When Dr. Andrew N. Cleland was an undergraduate at UC Berkeley,
superconductors were his research passion.
NEWS-PRESS STAFF WRITER
When Dr. Andrew N. Cleland was an undergraduate at UC Berkeley,
superconductors were his research passion.
"Midway through my graduate program, people realized there were some really interesting things you could do if you made some really small superconducting devices," said Mr. Cleland, now an assistant professor of physics at UCSB.
It was 1986, and nanoscience was just taking off. With the second half of his doctoral thesis focusing on such work, Mr. Cleland was in on the ground level of a relatively unexplored science that continues to grow in stature worldwide. The state-funded California Nanosystems Institute, a collaboration between UCLA and Santa Barbara, has garnered much attention for its focus on the smallest scientific research and innovation.
"It's a very vague term, and in a way there's a lot of nanoscience that's already commercial products," Mr. Cleland said, including microprocessors in the newest computer models. "It stems from the word nanometer, which is a billionth of a meter. Less than a billionth of a meter on down is nanoscience."
It is within this discipline that Mr. Cleland, 41, and his former post-doctoral researcher, Dr. Robert G. Knobel, worked to come up with a test of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle that could make them famous.
The work took three years, with Mr. Knobel, 34, working on the project full time and Mr. Cleland, his supervising professor, overseeing his progress as well as that of three other major undertakings at his seven-person UCSB lab.
Mr. Knobel left UCSB last month to take an assistant professorship at Queens College in Canada. Mr. Knobel plans to branch out with experiments that relate to work he did at UCSB at his new lab.
The men decided to take on the Heisenberg project, Mr. Cleland said, because it involved both quantum mechanics and very, very small objects.
"I've had a long interest in trying to explore the impact of quantum mechanics on things you wouldn't normally think it applies to."
The premise behind the science is a bit of a mind- bender, he said. "Quantum mechanics predicts things that your intuition says are impossible. ...Say you have a marble inside a coffee cup. It seems you can never get it out unless you tip the cup over. But quantum mechanics says there's some non-zero probability that the marble can always get out of the cup."
Another improbable part of the science, he said, is the assumption that you can never measure the speed and position of something with infinite accuracy at the subatomic level.
"That's the Heisenberg uncertainty principle," he said. In order to try to develop a device that measures the displacement of an object in minutely precise amounts, the scientists developed a device that used superconducting technology, an opportunity for Mr. Cleland to get back to his grad school roots.
Although Mr. Knobel is now far away, they plan to continue working on the project with Mr. Cleland's UCSB lab as the base of operations.
Practical application of the project will build on the idea of a University of Washington researcher who believes that microscopes should be able to take pictures of single atoms in an object and identify their type.
"Atomic force microscopes and tunneling microscopes can take pictures of atoms, but they don't know what type they are, such as carbon or nitrogen," Mr. Cleland explained. A number of research groups around the world are trying to develop such a device, and the hope of Mr. Cleland and Mr. Knobel is that their discovery may be integrated into one of the designs.
"They're still about a factor of a thousandth off what they need in atomic identification," Mr. Cleland said. "If we can demonstrate we can get to the quantum limit using our technique, they could adapt it to their equipment. This would be an extremely powerful tool. It could not only look at DNA, but sequence it."
Mr. Knobel added: "You could look at a protein and figure out its three-dimensional structure and composition, which could be useful for biology. That's hard to do right now."