Author: MIT News

Bose Grants for 2017 reward bold and unconventional research visions 

by MIT Resource Development |

Since 2014, the Professor Amar G. Bose Research Grant has supported MIT faculty with innovative and potentially paradigm-shifting research ideas, and this year is no exception: With Bose funding, six research teams composed of nine MIT faculty members will pursue projects ranging from nanoengineering a light-emitting plant to developing solid-state atmospheric propulsion technology for aircraft.

Steven Barrett, John Hart, Dina Katabi, Timothy Swager, Michael Strano, Sheila Kennedy, Evelyn Wang, Justin Solomon, and Or Hen were recognized at a reception on Monday, Nov. 20, hosted by MIT President L. Rafael Reif and attended by past awardees. To celebrate the fifth anniversary of the Bose Grants, MIT also held a colloquium that included a panel discussion about the importance of philanthropic support for basic science research.

The grant program is named for the late Amar Bose ’51, SM ’52, ScD ’56, a longtime MIT faculty member and the founder of the Bose Corporation. This year’s reception also honored his son, Vanu Bose ’87, SM ’94, PhD ’99, who passed away last month. In his opening remarks, President Reif called Vanu the “heart and soul of the Bose program.” “For now, the best way to honor our friend is to appreciate together the wonderful gift that is the Bose research fellowship,” he said.

Vanu’s wife, Judith, spoke to the newest class of fellows about his boundless enthusiasm for the Bose Grants: “Vanu loved this moment. He loved it for the way that it so beautifully and perfectly celebrated the intellectual curiosity of his father, and of Bose Corporation. And he loved it because it was the moment he got to celebrate all of you.”

The grants support unconventional, ahead-of-the-curve, and often interdisciplinary research endeavors that are unlikely to be funded through traditional avenues, yet have the potential to lead to big breakthroughs. Bose Fellows, chosen this year from a pool of more than 100 applicants, receive up to $500,000 over three years of research.

“That is the promise of the Bose Fellowship, to help bold new ideas become realities, and I’m deeply grateful to the Bose family for making all of it possible,” Reif concluded.

Reinventing propulsion for aircraft

Is it possible to develop a propulsion system for drones and airplanes that involves no moving parts? That is the question that Steven Barrett will explore with his Bose Grant as he works on developing solid-state atmospheric propulsion technology.

“If you think about the history of aviation at a sort of fundamental level, the way in which aircraft are being propelled, the source of thrust, hasn’t changed for over 100 years. It still needs a propeller or a turbine,” he explains.

Barrett’s research will employ a principle that involves ionizing air and accelerating the ionized air in an electrostatic field. As the accelerated ions collide with air molecules, they transfer momentum, creating a propulsive force.

“We have experiments that characterize the physics, efficiency, and effectiveness of creating this sort of propulsive force, and we’ve created simple prototypes as well,” Barrett says. “The next stage will be to try and make propulsion systems that are solid state that have the potential to be practically useful.”

For example, Barrett would like to integrate a solid-state propulsion system into the skin of an aircraft, eliminating the need for external engines or propellers. “The aircraft would pull itself through the air by ionizing air over its surface and then accelerating that air electrostatically,” Barrett explains.

Barrett is excited to use his Bose Grant to see how far forward he can push solid-state propulsion technology. “I think this project fits into the spirit of Bose, which is to do things that are clearly unconventional, high risk, and where you don’t really know if it’s going to work or not, but you think it’s worth taking a risk,” he says.

Building a more informative barcode

John Hart, Dina Katabi, and Tim Swager are developing a high-tech version of the barcodes used to identify everyday retail products. Their technology will combine a radio-frequency antenna with sensors to store and communicate detailed information about a product.

“Basically, you want to have a way of encoding what the product is, where was it born, when was it born, and what’s its current state,” Swager explains. “And you’d like to have all of that [built] into something that’s going to cost a penny or less.”

The researchers are working on building a radio-frequency antenna embedded with chemical sensors that change their electrical properties in response to chemical stimuli such as carbon dioxide or microbial activity. To keep costs down while scaling up, they will use fast, high- precision printing techniques.

“The goal is to come up with next generation types of resonant, radio-frequency circuits that are coupled into our chemistry, that then can be printed with great precision at high rates for all sorts of packaging applications,” Swager says.

The team hopes their next-generation barcode will help retailers, consumers, and distributors better understand product quality, and while they aren’t sure what the exact outcome will be, the researchers are confident that their cross-disciplinary efforts will produce something useful.

“This was a refreshingly interesting intersection of our areas of expertise, and it’s a way to push the boundaries of each of our own research areas as the collective product,” Hart says, adding that Bose funding provides a unique chance for exploration. “The Bose Grant was an opportunity to ask the most open-ended question that we could, and to dream big,” he says.

Seeking light from an unexpected source

Engineer Michael Strano and architect Sheila Kennedy are combining their expertise to develop the ultimate “green” energy technology: They are using nanotechnology to build plants that can provide lighting for buildings and cities.

“Plants are already well adapted for the outdoor environment. They self-repair, they already exist in the places where we would like lamps to function, they live and persist through weather events, they access their own water, and they do all of this autonomously. They’re not on a power grid and produce and store their own fuel,” Strano explains. “In my laboratory, we’ve been asking the question of whether living plants could be the starting point of advanced technology.”

The team is developing a technique that uses four nanoparticles — tiny particles the size of the natural building blocks of a plant — to intercept a chemical pathway the plant uses to make adenosine triphosphate, or ATP, and divert some of this fuel to make the plant luminesce. “These plants are not going to be searchlights or floodlights, but we’ve calculated that they can have a level of brightness and duration that will serve many important applications,” Strano says.

