Jan Schroers, a professor of mechanical engineering and materials science, and Naijia Liu, a former doctoral student in the lab, along with other researchers, studied the mechanical properties of metallic glass by molding nano-size features on the samples. In metallic glass, or amorphous metal, atoms are arranged randomly. When heated enough, metallic glass softens to a viscous, liquid-like state, like honey. By examining how the material deforms at different nanometer scales, the researchers proposed that metallic glass deforms at lower temperatures and smaller sizes by atoms diffusing individually rather than flowing as a group.  

According to Liu, while researchers have demonstrated that other materials, such as crystalline metals or semiconductors, can deform by atomic diffusion, they have not shown that amorphous materials could do the same.  

“In the case of amorphous material, especially amorphous metals, for the entire community, no people before had confirmed that these amorphous materials can deform through diffusion,” Liu told the News. “So, scientifically, this is a new thing.”

Liu said that one can divide materials into two categories: ordered or disordered, or, in the terminology of material science, crystalline or amorphous. While many researchers have analyzed the structure and properties of crystalline materials, they know much less about amorphous materials, including their structural properties and how they deform, according to Liu.

Though crystalline materials may seem to have perfectly ordered and predictable structure, they often contain defects due to misaligned atoms and boundaries between smaller crystalline grains. According to Sungwoo Sohn, a co-author of the study and an associate research scientist in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science, these irregularities, even if small, can cause concentrated stress and material breakage. 

“So what is a perfect thing?” Sohn rhetorically asked. “It can be a single crystalline, so everything [is] in order. Or it can be imperfectly perfect. So everywhere is random [and] there is no order … That is also perfect in another way.” 

The randomness in amorphous material — its “imperfection” — allows stress to spread out more evenly, making it less brittle and more malleable. Similar to other amorphous materials, like plastics or glass, researchers can use a mold to shape it. In this way, amorphous metals combine the properties of metal and plastic, having both strength and flexibility.  

Molding can happen with nanometer precision. In this study, the researchers used a mold with an array of nanometer pipes, whose diameter ranged from 10 nm to 250 nm, and experimented with different four-element alloys. Then, they pushed the samples into the mold, generating tiny whisks on its surface. They expected the wires to get shorter as the diameter of the holes got smaller, suggesting that the material collectively flowed into the pipes. 

“People have a concept of collective movement. It is like a viscous fluid,” Sohn said. “Let’s say you squeeze the ice cream. We don’t expect the ice cream molecules are going to jump one by one. They just [are] collectively pushed away, pushed inside. So that’s how people have imagined.”

However, at lower temperatures and smaller hole sizes, the behavior of the materials deviated from the collective movement. When the researchers used a small enough hole, the wires became longer. According to Liu, this relationship between size and length helped distinguish different deformation mechanisms. In collective flow, the length of the nanowire is positively correlated with size, but the length of the nanowire is inversely correlated to the root square of size in diffusion.   

After examining the data, the researchers proposed that under these conditions, the atoms in the amorphous metal move as individuals through diffusion instead of flowing as a collective. This mathematical model explained the size-length relationship and the variations they observed in nanowire compositions. 

According to Corey O’Hern, a professor of mechanical engineering and material science, this study helps fill the research gap on metallic glasses at small scales. 

“For the past 50 years, the field has characterized the mechanical properties of metallic glasses on meso- to macroscopic scales above 100 nm,” O’Hern wrote in an email to the News. “But the field has made little progress on visualizing and understanding the atomic motion in response to applied deformations on lengthscales below 100 nm.” 

O’Hern also noted that understanding the atomic behavior of the material enables researchers to manipulate and predict its behaviors. For example, when amorphous materials are under stress shear bands — dislocations within the material — can appear. But the location of these shear bands remains unpredictable, O’Hern told the News, and this study is an important first step to understanding this phenomenon.

Further, studying how a material deforms could also lead to the generation of better materials. As Liu pointed out, if a material is built by diffusion, the atoms can find more optimal positions instead of staying in their predetermined arrangements and form a more stable structure. For Liu, this mechanism could inform researchers seeking to achieve the synthesis of ultra-stable amorphous materials. 

“In the basic science point of view, the unknown part is the part that we want to work on — to fill the unknown cavity,” Liu said. “That’s why I think amorphous study is very, very interesting.”

The first reported glass metal was produced in 1960. 

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Michel Devoret, a professor of applied physics and Rob Schoelkopf, Sterling Professor of applied physics, were awarded the 2024 prize for their work on non-linear quantum optics — a scientific branch that describes how light moves in irregular media — in electrical circuits at the level of individual photons. Devoret and colleagues discovered quantum behavior in systems larger than atoms, such as circuits, while working as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley in 1984. 

