Deep Blue Sweeps Through
Wireless Transmission at High Speed
Visualizing Ancient Artifacts
Honors
LabNotes
Nanotechnology
Putting The Squeeze on Bucky Balls
Microfluidic Manipulation
Measuring Minuscule Forces
Magnetism vs. Superconductivity
Cosmic Turbulence
The D-Wave to High Tc
Deep Blue Sweeps Through
Taking a giant leap for machinekind, the 1997 version of Deep Blue®,
the chess-playing computer designed at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center,
defeated human world champion Garry Kasparov by 3.5 games to 2.5. Deep Blue's
reversal of last year's loss to Kasparov astonished the chess world. For IBM, the
victory marked a beginning rather than an end. The Watson team, headed by C.J.
Tan, is now seeking ways to exploit Deep Blues technology.
Winning two games outright, to Kasparov's one, Deep Blue showed itself a more
formidable opponent than the version of a year ago. Improvements were made
to both the hardware and software of the system, including the incorporation of
chess knowledge supplied by Joel Benjamin, a chess grandmaster who worked with
the Watson team.
"The biggest improvement involved changes in Deep Blues evaluation
functions for different positions and other parameters," explains team
member Murray Campbell. As a result, Deep Blue played better positional and
strategic chess. The doubling of Deep Blues speed of calculation allowed those
extensive positional evaluations to take place.
The team is now seeking ways to apply its technology. One possibility is
developing commercial chess ventures. Deep Blue software might be accessed on
the Internet. Deep Blues fundamental approach, which uses special-purpose
processors in parallel with general-purpose machines, has potential in other
applications. The most promising is the design of pharmaceuticals. To that end,
Watson researchers are working on a chip that calculates the forces between
atoms in a molecule.
For more information see http://www.chess.ibm.com
Wireless Transmission at High Speed
IBM researchers working on high-speed radio frequency wireless network
technology have transmitted data at speeds of 38 megabits per second (Mbps)
under laboratory conditions. That highest-ever wireless performance matches the
best speed in wired data links in corporate communication environments. It far
exceeds the 2 Mbps limit of current wireless local area networks.
The work forms part of an effort to develop a commercial low-cost
radiofrequency wireless network technology that transmits virtually error-free
data at up to 10 Mbps. "We've proven that an affordable and robust wireless
data link can operate reliably in indoor environments,"says Modest
Oprysko, senior manager of communication technology at IBM's Thomas J. Watson
Research Center.
The keys to IBM's patent-pending transmission technology are advanced
algorithms and coding based on digital signal processing techniques. These solve
the "multipath" transmission problems
responsible for effects similar to "ghosts" in television
reception that have bedeviled previous efforts to design high-speed radio links
for indoor use.
Visualizing Ancient Artifacts
The moche civilization, a pre-Incan culture which flourished on the coast of
northern Peru between the first and eighth centuries A.D., declined suddenly,
leaving no written records. Archaeologists from the Wiese Foundation in Lima
recently found a clue to the Moche lifestyle and religion: the disintegrated
painted ceiling of a building that may have been used for sacrifices.
Unfortunately, physical restoration proved impossible. The ceiling had
collapsed and broken into about 5,000 pieces some as small as a thumbnail, most
no larger than a fist, and all too fragile to be handled.
Coincidentally, Guillermo Wiese, head of the foundation, read an
advertisement promoting IBM's involvement with the reassembly of broken fossil
fragments in Morocco. Hoping that the Moche find could benefit from similar
technology, he contacted IBM Peru, who in turn contacted Alan Kalvin at IBM's
Thomas J. Watson Research Center. Kalvin agreed to help. A team consisting of
Kalvin, Alfredo Remy of IBM Peru, students from the Pontifical Catholic
University in Lima, the Wiese Foundation, and Watson's Data Explorer(TM)
software group developed a computer-assisted visualization system specifically
to restore the temple ceiling.
The system, called ARMADO (the Spanish word for "assemble") and
built with the IBM Visualization Data Explorer toolkit, enhances the traditional
way in which archaeologists restore paintings, says Kalvin. It enables
archaeologists and scientists to collaborate in a way that benefits from each
groups area of expertise. In fact, primary restorer Victor Fernandez learned to
operate it independently within a few days, even though he had never used a
computer before.
