Transistors, the building blocks of modern electronics, are typically made of silicon. Because it’s a semiconductor, this material can control the flow of electricity in a circuit. But silicon has fundamental physical limits that restrict how compact and energy-efficient a transistor can be.

MIT researchers have now replaced silicon with a magnetic semiconductor, creating a magnetic transistor that could enable smaller, faster, and more energy-efficient circuits. The material’s magnetism strongly influences its electronic behavior, leading to more efficient control of the flow of electricity. 

The team used a novel magnetic material and an optimization process that reduces the material’s defects, which boosts the transistor’s performance.

The material’s unique magnetic properties also allow for transistors with built-in memory, which would simplify circuit design and unlock new applications for high-performance electronics.

“People have known about magnets for thousands of years, but there are very limited ways to incorporate magnetism into electronics. We have shown a new way to efficiently utilize magnetism that opens up a lot of possibilities for future applications and research,” says Chung-Tao Chou, an MIT graduate student in the departments of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and Physics, and co-lead author of a paper on this advance.

Chou is joined on the paper by co-lead author Eugene Park, a graduate student in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE); Julian Klein, a DMSE research scientist; Josep Ingla-Aynes, a postdoc in the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center; Jagadeesh S. Moodera, a senior research scientist in the Department of Physics; and senior authors Frances Ross, TDK Professor in DMSE; and Luqiao Liu, an associate professor in EECS, and a member of the Research Laboratory of Electronics; as well as others at the University of Chemistry and Technology in Prague. The paper appears today in Physical Review Letters.

Overcoming the limits

In an electronic device, silicon semiconductor transistors act like tiny light switches that turn a circuit on and off, or amplify weak signals in a communication system. They do this using a small input voltage.

But a fundamental physical limit of silicon semiconductors prevents a transistor from operating below a certain voltage, which hinders its energy efficiency.

To make more efficient electronics, researchers have spent decades working toward magnetic transistors that utilize electron spin to control the flow of electricity. Electron spin is a fundamental property that enables electrons to behave like tiny magnets.

So far, scientists have mostly been limited to using certain magnetic materials. These lack the favorable electronic properties of semiconductors, constraining device performance.

“In this work, we combine magnetism and semiconductor physics to realize useful spintronic devices,” Liu says.

The researchers replace the silicon in the surface layer of a transistor with chromium sulfur bromide, a two-dimensional material that acts as a magnetic semiconductor.

Due to the material’s structure, researchers can switch between two magnetic states very cleanly. This makes it ideal for use in a transistor that smoothly switches between “on” and “off.”

“One of the biggest challenges we faced was finding the right material. We tried many other materials that didn’t work,” Chou says.

They discovered that changing these magnetic states modifies the material’s electronic properties, enabling low-energy operation. And unlike many other 2D materials, chromium sulfur bromide remains stable in air.

To make a transistor, the researchers pattern electrodes onto a silicon substrate, then carefully align and transfer the 2D material on top. They use tape to pick up a tiny piece of material, only a few tens of nanometers thick, and place it onto the substrate.

“A lot of researchers will use solvents or glue to do the transfer, but transistors require a very clean surface. We eliminate all those risks by simplifying this step,” Chou says.

Leveraging magnetism

This lack of contamination enables their device to outperform existing magnetic transistors. Most others can only create a weak magnetic effect, changing the flow of current by a few percent or less. Their new transistor can switch or amplify the electric current by a factor of 10.

They use an external magnetic field to change the magnetic state of the material, switching the transistor using significantly less energy than would usually be required.

The material also allows them to control the magnetic states with electric current. This is important because engineers cannot apply magnetic fields to individual transistors in an electronic device. They need to control each one electrically.

The material’s magnetic properties could also enable transistors with built-in memory, simplifying the design of logic or memory circuits.

A typical memory device has a magnetic cell to store information and a transistor to read it out. Their method can combine both into one magnetic transistor.

“Now, not only are transistors turning on and off, they are also remembering information. And because we can switch the transistor with greater magnitude, the signal is much stronger so we can read out the information faster, and in a much more reliable way,” Liu says.

Building on this demonstration, the researchers plan to further study the use of electrical current to control the device. They are also working to make their method scalable so they can fabricate arrays of transistors.

This research was supported, in part, by the Semiconductor Research Corporation, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. Army Research Office, and the Czech Ministry of Education, Youth, and Sports. The work was partially carried out at the MIT.nano facilities.