“Our main question was … whether microscopic variables such as current and voltage could be quantum mechanical,” Devoret said in an interview with the News.

During Devoret’s sabbatical year at Yale in 1999, Devoret, Schoelkopf and Steven Girvin, a professor of Physics, began working with quantum behavior in electrical circuits, specifically the fabrication of “artificial atoms” — electronic systems with a discrete number of electrons and energy levels — that are circuits that display atom-like behavior. 

After Devoret became a faculty member at Yale in 2002, he and Schoelkopf’s research groups continued to work together. Their collaborations helped create the field of circuit quantum electrodynamics, or circuit QED. Researchers in this field study the behavior and properties of artificial atoms, which are also called quantum circuits due to their quantum mechanical behavior at the circuit scale.

“In a [natural] atom, your nonlinearities are fixed by the universe, but you can engineer these nonlinearities when you have a circuit,” Gautham Umasankar GRD ’28, a second-year doctoral student, who works in Schoelkopf’s lab, told the News. 

Circuit QED explains the quantum mechanical behavior at the circuit scale. Devoret and Schoelkopf applied the principles of circuit QED to circuits made out of superconducting materials. During this collaboration, they created the transmon and the fluxonium qubits — two commonly used configurations of superconducting qubits, a type of quantum computing platform that is a promising candidate for the realization of quantum computers. 

Since their discovery, superconducting qubits have become increasingly efficient by orders of magnitude. Today, large technology companies, including IBM, Google and Amazon, use superconducting qubits in their attempts to build quantum computers. Many scientists at IBM and Google have also previously worked in Devoret and Schoelkopf’s research teams. 

John Garmon GRD ’26 is a fourth-year doctoral student who works in Schoelkopf’s lab. For him, Schoelkopf and Devoret’s collaboration is essential for their research. “The two groups are separate enough to develop initial ideas and projects on their own but also have many collaboration opportunities,” Garmon said.  

Charlotte Bøttcher, a postdoctoral researcher in Devoret’s group, previously studied and researched condensed matter physics, a subfield of physics in which researchers study the properties of materials and the origins of quantum phases. In an interview with the News, Bøttcher described how she used circuit QED principles in her graduate studies, informing her current research with Devoret.

“I am currently researching how to utilize new kinds of materials and develop them for innovative circuit QED systems. This collaborative approach between different fields in physics enables advancements in both directions,” Bøttcher told the News.

The Comstock Prize in Physics was first awarded in 1913. 

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Through their CubeSat project, YUAA aims to send a device called a cosmic ray detector aboard a NASA rocket into orbit around the Earth. Though the initiative began in 2015, it has faced delays — most recently, one of their computers catching fire — which has bumped their target completion date from winter 2024 to 2025. 

Still, CubeSat co-leads Rome Thorstenson ’25 and Matilda Vary ’25 are hopeful that the decade-long effort will soon bear fruit. Since the program’s start, two full “generations” of students have graduated, Thorstenson said. When he joined the group as a first year, he was brand new to the field. 

“It’s been a really rewarding experience to go from complete beginner… to then helping others learn those skills,” Thorstenson said. “It’s really cool to work on code that will be run in space, on a satellite — to just take a moment to sit back and appreciate that.” 

CubeSats are a class of cost-efficient, miniature cube-shaped satellites: the standard dimensions are 10 by 10 by 10 centimeters. The Yale CubeSat will carry a cosmic ray detector, also being built by the team, which will gather data on particles streaming into Earth’s atmosphere from the sun and distant galaxies. 

To fund their space-bound project, CubeSat receives funding from YUAA, which in turn received $13,000 from the School of Engineering & Applied Science this year to distribute across all four of YUAA’s projects — CubeSat included. The project also receives funding from a variety of sponsors, including the Yale Science and Engineering Association and the NASA Connecticut Space Grant Consortium. 

Once finished, the satellite will be handed off to NASA and then put on a rocket. The team estimates that it should remain in orbit for roughly nine months. 

Getting involved in CubeSat doesn’t require any background in aerospace. As a result, onboarding — in which recruits are taught what they need to know to contribute effectively — is extensive and critical, said Vary, who heads the mechanical division of the project. 

But as a student group that meets on Saturdays, learning to build a satellite is still largely informal. For Ava Schwarz ’27, who recently joined the hardware team designing the cosmic ray detector, older mentors are a key part of the learning process. 