The delicate condition of the fragments mandated that they be digitized
on-site. The scanned images were then transferred to an IBM RS/6000(TM)
workstation at the University for restoration. There, the restorers used ARMADO
to recover the figures painted on the ceiling and recreate the historical
narrative depicted there. They do this by identifying pieces to be grouped,
based on such criteria as colors, textures and numbers of paint layers, and then
manipulate potential matches on the computer monitor.
To date, restorers have put together half a dozen painted figures, from
about 100 pieces. The team expects to complete the restoration within a few
months. While those fragments make up less than half the ceiling, archaeologists
think that they provide enough evidence to interpret their religious
significance.
Honors
Charles H. Bennett, of the Thomas J. Watson Research Center, has been
elected a Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, one of the highest honors
that can be awarded to an American scientist or engineer. Bennett is recognized
worldwide for his contributions to the fundamental understanding of the
relationship of physics to computation and communication. He demonstrated that
the energy dissipation in computation could be made arbitrarily small provided
no information was discarded at any step and the computation was done slowly
enough. He resolved the famous demon paradox posed by Clerk Maxwell in 1867. And
along with Gilles Brassard of the Universit de Montreal he invented quantum
cryptography, which uses the uncertainty principle to protect secret messages
from eavesdropping.
The Personal Area Network (PAN) was a finalist in the Discover Awards
Computer Hardware and Electronics category. Developed by Thomas Zimmerman,
currently of IBM's Almaden Research Lab, PAN uses the natural electrical
conductivity of the human body to transmit data between electronic devices.
IBM Fellow Gottfried Ungerboeck of the Zurich Research Laboratory has shared
the 1997 Australia Prize, for contributions to the field of telecommunications.
The prestigious award recognizes Ungerboeck's development of trellis-coded
modulation (TCM), which enables reliable data transmission over telephone lines
and other transmission media at far higher speeds than previously thought
possible. Without Ungerboeck and his invention, said Australian Science and
Technology Minister Peter McGauran, "the telecommunications revolution
would have stalled long ago."
Stuart S. Parkin of the Almaden Research Center has been named a winner of
the prestigious 1997 Hewlett-Packard Europhysics Prize, given by the European
Physical Society to scientists who have made an outstanding contribution
to condensed matter physics within the last five years, with the potential for
leading advances in electronic, electrical or materials engineering."
Parkin shares the award with Albert Fert of the Universit de Paris Sud and Peter
Gruenberg of the German national physics laboratory in Julich. The three
physicists are cited for their discovery and contribution to
understanding of the giant magnetoresistive effect in transition-metal
multilayers and their demonstration of its potential for technological
applications."
LabNotes
Haifa Lab Celebrates a Quarter-Century
With an evening meal and a morning symposium, the Haifa Research Laboratory
celebrated the 25th anniversary of its birth. In large measure, the events
represented a tribute to Joe Raviv, who founded the institution in 1972 as a
four-person operation and has continued to guide it since. "I'm here
because of Joe," Nick Donofrio, IBM senior vice president and group
executive, server group, told the evening audience.
During Raviv's quarter-century in charge, the laboratory has grown from a
local center devoted strictly to Israeli problems to an operation that benefits
IBM business units worldwide. Today's Haifa deals with topics as diverse as
telecommunications technology, web navigation, Java(TM), data sharing and
multimedia technology.
The symposium, titled Network Computing in the Year 2000, reflected those
interests. It focused heavily on the fact that "information technology is
going to change everything," in the words of Paul Horn, IBM's senior vice
president, research. "In the next ten years," said Horn, "the
PC will be as different from what it is today as the present PC is from the 1987
mainframe."
Nanotechnology
A new breed of devices and technologies, based on atomic- and
molecular-scale manipulation, is beginning to appear on the technological
horizon. Using novel techniques many of which stem from the IBM-invented
scanning tunneling microscope and atomic force microscope scientists are both
extending our knowledge of the "nanoworld" and exploring entirely new
forms of information-handling and sensing technologies. IBM Research's pioneering
work in nanotechnology was recognized with the 1997 Editors Choice award for
Emerging Technology at the Eighth Annual Discover Magazine Awards for
Technological Innovation.
