Tyler O'Neal, Staff Editor APPLICATIONS

Two UH chemists are named 2020 Sloan Research Fellows

Brgoch, Wu honored for their work in fundamental chemistry

Two chemists from the University of Houston have been chosen as 2020 Sloan Research Fellows, an honor that recognizes outstanding early-career faculty selected for their potential to revolutionize their fields of study.

Jakoah Brgoch and Judy Wu, both assistant professors of chemistry working in different fields, are among 126 researchers in eight disciplines - ranging from chemistry to neuroscience, physics, and economics - selected for the honor.

"To receive a Sloan Research Fellowship is to be told by your fellow scientists that you stand out among your peers," says Adam F. Falk, president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. "A Sloan Research Fellow is someone whose drive, creativity, and insight makes them a researcher to watch."

Brgoch, whose lab works in both computational and experimental inorganic chemistry, develops materials with applications in energy, manufacturing and other fields. Wu, a computational quantum chemist, is currently working on expanding modern applications of an old chemical concept - aromaticity. Jakoah Brgoch and Judy Wu, both assistant professors of chemistry at the University of Houston, are recipients of a Sloan Research Fellowship.{module INSIDE STORY}

Wu said the Sloan Foundation's recognition of fundamental discoveries is encouraging in an era when much of the attention on science has focused on practical applications. "What we are doing is asking a new question of an old concept," she said. "This encourages me to believe the scientific community still values fundamental work. At the core, it is curiosity-driven research."

Wu earned a National Science Foundation CAREER award in 2018 and a National Institute of Health MIRA award in 2019 for her proposal suggesting that connecting aromaticity and hydrogen bonding - previously considered to be separate ideas - could change the way chemists view hydrogen bonds and potentially guide experimental efforts in the design of advanced materials and functional molecules. She continues to work with aromaticity, a fundamental concept in organic chemistry that is usually associated with ring-shaped molecules that increase chemical stability, describing her work as "putting old concepts into a new light."

"There are no dead fields, just new questions," she said. "A lot of these ideas, people think of them as basic concepts in the textbooks. We are showing that they can have practical implications."

Brgoch's lab does both computational and experimental work - using machine learning to predict materials with specific properties followed by synthesizing the material to confirm the predictions. Most researchers specialize in one or the other, collaborating in order to cover the spectrum from prediction to production, but Brgoch teaches his students how to do both.

Doing both in one lab is unusual, but he said it allows his students to see the full process. "It gives a comprehensive and unique perspective to the advantages and disadvantages of both approaches," he said. "They learn what questions to ask and which questions can't be addressed by a calculation or an experiment alone."

He also earned an NSF CAREER award in 2019 for his work in predicting and then synthesizing new compounds for energy-efficient LED-based lighting. There are only a handful of materials used in all of the LED lights around the world, and they are expensive; his research group employs data science to seek cheaper alternatives that outperform current materials.

Winners of the Sloan fellowship receive a $75,000 award to be used to advance their research.

David Hoffman, chairman of the UH chemistry department and himself a Sloan Research Fellow in 1992-94, said the recognition is an acknowledgment of the work done by Brgoch and Wu.

"My colleagues and I in the Department of Chemistry knew early on that Jakoah and Judy were exceptional scientists with all the right attributes to become leaders in their fields," he said. "To have the Sloan Foundation recognize them with fellowships is a wonderful acknowledgment that the scientific community agrees with us. We are fortunate to have them on the faculty at UH."

German scientist has commercialized green supercomputer technology 'Made in Hessen'

Tyler O'Neal, Staff Editor APPLICATIONS

Patenting and commercialization crown ten years' development work based on the 'Green IT' approach of Professor Volker Lindenstruth of Goethe University and the GSI Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion Research

By 2030, data centers could be responsible for 13 percent of worldwide power consumption. In Frankfurt, the global network node with the highest data volume, data centers today already consume 20 percent of all local electricity - and this figure is rising. A large part of it is used for cooling power. Already today, the waste heat from single large-scale data centers could be used to heat up to 10,000 households.

An answer to this global challenge comes from Hessen. To be specific, it comes from Goethe University and the GSI Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion Research, which was recently granted a European patent for their concept for an energy-efficient cooling structure for data centers. This patent now paves the way for the commercialization of the pioneering technology developed by Professor Volker Lindenstruth, Professor Horst Stöcker and Alexander Hauser of e3c. Together with parallel patents outside Europe, the invention can now be put to economic use throughout the world. The team has already received inquiries from various countries for the construction of such data centers.