“A very significant part of the process is learning from older students who are able to take the knowledge that they’ve [gained] through trial and error and teach it to you,” said Schwarz. 

According to Thorstenson, the data gathered by the cosmic ray detector could help other satellites avoid hazards. For example, in a region above the Atlantic Ocean called the South Atlantic Anomaly, he explained, intense magnetic radiation can interfere with electrical equipment on board satellites. 

As the CubeSat satellite spirals around the planet and passes through those high-risk regions, the team plans to collect data on where cosmic radiation is most intense — and most dangerous. They don’t, however, yet have a plan to send their data to partner organizations. 

“A bunch of cosmic rays flying around can cause bit-flips [and] other problems,” said Thorstenson. “So it’s very useful to know where the danger zones are.” 

For Vary, the CubeSat project’s purpose is more than just scientific. While the data the cosmic ray detector will collect is scientifically important, she said she believes that launching a Yale-created satellite could be a milestone for the University’s engineering community. 

“I think it’s important to realize [that] the scientific object of this satellite is very interesting and will provide data that hasn’t necessarily been provided before, but … really, the idea of this is to get a Yale-created satellite into space [and] prove that a not-so-large engineering program is capable of doing this,” Vary said. 

However, the initiative has faced technical issues, which have delayed the expected launch date by nearly a year. 

Right before the team left for winter break, the onboard computer caught fire, Vary said. “That’s a huge component and essentially is like the brain of our operation,” Vary said. 

While she said that the project was probably not on track to finish this December, it was likely that the CubeSat project would have been completed by this coming June. But, due to the onboard computer’s combustion, she estimated that the team was set back by at least a semester. 

Fires are not the only obstacle that the CubeSat team has faced. Unlike other university CubeSat teams, the Yale team challenged themselves to code all the system’s software from scratch, without downloading any pre-written software packages, Thorstenson said. 

While Thorstenson highlighted the team’s bottom-up approach to developing the system’s software as a unique hallmark of the program, the labor-intensive approach has created extra burdens for the software team. 

“There’s a lot of software to write,” Vary added. 

To address those software challenges, the CubeSat project partnered with the Yale Computer Society to recruit developers and volunteers among Yale programmers. As a result, they aim to achieve a hand-off to NASA as soon as possible.

Despite setbacks, Schwarz pointed out that the CubeSat project gives students vital hands-on experience in the field of aerospace engineering. 

“I think it’s a very valuable opportunity for engineering majors and majors in other disciplines interested in getting a tangible, real-life application of the stuff that they learn in class,” she said. “It’s also a really great preparation for getting a real job in one of these fields because you learn how to collaborate not only with people who do the same thing as you but with people who work on other parts of the project.” 

Though their anticipated launch date is still on the horizon, the culmination of ten years of work has sparked excitement among the CubeSat team, Schwarz added. She anticipates that completing the project and watching it fly into space will be “intensely tangible.” 

“All of us would love nothing more than to see a launch,” Schwarz said. “The project is super engaging… but it’s made even greater by the fact that you know that everything you touch will one day see outer space.” 

The CubeSat team conducted a “cold test” of the satellite at the Wright Lab in 2022. 

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XRPeds is a Yale research group, founded in 2020, that uses virtual reality, or VR, to address pediatric health challenges. On Nov. 20 the project team announced that it is developing “ReHashed,” a new VR game that teaches students refusal skills, how to help others quit and the health consequences of marijuana vaping. The game will be implemented in three Connecticut schools in 2024. 

“I think for prevention, specifically, virtual reality is very effective because the kids are motivated to use it,” said Veronica Weser, an associate research scientist who helped design the game. “It’s really exciting for them that they get to play not only a video game, in school, but a virtual reality game. It’s so much more interesting than listening to an invited speaker giving a lecture at a school assembly.” 

The project leaders of ReHashed are Kim Hieftje, an assistant professor of pediatrics, and Deepa Camenga ’00 MED ’11, an associate professor of emergency medicine. The game was developed by Weser, Kanu Priya Singh, a postdoctoral associate at XRPeds, and Jake Shaker, a project manager at the research group.

To play the game, the player first puts on Meta Oculus headsets, which were donated by Meta. The game’s protagonist is a nerdy middle school student who is trying to get invited to an exclusive party hosted by their peers. Those peers then pressure the student to vape marijuana. According to Weser, the ReHashed narrative is a “choose your own adventure,” where students’ choices inform the story. 

All paths end with a marijuana vaping prevention outcome, and the player cannot choose to have the character vape. 

