0 University assists first responders, area residents after Hurricane Sandy

Posted November 8, 2012; 07:01 a.m.by Office of Communications

As Princeton Borough and Princeton Township started recovering from the havoc caused by Hurricane Sandy, about 150 first responders working during the storm were provided with free meals by the University's Dining Services. Local residents whose homes lost power were invited to warm up, recharge phones and other electronic devices and use wireless Internet service at a hospitality center on campus.

The hospitality center, which was opened at the request of the Princeton municipal emergency operations center, "was just one of a number of ways that the University looked to provide resources to the community during the emergency," said Kristin Appelget, the University's director of community and regional affairs.

The University also offered a heavy duty electricity generator for use by Princeton municipal authorities if necessary.

Students affiliated with the University's Pace Center for Civic Engagement also volunteered at a community respite center at the John Witherspoon Middle School, where Princeton residents who lost power during Hurricane Sandy were able to take showers, charge electronic devices, get food and stay overnight.

The University's TigerTransit system provided free shuttle bus service between Princeton Junction station and the Princeton station while the "Dinky" train service was suspended in the aftermath of the storm. The TigerTransit service continued until New Jersey Transit began running shuttle buses on the route.

The University, which also lost power from the public electricity provider, had to shut down many administrative and academic buildings and run critical functions on limited power from the University's independent cogeneration plant for more than 24 hours. The plant can generate 13 megawatts of electricity, which is significantly less than the maximum campus demand when all buildings are fully operational.

However, University buildings that depend solely on electric power from the public grid remained without power for extended periods of time, and power was not restored to some University housing until Monday, Nov. 5.

Due to continued power outages in the Princeton area, several polling stations were relocated to the University’s Computer Science Building on Olden Street and the University's Jadwin Gym, where a large section of the parking area was reserved for voters. More than 3,400 voters from municipal districts 1, 2, 4, 14, 15, 16 and 20 cast their votes on campus on Nov. 6.

The meals for the first responders, students who remained on campus during fall recess and employees on duty were prepared and served by a small team of Dining Services employees who were able to make it to work.

"We always use the phrase, 'it's all about food, mood and attitude,'" said Stu Orefice, executive director of Dining Services. "Despite the challenges that they faced, our staff maintained a positive attitude, and our goal was to share that spirit through our service."

Orefice continued working even though his own house was badly damaged by the storm.

"We were operating with a lean but dedicated team that made literally hundreds of people happy — by serving nearly 9,000 hot and cold meals over five days," he said. "When Frist Campus Center opened its doors on Wednesday, not many restaurants in town were open, so members of the Princeton community started coming in, and we were selling as much as we do when all our students are back."

Elsewhere on campus, hundreds of employees, many of whom were unable to reach their homes, worked in shifts to keep critical University functions running. The storm felled about 110 trees, which blocked roads and damaged vehicles, fences and other property. No injuries were reported.

Throughout the storm the University coordinated its efforts with a joint emergency operations center for Princeton Borough and Princeton Township.

The University's response to the hurricane was coordinated through an emergency operations center on campus, which was staffed by representatives from the Department of Public Safety, Facilities, Dining Services, University Services, Office of Information Technology (OIT), Office of Environmental Health and Safety, University Health Services, Campus Life, Office of the Dean of Undergraduate Students, Office of the Dean of the Graduate School, Office of Human Resources, and Office of Communications, among others.

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0 Physicists and engineers at Stanford take first step toward quantum cryptography

Stanford Report, November 15, 2012

Stanford researchers demonstrate the first step in a scalable quantum cryptography system that could lead to uncrackable telecommunications.

By Bjorn Carey

Furqan M Fazal

The spin-photon entanglement experimental apparatus.

Quantum mechanics offers the potential to create absolutely secure telecommunications networks by harnessing a fundamental phenomenon of quantum particles. Now, a team of Stanford physicists has demonstrated a crucial first step in creating a quantum telecommunications device that could be built and implemented using existing infrastructure.

Quantum cryptography relies on the curious aspect of quantum mechanics by which pairs of electrons can become "entangled." Electrons have a property called "spin": Just as a bar magnet can point up or down, so too can the spin of an electron. When electrons become entangled, their spins mirror each other.

