Virginia Tech researcher among recipients of Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative program award
Vassilios Kovanis, quantum systems research professor within the Virginia Tech National Security Institute (VTNSI). Photo courtesy of UnCork-It.
A Virginia Tech researcher is leveraging 30 years of connections to solve historic problems in the field of applied physics using cutting-edge approaches.
In March, the U.S. Department of Defense announced $221 million in awards for defense-related research projects as part of the Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) program. At an average award amount of $7.5 million over five years, the grants will support 30 teams at 73 United States academic institutions.
Vassilios Kovanis, a quantum systems research professor within the Virginia Tech National Security Institute, is on one of the multi-university teams awarded. The project comes after the institute has made recent investments in quantum research as part of Virginia Tech’s initiative to advance the quantum frontier.
The project, AI-Guided Self-Organization: Tailoring Disorder to Shape Complex Nonlinear Dynamics, aims to use emerging artificial intelligence (AI) to tackle the age-old problem of of getting trained quantum photonic sensors to work in sync to generate greater power, super radiant emission, and coherent signals.
“We were the underdogs in that way because people are not sure if artificial intelligence can be successfully used for our purposes,” said Kovanis, collegiate professor in the Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. “We are willing to try new techniques. But it is the charge of the MURI awards to push fundamental research even if it is unsuccessful because we will still be learning new things.”
Kovanis’ team is made up of researchers from other universities, many of whom he had built working relationships with during the last three decades. It is led by Hui Cao and Logan G. Wright from Yale University and includes Herbert Winful from the University of Michigan, Steven Anlage from the University of Maryland at College Park, Ying-Cheng Lai from Arizona State University, and Tsampikos Kottos from Wesleyan University.
“The MURI award is based on the idea of encouraging collaboration between peer institutions,” Kovanis said. “There is so much more we can learn when we are able to work together with our peers at different universities who may have different resources than us, but also different perspectives.”
The award also will allow all of the universities involved to develop the next generation of researchers in applied physics. As part of the project, the team of universities will organize annual summer and winter conferences where they will share findings with the Naval Research Laboratory, peer universities, and student researchers
“It's important in a field like applied physics to have new people and new ideas coming in,” Kovanis said. “We have to bring them in and teach them some of our tricks and maybe they will be able to solve old problems with their new perspectives.”
The focus of this five-year project supported by the Office of Naval Research will be on basic research, discovering new physical concepts and AI techniques that are capable of universally controlling and regulating self-organization. The team will devote special attention to educating the next generation of defense scientists and engineers and realizing reconfigurable phase-locking in large arrays of two-dimensional semiconductor laser arrays, power scalable mode-locking in fiber lasers, and shaping the emission of arrays of Josephson junctions, a special set of quantum oscillators.