Hieftje said that the team decided to focus on marijuana vaping because they believe it is becoming an increasingly prominent and dangerous trend. While flavored e-cigarettes remain the primary driver of youth initiation, research shows that marijuana vaping poses increased health risks and is linked to increased use of other substances. Hieftje spotted the advent of Juul and nicotine e-cigarettes early. Around 2016, she began to study vaping, which she saw as a rising trend in tobacco addiction. 

According to Weser, the team originally designed “ReHashed” for eighth-grade students, but teachers and principals told the team that eighth-grade was too late. They wanted the team to reach students who had not already been exposed to marijuana vaping. 

“The goal of this game is prevention not cessation,” Weser said. “Kids are starting vaping as early as sixth grade. If we are trying to prevent them from vaping, we need to get them before they have started.”

Hieftje and Weser both emphasized that they are incorporating feedback from teachers, school resource officers counselors and students to ensure the game’s language and scenarios are realistic. The team also works with youth actors, who voice the avatars in the game, and they are also recruiting a formal Youth Advisory Board of local high school students to offer feedback. 

ReHashed builds upon Weser’s and Hieftje’s prior work with Invite Only VR, a nicotine vaping game with a similar premise that was tested in Milford public schools from 2019-2020 and published as part of a study in 2021. The results of that study showed high knowledge gain and student engagement, with some positive vaping behavioral change relative to controls. The game, published for free on the Meta store, was one of the Forbes Top 50 VR Games of 2019. 

Using funding from the Connecticut Department of Public Health, ReHashed will be implemented in health classes across three different southern Connecticut schools at no cost to schools. According to Hieftje, the team intentionally chose schools with different levels of socioeconomic status and urbanity to get an accurate data sample. Additionally, they plan to collect acceptability data from students and feasibility data from teachers through surveys. 

ReHashed’s state funding comes from Connecticut’s portion of the 2021 American Rescue Plan Act. Hieftje said that Connecticut State Senator James Maroney helped mobilize other senators to secure funding for the program. In an interview with the News, Maroney said he was happy to help, calling the project “a great use” of funds for prevention.

“I’m excited because it’s an innovative program — it’s a way to reach students not necessarily in their own idiom but in a way that’s fun for them,” Maroney said. “[It is] a way that they’re used to interacting through games and to use that to develop positive outcomes.”

Still, the team said that there are obstacles to implementing VR in the classroom. For example, because the team intends for students to play the game over three 45-minute sessions, each student has to have the same headset each time they resume the game. Additionally, the team has to disable the internet and remove all other applications from every headset. 

Hieftje also said she was worried about whether students were excited about the game due to the novelty of VR, rather than the game’s content. 

Justin Berry, the creative producer and project director at XRPeds who did not work on the ReHashed game, said he believes VR technology is inherently powerful because it enables users to experience phenomena without facing their actual consequences.

If the middle school results are successful, Hieftje said that the team hopes to expand its reach and adapt the game for non-English speakers, students with disabilities and those who can not use VR headsets. 

“Our goal is to make [ReHashed] accessible to all schools and every child within Connecticut,” Hieftje said.

Hieftje said that XRPeds is the only research group running VR-based youth vaping prevention projects. The News had the opportunity to try out the game in full VR at XRPeds’ new space, the Yale Center for Immersive Technologies in Pediatrics, which opened in August. The Center invites interested members of the Yale community to contact them to play the game and engage with XRPeds.

In 2022, 21 percent of 12th graders reported vaping marijuana in the past year, an increase from 9.5 percent in 2017. 

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Abraham’s work at the School of Engineering & Applied Science revolves around developing algorithms that enable robots to “think about how they learn” and “figure out how to explore for information,” he explained. 

Unlike many popular approaches that focus on training robots using large amounts of data, Abraham seeks to develop ways for robots to generate information about their environments on their own — and learn to perform tasks in new spaces.

“Instead of thinking about having a pile of data, we’re thinking about what’s the minimum number of data points that a robot needs to resolve a task,” Abraham told the News. 

Using these approaches — known in the field as optimal control theory — can lead to algorithms that are faster and more efficient, Abraham explained. They can also make robots more versatile and adaptable.

Robots’ inability to adapt to new situations is a critical problem in robotics. Since robots are often developed for highly specific purposes, small changes in their environment can throw off programs.

In the case of walking on legs, Abraham said, most robots rely on having extensive data about walking on different surfaces to learn how to respond to environmental factors like friction, inclines and unexpected bumps.

Using Abraham’s optimal control theory approach, robots walking on legs would operate a lot like a human would. In new environments — those for which a robot does not have data — robots learn to adapt and correct their motion accordingly.

