It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Friday, April 11, 2025
Marine shipping emissions on track to meet 2030 goals, but expected to miss 2050 target
The United Nations organization responsible for international marine shipping today approved new emission reduction policies.
A new paper published in Earth’s Future highlights the need.
Green energy investment
UBC researchers surveyed 149 marine shipping experts in 2021 and found they expect the sector to see a reduction of 30 to 40 per cent in the carbon intensity of shipping — a measure of the amount of CO2 emitted to ship cargo over a given distance — by 2030 compared with 2008 levels.
But they expect the sector won’t meet its net-zero goal for 2050, instead achieving about 40 to 75 per cent reductions from 2008 levels.
“We can achieve these near-term reductions thanks to operational and technical measures but for net-zero emissions, we also need to tackle green energy,” said senior author Dr. Amanda Giang (she/her), UBC assistant professor.
Less experience, more optimism
The study found that respondents with less than 10 years of work experience in the maritime sector were the most optimistic about emission reductions while respondents with more than 30 years of experience were the least optimistic.
Certainty in uncertain times
While alternative fuel sources such as ammonia, wind and related ship designs are available or in the works, transitioning to green-energy fleets would be a long-term investment, said first author Imranul Laskar (he/him), a doctoral candidate at the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability. “The sector needs some policy certainty so it can make those investments. Shipping could drive global energy transition. It’s a good news story, but we haven’t got it all figured out just yet.”
The International Maritime Organization’s (IMO) Marine Environment Protection Committee approved proposed regulations today.
HOUSTON – (April 11, 2025) – A team of Rice University researchers reported the first direct observation of a surprising quantum phenomenon predicted over half a century ago, opening pathways for revolutionary applications in quantum computing, communication and sensing.
Known as a superradiant phase transition (SRPT), the phenomenon occurs when two groups of quantum particles begin to fluctuate in a coordinated, collective way without any external trigger, forming a new state of matter. The discovery was made in a crystal composed of erbium, iron and oxygen that was cooled to minus 457 Fahrenheit and exposed to a powerful magnetic field of up to 7 tesla (over 100,000 times stronger than the Earth’s magnetic field), according to a study published in Science Advances.
“Originally, the SRPT was proposed as arising from interactions between quantum vacuum fluctuations — quantum light fields naturally existing even in completely empty space — and matter fluctuations,” said Dasom Kim, a Rice doctoral student in the Applied Physics Graduate Program who is a lead author on the study. “However, in our work, we realized this transition by coupling two distinct magnetic subsystems — the spin fluctuations of iron ions and of erbium ions within the crystal.”
Spin describes the magnetic poles of electrons or other particles and can be envisioned as a tiny arrow attached to each particle, constantly twirling and pointing in a given direction. When spins align, they create magnetic patterns across a material. When the pattern of spins ripples across the material like a wave, the resulting collective excitation is known as a magnon.
Until now, whether or not an SRPT could actually take place was subject to debate as it runs against a limitation — called “no-go theorem” in theoretical physics — arising in light-based systems. By staging an SRPT in a magnetic crystal based on the interactions between two spin subsystems, the researchers were able to get around this barrier, creating a magnonic version of the phenomenon. Specifically, the iron ions’ magnons play the role traditionally attributed to vacuum fluctuations, and the erbium ions’ spins represent matter fluctuations.
Using advanced spectroscopic techniques, the researchers observed unmistakable signatures of an SRPT, with the energy signal of one spin mode vanishing and another showing a clear shift or kink. These spectral fingerprints match exactly what theory predicts for entering the superradiant phase, giving the team high confidence that they had indeed coaxed the long-sought state into being.
“We established an ultrastrong coupling between these two spin systems and successfully observed a SRPT, overcoming previous experimental constraints,” Kim said.
Researchers are excited not just because a 50-year-old physics prediction has been confirmed but also because of what this could mean for quantum technology. Collective quantum states at the SRPT have unique properties that could be harnessed for next-generation quantum technologies.
“Near the quantum critical point of this transition, the system naturally stabilizes quantum-squeezed states — where quantum noise is drastically reduced — greatly enhancing measurement precision,” Kim said. “Overall, this insight could revolutionize quantum sensors and computing technologies, significantly advancing their fidelity, sensitivity and performance.”
Sohail Dasgupta, a graduate student at Rice working with Kaden Hazzard, associate professor of physics and astronomy, theoretically modeled the SRPT, building on a model developed by their collaborator and co-author Motoaki Bamba, a professor at Yokohama National University.