Putting The Squeeze on Buckyballs
Scientists from IBM's Zurich Research Laboratory and Frances National Center
of Scientific Research (CNRS) have demonstrated the worlds smallest
electromechanical amplifier. Its active element consists of a single molecule
0.7 nanometers in diameter, whose electrical resistance changes when it is
squeezed by the tip of a scanning tunneling microscope (STM). The size of the
STM tip determines the amplifiers size.
The heart of the amplifier is a carbon-60 molecule, the "buckyball"
whose discovery won the 1996 Nobel Prize in chemistry. The team positioned an
STM tip on top of a buckyball molecule resting on a copper surface, and allowed
a tunneling current to flow between the tip and the copper through the
buckyball.
Calculations by theorists at CNRS had indicated that deforming the molecule
slightly would significantly reduce its electrical resistance. Indeed, the IBM
team found that squeezing the molecule by lowering the STM tip one-tenth of a
nanometer reduced the buckyball's resistance, by a factor of one hundred. That
permitted electrons to tunnel more easily through the molecule. The result: a
fivefold voltage gain in the overall circuit. The effect proved reversible. When
the team raised the tip and the molecule assumed its original shape, its
resistance returned to the normal value.
The researchers published their work in the February 7, 1997, issue of
Chemical Physics Letters. "Our research is pragmatically aimed to
demonstrate the possibilities in bottom-up approaches to fabrication," says
Zurich's James Gimzewski. "We expect the next decade to hold many surprises
at the level of the single molecule."
Microfluidic Manipulation
Researchers at the Zurich Research Laboratory have demonstrated a simple
technique for attaching active biological proteins to a variety of substrates,
while conserving the proteins in their natural state. The work points to a means
of integrating molecules directly with electronic devices. That could hasten the
arrival of a new generation of biological sensors able to perform diagnostic
medical tests using significantly less blood than current methods require. The
technology is also simple. "[It] requires only environments typical of
biological and chemical laboratories," the team reports in the May 2, 1997,
issue of Science magazine.
"We use microfluidic networks ultraminiature liquid conduits 50 times
smaller than the diameter of a human hair to guide tiny quantities of proteins
across a surface with great accuracy and precision," explains team member
Emmanuel Delamarche. "Polymer films form the reusable networks directly on
a surface. By initiating chemical reactions in the conduits, active proteins can
be guided and fixed in place in a predetermined pattern that follows the twists
and turns of the conduits." Since each conduit in the network is
independent of the others, the method permits many different proteins to be
attached in distinct patterns on the surface simultaneously.
Traditional patterning techniques used to make computer chips cannot be used
for proteins because the high temperatures involved destroy them.
Measuring Minuscule Forces
A new microscope that uses the magnetic tip of a cantilever one thousand
times thinner than a human hair to measure minuscule forces is being developed
by a team at the Almaden Research Center, headed by Dan Rugar and Nino Yannoni.
The magnetic resonance force microscope (MRFM) combines the ability of the
atomic force microscope to image individual atoms with magnetic resonance
imagings capacity to tell one atom from another. Conceived by John Sidles of the
University of Washington, it promises to revolutionize the study of biological
processes at the molecular level and of electronic materials at the atomic
level.
Scientists from Almaden and Stanford University recently used the MRFM to
make the first measurement of atto-newton forces. Such tiny forces
one fifth of a billionth of a billionth of a pound can barely lift a protein
molecule and are far too weak to budge a blood cell.
The technique uses a radio frequency coil to create magnetic resonance. In
that effect, the atoms act like bar magnets whose north and south poles are
rapidly and continuously reversed. When a magnetic cantilever tip is placed
close to such resonating atoms, the tiny force between the tip and the atoms
also oscillates. That causes the cantilever to vibrate. Measurement of the
vibration gives the strength of the minuscule force. By scanning the tip over a
surface, a 3-D map of the relative positions of resonating atoms can be created.
So far, the instrument has taken images only at the micron scale. "One
key to extending MRFM capability to the atomic scale is the ability to detect
forces at the atto-newton level," says Rugar. "This is the motivation
for developing the new ultrasensitive cantilevers."
Magnetism vs. Superconductivity
Physicists have long known that superconductivity and magnetism stem from
opposing behaviors of electrons in metals. Now, a team from IBM's Almaden
Research Center has imaged the incompatibility on the atomic scale. The
scientists used a scanning tunneling microscope (STM) to image single atoms of
magnetic materials and measure their effect on a superconductor.