On ice, for instance, a robot might slip and flail at first, Abraham said. But unlike traditional robots, a robot that implements Abraham’s approach would teach itself to move more effectively, potentially by shimmying and adjusting its gait without the necessity of human intervention.

According to the National Science Foundation, the award is given to faculty early in their careers who have the potential to “lead advances in the mission” of their department or organization.

“If there is one award you should get when you are an up-and-coming junior faculty, then it is the NSF CAREER Award,” stated Professor Udo D. Schwarz, the chair of mechanical engineering and materials science at the engineering school.

Schwarz also noted that junior faculty only have three attempts to receive the award and applauded Abraham for receiving his on his first attempt. 

“The award is a great honor and a fantastic opportunity to work on a research area that is not well understood,” Abraham wrote in an email to the News.

At Yale, Abraham teaches the courses “Fundamentals of Robot Modeling and Control” and “Mechatronics Lab.”

His students describe him as a supportive, empathetic instructor and mentor.

“He’s a super down-to-earth, friendly guy who is very much understanding of what it’s like to be an undergraduate or graduate student,” said Ethan Dong ’24, a computer science and engineering student who took Abraham’s fall 2021 class and audited his spring 2022 class. 

Abraham, Dong told the News, is very willing to “help and put his hands on projects” and always provides his “full support.” 

Dong, who is also a student researcher in Abraham’s Intelligent Autonomy Lab, praised Abraham’s mentorship in addition to his teaching.

 “He lets you do your thing when you’re trying to get results or finish a proof, but if you ever need help he’s always available,” Dong added. “That’s something I very much appreciate.”

Over the course of five years, the NSF CAREER Award will provide Abraham with nearly $630,000 to support his research efforts. Through the grant, Abraham also hopes to develop science outreach programming. He hopes to support undergraduate research opportunities for veterans, a traditionally underrepresented group in academia. 

Abraham also wants to develop Spanish-language robotics education programs through Yale’s Pathways to Science program, an outreach program designed to encourage local middle and high school students to engage with STEM over the summer. 

Through the program, Abraham hopes to address an issue that has affected him personally. 

Born in Cuba and having immigrated to the United States as a child, Abraham was struck by the disconnect he felt between what he learned in school in English and what he learned from his parents at home in Spanish. 

“The hope is that we do all this work in Spanish so that students and parents can communicate with each other about what they’re learning in school, so that you can have participation from parents as well,” he said.

According to Schwarz, Abraham is the latest of Yale’s STEM faculty to receive the NSF award. Priyadarshini Panda, a professor of electrical engineering; Yu He, a professor of applied physics; and Eduardo Dávila, a professor of economics, also received the award in the past year. 

The National Science Foundation was created in 1950.

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This past June, Quantum-Si, a company Rothberg founded to develop more precise, cost-effective protein sequencing technology, opened their new headquarters in Branford, Connecticut. The 29,420 square-foot building provides Quantum-Si with space for engineering teams, laboratories, and meeting rooms for a staff of over 100 people.

“We believe New Haven County is the perfect strategic location to attract world-class scientific talent as we seek to grow our teams,” said Quantum-Si CEO Jeff Hawkins. “We look forward to leading the expansion of the life sciences industry in Connecticut.”

Before Quantum-Si, Rothberg founded a biotech company called Hyperfine, which develops portable MRI scanners. In 2014, President Barack Obama also awarded Rothberg the National Medal of Technology and Innovation.

That same year, Rothberg founded Quantum-Si with the aim of democratizing single-molecule protein sequencing, a scientific process that involves identifying specific amino acid building blocks within a longer protein chain. While sequencing single-molecule proteins has been a difficult feat for biotech companies to achieve, Quantum-Si achieved a breakthrough with their benchtop protein sequencer, Platinum. 

Marketed as a cost-effective and compact solution for laboratories, Platinum is able to map out protein sequences on the molecular level.

  “We have a truly transformative product on the market in Platinum, a next-generation protein sequencer, a leadership bench of highly experienced executives, and now we have the facilities to scale alongside that growth,” Rothberg said at the plant’s opening.

According to Quantum-Si leaders, Platinum’s small size and relatively low cost makes it designed for accessibility. The current industry standard for protein processing uses a large machine called a mass spectrometer, which can cost close to one million dollars to build and operate. In comparison, Platinum costs about $70,000 and is roughly the size of a panini oven.

“A lot of researchers don’t have [mass spectrometers] so they’ll take their sample and send it to a facility where someone will do the analysis for them and then return the result,” said Todd Rearick, Quantum-Si’s chief technology officer.

