Program Summary
The Mesodynamic Architectures (Meso) program seeks to address future Defense needs by exploiting unique characteristics of matter and energy emerging at small spatial and short temporal scales including new states of matter, untapped forces, novel relationships between fields and excitations and the importance of noise and nonlinearity. The parallel goals of the Meso program are to provide DoD with unrivaled communication, sensing, and computation by exploiting mesoscale characteristics, while establishing well-defined problems to accelerate the transition to quantum engineering.
To achieve the goals, the program is divided into four technical thrusts. Thrust 1 focuses on coherent collective dynamics in topological insulators. This new state of matter offers higher surface conduction with reduced noise and lower power. In addition, there are new megneto-electric effects that can be leveraged in new types of devices, including high-performance transistors, magnetic sensors, and optical detectors. Thrust 2 exploits the blurring of fields and excitations for information transduction among sound, electricity/magnetism and light to use the best properties of each on demand. This capability will enable, for example, long time delays to enhance radar, tunable on-chip filters, and optomechanical vehicle tags. Thrust 3 uses coherent feedback control to effectively manage collective states. This type of control may be exploited for a range of technologies, including ultra-low-power switches and sensors, sensitive detectors and low-power nanologic chips. The fourth thrust exploits nonlinearity and background noise to achieve high-performance frequency sources in a package the size of a medium size grain of sand. These sources will revolutionize communication and navigation in resource-limited environments.