Research Laboratory of Electronics

2016 MIT AAAS Fellows: (clockwise from top left) William Green, Wolfgang Ketterle, Howard Shrobe, and Elly Nedivi.

Four MIT faculty elected 2016 AAAS Fellows

Green, Ketterle, Nedivi, and Shrobe are among those recognized for their efforts toward advancing science.

November 21, 2016

This image shows the basic setup that enables researchers to use lasers as optical “tweezers” to pick individual atoms out from a cloud and hold them in place. The atoms are imaged onto a camera, and the traps are generated by a laser that is split into many different focused laser beams. This allows a single atom to be trapped at each focus.

Scientists set traps for atoms with single-particle precision

Technique may enable large-scale atom arrays for quantum computing.

November 3, 2016

A team of researchers at MIT, the University of Brasilia, and the University of British Columbia has now engineered an antimicrobial peptide that can destroy many types of bacteria, including some that are resistant to most antibiotics.

Engineers design a new weapon against bacteria

Antimicrobial peptides can kill strains resistant to existing antibiotics.

November 2, 2016

Electric motors find new roles in robots, ships, cars, and microgrids

James Kirtley discusses the transition from gas to electric motors and the impact these motors have had on modern technologies.

October 24, 2016

Monitoring Parkinson’s symptoms at home

Keyboard-monitoring technique can detect motor difficulties as patients type.

October 5, 2016

“Learning from this model, we can understand what’s really going on in these superconductors, and what one should do to make higher-temperature superconductors, approaching hopefully room temperature,” says Martin Zwierlein, professor of physics and principal investigator in MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics.

For first time, researchers see individual atoms keep away from each other or bunch up as pairs

Observations of atomic interactions could help pave way to room-temperature superconductors.

September 15, 2016

MIT biological engineers have devised a memory storage system illustrated here as a DNA-embedded meter that is recording the activity of a signaling pathway in a human cell.

Recording analog memories in human cells

Engineers program human cells to store complex histories in their DNA.

August 18, 2016

Toward practical quantum computers

Built-in optics could enable chips that use trapped ions as quantum bits.

August 8, 2016

(From left) MIT Professor of Electrical Engineering Steven Leeb, graduate student John Donnal, and electrical engineer and consultant Jim Paris PhD ’13

What’s wasting power at home? Ask your app!

New system from MIT can identify how much power is being used by each device in a household.

August 1, 2016

“You can build very complex computing systems if you integrate the element of memory together with computation,” says Timothy Lu, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science and of biological engineering, and head of the Synthetic Biology Group at MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics.

Scientists program cells to remember and respond to series of stimuli

New approach to biological circuit design enables scientists to track cell histories.

July 21, 2016

This diagram depicts the way a mid-infrared laser (red cylinder, left) can send a beam through the atmosphere that generates filaments of ionized air molecules (multicolored beam, center, shown with magnified view). These filaments, which can be kilometers long, help to keep the beam concentrated enough to generate mid-infrared light in air (blue cloud, right) that can reveal detailed chemical com...

New mid-infrared laser system could detect atmospheric chemicals

Laser pulses produce glowing plasma filaments in open air, could enable long-distance monitoring.

June 28, 2016

Researchers at MIT and Sandia National Laboratories have designed a device that is an array of 37 microfabricated lasers on a single chip. Its power requirements are relatively low because the radiation emitted by all of the lasers is “phase locked,” meaning that the troughs and crests of its waves are perfectly aligned.

New approach to microlasers

Technique for “phase locking” arrays of tiny lasers could lead to terahertz security scanners.

June 13, 2016

These micrographs show the fibers embedded in polymer and demonstrate how the fibers break apart into segments when they are stretched out in the cold-drawing process.

New method snips complex fibers into uniform particles

Stretching process can produce nanoscale rods or strips made of many material combinations.

June 6, 2016

A sample of the mineral perovskite is shown in the foreground, while behind it is an image the researchers used to prove the effects of intense light on a thin film of perovskite. Fluorescence imaging shows that areas that received more light became more purified, as revealed by brighter fluorescence from those regions.

Light can “heal” defects in some solar cells

Defects in some new electronic materials can be removed by making ions move under illumination.

May 24, 2016

$An artist’s embellishment of an image of the “gain medium” used to produce terahertz frequency combs. The different colors indicate that different wavelengths of oscillating terahertz radiation travel different distances through the medium, which has a different refractive index for each of them.$

Speedy terahertz-based system could detect explosives

Spectroscopic system with chip-scale lasers cuts detection time from minutes to microseconds.

May 20, 2016

MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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