The agency is close to finalizing its rollback of the endangerment finding. Legal experts say its success could hinge on these details.

But a return to the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative could give Republicans an opportunity to attack Democrats’ affordability message.

Oklahoma's insurance commissioner wants to bar property insurers from denying claims or coverage based solely on aerial imagery.

The lawsuit comes as two federal judges this week nixed the administration's efforts to block offshore wind projects.

The court order is the second legal setback this week for the Trump administration’s offshore wind blockade.

A company claims its deep-sea approach to desalination would cut energy use by about 40 percent compared to conventional plants.

Alterra, among the world’s largest private investment vehicles for climate finance, said the fund will pursue a diversified global investment strategy across climate-aligned infrastructure, private equity and private credit.

Across China and Korea, readings may drop more than 10 degrees Celsius below normal levels, with some locations nearing records based on model guidance as of Thursday, said a meteorologist.

A study of five such certifications found they fail to publicly disclose enough emissions data to substantiate those claims.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 16 January 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-025-02541-5

Economists have spent a decade designing the perfect climate club, yet political reality has hitherto rendered these designs practically infeasible. The Open Coalition on Compliance Carbon Markets offers a path forward, but only if its architects recognize that understanding political feasibility is crucial to turning a declaration into a functioning carbon pricing club that could close the emissions gap.

The 1994 genocide in Rwanda took place over a little more than three months, during which militias representing the Hutu ethnic group conducted a mass murder of members of the Tutsi ethnic group along with some politically moderate members of the Hutu and Twa groups. Soon after, local citizens and aid workers began to document the atrocities that had occurred in the country.

They were establishing evidence of a genocide that many outsiders were slow to acknowledge; other countries and the U.N. did not recognize it until 1998. By preserving scenes of massacre and victims’ remains, this effort allowed foreigners, journalists, and neighbors to witness what had happened. Though the citizens’ work was emotionally and physically challenging, they used these sites of memory to seek justice for victims who had been killed and harmed.

In so doing, these efforts turned memory into officially recognized history. Now, in a new book, MIT scholar Delia Wendel carefully explores this work, shedding new light on the people who created the state’s genocide memorials, and the decisions they made in the process — such as making the remains of the dead available for public viewing. She also examines how the state gained control of the effort and has chosen to represent the past through these memorials.

“I’m seeking to recuperate this forgotten history of the ethics of the work, while also contending with the motivations of state sovereignty that has sustained it,” says Wendel, who is the Class of 1922 Career Development Associate Professor of Urban Studies and International Development in MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP).

That book, “Rwanda’s Genocide Heritage: Between Justice and Sovereignty,” is published by Duke University Press and is freely available through the MIT Libraries. In it, Wendel uncovers new details about the first efforts to preserve the memory of the genocide, analyzes the social and political dynamics, and examines their impact on people and public spaces.

“The shift from memory to history is important because it also requires recognition that is official or more public in nature,” Wendel says. “Survivors, their kin, their relatives, they know their histories. What they’re wishing to happen is a form of repair, or justice, or empowerment, that comes with disclosing those histories. That truth-telling aspect is really important.”

Conversations and memory

Wendel’s book was well over a decade in the making — and emerged from a related set of scholarly inquiries about peace-building activities in the wake of genocide. For this project, about memorializing genocide, Wendel visited over 30 villages in Rwanda over a span of many years, gradually making connections and building dialogues with citizens, in addition to conducting more conventional social science research.

“Speaking with rual residents started to unlock a lot of different types of conversations,” Wendel says of those visits. “A good deal of those conversations had to do with memory, and with relationships to place, neighbors, and authority.” She adds: “These are topics that people are very hesitant to speak about, and rightly so. This has been a book that took a long time to research and build some semblance of trust.”

During her research, Wendel also talked at length with some key figures involved in the process, including Louis Kanamugire, a Rwandan who became the first head of the country’s post-war Genocide Memorial Commission. Kanamugire, who lost his parents in the genocide, felt it was necessary to preserve and display the remains of genocide victims, including at four key sites that later become official state memorials.

This process involved, as Wendel puts it, the “gruesome” work of cleaning and preserving bodies and bones and preserving material remains to provide both material evidence of genocide and the grounds for beginning the work of societal repair and individual healing.

Wendel also uncovers, in detail for the first time, the work done by Mario Ibarra, a Chilean aid worker for the U.N. who also investigated atrocities, photographed evidence extensively, conducted preservation work, and contributed to the country’s Genocide Memorial Commission as well. The relationships between global human rights practice and genocide survivors seeking justice, in terms of preserving and documenting evidence, is at the core of the book and, Wendel believes, a previously underappreciated aspect of this topic.

