In the news

LAFAYETTE – The Wabash Heartland community will get a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity” with a $38.9 million Lilly Endowment grant. Wabash Heartland Innovation Network's (WHIN) chair Gary Henriott said the almost $40 million grant will help a 10-county region become a global hub for agriculture and advanced manufacturing.

Researchers have experimentally demonstrated how to harness a property called negative capacitance for a new type of transistor that could reduce power consumption, validating a theory proposed in 2008 by a team at Purdue University. The researchers used an extremely thin, or 2-D, layer of the semiconductor molybdenum disulfide to make a channel adjacent to a critical part of transistors called the gate. Then they used a "ferroelectric material" called hafnium zirconium oxide to create a key component in the newly designed gate called a negative capacitor.

Purdue University researchers will use an award from the National Science Foundation to make computing more effective and energy efficient using “spins.” Joerg Appenzeller, the Barry M. and Patricia L. Epstein Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue, will lead the effort. He says the newly formed Computing Advances by Probabilistic Spin Logic (CAPSL) center is approaching the problem by developing new hardware. “Most other groups have worked on software implementations for probabilistic computing,” he says, “but not many have developed new hardware components to achieve more effective computing that uses much less energy in this way.”

INDIANAPOLIS - Former Eli Lilly and Co. (NYSE: LLY) Chief Executive Officer John Lechleiter says Indiana has all the tools it needs to be an agbiosciences leader, including heritage, strength in education, life sciences and logistics and an invested state government. Lechleiter was part of a panel on "crossing sector lines" at today's Agbiosciences Innovation Summit in Indianapolis. He says the key is getting all of those players to part with their "narrow self interests" and share ideas and resources.

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – New research published in Nature Communications suggests that electrons in a two-dimensional gas can undergo a semi-ordered (nematic) to mostly-ordered (smectic) phase transition, which has been discussed in physics theory but never seen in practice before. “Imagine that we could build an ice skating rink for electrons, and the electrons had to move along the surface; they couldn’t move up and down, so they just had to skate around each other,” said Michael Manfra, the Bill and Dee O’Brien Chair Professor of physics and astronomy at Purdue. “When you cool them down to very low temperatures and place them in a magnetic field, they sort of lock in step with each other; they line up like soldiers on a battlefield.”

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — A new technology that simulates tumors has been shown to perform as well as research animals in testing chemotherapy drugs, representing a potential tool for screening drugs before treating a patient. A long-term goal is to incorporate biopsied cancer cells from patients and test the effectiveness of different drugs on the patient-derived cells, said Bumsoo Han, a Purdue University professor of mechanical and biomedical engineering.

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — Researchers have developed a new type of cooling system for high-performance radars and supercomputers that circulates a liquid coolant directly into electronic chips through an intricate series of tiny microchannels. Conventional chip-cooling methods use finned metal plates called heat sinks, which are attached to computer chips to dissipate heat. Such attachment methods, however, do not remove heat efficiently enough for an emerging class of high-performance electronics, said Suresh V. Garimella, who is principal investigator for the project and the Goodson Distinguished Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Purdue University.

Microsoft is collaborating with some of the world’s top mathematicians, computer scientists, quantum physicists, and engineers to build a scalable, fault-tolerant, universal quantum computer.

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – Researchers are a step closer to harnessing single pulses of light called solitons, using tiny ring-shaped microresonators, in findings that could aid efforts to develop advanced sensors, high-speed optical communications and research tools. Being able to harness the solitons using devices small enough to fit on an electronic chip could bring a host of applications, from miniature optical sensors that detect chemicals and biological compounds, to high-precision spectroscopy and optical communications systems that transmit greater volumes of information with better quality.

Professor Zubin Jacob has won the Defense Advanced Research Programs Agency (DARPA) Young Faculty Award 2017. The research award is for the development of new nonlinear sources of light using molecular energy transfer approaches.