11 February 7, 2013 | year 55
Biweekly magazine of the Eindhoven University of Technology For news: www.cursor.tue.nl and follow tuecursor on andmm
3 | On the brink of extinction 2 A faster horse
4 A spintronic skyscraper
10 University news
2 | For Starters
Colophon Editor in chief Han Konings
Executive editor Brigit Span
Editorial staff Judith van Gaal Tom Jeltes | Science Odette Knappers (trainee) Frits van Otterdijk Norbine Schalij Monique van de Ven
Staff Nicole Testerink Gerard Verhoogt
Photography Rien Meulman Bart van Overbeeke
Cover iStockphoto
Translation Annemarie van Limpt (pages 2,3,4,5)
Layout Natasha Franc
February 7, 2013
Vreemdland Festival a must On Thursday, February 21, TU/e will be host to a major festival focusing on refugees: the Vreemdland Festival (foreign country festival). Studium Generale set up the event with several other bodies, and the help of student association SSRE, among others. But will it appeal to our students? Will they care? I sure hope every single one of our students drops by that day, because I’m positive it will change their world view. Seeing and hearing about the long and dangerous road people have had to travel to escape miserable and threatening situations will make you think twice before complaining about trifles like the cancellation of your free public transport pass. And comparing your opportunities to those of a refugee, you’ll come to realize how privileged you really are. It’s therefore that I admire SG’s gutsy move to bring the event to Eindhoven. We would have liked to publish an interview with an Ethiopian student in this issue. He’s currently studying at
Clmn Dutch Advanced Plus for foreigners
Han Koning s, editor in
chief Curs
or
TU/e with UAF support, a foundation devoted to helping refugee students. Unfortunately he cancelled last Monday, saying his refugee status has not yet been confirmed and his lawyer didn’t think it a good idea to give an interview considering the circumstances. It just goes to show that at TU/e there are people struggling with such issues on a daily basis, too. There’s much more to learn, so go and have a look on February 21! www.vreemdlandeindhoven.nl
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Meer info:
from my insurance company and even fill out my tax forms online. Yes, learning a foreign language is pretty hard work. To be able to really learn it, one must invest a lot of time and effort. But at the end it pays off greatly, because we can feel much stronger and more independent members of the society we live in. Finally we get closer to becoming a, maybe still exotic and foreign, part of this for some of us different culture. At the end I think, depending on our stay in the Netherlands, we should try to learn at least basic Dutch.
They also say that we foreigners hang out a lot with each other. Because the Dutchies have strict lines between their work and private lives, we just don’t meet them after work or after studies. They say. They say a lot of things. I came here almost four years ago and as soon as I got free time next to my studies and work, I started to take the Dutch courses that the TU/e offers. It helped me a lot to reach the level where in the shop I was able to find my way in Dutch. In addition I could finally read and understand letters
Editorial board prof.dr. Cees Midden prof.dr. Hans Niemantsverdriet Angela Stevens- van Gennip Thomas Reijnaerts Arold Roestenburg Anneliese Vermeulen-Adolfs
I want to tackle the topic which probably comes into our heads from time to time and raises the question: so, should foreigners try to learn Dutch? They say Dutch people speak English perfectly. Therefore living in the Netherlands does not particularly require one to be able to speak the local language. They say that if you try to mumble a couple of words you know in Dutch at the service desk in the station, the Dutchies right away get that you are foreigner and give you the answer in English. So now you don’t have to try so hard again. Just speak English.
Indre Ka Interactionlinauskaite, User Sy st trainee at ID departmem ent
Address editorial office TU/e, Laplace 0.35 5600 MB Eindhoven tel. 040 - 2474020 e-mail: cursor@tue.nl
Rewwwind
Cursor online
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Our Rewwwind feature provides you with snippets of last week’s news. What happened online after the previous Cursor magazine was published?
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Vici Grant for TU/e professor
Platform for international events open
Janssen/Pers, Gennep
Advertisement Bureau Van Vliet BV tel. 023 - 5714745
5 February - TU/e professor of Algorithms and Visualization prof.dr. Bettina Speckmann has been awarded a Vici Grant worth 1.5 million euros.