“Really what we’re talking about is a new form of living illumination infrastructure, which could involve many different species of wild-growing plants: single plants, plants aggregated, plants delivered and integrated into the built environment in new ways that are entirely different from the electrical grid paradigm,” Kennedy adds.

Realizing that it would be difficult to secure traditional funding for a project that combines nanotechnology, plant biology, architecture and urban design in such an unprecedented way, Strano and Kennedy looked to Bose. “The Bose is a unique and rare opportunity that MIT has for impactful thinking and the development of new ideas that are both completely logical and mind-blowing at the same time,” Kennedy says.

Designing wires to transport heat

With her Bose research grant, Evelyn Wang will attempt to design thermal wires that can efficiently transport heat long distances.

“We daily use electrical wires everywhere, we transfer electricity through the grid using these various cables around cities, and certainly that becomes a very powerful way for us to think about how we distribute electricity,” Wang explains. “However, it is very difficult to transfer thermal energy around the same types of distances, say on the order of hundreds of meters to kilometers.”

Wang is proposing a system that looks like an electrical wire, but takes advantage of the latent heat in liquid to vapor phase change. The wire will have an evaporator at one end that uses heat to vaporize liquid inside a pipe. The vapor will then travel to the other end of the wire, where a condenser will turn it back into a liquid, releasing heat in the process.

Wang is designing a new kind of evaporator that relies on surface tension forces, and she is building a condenser that uses mesh structures to facilitate the condensation process.

“It’s kind of like a closed-loop system that looks almost like a solid material,” says Wang, “but there’s actually something passive that’s working inside that allows us to be able to facilitate the effective thermal conductivity that you need to be able to now transfer across these length scales that we want.”

A Bose Grant has given Wang the flexibility to pursue what she calls “a little bit of a blue-sky project [that is] really highly exploratory.” “In some ways, the philosophy of what we want to do is quite different. It’s something that I don’t think people will believe until they see that it actually works.”

A better way of drawing voting districts

Justin Solomon is using a computer science approach to tackle gerrymandering, a centuries-old political issue that could easily affect the redrawing of voting districts after the 2020 census.

“There are a lot of cases where people engineer the vote that they receive by drawing the lines in a particular way. And it’s a really critical issue for our democracy,” Solomon says. “This is one of the great problems at the intersection of mathematics, computation, and society.”

With funding from Bose, Solomon and his team, along with collaborators from the joint Tufts-MIT Metric Geometry and Gerrymandering Group, plan to develop computational tools that will help state lawmakers draw fair districts and help courts objectively assess whether existing districts have been drawn equitably.

One promising approach involves developing a computer program that can generate millions of different political redistricting plans for a given district. Lawmakers could then compare a newly drawn district to the computer-generated versions.

“If it turns out that among the millions and millions of plans that you generated, few if any share fairness properties with the plan drawn by a legislature, then you have a pretty strong argument that something went wrong,” Solomon says.

The team will also use their funding to turn what is currently a volunteer-based research effort into an academic discipline with full-time researchers.

Solomon is especially grateful for his Bose Grant because it is allowing his team to pursue research that could not be funded through traditional avenues. “I think especially in the mathematical and computational community, people are averse to funding what they perceive as politically risky, which is really a shame,” Solomon says. “I view this as a problem with our democracy regardless of what side of the aisle you’re on.”

A new approach to particle physics experiments

Or Hen is proposing a bold new approach to particle physics experiments: He will replace traditional long-term experiments involving thousands of researchers and large-scale accelerators with a simple tabletop beta-decay experiment called OLIVIA that can be repeated over and over again in the lab.

“Particle physics is one of the most fundamental aspects of science, where we try to understand what are the building blocks of the universe: the fundamental particles that we’re all built of and their interactions,” Hen explains. “And now we’re at a point where we know that there’s new physics, in the sense that there are features of the universe that we can’t explain using the current particles and interactions that we know of, but so far we did not find any new ones in accelerators.”

Hen’s OLIVIA approach, which he calls “small and broad” involves analyzing nuclear beta decay of a radioactive isotope called lithium-8. To capture what happens during the beta decay process, he will use a new type of beta detector that is essentially a vessel full of gas. He will pump in gas containing lithium-8 nuclei, let it decay, and measure the resulting ionization, which is indicative of the decay process.

“The advantage of doing low-energy experiments is that I can actually do particle physics experiments in my lab at MIT, literally on a tabletop. This means looking for new physics in an indirect way, which also makes the search very broad,” Hen says. “By measuring the full kinematical distribution of the nuclear decay products, it’s been shown that we can get great sensitivity to new physics.”

Hen’s innovative approach to particle physics experiments captures the essence of the Bose Grants. “Bose is an amazing opportunity that really allows me to add a new direction to my research,” Hen says. “Bose basically gives you the freedom to go out on a limb.”

Researchers establish long-sought source of ocean methane

by Anne Trafton |

Industrial and agricultural activities produce large amounts of methane, a greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming. Many bacteria also produce methane as a byproduct of their metabolism. Some of this naturally released methane comes from the ocean, a phenomenon that has long puzzled scientists because there are no known methane-producing organisms living near the ocean’s surface.

A team of researchers from MIT and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has made a discovery that could help to answer this “ocean methane paradox.” First, they identified the structure of an enzyme that can produce a compound that is known to be converted to methane. Then, they used that information to show that this enzyme exists in some of the most abundant marine microbes. They believe that this compound is likely the source of methane gas being released into the atmosphere above the ocean.

