There are in fact two things, science and opinion; the former begets knowledge, the latter ignorance.
Colloquia
Coffee starts at 12:00 PM and talk starts at 12:15 PM
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I will discuss two cases where their role is far from innocent. In a classical transport theory for electromagnatic waves inside media with electric dipoles, longitudinal waves mix with transverse waves and induce a novel transport channel. This imposes a "minimum electromagnetic conductivity" and rules out Anderson localization. In QED, longitudinal electric fields are strongly connected to the vector potential. In the presence of an external magnetic field, the presence of longitudinal fields inside a medium with give rise to a diamagnetic Einstein - De Haas effect induced by the quantum vacuum.
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I will present our recent discoveries that solve a longstanding mystery of how nanowires move electrons to soil minerals or help generate electricity. By correlating cryo-electron microscopy with multimodal functional imaging and a suite of electrical, biochemical and physiological studies, we find that nanowires are made up of polymerized cytochrome proteins that transport electrons via seamless stacking of metal-containing heme molecules over micrometer distances (Cell 2019, Nature Chem.Bio. 2020, Nature 2021). As metalloproteins were not known to polymerize, the discovery of these cytochrome nanowires opens an entirely new field for the development of next-generation living bioelectronics. My recent experimental studies on individual nanowires show inherent spin polarization and the highest electronic conductivity reported on proteins (> 100 S/cm with ultrafast electron transfer rate of ~200 fs). Computational studies suggest that quantum coherent transport accounts for the high conductivity of these nanowires. Identifying the role of quantum effects in these processes will help understand, predict, and ultimately control extracellular electron transfer by protein nanowires used by diverse environmentally important microbes to capture, convert and store energy. Moreover, cytochrome nanowires acting as Biocompatible Quantum Probes at room temperature will enable a route to engineer quantum technologies based on biology.
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[1] L. Ledezma*, R. Sekine*, Q. Guo*, R. Nehra, S. Jahani, and A. Marandi, "Intense optical parametric amplification in dispersion-engineered nanophotonic lithium niobate waveguides," Optica, vol. 9, pp. 303-308, 2022.
[2] L. Ledezma, A. Roy, L. Costa, R. Sekine, R. Gray, Q. Guo, et al., "Widely-tunable optical parametric oscillator in lithium niobate nanophotonics," arXiv preprint arXiv:2203.11482, 2022.
[3] R. Nehra*, R. Sekine*, L. Ledezma, Q. Guo, R. M. Gray, A. Roy, et al., "Few-cycle vacuum squeezing in nanophotonics," Science, 2022.
[4] Q. Guo*, R. Sekine*, L. Ledezma*, R. Nehra, D. J. Dean, A. Roy, et al., "Femtojoule femtosecond all-optical switching in lithium niobate nanophotonics," Nature Photonics, vol. 16, pp. 625-631, 2022.
[5] Q. Guo et. al. Actively mode-locked laser in nanophotonic lithium niobate with Watt-level peak power (To be submitted).
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Mengkun Liu (Ph.D. 2012 Boston University) is an associate professor at the Department of Physics and Astronomy of Stony Brook University (since Jan. 2015). His post doc research was at UC San Diego from 2012-2014. His research interests include physics of correlated electron systems, low-dimensional quantum materials, infrared and terahertz nano-optics and ultrafast time-domain spectroscopy. Prizes include NSF career award (2021) and Seaborg Institute Research Fellowships at Los Alamos National Lab (2009, 2010).
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In the context of quantum and nonlinear optics, III-V semiconductors have among the highest optical nonlinearities but cannot be used in conventional phase-matched processes due to the symmetry of their nonlinear susceptibility tensor. However, as phase matching is relaxed when resonant nanoscale resonators are used, III-V semiconductor metasurfaces can be used for harmonic generation, harmonic mixing and parametric down-conversion in ways thathave no equivalence when using macroscopic nonlinear media. Some of the results that I’ll present include harmonicgeneration and generation of entangled photons and complex quantum states using spontaneous parametric downconversion enabled by quasi bound-states in the continuum resonances. If time permits, I will also show recentresults of beam steering of spontaneous emission from semiconductor metasurfaces.