“Although the basic mathematical model was already laid out before by Motoaki, we needed to account for some of the specific magnetic properties of the material to obtain the precise results. When your theory matches the experimental data ⎯ which happens rather rarely ⎯ it is the best feeling for a scientist,” Dasgupta said.
Hazzard said the achievement shows that concepts from quantum optics can be translated into solid materials.
“This opens a new way to create and control phases of matter using ideas from cavity quantum electrodynamics,” Hazzard said.
Moreover, the crystal used in this study is one example of a broader class of materials, which means the research paves the way for exploring quantum phenomena in other materials with similarly interacting magnetic components.
“Demonstrating a form of SRPT driven entirely by coupling two internal matter fluctuations marks a significant breakthrough in quantum physics, establishing a new framework for understanding and exploiting intrinsic quantum interactions within materials,” said Junichiro Kono, the Karl F. Hasselmann Professor in Engineering, professor of electrical and computer engineering and materials science and nanoengineering and the study’s corresponding author.
The research was supported by the U.S. Army Research Office (W911NF2110157), the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation (11520), the Robert A. Welch Foundation (C-1509), the W.M. Keck Foundation (995764), the Global Institute for Materials Research Tohoku University, the National Science Foundation (PHY-1848304), the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JPJSJRP20221202, JP24K21526), the Research Foundation for Opto-Science and Technology, the U.S. Department of Energy (DE-AC02-07CH11358) and the National Science Foundation of China (12374116). The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the funding institutions.
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This news release can be found online at news.rice.edu.
Follow Rice News and Media Relations via Twitter @RiceUNews.
Peer-reviewed paper:
Observation of the magnonic Dicke superradiant phase transition | Science Advances | DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adt1691
Authors: Dasom Kim, Sohail Dasgupta, Xiaoxuan Ma, Joong-Mok Park, Hao-Tian Wei, Xinwei Li, Linag Luo, Jacques Doumani, Wanting Yang, Di Cheng, Richard H.J. Kim, Henry O. Everitt, Shojiro Kimura, Hiroyuki Nojiri, Jigang Wang, Shixun Cao, Motoaki Bamba, Kaden Hazzard and Junichiro Kono
Located on a 300-acre forested campus in Houston, Texas, Rice University is consistently ranked among the nation’s top 20 universities by U.S. News & World Report. Rice has highly respected schools of architecture, business, continuing studies, engineering and computing, humanities, music, natural sciences and social sciences and is home to the Baker Institute for Public Policy. Internationally, the university maintains the Rice Global Paris Center, a hub for innovative collaboration, research and inspired teaching located in the heart of Paris. With 4,776 undergraduates and 4,104 graduate students, Rice’s undergraduate student-to-faculty ratio is just under 6-to-1. Its residential college system builds close-knit communities and lifelong friendships, just one reason why Rice is ranked No. 1 for lots of race/class interaction and No. 7 for best-run colleges by the Princeton Review. Rice is also rated as a best value among private universities by the Wall Street Journal and is included on Forbes’ exclusive list of “New Ivies.”
Observation of the magnonic Dicke superradiant phase transition
Article Publication Date
11-Apr-2025
AI and gaming platform aims to revolutionize emergency pipeline training
The Mary Kay O'Connor Process Safety Center and EnerSys Corporation are creating a training platform that simulates a potential pipeline incident using AI and a gaming platform.
Researchers and industry partners are looking to create a game-like training tool using artificial intelligence (AI) to make pipeline safety training more effective.
The Mary Kay O'Connor Process Safety Center (MKO) and EnerSys Corporation are partnering to create a multiplayer "game" that provides real-world scenarios and measurable outcomes of how pipeline operations respond to abnormal and emergency situations in a safe, controlled environment.
“This utilizes artificial intelligence as a tool to create a gaming platform where pipeline becomes at the source and all the different causes that can impact the pipeline operations response becomes the contributing factor,” said Faisal Khan, director of the Mary Kay O'Connor Process Safety Center.
Funded by the Pipeline Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, an agency within the Department of Transportation, this project aims to develop a realistic training system for teams to practice handling hazardous condition response and emergency response.
“In using this multiplayer gaming platform, it should become very much like actually working with pipelines,” said EnerSys Corporation CEO Russel Treat. “That's the goal, and ultimately, if that's the case, when incidents do occur, they should be responded to and mitigated more effectively.”
Pipelines are critical for infrastructure, so understanding how they operate can prevent major accidents, protect the economy and improve emergency response to issues like leaks.