“The story of Rwanda memorialization that has typically been told is one of state control,” Wendel says. “But in the beginning, the government followed independent initiatives by this human rights worker and local residents who really spurred this on.”

In the book, Wendel also examines how Rwanda’s memorialization practices relates to those of other countries, often in the so-called Global South. This phenomenon is something she terms “trauma heritage,” and has followed similar trajectories across countries in Africa and South America, for instance.

“Trauma heritage is the act of making visible the violence that had been actively hidden, and intervening in the dynamics of power,” she says. “Making such public spaces for silenced pain is a way of seeking recognition of those harms, and [seeking] forms of justice and repair.”

The tensions of memorialization

To be clear, Rwanda has been able to construct genocide memorials in the first place because, in the mid-1990s, Tutsi troops regained power in the country by defeating their Hutu adversaries. Subsequently, in a state without unlimited free expression, the government has considerable control over the content and forms of memorialization that take place.

Meanwhile, there have always been differing views about, say, displaying victims’ remains, and to what degree such a practice underlines their humanity or emphasizes the dehumanizing treatment they suffered. Then too, atrocities can produce a wide range of psychological responses among the living, including survivors’ guilt and the sheer difficulty many experience in expressing what they have witnessed. The process of memorialization, in such circumstances, will likely be fraught.

“The book is about the tensions and paradoxes between the ethics of this work and its politics, which have a lot to do with state sovereignty and control,” Wendel says. “It’s rooted in the tension between what’s invisible and what’s visible, between this bid to be seen and to recognize the humanity of the victims and yet represent this dehumanizing violence. These are irresolvable dilemmas that were felt by the people doing this work.”

Or, as Wendel writes in the book, Rwandans and others immersed in similar struggles for justice around the world have had to grapple with the “messy politics of repair, searching for seemingly impossible redress for injustice.”

Other experts have praised Wendel’s book, such as Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, a professor at Stellenbosch University in South Africa, who studies the psychological effects of mass violence. Gobodo-Madikizela has cited Wendel’s “extraordinary narratives” about the book’s principal figures, observing that they “not only preserve the remains but also reclaim the victims’ humanity. … Wendel shows how their labor becomes a defiant insistence on visibility that transforms the act of cleaning into a form of truth-telling, making injustice materially and spatially undeniable.”

For her part, Wendel hopes the book will engage readers interested in multiple related issues, including Rwandan and African history, the practices and politics of public memory, human rights and peace-building, and the design of public memorials and related spaces, including those built in the aftermath of traumatic historical episodes.

“Rwanda’s genocide heritage remains an important endeavor in memory justice, even if its politics need to be contended with at the same time,” Wendel says. 

Running large companies in construction, logistics, energy, and manufacturing requires careful coordination between millions of people, devices, and systems. For more than a decade, Samsara has helped those companies connect their assets to get work done more intelligently.

Founded by John Bicket SM ’05 and Sanjit Biswas SM ’05, Samsara’s platform gives companies with physical operations a central hub to track and learn from workers, equipment, and other infrastructure. Layered on top of that platform are real-time analytics and notifications designed to prevent accidents, reduce risks, save fuel, and more.

Tens of thousands of customers have used Samsara’s platform to improve their operations since its founding in 2015. Home Depot, for instance, used Samsara’s artificial intelligence-equipped dashcams to reduce their total auto liability claims by 65 percent in one year. Maxim Crane Works saved more than $13 million in maintenance costs using Samsara’s equipment and vehicle diagnostic data in 2024. Mohawk Industries, the world’s largest flooring manufacturer, improved their route efficiency and saved $7.75 million annually.

“It’s all about real-world impact,” says Biswas, Samsara’s CEO. “These organizations have complex operations and are functioning at a massive scale. Workers are driving millions of miles and consuming tons of fuel. If you can understand what’s happening and run analysis in the cloud, you can find big efficiency improvements. In terms of safety, these workers are putting their lives at risk every day to keep this infrastructure running. You can literally save lives if you can reduce risk.”

Finding big problems

Biswas and Bicket started PhD programs at MIT in 2002, both conducting research around networking in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). They eventually applied their studies to build a wireless network called MIT RoofNet.

Upon graduating with master’s degrees, Biswas and Bicket decided to commercialize the technologies they worked on, founding the company Meraki in 2006.