"Before our work, there was no clear picture of what happens
microscopically to superconductivity near a single magnetic atom," says
project leader Ali Yazdani. "The opportunity to construct and measure the
magnetism of nanometer-sized structures may open up new areas of research,"
adds IBM Fellow Don Eigler.
The team deposited individual atoms of manganese and gadolinium both of
which have magnetic moments and silver and gold which don't possess such fields
on niobium, a metal that becomes superconducting at low temperatures. STM
images of the superconductors surface showed that the electrical conductivity of
electrons tunneling between the tip of the STM and the surface changed when the
tip was placed near one of the magnetic atoms. Atoms of magnetic manganese and
gadolinium both affect the superconducting electrons, although in slightly
different ways, while nonmagnetic silver and gold atoms have no such effect.
Having seen the effect, the group set out to explain it. Calculations
suggest that individual magnetic atoms disrupt the matched pairs of electrons
responsible for superconductivity, the group reports in the March 21, 1997,
issue of Science magazine. They do so by forcing one of each pair to align with
the atoms magnetic field, and hence fall out of alignment with its companion
electron. Now, the Almaden team is preparing to explore the effects of clusters
of magnetic atoms on superconductivity.
Cosmic Turbulence
Clusters of stars, which form from the interstellar gas clouds in galaxies,
have long fascinated astronomers. But the way in which they themselves form has
remained a mystery. Now, two astronomers Bruce Elmegreen of IBM's Thomas J.
Watson Research Center and Yuri Efremov of Moscow's Sternberg Observatory have
proposed a theory that resolves several long-standing puzzles about clusters,
especially so-called globular clusters.
At the heart of their proposal lies the notion of fractals, objects
characterized by components of many different sizes, all of which are similar.
The theory of fractals was developed by IBM Fellow Emeritus Benoit Mandelbrot,
also of Watson.
Elmegreen and Efremov have established a strong fractal resemblance between
the clouds of interstellar gas in which the clusters form and ordinary clouds in
the earth's sky. Because it is known that the fractal nature of the earth's clouds
is caused by turbulence, the scientists infer that the star clusters also result
from turbulence.
The two astronomers also showed that for the globular clusters to form in a
turbulent cloud of gas, the clouds must be at an extremely high pressure to
prevent hot, young stars from dispersing the gas and preventing other stars from
forming. High pressure also implies that the stars would form very quickly; that
can account for the fact that the stars in these ancient clusters consist mainly
of hydrogen and helium.
The D-Wave to High Tc
Ever since 1986, when a team at IBM's Zurich Research Laboratory discovered
high-temperature (high-Tc) superconductivity, scientists have sought to
understand the underlying physics. While they know that the supercurrent
consists of pairs of electrons, as in low-temperature superconductivity, they do
not understand the mechanism responsible for the pairing. A major question
concerns the nature of the quantum mechanical wave function that describes the
pairs of electrons: is it a d-wave, an s-wave or a mixture of the two? The waves
are differentiated by their shapes and sign changes. D-waves have clover shapes
with alternating signs, while s-waves are spherical with the same sign.
A recent experiment by Chang Tsuei and John Kirtley of the Thomas J. Watson
Research Center, with collaborators from the State University of New York at
Buffalo and the Universite Paris-sud in France, has given an unambiguous answer.
Without any question we have established that pure d-wave pairing
prevails in our high-Tc system, says Tsuei.
Initially, most physicists favored s-wave pairing. In the past three years,
though, d-wave theory has gained favor, in large measure because of a series of
experiments performed by the Watson researchers. Using a high-resolution SQUID
scanning magnetometer, also designed at Watson, the scientists observed "half-integral
flux quantization" a giveaway sign of the presence of d-waves.
Until now, however, all experiments have been open to interpretation. The
team devised its latest experiment to overturn one alternative interpretation,
explains Kirtley. The team used a thin film of thallium cuprate superconductor.
Because of the cuprates structural simplicity, and the fact that only symmetry
arguments are needed to interpret the experiment, the team reports in the May 29
issue of Nature, the researchers were able to establish unambiguously that the
pairing was solely d-wave.
