Northern Arizona University is a partner institution in a major new initiative to establish and lead the Center for Quantum Networks, or CQN. NAU will collaborate with The University of Arizona, the lead institution on this five-year project. The new center is funded through an initial $26 million grant awarded to UA by the National Science Foundation (NSF), and includes an additional five-year $24.6 million renewal option. The project,… Read more
Department of Applied Physics and Materials Science
NAU physicist awarded prestigious $502,000 NSF grant to harness active matter for nanoscale applications
In the field of physics, everything that has mass and takes up space is matter. Active matter consists of many self-propelled entities uniting to create large-scale structures and movements, such… Read more
Major DOE study launched to drastically reduce data center energy consumption; NAU physicist named collaborator
As data centers expand to handle the exponential growth of global data traffic, the amount of energy they consume is increasing at an alarming rate. Currently, data centers use approximately 10 percent of the world’s electricity—predicted to grow to 20 percent by 2025—and in the process are also becoming one of the world’s biggest sources of pollution.
A major… Read more
NAU scientist contributes to significant advance in silicon photonics
Northern Arizona University assistant professor Ryan Behunin collaborated with a team of physicists from Yale and the University of Texas at Austin in discovering an innovative way to manipulate light in silicon. By demonstrating a new type of laser that amplifies light with sound waves in a silicon chip, the team’s research represents a significant advance in the field… Read more
NAU physicist contributes to new optomechanical theory with potential application in quantum computing
A new study published in Nature Physics describes how a team of scientists used a laser beam to gain access to long-lived sound waves in crystalline solids as the basis for a potentially new approach to information processing and storage. One of Northern Arizona University’s newest physicists, assistant professor Ryan Behunin, is a co-author of the study. In collaboration with scientists at Yale… Read more