Ocean-produced methane represents around 4 percent of the total that’s discharged into the atmosphere, and a better understanding of where this methane is coming from could help scientists better account for its role in climate change, the researchers say.

“Understanding the global carbon cycle is really important, especially when talking about climate change,” says Catherine Drennan, an MIT professor of chemistry and biology and Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. “Where is methane really coming from? How is it being used? Understanding nature’s flux is important information to have in all of those discussions.”

Drennan and Wilfred van der Donk, a professor of chemistry at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, are the senior authors of the paper, which appears in the Dec. 7 online edition of Science. Lead authors are David Born, a graduate student at MIT and Harvard University, and Emily Ulrich, a graduate student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Solving the mystery

Many bacteria produce methane as a byproduct of their metabolism, but most of these bacteria live in oxygen-poor environments such as the deep ocean or the digestive tract of animals — not near the ocean’s surface.

Several years ago, van der Donk and University of Illinois colleague William Metcalf found a possible clue to the mystery of ocean methane: They discovered a microbial enzyme that produces a compound called methylphosphonate, which can become methane when a phosphate molecule is cleaved from it. This enzyme was found in a microbe called Nitrosopumilus maritimus, which lives near the ocean surface, but the enzyme was not readily identified in other ocean microbes as one would have expected it to be.

Van der Donk’s team knew the genetic sequence of the enzyme, known as methylphosphonate synthase (MPnS), which allowed them to search for other versions of it in the genomes of other microbes. However, every time they found a potential match, the enzyme turned out to be a related enzyme called hydroxyethylphosphonate dioxygenase (HEPD), which generates a product that is very similar to methylphosphonate but cannot be cleaved to produce methane.

Van der Donk asked Drennan, an expert in determining chemical structures of proteins, if she could try to reveal the structure of MPnS, in hopes that it would help them find more variants of the enzyme in other bacteria.

To find the structure, the MIT team used X-ray crystallography, which they performed in a special chamber with no oxygen. They knew that the enzyme requires oxygen to catalyze the production of methylphosphonate, so by eliminating oxygen they were able to get snapshots of the enzyme as it bound to the necessary reaction partners but before it performed the reaction.

The researchers compared the crystallography data from MPnS with the related HEPD enzyme and found one small but critical difference. In the active site of both enzymes (the part of the protein that catalyzes chemical reactions), there is an amino acid called glutamine. In MPnS, this glutamine molecule binds to iron, a necessary cofactor for the production of methylphosphonate. The glutamine is fixed in an iron-binding orientation by the bulky amino acid isoleucine, which is directly below the glutamine in MPnS. However, in HEPD, the isoleucine is replaced by glycine, and the glutamine is free to rearrange so that it is no longer bound to iron.

“We were looking for differences that would lead to different products, and that was the only difference that we saw,” Born says. Furthermore, the researchers found that changing the glycine in HEPD to isoleucine was sufficient to convert the enzyme to an MPnS.

An abundant enzyme

By searching databases of genetic sequences from thousands of microbes, the researchers found hundreds of enzymes with the same structural configuration seen in their original MPnS enzyme. Furthermore, all of these were found in microbes that live in the ocean, and one was found in a strain of an extremely abundant ocean microbe known as Pelagibacter ubique.

“This exciting result builds on previous, related studies showing that the metabolism of the methylphosphonate can lead to the formation of methane in the oxygenated ocean. Since methane is a potent greenhouse gas with poorly understood sources and sinks in the surface ocean, the results of this study will serve to facilitate a more comprehensive understanding of the methylphosphonate cycle in nature,” says David Karl, a professor of oceanography at the University of Hawaii, who was not involved in the research.

It is still unknown what function the MPnS enzyme and its product serve in ocean bacteria. Methylphosphonates are believed to be incorporated into fatty molecules called phosphonolipids, which are similar to the phospholipids that make up cell membranes.

“The function of these phosphonolipids is not well-established, although they’ve been known to be around for decades. That’s a really interesting question to ask,” Born says. “Now we know they’re being produced in large quantities, especially in the ocean, but we don’t actually know what they do or how they benefit the organism at all.”

Another key question is how the production of methane by these organisms is influenced by environmental conditions in the ocean, including temperature and pollution such as fertilizer runoff.

“We know that methylphosphonate cleavage occurs when microbes are starved for phosphorus, but we need to figure out what nutrients are connected to this, and how is that connected to the pH of the ocean, and how is it connected to temperature of the ocean,” Drennan says. “We need all of that information to be able to think about what we’re doing, so we can make intelligent decisions about protecting the oceans.”

The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Jeremiah Johnson and Tracy Slatyer win 2017 School of Science Teaching Prizes

by School of Science |

The School of Science recently announced the winners of its 2017 Teaching Prizes for Graduate and Undergraduate Education. The prizes are awarded annually to School of Science faculty members who demonstrate excellence in teaching. Winners are chosen from nominations by their students or colleagues.

Jeremiah Johnson, the Firmenich Career Development Associate Professor in the Department of Chemistry, was awarded the prize for undergraduate education for his role in 5.43 (Advanced Organic Chemistry). Nominators remarked on how his sincere enthusiasm and well-organized lectures and recitations made extremely challenging subject matter accessible and enjoyable.

Tracy Slatyer, the Jerrold R. Zacharias Career Development Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics, was awarded the prize for graduate education for her course 8.323 (Relativistic Quantum Field Theory I). While her nominators were impressed with her passion for and mastery of the subject, they especially appreciated that she made her students feel comfortable with asking many questions and that she carefully considered and answered each question.