The data center is thus becoming an important export commodity "Made in Hessen." This success is also thanks to Innovectis, Goethe University's own transfer agency, and its managing director Dr. Martin Raditsch, the driving force behind the invention's commercialization, as well as Dr. Tobias Engert, head of the GSI's Technology Transfer Department. The successful commercialization of the patents is a perfect example of collaboration between a university and a major research facility in Hessen. CAPTION Volker Lindenstruth: {module INSIDE STORY}

NDC Data Centers GmbH, a Munich-based company, has obtained the rights to market the green technology in data center construction projects around the globe and is thus also making a major contribution to the careful handling of our energy resources against the backdrop of global digitalization.

The basis for these activities is the visionary concept of a significantly optimized cooling system for data centers with the highest possible level of energy efficiency, which was developed by Volker Lindenstruth, Professor for High-Performance Computing Architecture at Goethe University and former head of the Scientific IT Department at GSI. On the basis of his concept, data centers, and commercial IT systems can today be operated with up to 50 percent less primary energy consumption in comparison to conventional data centers.

The technology has been in use for years and is being continuously improved: The first data center of this type was Goethe University's own, which was set at in the Infraserv industrial park. Another very data center, the Green IT Cube, was built by the GSI Helmholtz Centre in Darmstadt and financed from funds provided by the German federal government and the Federal State of Hessen via Helmholtz expansion investments. The concept enables the realization and particularly efficient operation of data centers for large-scale research facilities such as FAIR (Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research), which is currently being set up at the GSI. Later, the Green IT Cube will be the central data center for FAIR, one of the largest projects worldwide in support of research. Moreover, the waste heat from the servers in the Green IT Cube is already being used today to heat a modern office and canteen building on the GSI campus.

Apart from the high energy savings associated with the use of this new technology, the construction of such data centers is also extraordinarily cost-efficient, thus minimizing procurement and operating costs: An expedient coupling of ecology and economy.

Lindenstruth's supercomputers have received several awards for their energy-efficient concept in recent years. At the end of 2014, one of his computers ranked first place in the global listing of the most energy-efficient supercomputers, thanks to its greatly optimized computer architecture.

Goethe University's success in the area of green IT is also spurring on its current application, together with Mainz, Kaiserslautern, and Saarbrücken, to host one of the new National High-Performance Computing Centres. Thanks to the optimized computer architecture based on the Hessian green IT approach, considerably more computing power could be made available to users at the same cost. Goethe University would, therefore, be an ideal location for one of the new centers.

Views on the green supercomputer technology:

Angela Dorn, Hessen's Minister of Science, says: "My sincere congratulations to Professor Lindenstruth and his team. I'm especially pleased that this success has been accomplished in a field close to my heart: The energy turnaround to which green IT can make a very important contribution. I'm also very happy that we as the Federal State of Hessen have contributed to this success. The first supercomputer in which Professor Lindenstruth used his energy-saving technology was the LOEWE-CSC at Goethe University's data center in the Infraserv industrial park. Hessen's Ministry of Science supported this investment with a total of almost € 2 million in the shape of both direct fundings as well as from the LOEWE program. We're therefore today harvesting together with the fruits of this funding and the LOEWE program launched in 2008."

Professor Birgitta Wolff, President of Goethe University, says: "Just as in Goethe's days it made no sense to harness more and more horses in front of a stagecoach in order to increase the speed, so today we are facing a fundamental paradigm shift in IT. Back then, the railroad was the answer to the problem of speed. Today, the smart IT sector has a huge sustainability and energy problem. To satisfy its enormous hunger for data, our IT-based society requires new energy concepts for supercomputers that drastically reduce power consumption. Volker Lindenstruth from Goethe University has developed such a solution. It's successful patenting with the support of our subsidiary Innovectis is a major step in the right direction: The dissemination and commercialization of this truly smart technology."

Professor Volker Lindenstruth, Professor for High-Performance Computing Architecture at Goethe University, says: "Our successful patent registration is a milestone for the further global commercialization of our "Green IT" approach. We've already received inquiries for it from various regions worldwide. This gives our work a further boost, the more so since with NDC we now have a strong business partner at our side to help with the practical steps."

Professor Karlheinz Langanke, Research Director of the GSI Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion Research and FAIR - Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research in Europe, says: "The Green IT Cube high-performance computing center at the GSI Helmholtz Centre is an outstanding example of how practical and usable know-how and developments evolve out of basic research. The Green IT Cube was developed for enormous volumes of measurement data from scientific research: It provides the highest computing capacities required and is at the same time extraordinarily energy-efficient and space-saving."

