In the Media

Vladimir Bulovic, the Fariborz Maseeh Professor of Emerging Technology and associate dean for innovation in MIT’s School of Engineering, with MIT professor of chemistry Moungi Bawendi and graduate students Chia-Hao Chuang and Patrick Brown have developed new quantum dot photovoltaic cells that demonstrate significant efficiency in solar cells with no need for high temperature or vacuum conditions to operate -- or to be produced. Read more.

Until now the theoretical and much studied quasiparticle known as the exciton — responsible for the transfer of energy within devices such as solar cells, LEDs, and semiconductor circuits — has never been observed in action. Now researchers in the Center for EXcitonics in the Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE) at MIT including EECS professors Marc Baldo and Vladimir Bulovic, and investigators at the City College of New York have imaged excitons' motions directly. Read more.

The Spanish Royal Academy of Engineering presented the "Agustin de Betancourt" award to Professor Tomás Palacios on Nov. 26. This award, the most prestigious given in Spain to an engineer less than 36 years old, recognizes Prof. Palacios’ work on nanotechnologies applied to high frequency electronic devices based on GaN and graphene.

Joel Voldman engineers cutting-edge approaches to stem cell signaling, point of care therapeutics, and neuroengineering. In the never-ending mega study of how biological systems work, Joel Voldman’s mission is to understand the most basic interactions between single cells. To achieve that, he applies the power of microfluidics to isolate the actions and behaviors of single cells and the interactions between cells.

Jeffrey Shapiro, the Julius A. Stratton Professor of Electrical Engineering working with members of the Optical and Quantum Communications Group of which he is a co-director in the Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT has demonstrated experimentally the effectiveness of a new quantum communication protocol. The group has shown in a series of papers the system's effectiveness in both security (against passive eavesdropping) and can be used for greater distances than the current quantum key distribution (QKD).

A new mechanism that could help explain the remarkable sensitivity and exquisite frequency selectivity of our sense of hearing has been discovered by Dennis Freeman, Professor of Electrical Engineering and Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE) Principal Investigator in the Micromechanics Group, in collaboration with Dr. Roozbeh Ghaffari, post-doctoral associate in the RLE.

Building an effective Photovoltaic cell (PV) that both collects enough solar energy and carries the charge efficiently has held back the use of quantum dots despite their relative ease of production. Read more.

Timothy Lu, MIT assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science and biological engineering working with members of the Synthetic Biology Group in the MIT Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE), has successfully created new synthetic biology circuits that combine memory and logic allowing potential control over production of cells to generate biofuels, drugs or other useful compounds. Read more...

In March 2011, Scott Aaronson, MIT associate professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department (EECS) and principal investigator in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) working with EECS graduate student Alex Arkhipov proposed the creation of a first step towards quantum computing -- an optical experiment that would demonstrate the feasibility of quantum computing. Four distinct research groups, which undertook Aaronson and Arkhipov's proposed experiment in December 2012, are now reporting the results.

EECS researchers including professors Vladimir Bulovic, Jing Kong and Mildred Dresselhaus and postdoctoral associate Hyesung Park and graduate student Joel Jean have joined MIT colleagues including associate professor of materials science and engineering Silvija Gradecak and postdoctoral associate Sehoon Chang, to produce a new kind of flexible and solar cell based on graphene paired with nanowires and quantum dots. This work could rival the current use of silicon crystals or indium tin oxide (ITO) and is predicted to be scalable for alternative use to the silicon or ITO models.

Luis Velásquez-García, a principal research scientist at MIT’s Microsystems Technology Laboratories, and his group have created a new system for spinning nanofibers—one that should offer significant productivity increases while drastically reducing power consumption. They will be presenting this work at the International Workshop on Micro and Nanotechnology for Power Generation and Energy Conversion Applications in December.

Molybdenum-Disulfide (MoS2), like Graphene, is a one-molecule-thick material. But, MIT researchers including EECS Professors Tomas Palacios and Jing Kong have been able to produce complex electronic circuits from MoS2, a material that could have many more applications than graphene. This work is now reported in the journal Nano Letters.