The School of Science welcomes Teaching Prize nominations for its faculty during the spring semester each academic year. For more information please visit the school’s website.

How to get sprayed metal coatings to stick

by David L. Chandler |

When bonding two pieces of metal, either the metals must melt a bit where they meet or some molten metal must be introduced between the pieces. A solid bond then forms when the metal solidifies again. But researchers at MIT have found that in some situations, melting can actually inhibit metal bonding rather than promote it.

The surprising and counterintuitive finding could have serious implications for the design of certain coating processes or for 3-D printing, which both require getting materials to stick together and stay that way.

The research, carried out by postdocs Mostafa Hassani-Gangaraj and David Veysset and professors Keith Nelson and Christopher Schuh, was reported in two papers, in the journals Physical Review Letters and Scripta Materialia.

Schuh, who is the Danae and Vasilis Salapatas Professor of Metallurgy and head of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, explains that one of the papers outlines “a revolutionary advance in the technology” for observing extremely high-speed interactions, while the other makes use of that high-speed imaging to reveal that melting induced by impacting particles of metal can impede bonding.

The optical setup, with a high-speed camera that uses 16 separate charged-coupled device (CCD) imaging chips and can record images in just 3 nanoseconds, was primarily developed by Veysset. The camera is so fast that it can track individual particles being sprayed onto a surface at supersonic velocities, a feat that was previously not possible. The team used this camera, which can shoot up to 300 million frames per second, to observe a spray-painting-like process similar to ones used to apply a metallic coating to surfaces in many industries.

While such processes are widely used, until now their characteristics have been determined empirically, since the process itself is so fast “you can’t see it, you can’t tell what’s happening, and no one has ever been able to watch the moment when a particle impacts and sticks,” Schuh says. As a result, there has been ongoing controversy about whether the metal particles actually melt as they strike the surface to be coated. The new technology means that now the researchers “can watch what’s happening, can study it, and can do science,” he says.

The new images make it clear that under some conditions, the particles of metal being sprayed at a surface really do melt the surface — and that, unexpectedly, prevents them from sticking. The researchers found that the particles bounce away in much less time than it takes for the surface to resolidify, so they leave the surface that is still molten.

If engineers find that a coating material isn’t bonding well, they may be inclined to increase the spray velocity or temperature in order to increase the chances of melting. However, the new results show the opposite: Melting should be avoided.

It turns out the best bonding happens when the impacting particles and impacted surfaces remain in a solid state but “splash” outward in a way that looks like liquid. It was “an eye-opening observation,” according to Schuh. That phenomenon “is found in a variety of these metal-processing methods,” he says. Now, it is clear that “to stick metal to metal, we need to make a splash without liquid. A solid splash sticks, and a liquid one doesn’t.” With the new ability to observe the process, Hassani-Gangaraj says, “by precise measurements, we could find the conditions needed to induce that bond.”

The findings could be relevant for processes used to coat engine components in order to reuse worn parts rather than relegating them to the scrap-metal bin. “With an old engine from a large earth-moving machine, it costs a fortune to throw it away, and it costs a fortune to melt and recast it,” Schuh says. “Instead, you can clean it off and use a spray process to renew the surface.” But that requires that the sprayed coating will remain securely bonded.

In addition to coatings, the new information could also help in the design of some metal-based additive manufacturing systems, known as 3-D printing. There, as with coatings, it is critical to make sure that one layer of the printing material adheres solidly to the previous layer.

“What this work promises is an accurate and mathematical approach” to determining the optimal conditions to ensure a solid bond, Schuh says. “It’s mathematical rather than empirical.”

The work was supported by the U.S. Army through MIT’s Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies, the U.S. Army Research Office, and the U.S. Office of Naval Research.

Cholesterol helps flu virus escape through host cell’s membrane

by Becky Ham |

After a flu virus infects a host cell and hijacks its inner workings to create copies of itself, these copies gather into viral buds that break free from the host cell to infect again. A new study from MIT now provides the clearest picture yet of how the buds are pinched off from the host cell membrane.

Using a technique called solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy, the MIT team found that two cholesterol molecules bind to a flu protein called M2 to sever the viral buds from their host. The molecular configuration creates an exaggerated wedge shape inside the cell membrane that curves and narrows the neck of the budding virus until the neck breaks.

While previous research had demonstrated that M2’s action during budding was dependent on cholesterol concentrations in the cell membrane, the new study demonstrates the exact role cholesterol plays in releasing the virus.

And although the team focused on a flu protein in their study, “we believe that with this approach we have developed, we can apply this technique to many membrane proteins,” says Mei Hong, an MIT professor of chemistry and senior author of the paper, which appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences the week of Nov. 20.

The amyloid precursor protein and alpha-synuclein, implicated in Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease, respectively, are among the proteins that spend at least some of their lifetimes within cell membranes, which contain cholesterol in their fatty layers, Hong says.

“About 30 percent of proteins encoded by the human genome are associated with the cell membrane, so you’re talking about a lot of direct and indirect interactions with cholesterol,” she notes. “And now we have a tool for studying the cholesterol-binding structure of proteins.”

Dynamic challenges

Earlier imaging and experimental studies showed that flu’s M2 protein was necessary for viral budding, and that the budding worked best in cell membranes containing a specific concentration of cholesterol. “But we were curious,” Hong says, “about whether cholesterol molecules actually bind or interact with M2. This is where our expertise with solid-state NMR comes in.”

NMR uses the magnetic properties of atomic nuclei to reveal the structures of the molecules containing those nuclei. The technique is especially well-suited to studying cholesterol, “which has been generally difficult to measure on a molecular level because it’s just so small and dynamic, interacting with many proteins, and the cell membrane where we observe it is also dynamic and disordered,” Hong says.

