Research-backed by a $7.5 million multidisciplinary university research initiative award

New York University Physicist Javad Shabani will lead a team of scientists, under a $7.5 million research award, in developing ways to improve quantum supercomputing, work aimed at advancing the performance of semiconductors, and superconductors, which fuel personal electronics, medical diagnostic equipment, and mass transit.

The award is part of the Department of Defense’s Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI). MURI is backing 28 research teams across more than 60 U.S. academic institutions with a total of $195 million over five years to conduct basic research spanning multiple scientific disciplines. 

“By supporting teams whose members have diverse sets of expertise, the MURI program acknowledges that the complexities of modern science and engineering challenges often intersect more than one discipline and require creative and diverse approaches to tackle these problems,” said Bindu Nair, director, Basic Research Office, Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, in announcing the awards. “This cross-fertilization of ideas can accelerate research progress to enable more rapid R&D breakthroughs and hasten the transition of basic research findings to practical application. It is a program that signifies a legacy of the scientific impact and remains a cornerstone of the DoD’s basic research portfolio.”

Previously, Shabani and his colleagues uncovered a new state of matter—a breakthrough that offers promise for increasing storage capabilities in electronic devices and enhancing quantum supercomputing. 

Under the MURI award, Shabani and his colleagues from Yale University, the University at Buffalo, the University of Maryland, the University of Pittsburgh, and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign will build on the earlier discovery by exploring, more deeply, means to optimize quantum computing—a method that can make calculations at significantly faster rates than conventional computing.

Specifically, they will focus on Majorana zero modes (MZMs), which are zero-energy quasiparticles that have special properties. For example, they remember their movement history.  This makes them robust and immune to local noise and errors and, therefore, can be used as building blocks of fault-tolerant topological quantum computers. This allows for the long-lived storage of quantum information and more accurate quantum processing. The concept of MZMs can be traced back to the 1930s as a mathematical construction. However, despite recent breakthroughs, efforts to use them in technologies have been largely elusive.

Shabani’s team will seek to establish MZMs’ viability, creating the potential to vastly improve the functionality of both semiconductors and superconductors. Here, they will build on

Josephson junctions (JJs)—layers of semiconducting material placed in between two layers of superconducting material to drive a transition from trivial to a topological regime where they can “host” MZMs. These JJs can be placed in microwave circuits for fast readout and manipulation of information paving the way to realizing the first topological qubits.

These resulting devices will be created with design flexibility in mind—and with the potential to be “scaled up” for use in commercial, industrial, and medical instruments.

A new computational model would help determine the safety of existing pesticides and aid in the design of safer, next-generation pesticides that meet increasing global agricultural demand

The majority of commercial chemicals that enter the market in the United States every year have insufficient health and safety data. For pesticides, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency uses a variety of techniques to fill data gaps to evaluate chemical hazards, exposure, and risk. Nonetheless, public concern over the potential threat that these chemicals pose has grown in recent years, along with the realization that traditional animal-testing methods are not pragmatic in using speed, economics, or ethics. Now, researchers at George Washington University have developed a new computational approach to rapidly screen pesticides for safety, performance, and how long they will endure in the environment. Moreover, and most importantly, the new approach will aid in the design of next-generation molecules to develop safer pesticides.

“In many ways, our tool mimics computational drug discovery, in which vast libraries of chemical compounds are screened for their efficacy and then tweaked to make them even more potent against specific therapeutic targets,” Jakub Kostal, an assistant professor of chemistry at GW and principal investigator on the project, said. “Similarly, we use our systems-based approach to modify pesticides to make them less toxic and more degradable, while, at the same time, making sure they retain good performance. It’s a powerful tool for both industry and regulatory agencies that can help design new, safer analogs of existing commercial agrochemicals, and so protect human life, the environment, and industry’s bottom line.”

Using their model, the team analyzed 700 pesticides from the EPA’s pesticide registry. The model considered a pesticide’s likely persistence or degradation in the environment over time, its safety, and how well it performed at killing, repelling, or controlling the target problem. 

They found that only 52, or 7%, of the chemical compounds, analyzed fulfilled the criteria for a safe chemical. According to the researchers, while the results from the analysis suggest most pesticides are likely not safe, many could be made safer by modifying their molecular structure in ways that would reduce their toxicity without sacrificing performance.

“Our analysis reveals there is definitely room for improvement when it comes to developing safer pesticides,” Jessica Lewer, a graduate student at GW and lead author on the paper, said. “Moreover, the computational approach we’ve developed to better screen and design safe pesticides can be used as a blueprint and applied to other industries that rely on commercial chemicals, for example, cosmetics and cleaning products.”

Going forward, the team hopes to augment their model with pesticide design from biobased, renewable chemical building blocks to advance sustainability goals in chemical design.

The study, “Structure-to-Process Design Framework for Developing Safer Pesticides,” was published in the journal Science Advances on March 30, 2022. The National Science Foundation (NSF1943127) provided funding for this research.