Research

Professor Meredith Betterton Wins a 2024 AB Nexus Award

Anonymous — Wed, 25 Sep 2024 19:00:59 +0000

Professor Meredith Betterton Wins a 2024 AB Nexus Award Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 09/25/2024 - 13:00

Kenna Hughes-Castleberry

Recently, the AB Nexus program announced its 2024 seed grant awards, recognizing interdisciplinary research teams from the University of Colorado Boulder and the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. The AB Nexus program fosters intercampus partnerships between scientists, engineers, and physicians to improve human health further. The 2024 AB Nexus awards include projects ranging from AI-optimized pacing for heart failure patients to investigating the health impacts of climate change on Colorado’s prison population. This year, seven teams received a total of $713,000 in funding for their projects.

Among the recipients is ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� Physics Professor Meredith Betterton, who, alongside collaborator Jeffrey Moore from CU Anschutz, received funding for their project on tubulinopathies, genetic diseases that disrupt brain and nervous system development due to mutated tubulin proteins.

“You can think of tubulin as being like a brick that is stacked next to other bricks to build a road (the microtubule),” Betterton explained. “One of the puzzles about tublinopathies is that the mutation usually occurs in one tubulin gene out of many, so it affects only a minority (usually 25% or less) of the subunits. We aim to understand how a mutation in one small part of a tubulin gene can cause catastrophic defects at the cell and tissue level, ultimately impacting patients.”

Betterton's and Moore’s research proposes that tubulin mutations influence structural changes in neighboring tubulins, amplifying the mutation's effects and creating serious health issues for individuals.

“This award is very exciting for my lab and me because it will provide seed funding for a new direction for our work,” Betterton added. “It’s a fantastic opportunity to potentially help people affected by these diseases.”

Highlighting the collaborative nature of the project, Betterton emphasized the importance of interdisciplinary research: “We will work with the Moore lab at CU Anschutz to conduct a combined experimental and theoretical study. This award is meaningful because it supports a new idea predicted by our theoretical work, now finding support in experiments. As a theoretical physicist, being able to predict an important new effect is something we all hope to do in our work.”

The AB Nexus program continues cultivating a culture of collaboration and innovation at the University of Colorado. Its vision is to tackle the toughest challenges in human health through teamwork across diverse fields.

As Vice Chancellor Thomas Flaig noted in the award announcement: “Solving the toughest challenges in human health requires teamwork across a wide range of fields, and we’re very proud of how this program has helped to inspire so many new interdisciplinary research projects across our campuses.”

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CU Physics Professor Ivan Smalyukh and His Team Receive a Guinness Book of World Records Award for Most Transparent Material

Anonymous — Thu, 15 Aug 2024 06:00:00 +0000

CU Physics Professor Ivan Smalyukh and His Team Receive a Guinness Book of World Records Award for Most Transparent Material Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 08/15/2024 - 00:00

Kenna Hughes-Castleberry

The Soft Matter Physics Smalyukh Research Group holding the Guinness World Record plaque.

Only a few individuals or teams are awarded by the Guinness Book of World Records for specific actions or research they’ve done. One of those teams is led by the University of Colorado Boulder Professor of Physics Ivan Smalyukh, who, with his research group, developed “the World’s Most Transparent Material.”

This material—a synthetic gel-derived material known as aerogel—is around 97-99% transparent, compared to glass, which is around 92% transparent. While many aerogels are being manufactured worldwide, the aerogel Smalyukh and his team have created involves fibers of cellulose, a protein derived from plants. Their aerogel, which has now been successfully patented, can be added to windows to boost thermal insulation, increasing the overall efficiency of a building.

What is an Aerogel?

Aerogels are often described as “frozen smoke” or “solid air” because they are incredibly light and porous. They are made by removing the liquid from a gel, leaving behind a mostly empty solid network.

“There are different ways people define aerogels, but it’s roughly one percent solid by volume and 99 percent air, so it’s mostly air,” explained Smalyukh.

Despite being extremely lightweight, aerogels are excellent thermal insulators, which means they can prevent heat from passing through them. This makes them useful in everything from space exploration to insulating homes.

“In the U.S., unfortunately, we still have almost 50 percent of single-pane windows,” added Smalyukh. “What that means is that you heat the building, especially during winter, but then a lot of that energy is actually lost through the windows.”

By retrofitting these windows with aerogel, the thermal efficiency of these windows can be increased as more heat is trapped inside.

The Challenge with Transparency

Traditional aerogels, however, despite being effective insulators, have drawbacks—they tend to scatter light, making them appear cloudy or opaque. This limits their use in applications where transparency is important, such as windows.

“They are so hazy because you have many tiny particles that are somehow connected to each other in a network. And the length of the pores between these particles ranges from a few nanometers to micrometers.”

That’s where the new aerogel Smalyukh and his team developed, called SiCellA, comes in. Instead of having various pore lengths and particle sizes like other aerogels, the researchers meticulously controlled the size of the particles, the cellulose fibers, within SiCellA, along with the distance between these particles.

“The cellulose fibers we use are typically under 6 nanometers in diameter. Because the particles themselves have a diameter much smaller than the wavelengths of light and the pores in between them are also much smaller, therefore, the scattering of light is very small.”

This produces a higher transparency percentage of the aerogel, allowing it to let through 97-99% of visible light while scattering and reflecting only 1% of the remaining light.