The NMR technique allowed Hong and her colleagues to pin down cholesterol “in its natural environment in the membrane, where we also have the protein M2 in its natural environment,” she says. The team was then able to measure the distance between cholesterol atoms and the atoms in the M2 protein to determine how cholesterol molecules bind to M2, as well as cholesterol’s orientation within the layers of the cell membrane.

“Using highly sophisticated solid-state NMR methods, Mei Hong’s team shows that it is possible to determine accurate distances between atoms of cholesterol molecules and backbone and side-chain atoms of the M2 protein, and thus determine the cholesterol/M2 interaction,” says Markus Zweckstetter, a research group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, who was not involved in the study. “Because membrane proteins are the target of many drugs and cholesterol influences the structure and function of these proteins, the approach described by Mei Hong’s team is a big breakthrough and lays the foundation to understand the interplay of cholesterol and more generally membrane composition and the function of membrane proteins that play critical roles in health and disease.”

Cholesterol and membrane curvature

Cholesterol isn’t evenly distributed throughout the cell membrane — there are cholesterol-enriched “rafts” along with less enriched areas. The M2 protein tends to locate itself at the boundary between the raft and nonraft areas in the membrane, where the budding virus can enrich itself with cholesterol to build its viral envelope.

The configuration that Hong and her colleagues observed at the budding neck — two cholesterol molecules attached to M2 — creates a significant wedge shape within the inner layer of the cell membrane. The wedge produces a saddle-shaped curvature at the budding neck that is needed to sever the membrane and release the virus.

The new findings do not have any direct implications for vaccinating or treating flu, although they could inspire new research into how to prevent viral budding, Hong says.

The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health.

MIT researchers collaborate with Lamborghini to develop an electric car of the future

by Danielle Randall, Department of Chemistry |

Members of the MIT community who passed through the Stata Center courtyard last week likely found it hard not to notice the Lamborghini parked there as if it were visiting from the future. The car’s name — Terzo Millenio — says it all. Terzo Millenio is an automobile prototype for the third millennium, and its unique ability to deliver high peak power and regenerate kinetic energy, all while ensuring the ability to release and harvest electric power, can be attributed to the work of MIT associate professor of chemistry Mircea Dincă.

The Terzo Millenio aims to be self-healing and electric — concepts that today seem about as far-fetched as the hovercrafts in “Back to the Future II”’s imagining of 2015. However, in reality, this technology is as attainable as it is visionary.

“The new Lamborghini collaboration allows us to be ambitious and think outside the box in designing new materials that answer energy storage challenges for the demands of an electric sport vehicle,” says Dincă. “We look forward to teaming up with their engineers and work on this exciting project.”

Lamborghini is relying on MIT to make its cars of the future operate on electricity, while maintaining the aesthetic standards and high-powered mechanical elements that make operating these luxurious sports cars so thrilling for those who drive them. In October 2016, Automobili Lamborghini began a three-year partnership with MIT that will grant Lamborghini exclusive rights to emerging research related to battery storage and materials science.

Lamborghini’s mission for this partnership is to “rewrite the rules on super sports cars” by addressing energy storage systems, innovative materials, propulsion systems, visionary design, and “emotion.” By incorporating research from Dincă and John Hart, associate professor of mechanical engineering, who will investigate new carbon fiber and composite materials that could enable the complete body of the car to somehow be used as a battery system, the hope is that this ambitious, visually stunning prototype will become a reality.

“We are thrilled to combine our expertise in advanced materials and manufacturing with the vision and support of Automobili Lamborghini, and to realize new concepts that will shape the future of transportation,” says Hart.

The concept of revolutionizing the Lamborghini of the future is an exciting one; not only will this collaboration undoubtedly lead to new technologies in the fields of the energy accumulation systems, materials science, and manufacturing, but MIT students will have the opportunity to perform research at Automobili Lamborghini. The sustained contact forged between MIT and Lamborghini carries the potential for groundbreaking revelations.

Synthetic circuits can harvest light energy

by Anne Trafton |

By organizing pigments on a DNA scaffold, an MIT-led team of researchers has designed a light-harvesting material that closely mimics the structure of naturally occurring photosynthetic structures.

The researchers showed that their synthetic material can absorb light and efficiently transfer its energy along precisely controlled pathways. This type of structure could be incorporated into materials such as glass or textiles, enabling them to harvest or otherwise control incoming energy from sunlight, says Mark Bathe, an associate professor of biological engineering at MIT.

“This is the first demonstration of a purely synthetic mimic of a natural light-harvesting circuit that consists of densely packed clusters of dyes that are precisely organized spatially at the nanometer scale, as found in bacterial systems,” Bathe says. One nanometer is one billionth of a meter, or 1/10,000 the thickness of a human hair.

Bathe is one of the senior authors of the new study, along with Alan Aspuru-Guzik, a professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Harvard University, and Hao Yan, a professor of chemistry and biochemistry at Arizona State University. Lead authors of the paper, which appears in the Nov. 13 issue of Nature Materials, are former MIT postdoc Etienne Boulais, Harvard graduate student Nicolas Sawaya, and MIT postdoc Rémi Veneziano.

Capturing light

Over billions of years, plants and photosynthetic bacteria have evolved efficient cellular structures for harvesting energy from the sun. This process requires capturing photons (packets of light energy) and converting them into excitons — a special type of quasiparticle that can carry energy. Energy from these excitons is then passed to other molecules at a complex of protein and pigments known as a reaction center, and eventually used by the plant to build sugar molecules.