The platform stimulates various pipeline failure scenarios and incorporates those into the training system designed for pipeline operators.
“Pipeline incidents are exceedingly rare,” Treat said. “Most people who work with pipelines work their entire lives and never have direct experience. What that means is when they do occur, for many people, it's a first-time experience. By doing this training and giving people real-world experience, then they will be prepared when an incident does occur, which means they should respond more quickly, more effectively.”
MKO will provide knowledge and understanding of the pipeline and its safety issues along with creating mathematical models to the project, while EnerSys Corporation will merge industry and facilitate research and the data collection from industry while serving as the Principal Investigator of the program.
“We have a mathematical representation of how a pipeline should be operating in an idealistic condition, based on our scientific knowledge and what stimulates a pipeline failure,” Khan said.
The next step is to begin trial scenarios with a research and development team by the end of this year, aiming to collect results and incorporating them into the training, Treat said.
“It's a great opportunity for us to learn, particularly from the industrial experiences, and develop tools that enable fusion of knowledge and experience to improve safety," Khan said.
Funding for this research is administered by the Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station (TEES), the official research agency for Texas A&M Engineering.
By Raven Wuebker, Texas A&M Engineering
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For a better cup of coffee, look to physics
Researchers from Penn have found new cost-effective ways to make a great cup of pour-over coffee using fewer beans. Their findings could potentially provide insights into similar systems such as waterfalls and surface erosion.
A high-speed camera catches water penetrating the simulated coffee bed. By modeling how the jet interacts with the grounds, the team found the most efficient flow pattern for extracting flavor with fewer beans.
The cost of raw arabica beans, the core component of most coffee, has spiked in recent years due to four consecutive seasons of adverse weather. Climate change has added further strain, threatening the delicate temperature balance required by the Coffea arabica plant. This growing pressure has inspired physicists at the University of Pennsylvania to ask: Can we make great coffee with fewer beans?
“There’s a lot of research on fluid mechanics, and there’s a lot of research on particles separately,” says Arnold Mathijssen, assistant professor in the School of Arts & Sciences. “Maybe this is one of the first studies where we start bringing these things together.”
Their findings, published in the journal Physics of Fluids, provide a scientific approach to improving extraction efficiency so fewer coffee grounds can go further without diminishing overall quality.
“We tried finding ways where we could use less [or] as little coffee as possible and just take advantage of the fluid dynamics of the pour from a gooseneck kettle to increase the extraction that you get from the coffee grounds—while using fewer grounds,” says coauthor Ernest Park, a graduate researcher in the Mathijssen Lab.
The experiment required making the invisible visible, explains coauthor Margot Young, a graduate researcher in the Mathijssen Lab.
“Coffee’s opacity makes it tricky to observe pour-over dynamics directly, so we swapped in transparent silica gel particles in a glass cone,” Park explains.
A laser sheet and high-speed camera allowed them to watch water streams create “miniature avalanches” of particles—revealing the flow’s inner workings. Water poured from a height produces the avalanche effect that stirs the bed of particles and enhances extraction.
A key factor in this process is laminar, or smooth and nonturbulent flow—made possible by a gooseneck kettle, even with a gentle pour-over flow. “If you were just to use a regular water kettle, it’s a little bit hard to control where the flow goes,” says Park. “And if the flow isn’t laminar enough, it doesn’t dig up the coffee bed as well.”
The team discovered that when water is poured from a height, it creates a stronger mixing effect.
“When you’re brewing a cup, what gets all of that coffee taste and all of the good stuff from the grounds is contact between the grounds and the water,” explains Young. “So, the idea is to try to increase the contact between the water and the grounds overall in the pour-over.”
They found that if poured from too great a height, the water stream breaks apart into droplets, carrying air with it into the coffee cone, which can actually decrease extraction efficiency.
The researchers conducted additional experiments with real coffee grounds to measure the extraction yield of total dissolved solids. Their results confirmed that the extraction of coffee can be tuned by prolonging the mixing time with slower but more effective pours that utilize avalanche dynamics.
For thicker water flow, they found that higher pours resulted in stronger coffee, confirming their observations about increased agitation with higher pour heights. When using a thinner water jet, the extraction remained consistently high across different pour heights, possibly due to the longer pouring time required to reach the target volume.
Broad implications that extend beyond the kitchen
The study is a love letter to coffee—and it’s also a window into the team’s broader research. “We weren’t just doing this for fun,” Mathijssen says. “We had the tools from other projects and realized coffee could be a neat model system to explore deeper physical principles.”