Speckmann will be using the grant for the development of geometric algorithms that can visualize patterns in complex data.
1 February - De Oude Rechtbank (the old court) at Stratumseind is open and will be a platform for international events. Catering, culture and work will
be combined in the building. All events are meant for both Dutch and international guests. For now, the idea is to plan two international events a month.
Brainmatters Psychology is becoming ever more important at TU/e. Technical systems and artifacts, be they games, cars, robots, lighting systems or buildings, are all meant for human end users eventually. It’s essential to know how these users perceive, think, feel, and act. The new human-oriented program Psychology & Technology examines every technical design from a psychological perspective. From now on, Cursor will be taking a closer psychological look at students, teachers, labs, technical artifacts, the workplace, the scientific business, campus, education, and websites.
A faster horse “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” This well-known quote, erroneously attributed to Henry Ford, was the response of a marketing manager of a large telecom firm, when I openly challenged the user-centeredness of their approach. He was in good company. Steve Jobs once famously told Business Week: “A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them”. In short, when your goal is to create revolutionary innovations, speaking to customers in the early stages of design is pretty useless. There’s a kernel of truth in this, but only because people are limited in mentally accessing and verbally expressing their needs. The trick is to offer people the right kind of tools that will allow them to express themselves. As people are notoriously bad at predicting their technological future, traditional market research will not suffice. Consumers are well able to express their preferences in relation to products that currently exist or that present only minor innovations within an existing frame of reference. However, whenever a dramatic innovation presents itself - a T-Ford instead of a horse - people’s imaginations generally fall short, as they tend to focus on fancier versions of the technologies they are familiar
with. Carolyn Marvin, a communication scholar at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School already noted this 25 years ago in her book ‘When Old Technologies Were New.’ In such cases, we have to dig deeper in Wijnand IJs selsteijn, pr order to access people’s latent needs. ofessor Co gnition an Human-Tec d Affect in Behind Henry Ford’s alleged ‘faster horse’, hnology In teraction we can, for example, identify a latent need to travel longer distances with greater speed. In this respect, psychology offers us a useful toolkit of structured methods to explore people’s perceptions at a deeper level - focusing on emotions and behaviours in order to understand what it is that moves people (no pun intended), beyond the limitations of introspection and the poverty of language to express oneself. Henry Ford, too, seemed to appreciate this, when he wrote: “If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from that person’s angle as well as from your own.”
For Starters | 3
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Vox Academici Dr. Martin Peterson, associate professor of Ethics & Technology, Department of IE&IS
Is the scientific genius on the brink of extinction? Take a random article from a random renowned scientific journal and there’s a good chance its title is preceded by a large number of authors. It seems ages ago a doctor to be published revolutionary findings on his own, US professor Dean Simonson argued in Nature last week. He doubts there will ever be another Einstein. But isn’t that a common fear? And is it really that bad scientists are now team players?
of scientists who initiated the project, and trust me, they won’t die out anytime soon.”
“There still are brilliant scientists, every single one of them a genius, but they’re just not as well-known as Einstein”, says Martin Peterson, associate professor at the Department of Industrial Engineering & Innovation Sciences (E&IS). He starts off right away. “Grigory Perelman is a Russian mathematician who solved one of the seven Millennium Prize Problems. On his own. The people who discovered graphene, Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov. Or take biochemist Kary Mullis -a Nobel Prize laureate- who developed the polymerase chain reaction, a technique to replicate DNA. I could go on.” “A genius has original, innovative ideas that are trailblazing in their area of expertise. The current scientific climate has many people working together in extensive research projects. But more often than not there’s only a small group
“I don’t mind the increasing collaboration. Problems can be so complex and experiments so elaborate that research benefits from combined expertise and varying viewpoints. One thing does not exclude the other anyway. Take the Higgs research project. The initial theory about this special particle was drafted by an Italian physicist in the thirties, a lone wolf. Still, it took a whole bunch of scientists to prove the actual existence of the Higgs particle.” “The media have their own definition of a genius, by the way. Everyone knows the photo of Einstein with his hair in disarray and him sticking out his tongue. Geniuses are supposed to be eccentric and weird. And although Gregory Perelman and Kary Mullis may fit that profile, there are ‘normal’ geniuses out there, too. They’re not as interesting to the general public, but does that mean
“Geniuses are supposed to be eccentric and weird.”