Markus Bodenmeier, NDC co-founder and partner: "With the help of the innovations created by Professor Volker Lindenstruth from Goethe University and by the GSI, NDC Data Centers GmbH builds the most energy-efficient and resource-friendly data centers. In so doing, we can guarantee over the long term the benefits offered by the exponential growth of digitalization. We're in keeping here with the current trend - all major cloud operators are at present keeping a very close eye on the impact of their activities on the environment."

Other statements by experts involved:

Dr. Martin Raditsch, Managing Director of Innovectis GmbH, a subsidiary of Goethe University explains: "The application in practice of this technology is a very nice example of how results from basic research at the university and their transfer lead to technological solutions for societal challenges. Through our technology, the advancing digitalization of industry and society can be accomplished in a far more energy-saving way."

Dr. Tobias Engert, Director of the Technology Transfer Department at the GSI, is very pleased about the invention's success: "The cooling concept of the Green IT Cube at the GSI is based on an innovative idea for the reduction of energy costs, and together with Innovectis we've now been able to successfully market it to NDC. Equipped with an innovative cooling system, the Green IT Cube meets the high requirements of optimum energy efficiency coupled with the highest possible computing power, and it will later become the central data center for the new accelerator FAIR - Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research. The commercialization of the patents is certainly one of the most important examples of technology transfer from the GSI into the industry." His colleague Michael Geier, Director of the Patents Department, adds: "The sale of the patents to NDC corroborates how important it is to protect new technical solutions developed at research facilities such as the GSI through patents. Such patents are a deciding factor for technology transfer into the industry, through which income is generated that then flows back into research."

British researchers use sound, light to generate ultra-fast data transfer

Tyler O'Neal, Staff Editor APPLICATIONS

Researchers have made a breakthrough in the control of terahertz quantum cascade lasers, which could lead to the transmission of data at the rate of 100 gigabits per second - around one thousand times quicker than a fast Ethernet operating at 100 megabits a second.

What distinguishes terahertz quantum cascade lasers from other lasers is the fact that they emit light in the terahertz range of the electromagnetic spectrum. They have applications in the field of spectroscopy where they are used in chemical analysis.

The lasers could also eventually provide ultra-fast, short-hop wireless links where large datasets have to be transferred across hospital campuses or between research facilities on universities - or in satellite communications.

To be able to send data at these increased speeds, the lasers need to be modulated very rapidly: switching on and off or pulsing around 100 billion times every second.

Engineers and scientists have so far failed to develop a way of achieving this.

A research team from the University of Leeds and University of Nottingham believe they have found a way of delivering ultra-fast modulation, by combining the power of acoustic and light waves.  Dr Aniela Dunn holds the laser and its mounting in the palm of her hand.

John Cunningham, Professor of Nanoelectronics at Leeds, said: "This is exciting research. At the moment, the system for modulating a quantum cascade laser is electrically driven - but that system has limitations. 

"Ironically, the same electronics that deliver the modulation usually puts a brake on the speed of the modulation. The mechanism we are developing relies instead on acoustic waves."

A quantum cascade laser is very efficient. As an electron passes through the optical component of the laser, it goes through a series of 'quantum wells' where the energy level of the electron drops and a photon or pulse of light energy is emitted.

One electron is capable of emitting multiple photons. It is this process that is controlled during the modulation.

Instead of using external electronics, the teams of researchers at Leeds and Nottingham Universities used acoustic waves to vibrate the quantum wells inside the quantum cascade laser.

The acoustic waves were generated by the impact of a pulse from another laser onto an aluminum film. This caused the film to expand and contract, sending a mechanical wave through the quantum cascade laser.

Tony Kent, Professor of Physics at Nottingham said "Essentially, what we did was use the acoustic wave to shake the intricate electronic states inside the quantum cascade laser. We could then see that its terahertz light output was being altered by the acoustic wave." {module INSIDE STORY}

Professor Cunningham added: "We did not reach a situation where we could stop and start the flow completely, but we were able to control the light output by a few percents, which is a great start.

"We believe that with further refinement, we will be able to develop a new mechanism for complete control of the photon emissions from the laser, and perhaps even integrate structures generating sound with the terahertz laser so that no external sound source is needed."

Professor Kent said: "This result opens a new area for physics and engineering to come together in the exploration of the interaction of terahertz sound and light waves, which could have real technological applications."