Public release date: 5-Sep-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Matthew Chin mchin@support.ucla.edu 310-206-0680 University of California - Los Angeles
A multidisciplinary team of researchers from UCLA and other universities is poised to help turn science fiction into reality in the form of some of the world's tiniest electromagnetic devices thanks to a major grant from the National Science Foundation's Engineering Research Center (ERC) program.
The grant, worth up to $35 million over 10 years, will fund a new center headquartered at UCLA's Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science that will focus on research aimed at developing highly efficient and powerful electromagnetic systems roughly the size of a biological cell systems that can power a range of devices, from miniaturized consumer electronics and technologies important for national security to as-yet unimagined machines, like nanoscale submarines that can navigate through the human blood stream.
Employing a fundamentally new approach to electromagnetic power at the nanoscale, researchers at the NSF-funded TANMS center (Translational Applications of Nanoscale Multiferroic Systems) are working to replace traditional wire-based electronics with a revolutionary technique that couples electricity and magnetism by using multiferroic materials, which can be magnetically switched "on" and "off" by an electric field.
UCLA's partners in the new center include UC Berkeley, Cornell University, Switzerland's ETH Zurich and California State University, Northridge.
"At UCLA, we strive to conduct research that pushes the boundaries of knowledge and benefits society in practical ways, and this new center is a prime example of that pursuit," UCLA Chancellor Gene Block said. "The National Science Foundation award for this major research center reflects the excellence and commitment of our renowned faculty and the quality of their collaborations with colleagues at other institutions."
"TANMS could spur a true paradigm shift for new devices that were once thought of as science fiction but now appear just over the horizon," said Vijay K. Dhir, dean of UCLA Engineering. "This new engineering research center's roster includes world-class faculty, and along with the best students in world, they will create and develop amazing new technologies that will certainly be exciting to see."
"We believe this is an opportunity for a truly revolutionary change in miniaturized electromagnetic devices," said Greg Carman, director of the new center and a UCLA professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering professor. "If you combine all three of our application areas memory, antennas and motors it really opens the possibilities of what new platforms may become possible. For example, it might be possible to build a remote submarine similar to the one described in the 1960s movie 'Fantastic Voyage.' Imagine a miniature submarine, at length-scales similar to red blood cells, that could be controlled and move through the blood stream.
"Present electromagnetic devices are based on concepts discovered nearly 200 years ago, and, while working well in large systems, they suffer from severe limitations in the small scale," he added. "TANMS overcomes this problem by developing a new, game-changing approach to produce electromagnetic fields using nanoscale multiferroic materials with lengths as small as a few hundred atoms."
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New UCLA Engineering research center to revolutionize nanoscale electromagnetic devices