Depositing Books Due At The Library, The Grad Student Takes A Humiliating Whirlwind Tour Of Everything

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“Before a scene, she would be muttering deprecations under her breath and making small moans. According to Vivien, the situation was stupid, the dialogue was silly, nobody could possibly believe the whole scene. And then…she would walk into the scene and do such a magnificent job that everybody on the set would be cheering.” -David O. Selznick

If you’ve ever watched a rocket launch, you’ve probably noticed the billowing clouds around the launch pad during lift-off. What you’re seeing is not actually the rocket’s exhaust but the result of a launch pad and vehicle protection system known in NASA parlance as the Sound Suppression Water System. Exhaust gases from a rocket typically exit at a pressure higher than the ambient atmosphere, which generates shock waves and lots of turbulent mixing between the exhaust and the air. Put differently, launch ignition is incredibly loud, loud enough to cause structural damage to the launchpad and, via reflection, the vehicle and its contents.

To mitigate this problem, launch operators use a massive water injection system that pours about 3.5 times as much water as rocket propellant per second. This significantly reduces the noise levels on the launchpad and vehicle and also helps protect the infrastructure from heat damage. The exact physical processes involved – details of the interaction of acoustic noise and turbulence with water droplets – are still murky because this problem is incredibly difficult to study experimentally or in simulation. But, at these high water flow rates, there’s enough water to significantly affect the temperature and size of the rocket’s jet exhaust. Effectively, energy that would have gone into gas motion and acoustic vibration is instead expended on moving and heating water droplets. In the case of the Space Shuttle, this reduced noise levels in the payload bay to 142 dB – about as loud as standing on the deck of an aircraft carrier. (Image credits: NASA, 1, 2; research credit: M. Kandula; original question from Megan H.)

Juliet - Marshall Beach, San Francisco

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Seeing stable topology using instabilities

We are most familiar with the four conventional phases of matter: solid, liquid, gas, and plasma. Changes between two phases, known as phase transitions, are marked by abrupt changes in material properties such as density. In recent decades a wide body of physics research has been devoted to discovering new unconventional phases of matter, which typically emerge at ultra-low temperatures or in specially-structured materials. Exotic “topological” phases exhibit properties that can only change in a quantized (stepwise) manner, making them intrinsically robust against impurities and defects.

In addition to topological states of matter, topological phases of light can emerge in certain optical systems such as photonic crystals and optical waveguide arrays. Topological states of light are of interest as they can form the basis for future energy-efficient light-based communication technologies such as lasers and integrated optical circuits.

However, at high intensities light can modify the properties of the underlying material. One example of such a phenomenon is the damage that the high-power lasers can inflict on the mirrors and lenses. This in turn affects the propagation of the light, forming a nonlinear feedback loop. Nonlinear optical effects are essential for the operation of certain devices such as lasers, but they can lead to the emergence of disorder from order in a process known as modulational instability, as is shown in Figure 1. Understanding the interplay between topology and nonlinearity is a fascinating subject of ongoing research.

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When a porous solid retains its properties in liquid form

Known for their exceptional porosity that enables the trapping or transport of molecules, metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) take the form of a powder, which makes them difficult to format. For the first time, an international team led by scientists from the Institut de recherche de Chimie Paris (CNRS/Chimie ParisTech ), and notably involving Air Liquide, has evidenced the surprising ability of a type of MOF to retain its porous properties in the liquid and then glass state. Published on October 9, 2017 in Nature Materials website, these findings open the way towards new industrial applications.

Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) constitute a particularly promising class of materials. Their exceptional porosity makes it possible to store and separate large quantities of gas, or to act as a catalyst for chemical reactions. However, their crystalline structure implies that they are produced in powder form, which is difficult to store and use for industrial applications. For the first time, a team of scientists from the CNRS, Chimie ParisTech, Cambridge University, Air Liquide and the ISIS (UK) and Argonne (US) synchrotrons has shown that the properties of a zeolitic MOF were unexpectedly conserved in the liquid phase (which does not generally favor porosity). Then, after cooling and solidification, the glass obtained adopted a disordered, non-crystalline structure that also retained the same properties in terms of porosity. These results will enable the shaping and use of these materials much more efficiently than in powder form.

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The Poplar Avenue at Moret, Cloudy Day, Morning via Alfred Sisley

Size: 59x73 cm Medium: oil on canvas

Major Research Instrumentation Program

Credit: Photo by Lance Long; courtesy Electronic Visualization Laboratory, University of Illinois at Chicago

The Major Research Instrumentation program has helped to fund pieces of research equipment ranging from scanning probe microscopes, which have helped to visualize and characterize nano-scale biological tools, to nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectrometers, which allow chemists to identify the individual molecules they make. Not only does this instrumentation help scientists advance their own research, it’s also used to train the next generation of scientists. For example, an X-ray diffractometer at Utah State University allowed Joan Hevel and Sean Johnson to teach four high school students in their lab about protein crystallization. Learn more.