Compared to mass spectrometers, Quantum-Si leaders claim, Platinum is also more simple to use. With Platinum, after scientists process and dye the proteins, they can load protein samples into the machine, which stores them in nanoscale holes on the processing chip.

Using custom-made proteins that bind to amino acid building blocks, Platinum can recognize the specific components of a protein chain. The machine then can upload that data to Quantum Si’s own cloud network. 

“It’s a very sensitive system and we are observing in real time the interaction of our custom recognizer molecules with the end terminal amino acid of a peptide as it’s being digested,” said Rearick, “When those interactions are happening, we’re actually observing the kinetic behavior and even very minute changes.”

The machine is so precise, according to Rearick, that it can even detect when a single oxygen atom reacts with the protein chain, or if there are atomic-level changes in much larger molecules.

To do so, the Quantum-Si team had to design a custom laser that they used to measure molecular reactions happening in the machine. They also had to invent a new, large image sensor from scratch.

The discoveries from Quantum-Si’s technology have attracted attention from more than just scientists.

“We’re here not to just cut the ribbon on a new building, but on a new era,” said Senator Richard Blumenthal LAW ’73, at the facility’s ribbon cutting. 

Quantum Si’s new headquarters was unveiled on June 6.

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Whereas before, only select systems of the engine were examined individually, last Sunday’s test marked the team’s first time testing the engine as a whole. The team — led by Jonah Halperin ’26 and Henry Demarest ’25 — is currently in the process of refining some of the subsystems of the engine and hopes to conduct another test before the end of the year. 

“A lot of people in YUAA and a lot of Yale engineers in general are interested in space exploration, and the aerospace industry,” Demarest said. “And most modern rockets use liquid propulsion. So we wanted to bring that technology and get more familiar with the technology while we’re in undergrad.”

The project was started by Ryan Smithers ’25 in Fall 2021. Since then, the team has grown to over 30 members. The team currently works on the engine within one of the storage spaces of the Mann Engineering Student Center in Dunham Laboratory.

The engineers hope to create a rocket engine able to theoretically output 200 pounds of force if loaded with rocket fuel. According to Demarest, this number, while not comparable to the rocket engines corporations or governments can produce, is significant because the engine could theoretically lift most people. The team currently has no plans of testing the rocket with combustible fuel, but hopes to prove the engine’s capability with water tests.

Halperin notes that through the building process, the team is focused on the application of mechanical engineering. He said that the mechanical engineering program at Yale is very theory focused.

“[Theory is] great, obviously, to know how to design things,” Halperin said. “But when you start going on to Master’s degrees, and you’re saying what’s an NPT versus SAE fitting? What is the correct sizing? And just starting to understand how you take those theoretical ideas and put them in a practical application. So the idea for this club is that we’re able to do something really cool, build a rocket engine, and learn stuff that is going to be even cooler.” 

Project Liquid consists of four smaller subteams: test stand, electronics and control, feed system and thrust chamber. 

The test stand subteam builds the metal frame structure that physically contains the components of the rocket engine. The electronics and control team connects all of the wiring for the engine, as well as the electronic sensors, and writes the programs for the engine. The feed system subteam deals with the plumbing of the engine — routing the engine fuel and the highly pressurized gas used to pressurize the engine. The thrust chamber team designs the injector and the portions of the engine that would need to handle extreme heat if tested with real rocket fuel.

“Progress has really picked up this semester and it’s really motivating, especially for the incoming class of 2027,” Kidus Abebe ’26, the thrust chamber subteam lead, said. “When we present our project during Bulldog Days and again during the extracurricular bazaar, I think it’s going to be really motivating.”

Great enthusiasm was shared amongst many of the engineers in the project. Abebe, Halperin, Demarest, Jack Griffin ’26, Cayden Cerveny ’26 and Aaron Cope ’26 all shared their passion for the project and the group’s camaraderie. 

According to Halperin, the project would not have been possible without the support received from Yale. Many members of the faculty have individually supported the project in areas such as part acquisition, procuring space to work and securing equipment. Yale Environmental Health and Safety has also helped to manage project safety.

“We’re a group that’s doing something awesome; we’re building a rocket engine,” Halperin said. “There is no person who can’t walk out of that room right now and say, ‘I didn’t contribute something,’ because everyone has been able to help … Continuing to build and giving undergraduates a chance to really understand what industry is like, understand what engineering can be, and even just what good teamwork is, [that’s] something that we’re looking forward to.”

Dunham Laboratory and the Mann Center are located on Hillhouse Avenue.

Correction 4/14: A previous version of this article mistranscribed a quote from Halperin. 