people are only geniuses if the media recognizes them as such? “There are many things that are yet to be discovered, including lots of brilliant findings. The fact so many scientific phenomena have already been described doesn’t change that. I do think there will be a shift towards applied sciences. A Higgs particle doesn’t really rouse me, but a Majorana fermion enabling the development of a superfast quantum computer certainly does. Applicability is key, it’s obvious in grant applications as well. And unfortunately, money is becoming an increasingly important factor in the science arena. Despite that, revolutionary findings can be done without lots of money, although those are often done by our more eccentric colleagues. I feel it’s our task as a university to create an atmosphere where geniuses-to-be are free to be ‘different’. Brilliant eccentricity must be cherished in the name of science!” (NT)
Dr. Martin Peterson. Photo | Bart van Overbeeke
Common Room moved 2
After years and well over months, the Common Room has moved from the Bunker to MetaForum (MF 0.090). The official opening of the Common Room was celebrated on October 21, 2010, and the final event in the Bunker was held on February 1, 2013. A group of student volunteers is responsible for organizing events. The Common Room is the home base of international student asso ciation Cosmos.
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For now, the new area will be open during lunch hours and from PM to PM on weekdays. On weekends, the Common Room can be visited from PM until PM. The new meeting place measures approximately square meters. On their last day in the Bunker, the student association put pieces of furniture up for auction, of which were sold. Remaining furniture will be uploaded to website Marktplaats. (JvG)
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Photo | Bart van Overbeeke
4 | Research
February 7, 2013
Reinoud Lavrijsen. Photo | Bart van Overbeeke
Research | 5
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A spintronic skyscraper Imagine never having to boot your computer again. Imagine fast, energy-efficient and reliable memories with huge capacity. It could become a reality with spintronics. ‘Spintronician’ dr.ir. Reinoud Lavrijsen moved from TU/e to Cambridge where he published an article about a three-dimensional chip (‘a spintronic skyscraper’), and has now returned to Eindhoven with a Veni Grant. A computer’s primary storage stores information temporarily using electric charge. In case of a power outage, all unsaved data is lost. This volatile electric primary storage is the reason a computer needs to boot before you can get to work, because that’s when data from the hard disk are uploaded to the primary storage. Using spintronic chips rather than the current electric chips, waiting for your computer to boot will be history, dr.ir. Reinoud Lavrijsen explains. “Spintronics makes use of the so-called electron spin and its associated magnetic properties. It allows us to store digital information in extremely thin layers of magnetic material, which has the advantage of holding on to that information even when the computer shuts down. In fact, information is stored for a much longer time than on flash drives, because those permanent electric memories gradually lose data, due to which at some point files become unreadable.” Another major advantage of spintronics is that magnetic bits can be minimized to an extent unthinkable with electric
components. And that makes for faster computers. Right now, spintronics is moving from its experimental phase to use in actual computers. MRAM (magneto-resistive random access memory), as spintronic memory is called, seems to be the memory of the future. Still, although storing data is important, a computer should also be able to process information, of course. And for that, a fully functional computer chip is essential.
Currently, calculations are done in the penthouse exclusively Over the past two years, after receiving his doctorate from the Physics of Nanostructure (FNA) group at TU/e, Lavrijsen made significant headway in
A soliton ratchet.