Those principles extend well beyond the kitchen, notes Young. “This kind of fluid behavior helps us understand how water erodes rock under waterfalls or behind dams,” she says. Even wastewater treatment and filtration systems involve similar dynamics, Mathijssen adds.
The project also reflects ongoing research in the lab, as Park is working on microscale active surfaces that use rotating magnetic fields to clean biofilms from medical devices.
Young, meanwhile, is investigating ultra-fast biological flows, using the same high-speed imaging setup to study how tiny vortices generated by lung cilia help clear pathogens.
“You can start small, like with coffee,” Mathijssen says. “And end up uncovering mechanisms that matter at environmental or industrial scales.”
Arnold Mathijssen is an assistant professor in the Department of Physics & Astronomy in the School of Arts & Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania.
Ernest Park is a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Arts & Sciences.
Margot Young is a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Arts & Sciences.
The research was supported by the Charles E. Kaufman Foundation (Award KA2022-129523).
In the Arnold Mathijssen lab, researchers used a gooseneck kettle, coffee grinder, and a pour-over setup alongside precise measurements and high-speed analysis to study the fluid dynamics and mechanics of coffee brewing to uncover ways to maximize flavor with fewer grounds. The findings could help researchers understand fluid dynamics.
To pinpoint pour-over variables affecting taste, the team recorded each brew’s temperature, weight, grind size, and extraction time—then rated the results for flavor. Precision scales and detailed lab notes were key to translating fluid dynamics into a better cup of coffee.
A high-speed camera catches water penetrating the simulated coffee bed. By modeling how the jet interacts with the grounds, the team found the most efficient flow pattern for extracting flavor with fewer beans.
Beams of light that can be guided into corkscrew-like shapes called optical vortices are used today in a range of applications. Pushing the limits of structured light, Harvard applied physicists in the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) report a new type of optical vortex beam that not only twists as it travels but also changes in different parts at different rates to create unique patterns. The way the light behaves resembles spiral shapes common in nature.
The researchers borrowed from classical mechanics to nickname their never-before-demonstrated light vortex an “optical rotatum,” to describe how the torque on the light’s corkscrew shape gradually changes. In Newtonian physics, “rotatum” is the rate of change in torque on an object over time.
The optical rotatum was created in the lab of Federico Capasso, the Robert L. Wallace Professor of Applied Physics and the Vinton Hayes Senior Research Fellow in Electrical Engineering at SEAS. “This is a new behavior of light consisting of an optical vortex that propagates through space and changes in unusual ways,” Capasso said. “It is potentially useful for manipulating small matter.” The research is published in Science Advances.
In a peculiar twist, the researchers found that their orbital angular momentum-carrying beam of light grows in a mathematically recognizable pattern found all over the natural world. Mirroring the Fibonacci number sequence (made famous in The Da Vinci Code), their optical rotatum propagates in a logarithmic spiral that is seen in the shell of a nautilus, the seeds of a sunflower, and the branches of trees.
“That was one of the unexpected highlights of this research,” said first author Ahmed Dorrah, a former research associate in Capasso’s lab, now an assistant professor at Eindhoven University of Technology. “Hopefully we can inspire others who are specialists in applied mathematics to further study these light patterns and gain unique insights into their universal signature.”
The research builds on previous work in which the team used a metasurface, a thin lens etched with light-bending nanostructures, to create a light beam with controlled polarization and orbital angular momentum along its propagation path, converting any input of light into other structures that change as they move. Now, they’ve introduced another degree of freedom to their light, in which they can also change its spatial torque as it propagates.
“We show even more versatility of control, and we can do it continuously,” said Alfonso Palmieri, a graduate student in Capasso’s lab and co-author of this research.
Potential use cases for such an exotic beam of light include the control of very small particles, such as colloids in suspension, by introducing a new type of force in accordance with the light’s unusual torque. It could also enable a precise optical tweezer for micro-manipulation of small things.
While others have demonstrated torque-changing light using high-intensity lasers and bulky setups, the Harvard team made theirs with a single liquid crystal display and a low-intensity beam. By showing they can create a rotatum in an industry-compatible, integrated device, the barrier to entry for their technology to become reality is much lower than previous demonstrations.
The paper was co-authored by Lisa Li in the Capasso Group. Federal funding for this research came from the Office of Naval Research MURI program under grant No. N00014-20-1-2450 and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research under grant No. FA9550-22-1-0243.