“How do you get big Wi-Fi networks out in the world?” Biswas asks. “With MIT RoofNet, we covered Cambridge in Wi-Fi. We wanted to enable other people to build big Wi-Fi networks and make Wi-Fi go mainstream for larger campuses and offices.”

Over the next six years, Meraki’s technology was used to create millions of Wi-Fi networks around the world. In 2012, Meraki was acquired by Cisco. Biswas and Bicket left Cisco in 2015, unsure of what they’d work on next.

“The way we found ourselves to Samsara was through the same curiosity we had as graduate students,” Biswas says. “This time it dealt more with the planet’s infrastructure. We were thinking about how utilities work, and how construction happens at the scale of cities and states. It drew us into operations, which is the infrastructure backbone of the planet.”

As the founders learned about industries like logistics, utilities, and construction, they realized they could use their technical background to improve safety and efficiency.

“All these industries have a lot in common,” Biswas says. “They have a lot of field workers — often thousands of them — they have a lot of assets like trucks and equipment, and they’re trying to orchestrate it all. The throughline was the importance of data.”

When they founded Samsara 10 years ago, many people were still collecting field data with pen and paper.

“Because of our technical background, we knew that if you could collect the data and run sophisticated algorithms like AI over it, you could get a ton of insights and improve the way those operations run,” Biswas says.

Biswas says extracting insights from data is easy. Making field-ready products and getting them into the hands of frontline workers took longer.

Samsara started by tapping into existing sensors in buildings, cars, and other assets. They also built their own, including AI-equipped cameras and GPS trackers that can monitor driving behavior. That formed the foundation of Samsara’s Connected Operations Platform. On top of that, Samsara Intelligence processes data in the cloud and provides insights like ways to calculate the best routes for commercial vehicles, be more proactive with maintenance, and reduce fuel consumption.

Samsara’s platform can be used to detect if a commercial vehicle or snowplow driver is on their phone and send an audio message nudging them to stay safe and focused. The platform can also deliver training and coaching.

“That’s the kind of thing that reduces risk, because workers are way less likely to be distracted,” Biswas says. “If you do for millions of workers, you reduce risk at scale.”

The platform also allows managers to query their data in a ChatGPT-style interface, asking questions such as: Who are my safest drivers? Which vehicles need maintenance? And what are my least fuel-efficient trucks?

“Our platform helps recognize frontline workers who are safe and efficient in their job,” Biswas says. “These people are largely unsung heroes. They keep our planet running, but they don’t hear ‘thank you’ very often. Samsara helps companies recognize the safest workers on the field and give them recognition and rewards. So, it’s about modernizing equipment but also improving the experience of millions of people that help run this vital infrastructure.”

Continuing to grow

Today Samsara processes 20 trillion data points a year and monitors 90 million miles of driving. The company employs about 4,000 people across North America and Europe.

“It still feels early for us,” Biswas says. “We’ve been around for 10 years and gotten some scale, but we needed to build this platform to be able to build more products and have more impact. If you step back, operations is 40 percent of the world’s GDP, so we see a lot of opportunities to do more with this data. For instance, weather is part of Samsara Intelligence, and weather is 20 to 25 percent of the risk, and so we’re training AI models to reduce risk from the weather. And on the sustainability side, the more data we have, the more we can help optimize for things like fuel consumption or transitioning to electric vehicles. Maintenance is another fascinating data problem.”

The founders have also maintained a connection with MIT — and not just because the City of Boston’s Department of Public Works and the MBTA are customers. Last year, the Biswas Family Foundation announced funding for a four-year postdoctoral fellowship program at MIT for early-stage researchers working to improve health care.

Biswas says Samsara’s journey has been incredibly rewarding and notes the company is well-positioned to leverage advances in AI to further its impact going forward.

“It’s been a lot of fun and also a lot of hard work,” Biswas says. “What’s exciting is that each decade of the company feels different. It’s almost like a new chapter — or a whole new book. Right now, there’s so many incredible things happening with data and AI. It feels as exciting as it did in the early days of the company. It feels very much like a startup.”

As a college student, Kevin Power never considered working in supply chain management; in fact, he didn’t know it was an option. He earned an undergraduate degree in manufacturing engineering while working full time at an oil refinery, which demanded a rigorous routine of shift work, long days, and evening classes.

After graduation, he found himself searching for new learning opportunities, and stumbled upon the online courses of the MITx MicroMasters Program in Supply Chain Management, an online program of the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics. Starting with Supply Chain Analytics (SC0x), Power was drawn in immediately by how directly applicable the lessons were to real work. 