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and how might we control such quantum processes to therapeutic and tech advantage
Imagine driving cell activities to treat injuries and disease simply by using tailored magnetic fields. Many relevant physiological processes, such as: the regulation of oxidative stress, proliferation, and respiration rates in cells; wound healing; ion channel functioning; and DNA repair were all demonstrated to be controlled by weak magnetic fields (with a strength on the order of that produced by your cell phone). Such macroscopic physiological responses to magnetic fields are consistent with being driven by chemical reactions that depend on the electron quantum property of spin. In the long-term, the electromagnetic fine-tuning of endogenous “quantum knobs” existing in nature could enable the development of drugs and therapeutic devices that could heal the human body — in a way that is non-invasive, remotely actuated, and easily accessible by anyone with a mobile phone. However, whereas spin-dependent chemical reactions have been unambiguously established for test-tube chemistry (bearing uncanny similarities with what physicists call “spin quantum sensing”), current research has not been able to deterministically link spin states to physiological outcomes in vivo and in real time. With novel quantum instrumentation, we are learning to control spin states within cells and tissues, having as a goal to write the “codebook” on how to deterministically alter physiology with weak magnetic fields to therapeutic and technological advantage.
Bio
Prof. Clarice D. Aiello is a quantum engineer interested in how quantum physics informs biology at the nanoscale. She is an expert on nanosensors harnessing room-temperature quantum effects in noisy environments. Aiello received her B.S. in Physics from the Ecole Polytechnique; her M.Phil. in Physics from the University of Cambridge, Trinity College; and her Ph.D. from MIT in Electrical Engineering. She also held postdoctoral appointments in Bioengineering at Stanford, and in Chemistry at Berkeley. Two months before the pandemic, she joined UCLA, where she leads the Quantum Biology Tech (QuBiT) Lab.
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[1] S. Sharma, A. Kani and M. Bhattacharya, Phys. Rev. A 105, 043505 (2022)
[2] R. M. Pettit, W. Ge, P. Kumar, D. R. L.-Martin, J. T. Schulz, L. P. Neukirch, M. Bhattacharya and A. N. Vamivakas, Nature Photonics 13, 372 (2019)
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1. Deshmukh, P. et al. A plug-and-play molecular approach for room temperature polariton condensation. ArXiv 2304.11608 (2023).
2. Datta, B. et al. Highly nonlinear dipolar exciton-polaritons in bilayer MoS2. Nature Communications 2022 13:1 13, 1–7 (2022).
3. Dirnberger, F. et al. Spin-correlated exciton–polaritons in a van der Waals magnet. Nature Nanotechnology 2022 17:10 17, 1060–1064 (2022).
4. Dirnberger, F. et al. Magneto-optics in a van der Waals magnet tuned by self-hybridized polaritons. Nature 620, 533–537 (2023).
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This seminar is an overview of recent and reported research in rapid automated disease identification with low-cost field portable bio-photonics systems through the analysis of blood cells using multidimensional digital holographic systems. Statistical and/or deep learning algorithms are used to analyze the spatial and temporal characteristics of the reconstructed blood cells for automated disease identification. Recent applications of digital holography and dedicated algorithms for rapid COVID-19 detection will be presented. We present a variety of bio-photonics sensors including 3D printed thin lensless sensors using pseudo-random phase encoding. Conventional holographic systems require a stable optical table for reliable performance. Self-referencing holographic systems show much greater stability and are field portable. Experimental results are presented to illustrate the performance of these instruments in the field such as health clinics for COVID-19 detection, Sickle Cell disease detection, etc. Dedicated algorithms to inspect and classify cells such as blood cells using field portable holographic systems for automated disease identification will be presented. Recent advances in the proposed bio-photonics sensors give this approach agreat potential for success.
Bio:
Prof. Bahram Javidi is Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor at University of Connecticut. His interests are in a broad range of transformative imaging approaches using optics and photonics, and he has made seminal contributions to passive and active multidimensional imaging from nano to micro and macro scales. His recent research activities include digital holography, polarimetric 3D imaging at low light, 3D visualization and recognition of objects in photon-starved environments; automated disease identification using biophotonics with compact digital holographic sensors for use in developing countries; and optical cyber physical security. He has 35 patents some of which have been licensed by industry. He has been awarded The Optica (OSA) Emmett Leith medal (2021), Optica C. E. K. Mees Medal (2019), and Optica Joseph Fraunhofer Award / Robert M. Burley Prize (2018); The IEEE Photonics Society William Streifer Scientific Achievement Award (2019); and the European Physical Society (EPS) Prize for Applied Aspects of Quantum Electronics and Optics (2015). He was awarded the IEEE Donald G. Fink Paper Prize (2008); the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellow Award (2008); the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Prize (2007); the SPIE Technology Achievement Award (2008); and the SPIE Dennis Gabor Award (2005). He was named an IEEE Photonics Society Distinguished Lecturer in 2004 and 2005; and was the 2010 recipient of the George Washington University's Distinguished Alumni Scholar Award. He has been named Fellow of IEEE, OSA, SPIE, AIMBE, National Academy of Inventors, and Inst. of Physics.
