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All together now: Experiments with twisted 2D materials catch electrons behaving collectively

A patterned, layered device purple, yellow, and teal films. The pattern of purple material at the center resembles circuitry.

Some of the most ambitious goals in physics and materials research are to make ordinary-sounding objects with extraordinary properties: wires that can transport power without any energy loss, or quantum computers that can perform complex calculations that today’s computers cannot achieve. And the emerging workbenches for the experiments that gradually move us toward these goals are 2D materials — sheets of material that are a single layer of atoms thick.

NanoES faculty receive National Science Foundation award to increase capacity of quantum computing systems

Headshots of ECE professors Mo Li, Arka Majumdar and Karl Böhringer

A team led by UW Electrical & Computer Engineering professors Mo Li, Arka Majumdar and Karl Böhringer was selected to participate in the National Science Foundation’s Convergence Accelerator, a new initiative to accelerate use-inspired research addressing societal challenges. The team will be working to increase the capacity of quantum computing systems to retain and process information.

UW receives NSF funds for investment in an interdisciplinary quantum future

The National Science Foundation has awarded $3 million to establish a NSF Research Traineeship at the University of Washington for graduate students in quantum information science and technology. The new traineeship — known as Accelerating Quantum-Enabled Technologies, or AQET — will make the UW one of just a handful of universities with a formal, interdisciplinary QIST curriculum. NanoES member and professor of electrical & computer engineering and physics, Kai-Mei Fu, will direct this new traineeship.

UW nanotechnology infrastructure gets a boost from National Science Foundation

The National Science Foundation has awarded the University of Washington and Oregon State University a five-year, $5 million grant to advance nanoscale science, engineering, and technology research in the Pacific Northwest. Known as the Northwest Nanotechnology Infrastructure (NNI), the UW and OSU partnership is one of 16 sites in the NSF’s National Nanotechnology Coordinated Infrastructure (NNCI) program. NNCI sites provide researchers from academia and industry access to leading-edge fabrication and characterization tools at university facilities.

Meeting the need for COVID-19 test kits: Pivoting from Seattle Flu Study and developing new rapid tests

UW SCAN swab kit assembly

Bioengineering professor Barry Lutz, in partnership with Dr. Matthew Thompson, a UW professor of family medicine and global health, is pioneering at home test kits for the Seattle Coronavirus Assessment Network to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Read more about how the Lutz lab is developing new ways to rapidly test.

Inaugural CoMotion Director’s Award goes to UW researchers assessing the persistence of potentially infectious aerosols in medical facilities

NanoES faculty member Igor Novosselov and an interdisciplinary team of researchers were awarded $25,000 to develop low-cost sensor networks for hospital operating rooms capable of mapping out the spatial and temporal distribution of long-lived aerosols that may contain SARS-CoV-2 or other infectious agents.

Quantum Edge

Quantum computing is the key to solving problems regular computers can’t handle, like designing silver-bullet drugs for cancer or improving materials for data storage. With a culture of interdisciplinary collaboration, and strengths in photonics, materials science, physics and electrical and computer engineering, the UW is positioned to lead the field with the launch of QuantumX, an initiative that brings together quantum expertise across campus.

Optics startup Tunoptix wins federal grant to develop metalenses for imaging satellites at Washington Nanofabrication Facility

A portion of the team’s experimental setup for capturing an image using a metalens. The researchers capture an image of flowers through a metalens (mounted on a microscope slide) and visualize it through a microscope.

Tunoptix, an optics startup co-founded by University of Washington (UW) electrical and computer engineering professors Karl Böhringer and Arka Majumdar, was awarded $223,000 in Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop metasurface lenses (or metalenses) for imaging in satellites at the UW Washington Nanofabrication Facility.