“So many courses that you do are more theoretical,” he reflects. “Everything I learned, I could apply it directly to my work and see the value in doing it. So as soon as I finished Supply Chain Analytics, I decided, OK, I’ll finish the whole program.” What he didn’t yet know was that he belonged to the very audience the MicroMasters was designed for — lifelong learners. Learners are often working professionals who want deep, flexible training while continuing their careers.

After completing the five-course MicroMasters track and earning his credential, Power uncovered another opportunity: the MIT SCM Blended Master’s Program, which pairs the online credential with a one-semester, on-campus program, resulting in a master of applied science degree in supply chain management.

For Power, the blend of online and in-person learning proved pivotal. He describes his MicroMasters experience as fertile ground for deep, self-paced study. “I’m a very introverted kind of learner, so I prefer to just learn out of a textbook and online,” he says. But, once in the MIT SCM program, he tapped into the soft skills he needs to stand out in the industry. “When I came to campus, it was more about networking and being able to communicate with executives, on top of our academic work,” he says. The immersive environment of combining scholarly rigor with real-world experience among peers across the supply chain industry is at the heart of what the blended program aims to facilitate.

During his time on campus, Power’s research included simulation modeling in port shipping and generative-AI–driven projects focused on supply chain resilience. “I had never done simulation modeling before, and right now it’s huge in the industry,” he says. “If I were trying to apply for a simulation modeling job, I’m sure it would help me greatly having done this.” 

His project, completed with fellow MIT SCM student Yassine Lahlou-Kamal, was one of the winners at the 2025 Annual MIT Global SCALE Network Supply Chain Student Research Expo, in which students showcased their industry-sponsored thesis and capstone projects. This experience pays off in his current work with Elenna Dugundji in her Deep Knowledge Lab for Supply Chain and Logistics.

Beyond academics and research, Power threw himself into the fast-paced world of hackathons, despite having never participated in one before. “I’m very competitive,” Power confesses, “and I feel like I learn something new every time.” His first effort, an internal MIT competition called Hack-Nation’s Global AI Hackathon, earned him a win with an AI sports-betting agent project that fuses model-driven analysis with web scraping. Soon after, he tackled the OpenAI Red Teaming Challenge on Kaggle. Despite joining the competition halfway through the 15-day window, he raced through the final week and was selected as one of the winners. “It gave me a lot of confidence … that the things I’m working on right now are cutting-edge, even in the eyes of OpenAI.”

In terms of his return on investment in the degree, Power says, “I’m getting so much value out of being here. Even from just doing the Kaggle competition, I won more than the cost of my full MIT degree.” Long-term, Power has been impressed that “as far as I know, everybody that was looking for a job in the supply chain program has one.” The data back him up, as every student from the MIT SCM residential program Class of 2025 secured a job within six months of graduation.

Now a current master’s student in the MIT Technology and Policy Program, looking ahead, Power says, “I want to do a startup. A lot of the ideas came from research I’ve done here.” 

Reflecting on the transformation he’s experienced in just 10 months of the program, he calls it “crazy.” “The SCM program really is amazing … I’d recommend it to anyone.”

Born and raised in Japan as part of a military family, Christine Pilcavage knows first-hand about the value of an immersive approach to exploration. 

“Any experience in a different context improves an individual,” says Pilcavage, who has also lived in Cambodia, the Philippines, and Kenya. 

It’s that ethos that Pilcavage brings to her role as managing director of MISTI Japan, which connects MIT students and faculty to Institute collaborators in Japan. In her role, Pilcavage sends students to Japan for internship and research opportunities. She also shares Japanese culture on campus with activities like Ikebana classes during Independent Activities Period and a Japanese Film Festival.

MIT’s connection to Japan dates back before 1874, when its first Japanese student graduated. Later, 1911 saw the foundation of the MIT Association of Japan, Japan’s first MIT trans-Pacific alumni club. That organization later evolved into the MIT Club of Japan. 

MISTI Japan predates the MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives (MISTI)’s creation. The MIT-Japan Program was established in 1981 to prepare MIT students to be better scientists and engineers who understand and work effectively with Japan. The program sought to foster a deeper U.S.-Japan collaboration in science and technology amidst Japan's growing economic and technological power. MIT-Japan began sending students to Japan in 1983. 