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The developing researchers hail from the lab of Laura Newburgh, an assistant professor of physics whose work focuses on cosmic microwave background radiation. The telescope uses radio waves and quadcopter drones to help fine-tune and adjust telescope beams — how telescopes see into the sky. The telescope was installed on the roof of Wright Lab in March 2021, after about a year of work.

“Most of the sophisticated science we do is designing the payload for the drone,” Will Tyndall GRD ’25, the project’s lead, said. “The telescope is quite rudimentary as far as scientific telescopes go. It doesn’t make scientifically valuable measurements, but what it does is it provides us with a way to measure the radio signals we’re producing with the drone.” 

Tyndall emphasized that although the testbed telescope is an important component of the project, the drone is the key. He noted that the telescope is a 3-meter dish that may have originally been used for sports gambling, television or radio.

Tyndall said that the value of developing the drone calibration technique was driven by the budgetary constraints of research projects in cosmology, which often require massive arrays of telescopes. Unlike optical telescopes, which only take a single image, when using radio telescopes, astronomers take multiple readings. The resulting map created by these readings must then be deconvolved, or simplified to account for the shape of the telescope’s beam, which influences the images gathered by the telescope.

While Tyndall said that sophisticated, motorized radio telescopes which can be pointed in multiple directions exist, he explained that they were too expensive for many projects in modern cosmology.

“To do future generation experiments, you need thousands of dishes,” Tyndall said. “If you have a thousand dishes, the price per dish is suddenly a really important factor, and you need to find a way to save a lot of money. The way to do that is by building a really big array of stationary dishes … All of the money you have in each of these dishes has to go into the electronics, instead of motorizing.”

Although these non-motorized radio telescopes are often the only affordable option for researchers, they also provide less precise measurements than motorized ones, according to Tyndall. With more sophisticated, steerable telescopes, “you can do a lot of this beam calibration by just pointing at radio sources,” Tyndall said, but the same is not true for stationary telescopes.

Drone calibration techniques offer a potential solution to this problem. This approach uses the positional data of a drone in conjunction with the signal measured by a telescope to map out the telescope’s sensitivity in different directions.

“The drone can fly around and measure which way the telescope is looking,” Michael Faison, a lecturer of astronomy and the director of the Leitner Family Observatory and Planetarium, said. “If you have the drone directly over the telescope, you hope it gets a strong signal, but if it flies over here, 10 degrees off, how much signal do you get?” 

Newburgh explained that researchers were already capable of using drones to calibrate the beams of relatively small telescopes, but in order to predict the beams of larger dishes, mathematical transformations had to be made to small telescopes’ measurements of the drones’ positions. The project focused on testing these transformations with measurements made of the drone by the testbed telescope.

While Tyndall said he enjoyed working on the project, he acknowledged that working with drones is not without its challenges.

“The drone actually flew away once because of a magnet that was on top of it and we had to rescue it out of a tree,” Tyndall said. “It’s a bit demotivating to have your thesis project in a tree with rain clouds coming in.”

Tyndall said a paper related to the project is currently in progress.

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In 2018, the YUAA was awarded a grant from NASA’s CubeSat Launch initiative. The group formed the CubeSat team to create a 2U — or 20 centimeters x 10 centimeters x 10 centimeters — satellite, named the Bouchet Low Earth Alpha-Beta Space Telescope, or BLAST. After seven years of development, BLAST is scheduled to launch this winter on a NASA mission and will be deployed from the International Space Station.

“I feel very lucky as an undergraduate to be able to work on flight hardware and software that will be launched into space and remain in orbit for several years,” said co-project lead Grady Morrissey ’24.

The satellite is designed to measure cosmic rays in low Earth orbit before the rays enter Earth’s atmosphere. Cosmic rays are high-energy streams of particles radiating from space, usually from outside the solar system. When they reach Earth’s atmospheres, they decay into lower-energy particles.

Detecting and identifying such rays is an extremely relevant and ongoing area of research with ramifications for cosmology and particle theory, according to Morrissey. The BLAST CubeSat will measure the energy and flux of these cosmic rays and make the data available online to the public.

Morrissey noted that two of the key subsystems in the satellite are entirely designed and manufactured by students: the cosmic ray detector and the gravity gradient boom — the system that allows the satellite to maintain its orientation.

The gravity gradient boom consists of a tape measure controlled by a sprocket to change the center of mass of the satellite, inducing an effect called “tidal locking” which maintains the satellite orientation throughout its orbit.

“It’s been really cool to see how work is coordinated between each subteam, and to see the direct effects of design decisions as they are passed between each group,” said co-project lead Elijah Bakaleynik ’24.

