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Monday, May 24, 2004 WRITER: Alan Flurry, 706/542-7825, aflurry@uga.edu UGA RESEARCHER LEADS $1.46 MILLION NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION GRANT IN RACE TO QUANTUM LIMIT ATHENS, Ga. – Michael Geller, professor of physics and member of the University of Georgia Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center, is one of five co-principal investigators on a three-year $1.46 million multi-institution grant from the National Science Foundation to pursue the theoretical underpinnings behind some of the newest challenges in science – the laws governing theoretical nanomechanics. Geller and a team of the nation’s pre-eminent physicists and engineers from Cal Tech, Brown University, Dartmouth College and Lawrence-Livermore National Laboratory will examine ongoing experimentation in state-of-the-art computation and simulation techniques for solid state, biological and integrated nano/bio systems. UGA is the lead institution on the grant. As nanotechnology has gained currency as the most promising next frontier in science, experimentation has far outstripped the theory needed to properly understand and make the most efficient use of it. The purpose of this interdisciplinary grant is to make some fundamental inroads in closing that gap. The team’s strategy will be to develop broadly applicable theoretical methods by examining three paradigmatic mechanics problems: friction and energy dissipation in nanomechanical systems (NEMS); the development of new mechanical models for biological materials and machines, including DNA, bacterial flagella and ion channels; and the design and simulation of bio-functionalized devices with applications to chemical and biological sensing. The friction issues uncovered by experimentalists in NEMS highlight a recent breakthrough in quantum mechanics, the multi-faceted potential of nanomechanical resonators. “This is one of the biggest things going on in nanoscience period right now,” explained Geller. “It turns out these resonators can act very well to communicate information and actually process and perform quantum computation.” Applications from this work reach from sensors to quantum computing to devices yet to be imagined. Traditional mechanics approaches have been unable to describe the mechanical properties of many nanoscale systems of interest. Hence the proposal was designed around a team of mechanical engineers and condensed-matter physicists with expertise to mirror the growing evidence that nanomechanics is a multiscale problem, combining traditional atomistic and continuum methods. The multi-institutional NSF grant is designated for a NIRT, a Nanoscale Interdisciplinary Research Team. Because of the wide-scale potential of applications to the work, the team ventures into bio-physics and is coordinated to take advantage of, assist and even compete with the experimental side of research in quantum mechanics. One investigator, Robert Rudd of Lawrence-Livermore, is an expert at multiscale simulations. These are critical in answering such fundamental questions from how energy is absorbed at the molecular level to unlocking the larger potential for nanoscale devices. This grant is the second NIRT award for UGA within the last calendar year; in September 2003, a team of UGA researchers were awarded $1 million to develop 3-D nanostructures. “Winning two such highly competitive awards in a short period of time just highlights the level and quality of nanotechnology research going on at UGA,” said William Dennis, director of the UGA Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center. The program funded by this grant contains significant outreach components that include a summer school on nanomechanics and a public lecture series on nanoscale science and engineering that will take place at UGA’s Georgia Center for Continuing Education and scheduled for June 2006. While the research program is directed primarily toward graduate and post-doctoral students, the evening lecture series will be directly targeted to the general public to enhance public awareness and understanding of progress in this promising new field. “We are very excited about this opportunity and are thinking very broadly about the nanoscale mechanical properties of solids and biomaterials,” said Geller. “This is uncharted territory because it requires understanding physics, chemistry, engineering and biology all at the same time.”
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