Students in the MIT-Japan Program complete a three-to-12-month internship at their host institution, and the immersive experiences are invaluable. “Japan is so different from the Western world,” Pilcavage notes. “For example, in Japanese, verbs end sentences, so it’s important to develop patience and listen carefully when communicating.”

Pilcavage believes there is tremendous value in creating and supporting a program like MISTI at MIT. Traveling to areas outside the Institute and the United States can expose students to diverse cultures, aid the exploration of challenges, help them discover solutions, improve language learning, and foster communication. 

“We want our students to think and create,” she says. “They need to see beyond the MIT bubble and think carefully about how to solve difficult problems and help others.”

Japan, Pilcavage continues, is monocultural in ways the United States isn’t. While English is spoken in larger cities, it’s harder to find it spoken in rural areas. “MIT students teach STEM topics to rural Japanese kids in Japanese,” Pilcavage says, citing a program that’s been teaching STEAM workshops in the tsunami-affected area in Northern Japan since 2017. “Learning to code switch means they improve their language skills while also learning important cultural nuances, like body language.”

Pilcavage emphasizes the importance of “learning differently” for MIT students and the Japanese people with whom they interact. “I wanted our students to engage with the local population,” she says, encouraging them to develop what she calls “cultural resilience.”

Journey to MIT

Pilcavage — whose educational background includes master’s degrees in international affairs and public health, and undergraduate study in economics and psychology — has also worked with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the Japanese government, the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), and the World Health Organization on global health and educational issues in Africa and Asia. 

Pilcavage first came to Cambridge, Massachusetts, looking for hands-on experience in public health and community outcomes in a role with Management Sciences for Health, co-founded by MIT Sloan School of Management alumnus Ron O’Connor SM ’71. There, she investigated reproductive and women’s health and supported a Japanese nonprofit affiliated with the organization.

She has since developed strong ties to Cambridge and MIT. “I was married in the MIT Chapel to an MIT alum, and our reception was held in Walker Memorial,” she says. “I was a migratory bird who landed on a tree, and my husband is the tree that has deep local roots here.” 

In keeping with her ethos of overcoming roadblocks to success, Pilcavage encourages students to challenge themselves. “I’ve tried to model that behavior throughout my career,” she says.

Following her arrival at MIT In 2013, Pilcavage worked with the Comprehensive Initiative on Technology Evaluation (CITE), an MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning project established in 2012 to develop new methods for product evaluation in global development. Formerly funded by USAID, Pilcavage administered the $10 million research program, which sought to learn which low-cost interventions worked best by evaluating products designed for people living in lower-income communities. 

“It’s important to learn how to manage real-world challenges and deal with them effectively,” she argues. “Creating a collaborative environment in which people can discover solutions is how things get done.”

A career of service

Pilcavage has been recognized for her outstanding contributions to encouraging positive relations between America and Japan. She received the Foreign Minister's Commendation from the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the John E. Thayer III Award from the Japan Society of Boston.

“I’m honored to join a community of people who have dedicated their lives to strengthening ties between the U.S. and Japan,” Pilcavage says when asked about the awards. “It’s exciting and humbling to be recognized for doing something I love.” 

“Chris is a determined, empathetic leader who inspires our students and is committed to advancing both MIT’s mission and U.S.-Japan relations,” says Richard Samuels, the Ford International Professor of Political Science at MIT, and founder and faculty director of MISTI Japan. “I can think of no one more deserving of these awards.”

Pilcavage is excited about new MISTI Japan initiatives that are in development or already underway. “We’re launching our first global classroom with [MIT historian] Hiromu Nagahara and [lecturer in Japanese] Takako Aikawa,” she notes. “Students will visit cities like Kyoto and Hiroshima, and explore Japanese history and culture up close.”

Additionally, Pilcavage is developing social impact workshops and consistently questioning how to improve MIT Japan’s work and its impact. She’s always looking for new projects and new ways to engage and encourage students. “How can I make the program better?” she asks when considering MISTI Japan and its value to MIT and its students. 

“I tell people I have the best job in the world,” she says. “I get to share my culture with the MIT community and work with the best colleagues who are nurturing and supportive. I believe I’ve found my home here.”

EFF last summer asked a federal judge to block the federal government from using Medicaid data to identify and deport immigrants.  

We also warned about the danger of the Trump administration consolidating all of the government’s information into a single searchable, AI-driven interface with help from Palantir, a company that has a shaky-at-best record on privacy and human rights. 

Now we have the first evidence that our concerns have become reality. 