Boosting Energy Efficiency

Infrared thermal imaging photos of different types of treated and untreated window panes mounted into an insulated box. These boxes are designed to hold extreme hot and cold temperatures to test the thermal insulating properties of each window type. The double-paned Insulated Glass Unit (IGU) containing the SiCellA aerogel (Top Left) and the single window pane treated with the SiCellA aerogel film (Bottom Left) show markedly higher thermal insulation properties than a conventional double-paned IGU (Top Right), and a single pane of glass (Bottom Right).

To create comfortable indoor environments, buildings consume around 40% of the energy produced worldwide. Windows and skylights are often the weakest points in a building’s insulation, allowing heat to escape in the winter and letting it in during the summer.

“If we only could stop that heat loss, then we would not need to generate this much energy,” Smalyukh elaborated. “That means shutting down some coal-based power plants or using less fossil fuels.”

By using this SiCellA in windows, buildings could become much more energy-efficient, reducing the need for heating and cooling and lowering energy bills. Because SiCellA is so transparent, it can be used in windows without blocking the natural light that makes spaces bright and inviting. This means that homes and offices can stay comfortable all year round while using less energy, contributing to a more sustainable future.

A Guinness World Record

The incredible transparency of SiCellA hasn’t gone unnoticed. The Guinness Book of World Records has officially recognized it as the most transparent material ever created.

When Smalyukh & team presented their results at an ARPA-E project meeting, the program manager suggested submitting SiCellA to the Guinness Book of World Records to help disseminate the project's outcomes. While Smalyukh and his team did submit the record to Guinness back in 2019, the public release of this World Record wasn’t until much later, as the team was patenting SiCellA at the same time and had to wait for the patents and related publications in Nature Energy to be accepted before breaking the news.

“It was interesting and exciting to see the record entry in the Guinness Book of World Records,” Smalyukh added. “We were happy that everything went through.”

Title Image: Senior Research Associates Vladyslav Cherpak and Bohdan Senyuk hold SiCellA aerogel film, suspended in plastic wrap, in front of the foothills. Image courtesy of the Smalyukh Group

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Margaret Murnane and Henry Kapteyn's latest advance in ptychography featured in ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� Today

Anonymous — Wed, 06 Dec 2023 15:51:52 +0000

Anonymous — Fri, 08 Sep 2023 16:53:54 +0000

Professor Noah Finkelstein collaborating on $30 million center exploring new frontiers of sound Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 09/08/2023 - 10:53

Image credit: University of Arizona College of Engineering

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2023 Physics and JILA Research Experience for Undergraduates

Anonymous — Thu, 24 Aug 2023 22:41:24 +0000

2023 Physics and JILA Research Experience for Undergraduates Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 08/24/2023 - 16:41

The 2023 Physics and JILA REU participants with the REU Leadership Team. Image Credit: Keith Hedlund

The 2023 REU students participate in lab tours. Image Credit: Christine Morrow

Hailing from across the country, 10 exceptional undergraduates joined this summer’s Physics and JILA Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program at ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ��. The REU Program is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and students are matched with outstanding ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� faculty to conduct innovative research in all areas of physics. ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� Physics Assistant Professor Mike Litos is the Principal Investigator, and Professor Dan Dessau and Christine Morrow serve as Co-Principal Investigators.

Throughout the summer, REU students participated in professional development and skill-building activities including machining and electronics courses, lab tours, and weekly seminars. Highlighting the benefit of the program, one student commented, “I thought this summer experience was a good trial in seeing how graduate school would be like without having the financial and class responsibilities, it was a life changing experience.” The program concluded with each student giving a presentation on their summer research.

"Our main goal is to educate our students by immersing them in an active research environment, which we believe is one of the most effective ways to attract and retain talented undergrads into careers in science and engineering. We put emphasis on selecting students who will be most impacted by participating in our program, such as students from non-R1 universities with limited research opportunities at their home institutions. Our program has been doing an excellent job in achieving our goals, as nearly all of our students go on to top graduate schools and other important technical or research-oriented positions in industry. We look forward to seeing these students make their own impacts on education, science, and society."
Physics and JILA REU Leadership Team: Mike Litos, Dan Dessau, and Christine Morrow

A selection of this year’s REU projects included

Investigating scaling of forces and length scales in rotating spherical dynamos
Optimizing CMB Detectors with Microwave Loss Measurements Electron Trajectories in Static Electric Fields
Characterizing Collisions Between Ultracold Rb and Cold OH in Dual Electromagnetic Trap
The Use of Autoencoders for Anomaly Detection at CMS

Applications for the 2024 Physics and JILA REU Program will open in mid-fall and are due by January 31, 2024.

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Research

Professor Meredith Betterton Wins a 2024 AB Nexus Award

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CU Physics Professor Ivan Smalyukh and His Team Receive a Guinness Book of World Records Award for Most Transparent Material

What is an Aerogel?

The Challenge with Transparency

Boosting Energy Efficiency

A Guinness World Record

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Margaret Murnane and Henry Kapteyn's latest advance in ptychography featured in ���Ҵ�ý�ƽ������ Today

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Prof. Dennis Perepelitsa and colleagues explain how they measure wobbling tau particles

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Venture Partners highlights decades-long relationship between CU Physics, LASP and Ball Aerospace

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CU PREP researchers collaborate on advancing MRI technology

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JILA's Physics Frontiers Center awarded $25M from NSF

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Professor Noah Finkelstein collaborating on $30 million center exploring new frontiers of sound

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2023 Physics and JILA Research Experience for Undergraduates

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Margaret Murnane and Henry Kapteyn's latest advance in ptychography featured in ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� Today