If the spin of electron A is found to be pointing "up," then electron B's spin will also point up. If electron A's spin measures "down," so too would electron B's. An amazing feature of entangled electrons is that this pairing persists no matter the distance between electron A and electron B.

This behavior can be applied to create a perfectly secure communications network, which is of great interest to governments as well as members of private industry, such as banks. If one has a set of electrons in San Francisco and another set in New York, and the electrons can be made to be entangled, then it is possible to distribute cryptographic keys – strings of 1s and 0s, in which the different electron spin directions correspond to either 1 or 0 – between San Francisco and New York. The nature of quantum entanglement means it would be impossible for an eavesdropper to intercept the keys without the original parties noticing.

The work done by the Stanford research group of Yoshihisa Yamamoto, a professor of applied physics and of electrical engineering, in collaboration with the group of applied physics Professor Martin Fejer, provides a solution to one of the key wrinkles of quantum telecommunications. In the example above, the electrons are thousands of miles apart, so they can't be directly entangled; instead, they become entangled by sending photons between the two over fiber optic cables.

In this case, the San Francisco-based sender would coax its electron to emit a photon, which would itself be entangled to the electron. The New York-based recipient's electron would also emit an entangled photon, and when the two photons interact, the electrons on either end would then become entangled and share the same quantum spin.

A challenge is that light "leaks" from even the best fiber optic cables; current systems employ multiple devices called "repeaters" that receive a fading light signal and then amplify and reproduce it to send to the end recipient. In order to transmit quantum messages, scientists need to build "quantum repeater" systems that enable entanglement between electrons to be created over many repeater stations between the start and end locations.

Quantum telecommunication networks such as this are still years away, but the new Stanford research – published this week in Nature, with recent PhD graduate Kristiaan De Greve as lead author – demonstrates a critical first step in that chain.

Other researchers have entangled an electron and photon and created a memory using the electron, but those efforts required complex systems that are bulky and difficult to duplicate. The new approach, however, is potentially easier to scale up to systems that have many entangled pairs of electrons, said one of the study co-authors, Peter McMahon, an electrical engineering PhD candidate at Stanford.

The Stanford group used a quantum dot array – provided by collaborators at the University of Würzburg in Germany – that sits on a postage stamp-size semiconductor chip that contains a layer that is covered with millions of tiny bubbles, or dots. Each of these so-called quantum dots contains a single electron; in essence, each quantum dot is an artificial atom. By focusing a laser on a single dot, the researchers excited the electron inside and caused it to emit a photon. Tests showed that the emitted photon's orientation corresponded to the electron's spin direction, confirming that the photon and electron were quantum entangled.

An advantage of quantum dot arrays is that they could be produced using standard semiconductor-manufacturing technology. A single chip could contain millions of dots, arranged in a regular grid layout that would allow for the generation of long keys at high speeds.

Another experimental first achieved by the Stanford group is that the photon entangled with the electron is produced at the optimal frequency for transmission along fiber optic cables. The ability to slide into existing telecommunications networks and the ease of manufacture make Stanford's approach particularly appealing for future research, McMahon said.

The next step will involve building a receiver and confirming that electrons on both ends become entangled. And though that work could take several years, McMahon and his colleagues are optimistic. "We have demonstrated a fundamental building block of a quantum repeater node," he said. "It should not be impossible to create the second link."

The paper by Kristiaan De Greve and co-contributors Leo Yu, Peter McMahon, Jason Pelc et al. appears in Nature, Vol. 491. The work was done in collaboration with researchers from the University of Würzburg and Heriot-Watt University.

The work was supported by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Special Coordination Funds for Promoting Science and Technology, and the State of Bavaria. Funding also came from the Herb and Jane Dwight Stanford Graduate Fellowship, a David Cheriton Stanford Graduate Fellowship and a Robert N. Noyce Stanford Graduate Fellowship.

Kristiaan De Greve, lead author: kdegreve@stanford.edu

Bjorn Carey, Stanford News Service: (650) 725-1944, bccarey@stanford.edu

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