Cambridge by designing a concept for a chip that’s entirely based on spintronics, meaning no electric transistors are involved. His British adventure led to a publication in renowned scientific journal Nature last week. Lavrijsen, now back at his old spot at FNA - he’s been awarded a Veni Grant to finance himself and his research at TU/e for the next three years - says he met Professor Russell Cowburn of the acclaimed Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge at a conference. “Cowburn told me he had plans involving three-dimensional spintronic chips, only he intended to store the information in electron spins oriented in the plane of magnetic layers. In Eindhoven, I had learnt it’s advisable to orient the spins perpendicularly to the magnetic layer, since that way they’re much more stable.” Cowburn was impressed and invited Lavrijsen to come to Cambridge in March of 2011. In June of that year, Lavrijsen was awarded a Rubicon Grant that allowed him to work in England for a year and a half. The breakthrough in the Nature article mentioned above lies in the shape of the spintronic chip. “Although current chips consist of multiple layers, it’s only the top layer - the penthouse, so to speak that does any actual calculations. The layers below merely function as ‘interconnects’: connectors between the various parts of the processor. If each floor of the skyscraper were able to store and process data, you’d need a lot less space as well as be able to work faster. In order to make that work, you’d need some sort of elevator or stairwell that connects all floors. And those connections have been developed by us.” Lavrijsen’s 3D chips consist of thin layers alternately made of cobalt and ruthenium, with a layer of platinum between each layer. Every layer of cobalt, only two to three atoms thick, forms a tiny magnetic area in which the magnetic field (as a result of the electron spins) can face either upwards or downwards. “The ruthenium layers effectuate a quantum connection between the cobalt areas, which makes the spins on adjoining layers influence each other. In principle, the spins are alternately facing upwards and downwards as that is the state of the lowest energy.” Using magnetic energy, spins in a specific area may be ‘switched’ so two adjacent spins are faced in the same direction. “That disrupts the system; together, those two areas facing in the same direction are called a soliton”, says Lavrijsen. A soliton holds digital information and can be called a bit in this system. If you were to switch one of the areas within the soliton again, all spins on the higher floors will switch automatically as well, not unlike dominoes. The technical term for that is shift register. “Our creation can be compared to existing MRAM, the
Schematic representation of the ‘spintronic skyscraper’. In the red areas, the electron spins face upwards, in the blue ones they face downwards. A binary ‘1’ is formed by two adjacent areas of the same color (a soliton). Moving from left to right, influenced by external magnetic fields, data is moved up a notch.
difference being that, rather than having a single bit per MRAM cell, with our technique hundreds of bits can be stacked on top of each other.” Lavrijsen and his Cambridge colleagues managed to vary the thickness of the consecutive layers so that the solitons can be made to move either towards or away from each other. “If two solitons meet, they neutralize each other. That’s how we can do calculations.” Although this last step wasn’t described in the Nature article, it will be published in another article soon.
All spins shift like a row of dominoes While doing his doctorate at TU/e, Lavrijsen was already working on computer memories based on spintronics. At the time, he focused on flat nanowires in which digital information was stored in positions of moveable walls between magnetic domains: the so-called racetrack memory. Only last weekend the Nature Materials website published an article, with Lavrijsen as co-author, about a new way to move domain walls. “That article on the Spin Hall Effect is a direct result of an unsolved problem in my dissertation.” Last year, researchers of the FNA group succeeded in energy-efficiently manipulating racetrack memory with electric fields. Eventually, 3D chips should become electrically controlled as well. Lavrijsen thinks it can be done. “Originally, people wanted to make 3D racetrack memories by folding nanowire in three dimensions, but that turned out
to be quite challenging in practice. Our 3D chip seems to have more potential en has the advantage that switching the electron spins is a binary process. In a racetrack, the distance over which a domain wall is moved always varies somewhat - it’s a continuous process and that introduces an uncertainty you ideally want to avoid in computers.” Back in Eindhoven, Lavrijsen wants to tackle the next problem: “It’s quite hard to maneuver a soliton into the shift register. Right now we still need pretty large magnetic fields to make that happen. I want to figure out if there’s a way to change that, perhaps by some smart adjustment of the material on the edges. I’ll be working on the problem with a Dutch expert based in Finland.” (TJ)