Researchers at UC Santa Barbara now have 300 teraFLOPs of computing power at their fingertips, thanks to the recent installation of the campus’s new computing cluster. Named Pod, the $1.1 million high-performance computing (HPC) cluster is hosted by the campus’s Center for Scientific Computing (CSC) at the California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI) and Materials Research Laboratory (MRL), and is available for scientific and engineering research to any UCSB researcher who needs it.
CNSI is pleased to announce that four proposals submitted through our department for the prestigious DOE Energy Frontier Research Center (EFRC) competition were successful. Rachel Segalman will co-lead the "Center for Materials for Water and Energy Systems - M-WET)" with UT Austin and Ram Seshadri/Anton Van der Ven will co-lead with UCLA (lead campus) the "Center for Synthetic Control Across Length-scales for Advancing Rechargeables (SCALAR)”. Ania Bleszynski Jayich will participate in a LBNL-led EFRC project, entitled, "Novel Pathways to Quantum Coherence in Materials (CNPQCM)." Additi
CNSI Faculty Member Bolin Liao has been selected to receive an Early Career Award by the U.S. Department of Energy for his research project entitled, "Probing Coherence in Nanoscale Energy Transport with High Spatial-Temporal Resolution."
CNSI Director Craig J. Hawker has been elected as a member of the 238th class of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His selection, one of three UCSB faculty members, brings the total number of UCSB faculty members who have been named fellows of the academy to 37. The academy is an independent policy research center that conducts interdisciplinary studies of complex and emerging problems.
Signed into law in 2016 by Gov. Jerry Brown, AB 2664 provided $22 million in one-time funds to be evenly distributed among the 10 UC campuses to expand or accelerate economic development in the state in ways that are aligned with other efforts to support innovation and entrepreneurship.
The University of California announced today (Nov. 30) that a $22 million investment from the State of California to accelerate innovation and entrepreneurship across the UC system has supported more than 500 new startups and existing companies, helped launch at least 47 new products and enabled companies to attract $3.7 million in additional investments.
Continuing the evolution of biodegradable bioplastics, Megan Valentine and her research group created a plastic with the same properties as mussels by mimicking the chemistry the mussels use.
In a paper that appears in the journal Nature, Chris Palmstrøm, a UCSB professor of electrical and computer engineering and of materials, and colleagues describe a method by which “hashtag”– shaped nanowires may be coaxed to generate Majorana quasiparticles. These quasiparticles are exotic states that if realized, can be used to encode information with very little risk of decoherence — one of quantum computing’s biggest challenges — and thus, little need for quantum error correction.
In a study that appears in the journal Nature, physicist Andrea Young, his graduate student Sasha Zibrov and their colleagues have taken a leap toward finding conclusive evidence for non-Abelian anyons. Using graphene, an atomically thin material derived from graphite (a form of carbon), they developed an extremely low-defect, highly tunable device in which non-Abelian anyons should be much more accessible.