“Palantir is working on a tool for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that populates a map with potential deportation targets, brings up a dossier on each person, and provides a “confidence score” on the person’s current address,” 404 Media reports today. “ICE is using it to find locations where lots of people it might detain could be based.” 

The tool – dubbed Enhanced Leads Identification & Targeting for Enforcement (ELITE) – receives peoples’ addresses from the Department of Health and Human Services (which includes Medicaid) and other sources, 404 Media reports based on court testimony in Oregon by law enforcement agents, among other sources. 

This revelation comes as ICE – which has gone on a surveillance technology shopping spree – floods Minneapolis with agents, violently running roughshod over the civil rights of immigrants and U.S. citizens alike; President Trump has threatened to use the Insurrection Act of 1807 to deploy military troops against protestors there. Other localities are preparing for the possibility of similar surges. 

Different government agencies necessarily collect information to provide essential services or collect taxes, but the danger comes when the government begins pooling that data and using it for reasons unrelated to the purpose it was collected.

This kind of consolidation of government records provides enormous government power that can be abused. Different government agencies necessarily collect information to provide essential services or collect taxes, but the danger comes when the government begins pooling that data and using it for reasons unrelated to the purpose it was collected. 

As EFF Executive Director Cindy Cohn wrote in a Mercury News op-ed last August, “While couched in the benign language of eliminating government ‘data silos,’ this plan runs roughshod over your privacy and security. It’s a throwback to the rightly mocked ‘Total Information Awareness’ plans of the early 2000s that were, at least publicly, stopped after massive outcry from the public and from key members of Congress. It’s time to cry out again.” 

In addition to the amicus brief we co-authored challenging ICE’s grab for Medicaid data, EFF has successfully sued over DOGE agents grabbing personal data from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, filed an amicus brief in a suit challenging ICE’s grab for taxpayer data, and sued the departments of State and Homeland Security to halt a mass surveillance program to monitor constitutionally protected speech by noncitizens lawfully present in the U.S. 

But litigation isn’t enough. People need to keep raising concerns via public discourse and Congress should act immediately to put brakes on this runaway train that threatens to crush the privacy and security of each and every person in America.  

Quantum computers could rapidly solve complex problems that would take the most powerful classical supercomputers decades to unravel. But they’ll need to be large and stable enough to efficiently perform operations. To meet this challenge, researchers at MIT and elsewhere are developing trapped-ion quantum computers based on ultra-compact photonic chips. These chip-based systems offer a scalable alternative to existing trapped-ion quantum computers, which rely on bulky optical equipment.

The ions in these quantum computers must be cooled to extremely cold temperatures to minimize vibrations and prevent errors. So far, such trapped-ion systems based on photonic chips have been limited to inefficient and slow cooling methods.

Now, a team of researchers at MIT and MIT Lincoln Laboratory has implemented a much faster and more energy-efficient method for cooling trapped ions using photonic chips. Their approach achieved cooling to about 10 times below the limit of standard laser cooling.

Key to this technique is a photonic chip that incorporates precisely designed antennas to manipulate beams of tightly focused, intersecting light.

The researchers’ initial demonstration takes a key step toward scalable chip-based architectures that could someday enable quantum computing systems with greater efficiency and stability.

“We were able to design polarization-diverse integrated-photonics devices, utilize them to develop a variety of novel integrated-photonics-based systems, and apply them to show very efficient ion cooling. However, this is just the beginning of what we can do using these devices. By introducing polarization diversity to integrated-photonics-based trapped-ion systems, this work opens the door to a variety of advanced operations for trapped ions that weren’t previously attainable, even beyond efficient ion cooling — all research directions we are excited to explore in the future,” says Jelena Notaros, the Robert J. Shillman Career Development Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) at MIT, a member of the Research Laboratory of Electronics, and senior author of a paper on this architecture.

She is joined on the paper by lead authors Sabrina Corsetti, an EECS graduate student; Ethan Clements, a former postdoc who is now a staff scientist at MIT Lincoln Laboratory; Felix Knollmann, a graduate student in the Department of Physics; John Chiaverini, senior member of the technical staff at Lincoln Laboratory and a principal investigator in MIT’s Center for Quantum Engineering; as well as others at Lincoln Laboratory and MIT. The research appears today in two joint publications in Light: Science and Applications and Physical Review Letters.

Seeking scalability

While there are many types of quantum systems, this research is focused on trapped-ion quantum computing. In this application, a charged particle called an ion is formed by peeling an electron from an atom, and then trapped using radio-frequency signals and manipulated using optical signals.