While scientists have developed reliable techniques for carrying electrons (such as semiconductors) and photons (fiber optics), coming up with ways to control excitons has proven more challenging.

Four years ago, Bathe, Aspuru-Guzik, and Yan began working on synthetic structures that could mimic natural light-harvesting assemblies. These assemblies, usually found in cell organelles called chloroplasts, have an intricate structure that efficiently captures and transports solar energy at the scale of nanometers.

“What’s really amazing about photosynthetic light-harvesting is how well it meets the organism’s needs,” says Gabriela Schlau-Cohen, an MIT assistant professor of chemistry who is also an author of the paper. “When it is required, every absorbed photon can migrate through the network of proteins that surrounds the reaction center, to generate electricity.”

The researchers set out to mimic these structures by attaching light-harvesting pigments to study scaffolds made of DNA. Over the past several years, Bathe’s lab has devised new ways to program DNA to fold in particular shapes, and last year Bathe and his colleagues created a new computer-programming tool that automates the process of designing DNA scaffolds of nearly any shape.

For this study, the researchers wanted to use DNA scaffolds to spatially organize densely packed clusters of pigments similar to those found in nature. Boulais found a 1977 paper that showed that a synthetic pigment called pseudoisocyanine (PIC) aggregates onto specific sequences of naturally occurring DNA to form the type of structure the researchers were seeking, called a J-aggregate. However, because this approach used naturally occurring DNA, there was no way to control the spacing, size, or 3-D spatial organization of the clusters.

Veneziano tested the researchers’ ability to template these J-aggregates into discrete clusters with distinct 2-D organizations using synthetic DNA, and Boulais and Sawaya worked to computationally design customizable, synthetic DNA scaffolds that organize these aggregates into circuits that absorb photons and transport the resulting excitons along a predictable path. By programming specific DNA sequences, the researchers can control the precise location and density of the clusters of dye molecules, which sit on a rigid, double-stranded DNA scaffold. They computationally modeled how factors such as the number of dye molecules, their orientation, and the distances between them would affect the efficiency of the resulting circuits, analyzing many versions of the circuits for their efficiency of energy transfer.

“Photosynthetic organisms organize their light-harvesting molecules precisely using a protein scaffold. Up to now, this kind of structural control has been difficult to realize in synthetic systems. It looks like DNA origami provides a means of mimicking many of the principles of photosynthetic light-harvesting complexes,” says Gregory Scholes, a professor of chemistry at Princeton University who was not involved in the study.

Part of the ASU team, led by co-author Su Lin, performed a series of spectroscopic measurements to demonstrate that the designed DNA structures produced the desired J-aggregates, and to characterize their photophysical properties. Schlau-Cohen, who uses advanced spectroscopy techniques to analyze light-harvesting systems, both natural and synthetic, showed that these dense pigment assemblies were able to efficiently absorb light energy and transport it along specific pathways.

“We demonstrated the ability to control the traffic patterns using J-aggregated dyes, not just how far the excitons can travel. That’s important because it offers versatility in designing such circuits for functional materials,” Bathe says.

“Bottom-up design of excitonics systems has been a focused goal of our Energy Frontiers Research Center (EFRC). I am glad to see an important stepping stone toward demonstrating bottom-up control of exciton flow,” Aspuru-Guzik says. He adds that “multidisciplinary research that tightly couples synthesis, theory, and characterization was required to get to this point.”

New materials

The researchers believe that these synthetic structures could be integrated into 2-D and 3-D materials such as glass or textiles, giving those materials the ability to absorb sunlight and convert it into other forms of energy such as electricity, or to otherwise store or harness the energy. The structures might also form a new basis for quantum computers, implemented at the nanoscale, using excitonic circuits as quantum logic gates.

The researchers now plan to explore ways to make these synthetic light-harvesting systems even better, including looking for more efficient pigments, which may lie in the recently announced Max Weaver Dye Library at North Carolina State University, which houses 98,000 unique dyes.

“There are still a lot of ways that we can imagine improving this,” Schlau-Cohen says. “We have the ability to control individual molecular parameters to explore the basic science questions of how can we transport energy efficiently in a disordered material.” Schlau-Cohen is also the senior author of a companion publication that will be published in the Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters next week.

Other authors of the Nature Materials paper are MIT postdocs James Banal and Toru Kondo, who led the Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters paper; former ASU postdoc Alessio Andreoni; ASU postdoc Sarthak Mandal; ASU Senior Research Professor Su Lin; and ASU Professor Neal Woodbury.

The research was funded by the U.S. Department of Defense’s Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative, the U.S. Department of Energy through MIT’s Center for Excitonics, the Office of Naval Research, a Smith Family Graduate Science and Engineering Fellowship, and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.

Twelve from MIT honored by the American Physical Society

by School of Science |

Twelve members of the MIT community are among those recently honored with prizes and fellowships by the American Physical Society (APS). The awardees include faculty, students, and alumni from the departments of Physics, Chemistry, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Nuclear Science and Engineering, and Chemical Engineering.

As the leading membership organization for physicists from academia, industry, and the national laboratories, the APS recognizes work deemed by outstanding by leading researchers in the field worldwide.

Each year, no more than one half of 1 percent of the society membership is recognized by their peers for election as fellows. The 2017 MIT APS fellows include:

R. Scott Kemp, associate professor of nuclear science and engineering, has been named a fellow of the American Physical Society (APS). Nominated by the Forum on Physics and Society, Kemp was cited, “[f]or innovative applications of physics to arms control verification, and pivotal scientific contributions to nuclear nonproliferation diplomacy and the understanding of technology-policy interactions in international security.”

