Thermal radiation from nuclear reactions in our sun is the sunlight which sustains life on earth today and powered the photosynthetic processes responsible for the inexpensive fossil fuels which have made possible mankind’s present prosperity.  Investigations of photovoltaics and photoelectrocatalysts for artificial solar photosynthesis have been ongoing for decades and the fundamental processes involved are well known.

The interconnect fabric is taking an ever-more dominant portion of the power budget and optical interconnects are already used today within datacenters for rack to rack interconnection to overcome the limits of electrical signaling. However, the switches interconnecting these racks have inadequate capacity to continue to scale with CMOS-based technology due to fundamental limitation of on-chip interconnects and power consumption and pin-count of scheduler ASICs .

The dependence on oil and other fossil fuels for over 80% of our energy and the continued emission of carbon dioxide threatening stable climate are captured in a single term: sustainability.  Although we generally agree that sustainability is valuable, there is less agreement on how much sustainability is necessary or desirable.

There is no doubt that the provision of energy to the world will be one of the defining challenges of the 21st century and our ability to raise to it will define our generation to future ones. Supplying the ever increasing demand of the world without inflicting considerable environmental impact and at a cost which does not stifle prosperity, especially in developing and emerging countries, will require a tremendous amount of ingenuity. A large amount of energy is consumed in the transportation of peoples and goods.

Survivable passive optical networks are desirable for applications in environments that are vulnerable and where providing power to the network infrastructure is difficult.

Transient stability is the ability of a power system to remain in synchronism when subjected to large disturbances and severe fluctuation in generation or load. This problem is receiving renewed attention because of the rising complexity of power grids and because of the stochastic nature of renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power. In this talk, Bullo and Dörfler present novel algebraic conditions for transient stability in power systems.

During the last two decades, a phenomenal growth has taken place in the deployment of solar cells or panels. The market has grown from about 40 MW in 1990 to more than 1500 MW  in 2010, and the price of the panels has gone down from about $7 /watt to less than $2 /watt during the same period. Innovation has played a key role in reducing the cost of manufacturing of the cells and modules. The goal is to reach grid parity without any incentive or subsidy.

The Shockley-Queisser (SQ) limit for a single junction solar cell is ~33.5 (under the standard AM1.5 flat-plate, solar spectrum).  Indeed detailed calculations show that GaAs is capable of achieving this efficiency. Nonetheless, the record GaAs solar cell had achieved only 26.4% efficiency in 2010.  Previously, the record had been stuck at 25.1% for almost two decades.  Why then the 7% discrepancy between the theoretical limit 33.4% versus the achieved efficiency of 26.4%?

Energy and water are precious, global, and interconnected resources. Water provides hydroelectric power and plays a growing role for irrigation of energy crops. At the same time, the thermoelectric sector is the largest user of water in the U.S., withdrawing 200 billion gallons daily for powerplant cooling. And while the energy sector uses water, the water sector is responsible for about ten percent of national energy consumption for moving, pumping, treating, and heating water.

Graphene, a unique two-dimensional carbon material, has many excellent properties, such  [HuiMing Cheng] as high specific surface area, good chemical stability, ultrahigh mobility, high electrical and thermal conductivity, as well as high mechanical strength and Young’s modulus. Therefore, graphene and its composite materials are expected to be used in many fields. This talk will focus on the synthesis and exploration of applications of graphene, graphene networks and their composite materials.