research fellow, and Dr. Johnathan Huff, a graduate research assistant, offered their insight on the instrument, mentioning that the entire setup is custom made and built according to Duncan. She alongside Pensack and Huff finalized measurements together.
Huff walked The Arbiter through the samples they utilized on the instrument, such as dye solutions, and the process of how the Stark Spectrometer works.
The work the qDNA team has done has received national recognition. Two of the teams technical manuscripts were featured in National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI), the National Nanotechnology Initiative Supplement to the Presidents 2023 Budget submitted to Congress March 8, 2022. The team has submitted over 30 technical manuscripts and academic articles, in 2023 the dDNA published 12 articles so far.
We are all very passionate about what we do, Pensack said. While our main mission is this notion of room temperature quantum computing, there will be spin-offs of what we do. The new knowledge we create could be used to help serve society.
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Research leaders at Boise state are taking the science of quantum ... - Boise State University The Arbiter Online
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