Pedro M. Reis, Gilbert W. Winslow Career Development Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and associate professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, was elected an APS fellow for his “contributions to the field of extreme mechanics, including elastic instabilities and geometrical nonlinearities.” He was also a 2017 recipient of an APS Early Career Award for this seminal research in soft matter.

Earlier in the year, three members of MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC) High-Energy-Density Physics Division — including division head and Senior Research Scientist Richard Petrasso, Senior Research Scientist Chikang Li, and Research Scientist Fredrick Seguin — were honored with the APS John Dawson Award for Excellence in Plasma Physics Research.

Other recent APS award winners include:

Aram W. Harrow ’01, PhD ’05, an associate professor of physics and research in the Laboratory for Nuclear Science, received the 2018 Rolf Landauer and Charles H. Bennett Award in Quantum Computing for his “outstanding accomplishments in the mathematics of quantum information, and the development of new algorithmic primitives for quantum computers.” A faculty member of the MIT Center for Theoretical Physics since 2013, Harrow focuses on theoretical aspects of quantum computing and quantum information. In quantum information theory, he invented the concepts of “coherent classical communication” and “entanglement spread.” In 2009, Harrow received an Outstanding Referee Award from the APS.

Benjamin J.P. Jones PhD ’15, an assistant professor of physics at the University of Texas at Arlington, received the 2017 Mitsuyoshi Tanaka Dissertation Award in Experimental Particle Physics for his thesis in the field of experimental neutrino physics, “Sterile Neutrinos in Cold Climates.” Jones earned his PhD under the supervision of Professor Janet Conrad in the Department of Physics and the Laboratory for Nuclear Science, and received the Department of Physics’ 2015 Martin Deutsch Award for Excellence in Experimental Particle Physics.

Calvin Leung, a first-year PhD student in the Department of Physics, is a co-recipient of the 2017 LeRoy Apker Award, for his work as an undergraduate at Harvey Mudd College on the “development and experimental implementation of astronomical random number generators for loophole-free tests of Bell’s inequality and other applications in quantum fundamentals, astrophysics, and tests of general relativity.” Leung currently holds a National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship and is also the recipient of the 2016 Astronaut Scholarship, the Louise and Graydon Bell Prize, the Mindlin Prize, and the Alfred B. Focke Award.

Ian Moult PhD ’16 received the 2017 J.J. and Noriko Sakurai Dissertation Award in Theoretical Particle Physics for his work “inventing powerful new observables for tagging boosted bosons, for developing new quantum field theory techniques for jet substructure calculations, and for devising new helicity operator methods to improve precision Higgs boson studies at the Large Hadron Collider.” Moult earned his PhD under the supervision of Professor Iain Stewart in the MIT Center for Theoretical Physics and received the Department of Physics’ 2015 Andrew M. Lockett Memorial Fund Award for his graduate research. He is currently a postdoctoral research associate at the University of California at Berkeley and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Keith A. Nelson, Haslam and Dewey Professor of Chemistry, was a co-recipient of the 2018 Frank Isakson Prize for Optical Effects in Solids for his “pioneering contributions to the development and application of ultra-fast optical spectroscopy to condensed matter systems, and providing insight into lattice dynamics, structural phase transitions, and the non-equilibrium control of solids.” Nelson is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Optical Society of America, and the American Physical Society, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and has received the Coblentz, Lippincott, Zewail, and Bomem-Michelson awards.

Bradley D. Olsen ’03, Paul M. Cook Career Development Professor of Chemical Engineering, was awarded the 2018 John H. Dillon Medal for his work “significantly expanding our understanding of the physics of polymers, including the self-assembly of block copolymers incorporating a fully folded protein, the influence of polymer shape on diffusion; for engineering novel gels; and for updating the theory of the modulus of a network.” Olsen’s previous honors include an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, the DuPont Young Professor Award and the Allan P. Colburn Award; he was named a Kavli Foundation Emerging Leader in Chemistry in 2017.

Jonathan Loren Ouellet, a postdoctoral researcher at MIT working in the Professor Lindley Winslow’s group in the Laboratory for Nuclear Science, received the 2017 Dissertation Award in Nuclear Physics for “his outstanding contributions to the search for neutrinoless double beta decay of 130Te, and setting a new limit on its decay half-life, at the Cryogenic Underground Observatory for Rare Events in Gran Sasso, Italy.” At MIT, he has recently begun working on a new cryogenic-based axion dark matter search, called ABRACADABRA.

Keith Nelson awarded the Frank Isakson Prize for Optical Effects in Solids

by Danielle Randall, Department of Chemistry |

The American Physical Society has selected Haslam and Dewey Professor of Chemistry Keith A. Nelson as the recipient of the 2018 Frank Isakson Prize for Optical Effects in Solids. Nelson was chosen by the award’s selection committee for pioneering contributions to the development and application of ultra-fast optical spectroscopy to condensed matter systems, and providing insight into lattice dynamics, structural phase transitions, and the non-equilibrium control of solids.

“[This award] is very special for me, because a great deal of the progress in my research into molecular and collective dynamics has been enabled by discoveries of new light-matter interactions, in most cases demonstrated first in crystalline solids and then in liquids and isolated molecules,” Nelson said. “The optical effects themselves are fascinating to me, and it’s deeply gratifying to see them recognized.”

