For at least one week, the American Institute of Physics and the International Centre for Theoretical Physics merged missions. Attendee demographics and presentation content at AIP's Industrial Physics Forum, held from 16 to 19 April, reflected the ICTP's goal of ending scientific isolation. More than 100 scientists from industry and academia and students from Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, and Latin America converged at ICTP's campus in Trieste, Italy, to address the theme, 'Industrial Physics for Capacity Building in Developing and Emerging Countries.'
The first talk, by Larry Kazmerski, executive director of science and technology partnerships at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado, set the tone. Titled 'Photovoltaics Technology: No Longer an Outlier,' the talk included a look back, and a look at, solar-powered technologies from decades past, and one from the immediate past: Kazmerski showed attendees a model of Vanguard I, the first solar-powered satellite; a transistor radio, or as Kazmerski called it, the first iPod; and the cylindrical photovoltaic module that was to be manufactured by Solyndra, the now-bankrupt company that had received a $535 million loan guarantee from the US Department of Energy.
Here are other highlights from the meeting:
Energy and energy policy
Several speakers discussed ways to improve the performance of solar cells. Sean Shaheen from the University of Denver gave a broad overview of the quantum chemistry of, and processing techniques for, organic photovoltaics, and K. S. Narayan from the Indian Institute of Technology in Mumbai discussed his group's studies of defects in bulk heterojunction cells by analyzing the photocurrent noise. Kazmerski and others called for increased support and a balanced investment from governments and industry in research on near-term photovoltaic systems such as those based on silicon and other semiconductor thin films and longer-term systems such as those based on multijunctions, quantum dots, and carbon nanotubes.
Taking a global perspective, MIT's Rob Stoner, in his talk, 'Grid Access and Renewables in Developing Countries,' presented a plot that showed a negative correlation between a country's electrification and the percentage of its poor. And Caroline Taylor, a senior fellow at the BP-funded Energy Biosciences Institute at the University of California, Berkeley, discussed the potential for biofuels production in developing countries. She cited Brazil as an example but acknowledged the industry's dependency on local infrastructure development and consistent international policies for biofuels production and consumption.
Advanced materials
Alessandro Curioni from IBM Research–Zurich presented results from computer simulations showing that the performance of lithium air batteries, which are projected to increase the range of electric vehicles to 500 miles, may actually be reduced by the introduction of catalysts. Solomon Assefa at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center in New York talked about his group's design of single-crystal germanium photodetectors for nanophotonic silicon waveguides that will be used in the next generation of supercomputers. And Luigi Colombo from Texas Instruments in Dallas presented TI's research aimed at taking advantage of graphene's exceptional electrical and optical transport properties to mitigate the power losses in integrated circuits.
Diagnostic technology
Aside from solar energy, the two most discussed technical topics were optics and microfluidics. And many of those talks included potential or existing applications for medical diagnostics or environmental analysis in the developing world. Sune Svanberg from Lund University in Sweden focused on realistic applications of optical spectroscopy; he gave as an example the multispectral microscopes he and his collaborators have developed for diagnosing malaria and cancer using inexpensive LEDs. Columbia University's Samuel Sia talked about his diagnostic technology based on adsorption of chemical species in a microfluidic channel lined with gold nanoparticles. He has conducted field tests in Rwandan villages, where he used the technology to detect HIV and syphilis. But Sia bemoaned the lack of interest from investors for the less-profitable developing-world market. Instead, his technology has been funded for prostate cancer monitoring. Independently, Sia and Svanberg posed the rhetorical question: Wouldn't low-cost technologies also benefit the developed world by reducing their health-care costs?
Physics education
For the first time, the IPF held physics education sessions, which in keeping with the theme, were designed primarily to address the preparation of students in developing countries for careers in science. But as with most of the talks during the week, the topics discussed were broadly applicable. Gorazd Planinsic from the University of Ljubljana in nearby Slovenia demonstrated ways to engage students using inquiry-based methods. In the demonstration shown here, Planinsic measured the mass of a water-filled balloon and asked attendees why the mass initially decreased—the answer was buoyant force opposing gravity. And Elizabeth McCormack from Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania talked about survey results in the US that revealed the benefits of undergraduate research in preparing science students for graduate school and beyond. She said the broader challenge in the US is for policy that supports the creation of 'new knowledge' through innovative research; graduates more US citizens and residents in science, technology, engineering, and math; and promotes a more 'creative ecosystem' in which industry spends less on litigation and more on research.