Researchers use lasers to encode information in the trapped ion by changing its state. In this way, the ion can be used as a quantum bit, or qubit. Qubits are the building blocks of a quantum computer.

To prevent collisions between ions and gas molecules in the air, the ions are held in vacuum, often created with a device known as a cryostat. Traditionally, bulky lasers sit outside the cryostat and shoot different light beams through the cryostat’s windows toward the chip. These systems require a room full of optical components to address just a few dozen ions, making it difficult to scale to the large numbers of ions needed for advanced quantum computing. Slight vibrations outside the cryostat can also disrupt the light beams, ultimately reducing the accuracy of the quantum computer.

To get around these challenges, MIT researchers have been developing integrated-photonics-based systems. In this case, the light is emitted from the same chip that traps the ion. This improves scalability by eliminating the need for external optical components.

“Now, we can envision having thousands of sites on a single chip that all interface up to many ions, all working together in a scalable way,” Knollmann says.

But integrated-photonics-based demonstrations to date have achieved limited cooling efficiencies.

Keeping their cool

To enable fast and accurate quantum operations, researchers use optical fields to reduce the kinetic energy of the trapped ion. This causes the ion to cool to nearly absolute zero, an effective temperature even colder than cryostats can achieve.

But common methods have a higher cooling floor, so the ion still has a lot of vibrational energy after the cooling process completes. This would make it hard to use the qubits for high-quality computations.

The MIT researchers utilized a more complex approach, known as polarization-gradient cooling, which involves the precise interaction of two beams of light.

Each light beam has a different polarization, which means the field in each beam is oscillating in a different direction (up and down, side to side, etc.). Where these beams intersect, they form a rotating vortex of light that can force the ion to stop vibrating even more efficiently.

Although this approach had been shown previously using bulk optics, it hadn’t been shown before using integrated photonics.

To enable this more complex interaction, the researchers designed a chip with two nanoscale antennas, which emit beams of light out of the chip to manipulate the ion above it.

These antennas are connected by waveguides that route light to the antennas. The waveguides are designed to stabilize the optical routing, which improves the stability of the vortex pattern generated by the beams.

“When we emit light from integrated antennas, it behaves differently than with bulk optics. The beams, and generated light patterns, become extremely stable. Having these stable patterns allows us to explore ion behaviors with significantly more control,” Clements says.

The researchers also designed the antennas to maximize the amount of light that reaches the ion. Each antenna has tiny curved notches that scatter light upward, spaced just right to direct light toward the ion.

“We built upon many years of development at Lincoln Laboratory to design these gratings to emit diverse polarizations of light,” Corsetti says.

They experimented with several architectures, characterizing each to better understand how it emitted light.

With their final design in place, the researchers demonstrated ion cooling that was nearly 10 times below the limit of standard laser cooling, referred to as the Doppler limit. Their chip was able to reach this limit in about 100 microseconds, several times faster than other techniques.

“The demonstration of enhanced performance using optics integrated in the ion-trap chip lays the foundation for further integration that can allow new approaches for quantum-state manipulation, and that could improve the prospects for practical quantum-information processing,” adds Chiaverini. “Key to achieving this advance was the cross-Institute collaboration between the MIT campus and Lincoln groups, a model that we can build on as we take these next steps.”

In the future, the team plans to conduct characterization experiments on different chip architectures and demonstrate polarization-gradient cooling with multiple ions. In addition, they hope to explore other applications that could benefit from the stable light beams they can generate with this architecture.

Other authors who contributed to this research are Ashton Hattori (MIT), Zhaoyi Li (MIT), Milica Notaros (MIT), Reuel Swint (Lincoln Laboratory), Tal Sneh (MIT), Patrick Callahan (Lincoln Laboratory), May Kim (Lincoln Laboratory), Aaron Leu (MIT), Gavin West (MIT), Dave Kharas (Lincoln Laboratory), Thomas Mahony (Lincoln Laboratory), Colin Bruzewicz (Lincoln Laboratory), Cheryl Sorace-Agaskar (Lincoln Laboratory), Robert McConnell (Lincoln Laboratory), and Isaac Chuang (MIT).

This work is funded, in part, by the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. National Science Foundation, the MIT Center for Quantum Engineering, the U.S. Department of Defense, an MIT Rolf G. Locher Endowed Fellowship, and an MIT Frederick and Barbara Cronin Fellowship.

This isn’t good:

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