The Isakson Prize is awarded biennially (in even-numbered years) as a memorial to Frank Isakson. It  is given in recognition of outstanding optical research that leads to breakthroughs in the condensed matter sciences. The prize, which consists of $5,000, as well as a certificate citing Nelson’s contributions, will be presented to him at the meeting of the American Physical Society. The award was established in 1979, and supported by the Photoconductivity Conference. Since 1994, it has been supported by Solid State Communications.

Nelson’s research interests are in ultrafast optics, coherent spectroscopy, and coherent control over collective dynamics and structure in condensed matter. He has worked on discovery of new light-matter interactions and their exploitation for spectroscopy and control of coherent acoustic waves, lattice and molecular vibrations, excitons, spins, and their admixtures with light. He has developed novel methods for study of solid-state chemical reactions, crystals near phase transitions, glass-forming liquids, electronic excited-state dynamics, thermal transport, and matter far from equilibrium. Nelson has pioneered tabletop generation of strong terahertz frequency fields and nonlinear terahertz spectroscopy.

A new way to harness wasted methane

by David L. Chandler |

Methane gas, a vast natural resource, is often disposed of through burning, but new research by scientists at MIT could make it easier to capture this gas for use as fuel or a chemical feedstock.

Many oil wells burn off methane — the largest component of natural gas — in a process called flaring, which currently wastes 150 billion cubic meters of the gas each year and generates a staggering 400 million tons of carbon dioxide, making this process a significant contributor to global warming. Letting the gas escape unburned would lead to even greater environmental harm, however, because methane is an even more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide is.

Why is all this methane being wasted, when at the same time natural gas is touted as an important “bridge” fuel as the world steers away from fossil fuels, and is the centerpiece of the so-called shale-gas revolution? The answer, as the saying goes in the real estate business, is simple: location, location, location.

The wells where methane is flared away are primarily being exploited for their petroleum; the methane is simply a byproduct. In places where it is convenient to do so, methane is captured and used to generate electrical power or produce chemicals. However, special equipment is needed to cool and pressurize methane gas, and special pressurized containers or pipelines are needed to transport it. In many places, such as offshore oil platforms or remote oil fields far from the needed infrastructure, that’s just not economically viable.

But now, MIT chemistry professor Yogesh Surendranath and three colleagues have found a way to use electricity, which could potentially come from renewable sources, to convert methane into derivatives of methanol, a liquid that can be made into automotive fuel or used as a precursor to a variety of chemical products. This new method may allow for lower-cost methane conversion at remote sites. The findings, described in the journal ACS Central Science, could pave the way to making use of a significant methane supply that is otherwise totally wasted.

“This finding opens the doors for a new paradigm of methane conversion chemistry,” says Jillian Dempsey, an assistant professor of chemistry at the University of North Carolina, who was not involved in this work.

Existing industrial processes for converting methane to liquid intermediate chemical forms requires very high operating temperatures and large, capital-intensive equipment. Instead, the researchers have developed a low-temperature electrochemical process that would continuously replenish a catalyst material that can rapidly carry out the conversion. This technology could potentially lead to “a relatively low-cost, on-site addition to existing wellhead operations,” says Surendranath, who is the Paul M. Cook Career Development Assistant Professor in MIT’s Department of Chemistry.

The electricity to power such systems could come from wind turbines or solar panels close to the site, he says. This electrochemical process, he says, could provide a way to do the methane conversion — a process also known as functionalizing — “remotely, where a lot of the ‘stranded’ methane reserves are.”

Already, he says, “methane is playing a key role as a transition fuel.” But the amount of this valuable fuel that is now just flared away, he says, “is pretty staggering.” That vast amount of wasted natural gas can even be seen in satellite images of the Earth at night, in areas such as the Bakken oil fields in North Dakota that light up as brightly as big metropolitan areas due to flaring. Based on World Bank estimates, global flaring of methane wastes an amount equivalent to approximately one-fifth of U.S. natural gas consumption.

When that gas gets flared off rather than directly released, Surendranath says, “you’re reducing the environmental harm, but you’re also wasting the energy.” Finding a way to do methane conversion at sufficiently low cost to make it practical for remote sites “has been a grand challenge in chemistry for decades,” he says. What makes methane conversion so tough is that the carbon-hydrogen bonds in the methane molecule resist being broken, and at the same time there’s a risk of overdoing the reaction and ending up with a runaway process that destroys the desired end-product.

Catalysts that could do the job have been studied for many years, but they typically require harsh chemical agents that limit the speed of the reaction, he says. The key new advance was adding an electrical driving force that could be tuned precisely to generate more potent catalysts with very high reaction rates. “Since we’re using electricity to drive the process, this opens up new opportunities for making the process more rapid, selective, and portable than existing methods,” Surendranath says. And in addition, “we can access catalysts that no one has observed before, because we’re generating them in a new way.”

The result of the reaction is a pair of liquid chemicals, methyl bisulfate and methanesulfonic acid, which can be further processed to make liquid methanol, a valuable chemical intermediate to fuels, plastics, and pharmaceuticals. The additional processing steps needed to make methanol remain very challenging and must be perfected before this technology can be implemented on an industrial scale. The researchers are actively refining their method to tackle these technological hurdles.

“This work really stands out because it not only reports a new system for selective catalytic functionalization of methane to methanol precursors, but it includes detailed insight into how the system is able to carry out this selective chemistry. The mechanistic information will be instrumental in translating this exciting discovery into an industrial technology,” Dempsey says.

The research team included postdoc Matthew O’Reilly and doctoral students Rebecca Soyoung Kim and Seokjoon Oh, all in MIT’s Department of Chemistry. The work was supported by the Italian energy company Eni S.p.A. through the MIT Energy Initiative.