Validating a satellite for the harsh environment of space happens in incremental steps, according to Morrissey. Last semester, the team “cold-tested” components of their satellite in Wright Lab.

There, the team brought the instrument down to -40 degrees Celsius and validated its functionality. This thermal testing, Morrissey noted, ensured that their satellite would perform well in the cold.

Morrissey highlighted how CubeSat has provided many undergraduate students with the novel opportunity to develop a product that will be launched into space — an experience directly applicable to myriad future careers in a wide range of industries — as well as allowing for the possibility of more advanced CubeSats launched by Yale in the future.

“The team meetings are the highlights of my week,” Computer-Aided Design and Mechanical Integration sub team lead Matilda Vary ’25 said. “The technical and leadership experiences I have gained on the mechanical team have helped me in classes and securing summer internships.”

The CubeSat team hopes their launch will benefit other teams and scientists, as well as contribute to making space more accessible. They plan to publish the design post-launch, as well as the data on their website to create a publicly accessible dataset available for research.

Moreover, the data collected by the detector will be transmitted regularly over radio, allowing amateur radio operators around the world to receive and analyze it.

The team also hopes to travel to Houston Flight Control to witness the launch of the BLAST CubeSat this winter and celebrate the successful culmination of nearly 8 years of work.

“This group has been an incredible opportunity for me to develop my own engineering skills, meet an amazing community of like-minded students and see what it is like to actually be an aerospace engineer,” Attitude Determination and Control Algorithm lead Henry Demarest ’25 said.

The CubeSat team meets on Saturdays 12 to 4 p.m. in Watson B-42.

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While in theory the quantum computer is a powerful tool with the ability to encode calculations at speeds faster than those of a classical computer, the physical proof of principle has yet to be demonstrated. However, recent developments by Yale researchers in quantum error correction could represent a major step in proving the feasibility and potential of quantum computers. 

A qubit, or quantum bit, is a unit of quantum information that is physically constructed of circuits made of superconductors and cooled to very low temperatures to optimize the circuits’ efficiency. Yale researchers in the Devoret research group have successfully extended the lifetime of a qubit beyond the break-even point, seeing a gain in the preservation of information and the amount of operations that can be performed on a qubit in one lifetime. 

“We increased the lifetime by a factor of 2.3, so we more than doubled the number of operations that we can perform before the qubit begins to fail,” said Luigi Frunzio, a senior research scientist in applied physics. 

With the help of machine learning to optimize calibration and precision, the researchers used quantum error correction — a process used to protect information encoded in qubits from errors due to quantum noise — to achieve this breakthrough. 

According to Frunzio, using the Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill quantum error correction code, the research group was the first to see more errors corrected than errors produced in quantum information. Before this breakthrough, he said, there were more errors than corrections from quantum error correction codes. 

Steve Girvin, Yale’s Eugene Higgins professor of physics, noted that prior to this study, many research groups across the world had gotten close to the break-even point. According to Girvin, by incorporating the efforts of interdisciplinary research and an accumulation of progress from over the years, this breakthrough was finally the first to extend the qubit’s lifetime above the break-even point to see a gain greater than one. 

Having a stable qubit above the break-even point shows that the theories behind quantum computing are plausible, according to Baptiste Royer, former postdoctoral student in the Devoret research group. 

“One of the main claims is to show that it is possible to have a stable qubit above break-even at the heart of quantum error correction,” Royer said. 

All sources the News spoke to noted that in addition to being a step towards building more functional quantum computers, the breakthrough is also a proof-of-principle demonstration that shows that researchers may eventually be able to build a quantum computer that provides an advantage beyond any modern supercomputer. 

While there is still a long way to go before quantum computers can be as effective as classical computers in terms of functionality, according to Girvin, this breakthrough is an important first step to improving the practicality of quantum computers. 

“This is a big step forward, though, there is still a huge distance to go to get a gain of millions or billions,” Girvin said. “But the journey to a billion begins with being above one. The grand challenge to solve is if quantum computers are going to be practical.”

With this goal in mind, all three researchers mentioned that the next advancement needed to further validate quantum error correction and the practicality of quantum computing is extending the lifetime of qubits to the scale of billions. Royer added that they are also working on extending this breakthrough to more than one qubit such that complex algorithms can be implemented in the quantum computers. 

“With the feasibility of quantum error correction, better qubits and better machines altogether, quantum computation will not only be possible but also more concretely useful for disciplines beyond science and math,” Frunzio said. 

The first quantum computer, a two-qubit with the ability to load and output data, was built in 1989.

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