TechBlog

If you could hold a giant magnifying glass in space and focus all the sunlight shining toward Earth onto one grain of sand, that concentrated ray would approach the intensity of a new laser beam made in a University of Michigan laboratory.
“That’s the instantaneous intensity we can produce,” said Karl Krushelnick, a physics and engineering professor. “I don’t know of another place in the universe that would have this intensity of light. We believe this is a record.”

The pulsed laser beam lasts just 30 femtoseconds. A femtosecond is a millionth of a billionth of a second. The beam is twice as intense as one the researchers produced in 2004.

Such intense beams could help scientists develop better proton and electron beams for radiation treatment of cancer, among other applications.

Continue reading ‘Michigan Laser Beam Believed To Set Record For Intensity’ »

r. Yu-Chong Tai, professor of electrical engineering and bioengineering at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, is an electrical engineer whose early work pioneered a new direction that is now called, “microelectromechanical systems” (MEMS). He has published on just about every facet of MEMS, from shear-stress sensors to micromachining to thermal sensors to lab-on-a-chip. His recent research forays are leading him into studies of biological systems at the micro level. According to our Special Topics analysis of MEMS research over the past decade, Dr. Tai’s work ranks at #5, with 27 qualifying papers cited a total of 272 times. In the ISI Essential Science Indicators Web product, Dr. Tai’s record includes 41 papers cited a total of 383 times to date. Dr. Tai points to some of his earlier papers and presentations, which are outside of the range of our database, as very important in the field. Among these is a presentation report (Fan L.S., Tai Y.C., Muller R.S., “IC-processed electrostatic micromotors,” Tech. Digest, IEEE International Electron Device Meeting [IEDM ’88], San Francisco, Calif., Dec. 11-14, 1988, pp.666-669; and Fan L.S., Tai Y.C., Muller R.S., “Integrated movable micromechanical structures for sensors and actuators,” IEEE Trans. On Electron Devices ED-35:724-730, 1988). Dr. Tai is a graduate of National Taiwan University and received his master’s and Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer sciences from University of California, Berkeley. He took a faculty appoint at the California Institute of Technology in 1989.

Your work is in microelectromechanical systems (MEMS). Could you explain what this field is?

The name MEMS didn’t even exist in the ‘80s while I was in graduate school. My major was integrated circuits (IC) then. I learned solid-state devices and IC technology. So I know how to make these devices. It all started with an interesting question. We knew that the IC industry was really big in the 1980s. People had already invested billions, if not trillions, of dollars in IC technology. The question was: can we do something with the IC technology for applications other than IC? In other words, IC technology is a huge investment, could something else benefit from it? Here, IC is really only electrical devices. What devices, other than electrical devices, could we build? From an academic point of view, this whole world is either electrical or mechanical. For example, even biology and its fundamental science are all electrical or mechanical. Similarly, chemistry is no different.

Continue reading ‘MEMS: An INTERVIEW with Dr. Yu-Chong Tai’ »

Dutch-sponsored researcher Christos Tsekrekos has investigated how a small network for at home or in a company can function optimally. His research analyses the MGDM technique (Mode Group Diversity Multiplexing) of the Eindhoven University of Technology. This technique transmits each TV, telephone and Internet signal via a separate group of light rays through the optical fiber cable.

 Such a technology has not yet been marketed. Yet in the ideal situation it could be applied in a glass or polymer fiber, has the potential of being cheap, and transmits all information without disruption.

Existing systems for small networks at home or in a company make use of multimode glass fibers or multimode polymer optical fibers (POF). The latter are relatively thick cables (about 1 mm thick, thus thicker than the glass fiber m thick). Multimode fiber cables can conduct many light rays and?which is 0.125 can operate free of disruption and with a greater bandwidth than a wireless connection. However, due to a slight variation in the speed of the light rays through the multimode fiber, a signal transmitted by all of these rays becomes spread out. Consequently, the signals become broader and therefore fewer signals fit in the fiber, limiting the transmission capacity.

Continue reading ‘Separate Signals Through Optical Fibers For Ultrafast Home Network’ »